Philippians

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thanks for being here this morning. Apparently, what it takes to get Grace excited about church in June is a pandemic that lasts 18 months. Look at this. This is fantastic. We are in the second part of our series called One Hit Wonders, where we're basically, I said last week, we're basically just using this as a vehicle to look at some of the verses in the Bible that are pretty famous, pretty significant verses, ones that we treasure, but maybe a typical series doesn't hit on them, or even a typical Bible study might not arrive at these verses. So it's a time to kind of grab some of the verses and some of the passages out of Scripture that we may not land on in sermons and in Bible studies, but focus on them here in the summer as we come together each week. And so this week, I actually want to talk to you, ironically, about the danger of doing that. I want to talk to you about the danger of One-Hit Wonders, of just seeing a verse that we like. I like the words in this verse. I like what it says. I like what God is telling me. So I'm just going to grab it out of the Bible and I'm going to use it to encourage myself. This is a thing that brings encouragement to me and we kind of cling on to it. If you grew up in church, okay, how many of you, I want to see a show of hands actually. I didn't plan to do this, but I'm just now empirically interested. How many of you have ever heard someone else claim to have or have ever had your own life verse? How many of you have ever heard someone claim to have a life verse? Yes, this is a big time, this is a church thing, okay? If you're like, what in the world is that? You're one of the fortunate ones. But if you know what that is, to have a life verse, this is the verse, this is me. When I see this verse, I feel seen and heard. This is my life verse, okay? This is kind of my theme for life. And so what we do is we'll pull out these individual verses and we'll allow them to mean something of great significance to us. But sometimes when we do that, it can be dangerous. As I talk about this this morning, we're going to look at probably the most famous one of these verses. It's probably the most famous verse in the Old Testament, Jeremiah 29, 11. We're going to look at that verse today, and we're going to talk about why is it dangerous to just pull a single verse out of context. But I would preface it this way. My wife, Jen, she told me that I needed to be kind and gentle as I did this, because she noted that oftentimes I take glee in bursting people's bubbles. She may have cited the fact that every Christmas, I'd like to point out to you that the wise men were nowhere near the manger on Christmas and therefore all your nativity scenes are wrong and dumb. But I'm not allowed to crush this verse with that sort of careless flair. And I actually learned the lesson about this the hard way. Several years ago at my previous church, I was asked to come and give the devotional for the Loganville High School Red Devils baseball team. And you have no reason to know this. If you do know this and you're from North Carolina, you're weird, okay? But the Loganville Red Devils were really, really good at baseball. They won several state tournaments. They had a really good program over there. And their head coach was a guy named Brian Mills. And he went to our church and he asked me to come and give the devotional to the boys as they, because in Loganville, things are different. You can go talk about Jesus in public schools and everyone's just like, cool. That's not how it goes in Wake County. But I went out there, I went out there and I gave them a devotion, right? And they had this kid on their team named Clint Frazier, who at the time was the number one baseball prospect in the country, right? A big old mop of red hair. I never had any interactions with Clint, and this was the only time I ever really did get to interact with him. And I'm going to give a devotional to the team. And at the time, you may remember this, those of you who have been involved in church culture, there was actually an athletic gear, like Under Armour or Nike, like athletic apparel company called Phil 413, Philippians 413. And they would put Philippians 413 on all their stuff. And that's the verse, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, right? And so they're giving it to athletes. You can run that mile through Christ who strengthens you. You're going to hit that jump shot. You're going to hit that home run. You're going to complete that pass, you know, or make that sweet set, volleyball players. You're going to do it through Christ who gives you strength, right? And so they're like claiming this. They're emblazing it on their chest and on their equipment and they're going and God is powering me and I'm going to do good here. But the verse really, it's written by Paul and it comes in this context where Paul has said, I have learned how to be joyful with plenty and I have learned how to be joyful with little in want. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. So he's saying no matter what the circumstances are in my life, I've learned how to find joy in want. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. So he's saying, no matter what the circumstances are in my life, I've learned how to find joy in God. I've learned how to find that contentment in him. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. And so really, if we wanted to apply it to a baseball team, I explained to them, it would be about being okay with winning or losing, being happy whether you win or whether you lose. And I said, it's not going to make you hit the ball harder. It's not going to make you throw it further. It's not the verse to claim for your playoff run. If you want a verse, and then I went to Proverbs, and it was a verse on hard work and how God honors hard work. So claim this verse and outwork the other teams. But don't claim that verse like it's going to make you a better athlete because it won't. The whole time I'm talking about this, the boys kind of just, they all just have this smirk on their face. They're all just kind of smiling at me, you know? And so when I'm done, I'm like, all right, look, what gives? What did I step in? What's going on? Clint Frazier walks up to me, and he pulls back his sleeve, and he freshly minted Philippians 4.13 tat on his forearm, just right there. And I'm like, oh my gosh, man, I'm so sorry. Clint is now the starting right fielder for the New York Yankees. I'm not making it up. You can look it up. He's there. He's a great ball player and he's still got the tattoo. So apparently I was wrong. It did make him hit the ball further and throw better. I don't know. But that was where I learned to be gentle as you talk about verses that are near and dear to people. And Jeremiah 29 11 is one that is really special to folks and really does give us a sense of hope and a sense of peace. You may know it. If you don't, you can turn your Bible there. If you don't have a Bible with you, it's in the seat back in front of you. But Jeremiah 29, 11 says, I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans for a hope and a future. It's a really great verse. I know the plans I have for you. Plans to prosper you, not to harm you. Plans for a hope and a future. If you're in a place where you feel uncertain, I don't know what's coming next. I need this relationship to work out. I don't know how in the world, in this market, I'm ever going to be able to afford a house. I don't know where the next job is going to come from. I don't know if I can close this deal. I don't know if this thing is going to work out with my kid. I don't know if this relationship is going to pan out. I don't know, God. And then for someone to speak that peace into your life, that God has a plan for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans for a hope and a future. That's a real hopeful, life-giving verse. And a lot of people claim it for those reasons, and that's great. I actually get to go and do a wedding here in a few weeks for Jen's cousin. Jen's my wife, by the way, not just a lady that I refer to in my sermons. I'm going to do a wedding for her cousin, and his bride is a girl named Haley. We were planning out the ceremony a couple of nights ago. And part of Haley's story is she had a brother named David growing up who struggled with addiction and depression. And David ended up taking his own life. And to honor him in the ceremony, she still has a voicemail from him where he reads her that verse. And they want it played in the ceremony. And that's a beautiful thing. Because God does have a plan for David. He does have a plan for Haley. He does have a plan for us. But I also think that it's important to understand what that plan is. And to understand what that verse really means. Because I think there's actually greater comfort waiting on us there than we've given that verse credit for. So I want to talk to you this morning about two dangers of one-hit wonders. Two dangers of grabbing a verse, plucking it out of the Bible, not reading anything around it and going, boom, this is what this means for me and my life. There's two big ways that we get in big trouble when we do that. So the first way and the first danger of just grabbing a verse out of context, when you hear someone grab a verse out of context, when you hear someone quote a verse, when you see something on a meme, when you see something on a t-shirt or whatever it is, we need to read it and look around it. And when we don't do that, we don't fully understand the verse, two really bad things can happen. The first one is we mislead ourselves and others. We just grab a verse out of the Bible and we apply it. It sounds nice. We mislead ourselves and others. And I say ourselves and others because each of us has a circle of influence. Sometimes we repeat what we hear to other people. I said something last week to a friend of mine and he goes, is that true? And I said, you know what? Honestly, I don't know. I heard it years ago and I've been parroting it ever since. I need to do some research on that. I have no idea. I think we do this sometimes. So when we just grab a verse out of context, we run the risk of misleading ourselves and others. I know of a church a few years ago that they were doing a building campaign. They were launching another campus. They were kind of relaunching their main campus. And they kind of grabbed a verse as the theme verse for the year. Look at what God is going to do at this place. And this is what's going to motivate us. And so the pastor was kind of casting vision for what's going to happen in the future. And then they found a nice verse to pair with it because when you're doing church right, that's what you do. You kind of decide what you think God wants you to do, and then you find a verse in the Bible that happens to coincide with the plans that you made. I'm kidding. That's not really a good way to go about applying Bible verses, but churches do this all the time, and so this church did it too, and they landed on this verse, Habakkuk 1.5. And Habakkuk 1.5, when you read it, it's like, oh, shoot. Look at what God's going to do here. There's going to be amazing things done in this place. Look at what Habakkuk 1 Ooh. Ooh, what if we did that at Grace? We're doing a building campaign. What if this home stretch? I said, guys, this is our verse that we are claiming. Look among the nations and see, wonder and be astounded, for I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told. I'm going to do something so amazing you wouldn't even believe it. If I told you what I was going to do you wouldn't believe it. And so the church, they claimed it, they put it on their literature, they piped it out there and everyone's like God's going to do amazing things here. We're not going to believe it. Even if he tells us what he's going to do we wouldn't believe him. And then one day somebody picked up their Bible and they read the rest of the verses. This is Habakkuk 1, 6 and following. Look at what the Lord will do here. He will bring great punishment upon our negligence. It's genuinely funny how opposite that verse is of what they wanted it to be. But it's also really sad. And I don't think that the pastor did this in any way to manipulate. I don't think he did it intentionally in any way. I think it was just lazy. Just kind of ignorant. I think he saw that verse somewhere. It was like, ooh, that's a good campaign verse. And then everybody started claiming it. Thinking that's what Habakkuk 1.5 meant. And it didn't. It meant, God, bring your punishment on us. Bring the Chaldeans and their violent faces. When we just pluck a verse out of context, we run a real risk of misleading ourselves and others. And so we don't want to do that with Jeremiah 29 11. We want to understand this verse in its proper context. And in its proper context, the prophet Jeremiah was writing this letter, the book of Jeremiah, to God's children, to the children of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, the Jews, the Hebrews, however it is you most easily refer to him, that's who he is writing to. And these people are people who are in captivity in Babylon. Israel, Jerusalem has been laid waste to. It has been conquered. It is left in smoke and ashes. And then Babylon carried away the best and the brightest. So the only people who were left in Israel were the old and the feeble and the young and the useless. Everybody else got taken away, right? And these people have a promise from God. Back in Genesis chapter 12, that God made to their forefather Abraham, where God promised Abraham, I will provide you with land, people, and blessing. One of your descendants will bless the whole earth. That's Jesus. That came true. Your descendants will be like the sand on the shore and the stars in the sky. There's a lot of Jewish people now. That came true. And I will give you the land of Canaan, the modern-day nation of Israel. So these people grew up being taught these promises of God that he made to their forefather Abraham, claiming those promises from the sovereign God, and now have watched that land be taken away from them. Now they have watched their best and their brightest be carried off as slaves into Babylon. Now they look at the smoldering ash heap of their once proud country and think, how could this be? How could this have ever happened? It's a discouraged people who think that their God has forgotten them or is somehow incapable of keeping his promises to them. They're spiritually and literally destitute. And to them, Jeremiah speaks these amazing words of comfort. Do you see how those hit a little different for the Hebrew people who have been carried away as slaves to Babylon? Jeremiah tells them, God sees you. He knows you. He has not forgotten about you. He intends to keep his promises to you. Hang in there. Have faith. And see, we take that verse and we apply it to the immediate situation. We take that verse and we say, God has a plan for me. I'm going to get the job. God has a plan for me. This relationship is going to work out. God has a plan for me. I know this thing is going to work. I just walked through this tremendous loss, but I'm comforted by the fact that God has a plan for me. So he's going to restore that. And we take this promise that was made to the Hebrew people in the Old Testament who were destitute and enslaved, and we make it mean that we're going to do better in the job interview or that the relationship's going to work out or that we're going to close that deal or that this stress is going to go away in my life. Which brings me to my next point. The next danger of one-hit wonders is that we cheapen the text. We cheapen the text. Now, I've got to be honest with you. This last week, a buddy of mine made fun of me for using ridiculous words in my sermons. So this So this week, when I wrote these notes, I said, we impoverish the text. But I had his voice in my head, and I changed it to cheapen. So if you just want the authentic experience, you need to change that word cheapen to impoverished in your own notes, okay? And giggle at me for doing that, but I can't. Impoverish is such a better word, but I just, I got insecure about it, so we went with cheapen the text. It cheapens the text. We take what it does mean, and we reduce it to what we need it to mean, and when we do that, we cheapen it, we impoverish it, we make it so much weaker than it should be. To show you this, look with me at what Jeremiah writes after the famous verse, Jeremiah 29 29 11. We pick it up in verse 12. Then you will call, I know the plans I have for you, he says, here are the plans. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations. I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Let me tell you what my plans are. My plans are that when you cry out to me, I'm going to hear you. My plans are that when you draw near to me, I will draw near to you. My plans are that, listen to this, my plans are that you would know me. My plans are that I would draw you into a relationship with myself. That's what God says his plans are. The very first thing I know, don't worry. I have a hope and a future. I have plans for you. You know what my plans for you are? He tells them in the following verses, my plans are that you would know me, which I love because this is a theme throughout the Bible. It's all that God has ever wanted, that we would know him. This is when Paul prays in the New Testament, when he writes out greetings to the churches, and he tells them that he prays for them. The most explicit of this is in Ephesians chapter 3, where he says, And then the conclusion of the prayer is that you would know the richness of the depth of the knowledge of Christ and be filled with all the knowledge of God, that you would know him. It's this prayer for us that's echoed throughout the centuries, not just in Jeremiah 29, but we see it before that. We see it in the high priestly prayer that Jesus prays in John chapter 17. We see it at the end of the Bible when he brings us all to him, to know him. The plan that he has for the Hebrew people is the same plan that he has for you, that you would know him. That the creator God would have an intimate relationship with you and that you would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he cares about the smallest of details in your life. Scripture teaches us that not even a bird falls to the ground without the Father knowing, and that the very numbers of head, the very hair on your head is numbered. He knows you intimately, and He wants you to know Him that much. So does Jeremiah 29 11 apply to you? You're darn right it does. You're darn right it does, because his plan for them and for you is that you would know him. That's the plan. That the things in your life would be orchestrated to bring you down this path where you would know him and see him as the ultimate good. Are the things going to work out in the temporary? Maybe. I don't know. But if they don't, he's going to orchestrate and weave those things as one giant river that flows to him in eternity so that you might know him. That's what he's doing. I don't know what's going to happen in the temporary, but I do know that the result of them are going to be to funnel you towards God himself. And that's his plan for you, that he would know you. And listen to this cool thing. He says in verse 14, I will restore your fortunes and gather you from the nations and all the places where I've driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. I'm going to bring you back to Israel. I'm going to restore your fortune. I'm going to restore your family. Everything's going to be okay. And that's a great thought, and it's a comforting one for them. But listen to this, and this is why prophecy in the Old Testament is so cool. You know what happens in the last two chapters of the Bible? If you flip to the very end, Revelation 21, 22, you know what happens there? You're gonna, because I'm doing a series in Revelation in the fall. It's gonna be like seven weeks, October, November. Get pumped up. I'm gonna answer every question you've ever had about Revelation with absolute certainty. The last two chapters of the Bible, God creates a new heaven and a new earth and a new Jerusalem. And he gathers us to himself. And he restores our families. And he unites us. And he rejuvenates us and he completes his plan. His plan that he enacted when he promised it to Abraham, his plan that he reminded David of in 2 Samuel chapter 7 when he said the Messiah will sit on your throne, his plan that he told Mary about when he sent Jesus and his plan that seemed like it was done when Jesus hung on the cross and then the plan that the victory was won for on Easter when the tomb was empty. The plan that Jesus comes back for in Revelation 18 and 19 as the Lion of Judah, no longer the Lamb of God, when he makes all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, and then he claims his creation back to him, to the new heaven, the new earth, and the new Jerusalem as we surround the throne of God. That's his plan. And that's what he's enacted for you. And that's what he's done for them. That's the goal. That's what it's all about. And see, when we take Jeremiah 29, 11, and we make it mean this temporary situation is going to work out, we impoverish that text because it has such a greater meaning than that. It carries such greater significance than that. And in light of that, how much cooler is it that Haley gets to play that voicemail from her brother at her wedding because she knows that David knew Jesus. And the plan was murky and it was tough, but he's there waiting on her. And one day she will be restored. And one day they will be reunited. And one day they will see each other again because they each know Jesus because God's plan was to weave their lives back to him in such a way that they could spend eternity with him forever and he spent all of time acting out and initiating that plan for you and for them. When we do the work to understand the verses that mean so much to us, we will always find that there is more richness waiting there to be uncovered. So this morning, understand the dangers of plucking a verse out of context and throwing it on a t-shirt and letting it mean whatever we want it to mean. Because sometimes we mislead ourselves and others, and then even worse, we impoverish the text to such a degree that if we would just put in the time, I think we would be met with the richness and the fullness of God through his word as we are met with it over and over and over again. So listen, if you came in this morning and you love Jeremiah 29 11, take great comfort in Jeremiah 29 11. But take it in knowing that God's plan for you is that you know him. Take it in knowing that, yeah, God has a plan for you. It's to orchestrate everything in your life back to this wonderful tapestry so that you might know him. And I think that that's a pretty good plan. Let's pray. Father, I know that there are people here who are heartened by your eternal plan. But boy, God, if you could just kind of give them a temporary one, that'd be great too. So to those folks, I pray you would give them comfort and peace. For those folks, for all of us, I pray that we would see the things that we walk through in our life in light of eternity. In light of knowing that, yeah, you don't just have plans for us in this life, but God, you have a grand plan that you have been enacting since the dawn of time. And that one day you will restore us and return us all to the place, heaven, from which we have been exiled here. God, your word is amazing. I pray that we would all, every one of us, be more enthralled and awed by your word and that you would create within us a heart to mine it for all it's worth, God. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thanks for being here this morning. Apparently, what it takes to get Grace excited about church in June is a pandemic that lasts 18 months. Look at this. This is fantastic. We are in the second part of our series called One Hit Wonders, where we're basically, I said last week, we're basically just using this as a vehicle to look at some of the verses in the Bible that are pretty famous, pretty significant verses, ones that we treasure, but maybe a typical series doesn't hit on them, or even a typical Bible study might not arrive at these verses. So it's a time to kind of grab some of the verses and some of the passages out of Scripture that we may not land on in sermons and in Bible studies, but focus on them here in the summer as we come together each week. And so this week, I actually want to talk to you, ironically, about the danger of doing that. I want to talk to you about the danger of One-Hit Wonders, of just seeing a verse that we like. I like the words in this verse. I like what it says. I like what God is telling me. So I'm just going to grab it out of the Bible and I'm going to use it to encourage myself. This is a thing that brings encouragement to me and we kind of cling on to it. If you grew up in church, okay, how many of you, I want to see a show of hands actually. I didn't plan to do this, but I'm just now empirically interested. How many of you have ever heard someone else claim to have or have ever had your own life verse? How many of you have ever heard someone claim to have a life verse? Yes, this is a big time, this is a church thing, okay? If you're like, what in the world is that? You're one of the fortunate ones. But if you know what that is, to have a life verse, this is the verse, this is me. When I see this verse, I feel seen and heard. This is my life verse, okay? This is kind of my theme for life. And so what we do is we'll pull out these individual verses and we'll allow them to mean something of great significance to us. But sometimes when we do that, it can be dangerous. As I talk about this this morning, we're going to look at probably the most famous one of these verses. It's probably the most famous verse in the Old Testament, Jeremiah 29, 11. We're going to look at that verse today, and we're going to talk about why is it dangerous to just pull a single verse out of context. But I would preface it this way. My wife, Jen, she told me that I needed to be kind and gentle as I did this, because she noted that oftentimes I take glee in bursting people's bubbles. She may have cited the fact that every Christmas, I'd like to point out to you that the wise men were nowhere near the manger on Christmas and therefore all your nativity scenes are wrong and dumb. But I'm not allowed to crush this verse with that sort of careless flair. And I actually learned the lesson about this the hard way. Several years ago at my previous church, I was asked to come and give the devotional for the Loganville High School Red Devils baseball team. And you have no reason to know this. If you do know this and you're from North Carolina, you're weird, okay? But the Loganville Red Devils were really, really good at baseball. They won several state tournaments. They had a really good program over there. And their head coach was a guy named Brian Mills. And he went to our church and he asked me to come and give the devotional to the boys as they, because in Loganville, things are different. You can go talk about Jesus in public schools and everyone's just like, cool. That's not how it goes in Wake County. But I went out there, I went out there and I gave them a devotion, right? And they had this kid on their team named Clint Frazier, who at the time was the number one baseball prospect in the country, right? A big old mop of red hair. I never had any interactions with Clint, and this was the only time I ever really did get to interact with him. And I'm going to give a devotional to the team. And at the time, you may remember this, those of you who have been involved in church culture, there was actually an athletic gear, like Under Armour or Nike, like athletic apparel company called Phil 413, Philippians 413. And they would put Philippians 413 on all their stuff. And that's the verse, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, right? And so they're giving it to athletes. You can run that mile through Christ who strengthens you. You're going to hit that jump shot. You're going to hit that home run. You're going to complete that pass, you know, or make that sweet set, volleyball players. You're going to do it through Christ who gives you strength, right? And so they're like claiming this. They're emblazing it on their chest and on their equipment and they're going and God is powering me and I'm going to do good here. But the verse really, it's written by Paul and it comes in this context where Paul has said, I have learned how to be joyful with plenty and I have learned how to be joyful with little in want. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. So he's saying no matter what the circumstances are in my life, I've learned how to find joy in want. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. So he's saying, no matter what the circumstances are in my life, I've learned how to find joy in God. I've learned how to find that contentment in him. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. And so really, if we wanted to apply it to a baseball team, I explained to them, it would be about being okay with winning or losing, being happy whether you win or whether you lose. And I said, it's not going to make you hit the ball harder. It's not going to make you throw it further. It's not the verse to claim for your playoff run. If you want a verse, and then I went to Proverbs, and it was a verse on hard work and how God honors hard work. So claim this verse and outwork the other teams. But don't claim that verse like it's going to make you a better athlete because it won't. The whole time I'm talking about this, the boys kind of just, they all just have this smirk on their face. They're all just kind of smiling at me, you know? And so when I'm done, I'm like, all right, look, what gives? What did I step in? What's going on? Clint Frazier walks up to me, and he pulls back his sleeve, and he freshly minted Philippians 4.13 tat on his forearm, just right there. And I'm like, oh my gosh, man, I'm so sorry. Clint is now the starting right fielder for the New York Yankees. I'm not making it up. You can look it up. He's there. He's a great ball player and he's still got the tattoo. So apparently I was wrong. It did make him hit the ball further and throw better. I don't know. But that was where I learned to be gentle as you talk about verses that are near and dear to people. And Jeremiah 29 11 is one that is really special to folks and really does give us a sense of hope and a sense of peace. You may know it. If you don't, you can turn your Bible there. If you don't have a Bible with you, it's in the seat back in front of you. But Jeremiah 29, 11 says, I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans for a hope and a future. It's a really great verse. I know the plans I have for you. Plans to prosper you, not to harm you. Plans for a hope and a future. If you're in a place where you feel uncertain, I don't know what's coming next. I need this relationship to work out. I don't know how in the world, in this market, I'm ever going to be able to afford a house. I don't know where the next job is going to come from. I don't know if I can close this deal. I don't know if this thing is going to work out with my kid. I don't know if this relationship is going to pan out. I don't know, God. And then for someone to speak that peace into your life, that God has a plan for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans for a hope and a future. That's a real hopeful, life-giving verse. And a lot of people claim it for those reasons, and that's great. I actually get to go and do a wedding here in a few weeks for Jen's cousin. Jen's my wife, by the way, not just a lady that I refer to in my sermons. I'm going to do a wedding for her cousin, and his bride is a girl named Haley. We were planning out the ceremony a couple of nights ago. And part of Haley's story is she had a brother named David growing up who struggled with addiction and depression. And David ended up taking his own life. And to honor him in the ceremony, she still has a voicemail from him where he reads her that verse. And they want it played in the ceremony. And that's a beautiful thing. Because God does have a plan for David. He does have a plan for Haley. He does have a plan for us. But I also think that it's important to understand what that plan is. And to understand what that verse really means. Because I think there's actually greater comfort waiting on us there than we've given that verse credit for. So I want to talk to you this morning about two dangers of one-hit wonders. Two dangers of grabbing a verse, plucking it out of the Bible, not reading anything around it and going, boom, this is what this means for me and my life. There's two big ways that we get in big trouble when we do that. So the first way and the first danger of just grabbing a verse out of context, when you hear someone grab a verse out of context, when you hear someone quote a verse, when you see something on a meme, when you see something on a t-shirt or whatever it is, we need to read it and look around it. And when we don't do that, we don't fully understand the verse, two really bad things can happen. The first one is we mislead ourselves and others. We just grab a verse out of the Bible and we apply it. It sounds nice. We mislead ourselves and others. And I say ourselves and others because each of us has a circle of influence. Sometimes we repeat what we hear to other people. I said something last week to a friend of mine and he goes, is that true? And I said, you know what? Honestly, I don't know. I heard it years ago and I've been parroting it ever since. I need to do some research on that. I have no idea. I think we do this sometimes. So when we just grab a verse out of context, we run the risk of misleading ourselves and others. I know of a church a few years ago that they were doing a building campaign. They were launching another campus. They were kind of relaunching their main campus. And they kind of grabbed a verse as the theme verse for the year. Look at what God is going to do at this place. And this is what's going to motivate us. And so the pastor was kind of casting vision for what's going to happen in the future. And then they found a nice verse to pair with it because when you're doing church right, that's what you do. You kind of decide what you think God wants you to do, and then you find a verse in the Bible that happens to coincide with the plans that you made. I'm kidding. That's not really a good way to go about applying Bible verses, but churches do this all the time, and so this church did it too, and they landed on this verse, Habakkuk 1.5. And Habakkuk 1.5, when you read it, it's like, oh, shoot. Look at what God's going to do here. There's going to be amazing things done in this place. Look at what Habakkuk 1 Ooh. Ooh, what if we did that at Grace? We're doing a building campaign. What if this home stretch? I said, guys, this is our verse that we are claiming. Look among the nations and see, wonder and be astounded, for I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told. I'm going to do something so amazing you wouldn't even believe it. If I told you what I was going to do you wouldn't believe it. And so the church, they claimed it, they put it on their literature, they piped it out there and everyone's like God's going to do amazing things here. We're not going to believe it. Even if he tells us what he's going to do we wouldn't believe him. And then one day somebody picked up their Bible and they read the rest of the verses. This is Habakkuk 1, 6 and following. Look at what the Lord will do here. He will bring great punishment upon our negligence. It's genuinely funny how opposite that verse is of what they wanted it to be. But it's also really sad. And I don't think that the pastor did this in any way to manipulate. I don't think he did it intentionally in any way. I think it was just lazy. Just kind of ignorant. I think he saw that verse somewhere. It was like, ooh, that's a good campaign verse. And then everybody started claiming it. Thinking that's what Habakkuk 1.5 meant. And it didn't. It meant, God, bring your punishment on us. Bring the Chaldeans and their violent faces. When we just pluck a verse out of context, we run a real risk of misleading ourselves and others. And so we don't want to do that with Jeremiah 29 11. We want to understand this verse in its proper context. And in its proper context, the prophet Jeremiah was writing this letter, the book of Jeremiah, to God's children, to the children of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, the Jews, the Hebrews, however it is you most easily refer to him, that's who he is writing to. And these people are people who are in captivity in Babylon. Israel, Jerusalem has been laid waste to. It has been conquered. It is left in smoke and ashes. And then Babylon carried away the best and the brightest. So the only people who were left in Israel were the old and the feeble and the young and the useless. Everybody else got taken away, right? And these people have a promise from God. Back in Genesis chapter 12, that God made to their forefather Abraham, where God promised Abraham, I will provide you with land, people, and blessing. One of your descendants will bless the whole earth. That's Jesus. That came true. Your descendants will be like the sand on the shore and the stars in the sky. There's a lot of Jewish people now. That came true. And I will give you the land of Canaan, the modern-day nation of Israel. So these people grew up being taught these promises of God that he made to their forefather Abraham, claiming those promises from the sovereign God, and now have watched that land be taken away from them. Now they have watched their best and their brightest be carried off as slaves into Babylon. Now they look at the smoldering ash heap of their once proud country and think, how could this be? How could this have ever happened? It's a discouraged people who think that their God has forgotten them or is somehow incapable of keeping his promises to them. They're spiritually and literally destitute. And to them, Jeremiah speaks these amazing words of comfort. Do you see how those hit a little different for the Hebrew people who have been carried away as slaves to Babylon? Jeremiah tells them, God sees you. He knows you. He has not forgotten about you. He intends to keep his promises to you. Hang in there. Have faith. And see, we take that verse and we apply it to the immediate situation. We take that verse and we say, God has a plan for me. I'm going to get the job. God has a plan for me. This relationship is going to work out. God has a plan for me. I know this thing is going to work. I just walked through this tremendous loss, but I'm comforted by the fact that God has a plan for me. So he's going to restore that. And we take this promise that was made to the Hebrew people in the Old Testament who were destitute and enslaved, and we make it mean that we're going to do better in the job interview or that the relationship's going to work out or that we're going to close that deal or that this stress is going to go away in my life. Which brings me to my next point. The next danger of one-hit wonders is that we cheapen the text. We cheapen the text. Now, I've got to be honest with you. This last week, a buddy of mine made fun of me for using ridiculous words in my sermons. So this So this week, when I wrote these notes, I said, we impoverish the text. But I had his voice in my head, and I changed it to cheapen. So if you just want the authentic experience, you need to change that word cheapen to impoverished in your own notes, okay? And giggle at me for doing that, but I can't. Impoverish is such a better word, but I just, I got insecure about it, so we went with cheapen the text. It cheapens the text. We take what it does mean, and we reduce it to what we need it to mean, and when we do that, we cheapen it, we impoverish it, we make it so much weaker than it should be. To show you this, look with me at what Jeremiah writes after the famous verse, Jeremiah 29 29 11. We pick it up in verse 12. Then you will call, I know the plans I have for you, he says, here are the plans. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations. I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Let me tell you what my plans are. My plans are that when you cry out to me, I'm going to hear you. My plans are that when you draw near to me, I will draw near to you. My plans are that, listen to this, my plans are that you would know me. My plans are that I would draw you into a relationship with myself. That's what God says his plans are. The very first thing I know, don't worry. I have a hope and a future. I have plans for you. You know what my plans for you are? He tells them in the following verses, my plans are that you would know me, which I love because this is a theme throughout the Bible. It's all that God has ever wanted, that we would know him. This is when Paul prays in the New Testament, when he writes out greetings to the churches, and he tells them that he prays for them. The most explicit of this is in Ephesians chapter 3, where he says, And then the conclusion of the prayer is that you would know the richness of the depth of the knowledge of Christ and be filled with all the knowledge of God, that you would know him. It's this prayer for us that's echoed throughout the centuries, not just in Jeremiah 29, but we see it before that. We see it in the high priestly prayer that Jesus prays in John chapter 17. We see it at the end of the Bible when he brings us all to him, to know him. The plan that he has for the Hebrew people is the same plan that he has for you, that you would know him. That the creator God would have an intimate relationship with you and that you would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he cares about the smallest of details in your life. Scripture teaches us that not even a bird falls to the ground without the Father knowing, and that the very numbers of head, the very hair on your head is numbered. He knows you intimately, and He wants you to know Him that much. So does Jeremiah 29 11 apply to you? You're darn right it does. You're darn right it does, because his plan for them and for you is that you would know him. That's the plan. That the things in your life would be orchestrated to bring you down this path where you would know him and see him as the ultimate good. Are the things going to work out in the temporary? Maybe. I don't know. But if they don't, he's going to orchestrate and weave those things as one giant river that flows to him in eternity so that you might know him. That's what he's doing. I don't know what's going to happen in the temporary, but I do know that the result of them are going to be to funnel you towards God himself. And that's his plan for you, that he would know you. And listen to this cool thing. He says in verse 14, I will restore your fortunes and gather you from the nations and all the places where I've driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. I'm going to bring you back to Israel. I'm going to restore your fortune. I'm going to restore your family. Everything's going to be okay. And that's a great thought, and it's a comforting one for them. But listen to this, and this is why prophecy in the Old Testament is so cool. You know what happens in the last two chapters of the Bible? If you flip to the very end, Revelation 21, 22, you know what happens there? You're gonna, because I'm doing a series in Revelation in the fall. It's gonna be like seven weeks, October, November. Get pumped up. I'm gonna answer every question you've ever had about Revelation with absolute certainty. The last two chapters of the Bible, God creates a new heaven and a new earth and a new Jerusalem. And he gathers us to himself. And he restores our families. And he unites us. And he rejuvenates us and he completes his plan. His plan that he enacted when he promised it to Abraham, his plan that he reminded David of in 2 Samuel chapter 7 when he said the Messiah will sit on your throne, his plan that he told Mary about when he sent Jesus and his plan that seemed like it was done when Jesus hung on the cross and then the plan that the victory was won for on Easter when the tomb was empty. The plan that Jesus comes back for in Revelation 18 and 19 as the Lion of Judah, no longer the Lamb of God, when he makes all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, and then he claims his creation back to him, to the new heaven, the new earth, and the new Jerusalem as we surround the throne of God. That's his plan. And that's what he's enacted for you. And that's what he's done for them. That's the goal. That's what it's all about. And see, when we take Jeremiah 29, 11, and we make it mean this temporary situation is going to work out, we impoverish that text because it has such a greater meaning than that. It carries such greater significance than that. And in light of that, how much cooler is it that Haley gets to play that voicemail from her brother at her wedding because she knows that David knew Jesus. And the plan was murky and it was tough, but he's there waiting on her. And one day she will be restored. And one day they will be reunited. And one day they will see each other again because they each know Jesus because God's plan was to weave their lives back to him in such a way that they could spend eternity with him forever and he spent all of time acting out and initiating that plan for you and for them. When we do the work to understand the verses that mean so much to us, we will always find that there is more richness waiting there to be uncovered. So this morning, understand the dangers of plucking a verse out of context and throwing it on a t-shirt and letting it mean whatever we want it to mean. Because sometimes we mislead ourselves and others, and then even worse, we impoverish the text to such a degree that if we would just put in the time, I think we would be met with the richness and the fullness of God through his word as we are met with it over and over and over again. So listen, if you came in this morning and you love Jeremiah 29 11, take great comfort in Jeremiah 29 11. But take it in knowing that God's plan for you is that you know him. Take it in knowing that, yeah, God has a plan for you. It's to orchestrate everything in your life back to this wonderful tapestry so that you might know him. And I think that that's a pretty good plan. Let's pray. Father, I know that there are people here who are heartened by your eternal plan. But boy, God, if you could just kind of give them a temporary one, that'd be great too. So to those folks, I pray you would give them comfort and peace. For those folks, for all of us, I pray that we would see the things that we walk through in our life in light of eternity. In light of knowing that, yeah, you don't just have plans for us in this life, but God, you have a grand plan that you have been enacting since the dawn of time. And that one day you will restore us and return us all to the place, heaven, from which we have been exiled here. God, your word is amazing. I pray that we would all, every one of us, be more enthralled and awed by your word and that you would create within us a heart to mine it for all it's worth, God. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thanks for being here this morning. Apparently, what it takes to get Grace excited about church in June is a pandemic that lasts 18 months. Look at this. This is fantastic. We are in the second part of our series called One Hit Wonders, where we're basically, I said last week, we're basically just using this as a vehicle to look at some of the verses in the Bible that are pretty famous, pretty significant verses, ones that we treasure, but maybe a typical series doesn't hit on them, or even a typical Bible study might not arrive at these verses. So it's a time to kind of grab some of the verses and some of the passages out of Scripture that we may not land on in sermons and in Bible studies, but focus on them here in the summer as we come together each week. And so this week, I actually want to talk to you, ironically, about the danger of doing that. I want to talk to you about the danger of One-Hit Wonders, of just seeing a verse that we like. I like the words in this verse. I like what it says. I like what God is telling me. So I'm just going to grab it out of the Bible and I'm going to use it to encourage myself. This is a thing that brings encouragement to me and we kind of cling on to it. If you grew up in church, okay, how many of you, I want to see a show of hands actually. I didn't plan to do this, but I'm just now empirically interested. How many of you have ever heard someone else claim to have or have ever had your own life verse? How many of you have ever heard someone claim to have a life verse? Yes, this is a big time, this is a church thing, okay? If you're like, what in the world is that? You're one of the fortunate ones. But if you know what that is, to have a life verse, this is the verse, this is me. When I see this verse, I feel seen and heard. This is my life verse, okay? This is kind of my theme for life. And so what we do is we'll pull out these individual verses and we'll allow them to mean something of great significance to us. But sometimes when we do that, it can be dangerous. As I talk about this this morning, we're going to look at probably the most famous one of these verses. It's probably the most famous verse in the Old Testament, Jeremiah 29, 11. We're going to look at that verse today, and we're going to talk about why is it dangerous to just pull a single verse out of context. But I would preface it this way. My wife, Jen, she told me that I needed to be kind and gentle as I did this, because she noted that oftentimes I take glee in bursting people's bubbles. She may have cited the fact that every Christmas, I'd like to point out to you that the wise men were nowhere near the manger on Christmas and therefore all your nativity scenes are wrong and dumb. But I'm not allowed to crush this verse with that sort of careless flair. And I actually learned the lesson about this the hard way. Several years ago at my previous church, I was asked to come and give the devotional for the Loganville High School Red Devils baseball team. And you have no reason to know this. If you do know this and you're from North Carolina, you're weird, okay? But the Loganville Red Devils were really, really good at baseball. They won several state tournaments. They had a really good program over there. And their head coach was a guy named Brian Mills. And he went to our church and he asked me to come and give the devotional to the boys as they, because in Loganville, things are different. You can go talk about Jesus in public schools and everyone's just like, cool. That's not how it goes in Wake County. But I went out there, I went out there and I gave them a devotion, right? And they had this kid on their team named Clint Frazier, who at the time was the number one baseball prospect in the country, right? A big old mop of red hair. I never had any interactions with Clint, and this was the only time I ever really did get to interact with him. And I'm going to give a devotional to the team. And at the time, you may remember this, those of you who have been involved in church culture, there was actually an athletic gear, like Under Armour or Nike, like athletic apparel company called Phil 413, Philippians 413. And they would put Philippians 413 on all their stuff. And that's the verse, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, right? And so they're giving it to athletes. You can run that mile through Christ who strengthens you. You're going to hit that jump shot. You're going to hit that home run. You're going to complete that pass, you know, or make that sweet set, volleyball players. You're going to do it through Christ who gives you strength, right? And so they're like claiming this. They're emblazing it on their chest and on their equipment and they're going and God is powering me and I'm going to do good here. But the verse really, it's written by Paul and it comes in this context where Paul has said, I have learned how to be joyful with plenty and I have learned how to be joyful with little in want. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. So he's saying no matter what the circumstances are in my life, I've learned how to find joy in want. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. So he's saying, no matter what the circumstances are in my life, I've learned how to find joy in God. I've learned how to find that contentment in him. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. And so really, if we wanted to apply it to a baseball team, I explained to them, it would be about being okay with winning or losing, being happy whether you win or whether you lose. And I said, it's not going to make you hit the ball harder. It's not going to make you throw it further. It's not the verse to claim for your playoff run. If you want a verse, and then I went to Proverbs, and it was a verse on hard work and how God honors hard work. So claim this verse and outwork the other teams. But don't claim that verse like it's going to make you a better athlete because it won't. The whole time I'm talking about this, the boys kind of just, they all just have this smirk on their face. They're all just kind of smiling at me, you know? And so when I'm done, I'm like, all right, look, what gives? What did I step in? What's going on? Clint Frazier walks up to me, and he pulls back his sleeve, and he freshly minted Philippians 4.13 tat on his forearm, just right there. And I'm like, oh my gosh, man, I'm so sorry. Clint is now the starting right fielder for the New York Yankees. I'm not making it up. You can look it up. He's there. He's a great ball player and he's still got the tattoo. So apparently I was wrong. It did make him hit the ball further and throw better. I don't know. But that was where I learned to be gentle as you talk about verses that are near and dear to people. And Jeremiah 29 11 is one that is really special to folks and really does give us a sense of hope and a sense of peace. You may know it. If you don't, you can turn your Bible there. If you don't have a Bible with you, it's in the seat back in front of you. But Jeremiah 29, 11 says, I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans for a hope and a future. It's a really great verse. I know the plans I have for you. Plans to prosper you, not to harm you. Plans for a hope and a future. If you're in a place where you feel uncertain, I don't know what's coming next. I need this relationship to work out. I don't know how in the world, in this market, I'm ever going to be able to afford a house. I don't know where the next job is going to come from. I don't know if I can close this deal. I don't know if this thing is going to work out with my kid. I don't know if this relationship is going to pan out. I don't know, God. And then for someone to speak that peace into your life, that God has a plan for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans for a hope and a future. That's a real hopeful, life-giving verse. And a lot of people claim it for those reasons, and that's great. I actually get to go and do a wedding here in a few weeks for Jen's cousin. Jen's my wife, by the way, not just a lady that I refer to in my sermons. I'm going to do a wedding for her cousin, and his bride is a girl named Haley. We were planning out the ceremony a couple of nights ago. And part of Haley's story is she had a brother named David growing up who struggled with addiction and depression. And David ended up taking his own life. And to honor him in the ceremony, she still has a voicemail from him where he reads her that verse. And they want it played in the ceremony. And that's a beautiful thing. Because God does have a plan for David. He does have a plan for Haley. He does have a plan for us. But I also think that it's important to understand what that plan is. And to understand what that verse really means. Because I think there's actually greater comfort waiting on us there than we've given that verse credit for. So I want to talk to you this morning about two dangers of one-hit wonders. Two dangers of grabbing a verse, plucking it out of the Bible, not reading anything around it and going, boom, this is what this means for me and my life. There's two big ways that we get in big trouble when we do that. So the first way and the first danger of just grabbing a verse out of context, when you hear someone grab a verse out of context, when you hear someone quote a verse, when you see something on a meme, when you see something on a t-shirt or whatever it is, we need to read it and look around it. And when we don't do that, we don't fully understand the verse, two really bad things can happen. The first one is we mislead ourselves and others. We just grab a verse out of the Bible and we apply it. It sounds nice. We mislead ourselves and others. And I say ourselves and others because each of us has a circle of influence. Sometimes we repeat what we hear to other people. I said something last week to a friend of mine and he goes, is that true? And I said, you know what? Honestly, I don't know. I heard it years ago and I've been parroting it ever since. I need to do some research on that. I have no idea. I think we do this sometimes. So when we just grab a verse out of context, we run the risk of misleading ourselves and others. I know of a church a few years ago that they were doing a building campaign. They were launching another campus. They were kind of relaunching their main campus. And they kind of grabbed a verse as the theme verse for the year. Look at what God is going to do at this place. And this is what's going to motivate us. And so the pastor was kind of casting vision for what's going to happen in the future. And then they found a nice verse to pair with it because when you're doing church right, that's what you do. You kind of decide what you think God wants you to do, and then you find a verse in the Bible that happens to coincide with the plans that you made. I'm kidding. That's not really a good way to go about applying Bible verses, but churches do this all the time, and so this church did it too, and they landed on this verse, Habakkuk 1.5. And Habakkuk 1.5, when you read it, it's like, oh, shoot. Look at what God's going to do here. There's going to be amazing things done in this place. Look at what Habakkuk 1 Ooh. Ooh, what if we did that at Grace? We're doing a building campaign. What if this home stretch? I said, guys, this is our verse that we are claiming. Look among the nations and see, wonder and be astounded, for I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told. I'm going to do something so amazing you wouldn't even believe it. If I told you what I was going to do you wouldn't believe it. And so the church, they claimed it, they put it on their literature, they piped it out there and everyone's like God's going to do amazing things here. We're not going to believe it. Even if he tells us what he's going to do we wouldn't believe him. And then one day somebody picked up their Bible and they read the rest of the verses. This is Habakkuk 1, 6 and following. Look at what the Lord will do here. He will bring great punishment upon our negligence. It's genuinely funny how opposite that verse is of what they wanted it to be. But it's also really sad. And I don't think that the pastor did this in any way to manipulate. I don't think he did it intentionally in any way. I think it was just lazy. Just kind of ignorant. I think he saw that verse somewhere. It was like, ooh, that's a good campaign verse. And then everybody started claiming it. Thinking that's what Habakkuk 1.5 meant. And it didn't. It meant, God, bring your punishment on us. Bring the Chaldeans and their violent faces. When we just pluck a verse out of context, we run a real risk of misleading ourselves and others. And so we don't want to do that with Jeremiah 29 11. We want to understand this verse in its proper context. And in its proper context, the prophet Jeremiah was writing this letter, the book of Jeremiah, to God's children, to the children of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, the Jews, the Hebrews, however it is you most easily refer to him, that's who he is writing to. And these people are people who are in captivity in Babylon. Israel, Jerusalem has been laid waste to. It has been conquered. It is left in smoke and ashes. And then Babylon carried away the best and the brightest. So the only people who were left in Israel were the old and the feeble and the young and the useless. Everybody else got taken away, right? And these people have a promise from God. Back in Genesis chapter 12, that God made to their forefather Abraham, where God promised Abraham, I will provide you with land, people, and blessing. One of your descendants will bless the whole earth. That's Jesus. That came true. Your descendants will be like the sand on the shore and the stars in the sky. There's a lot of Jewish people now. That came true. And I will give you the land of Canaan, the modern-day nation of Israel. So these people grew up being taught these promises of God that he made to their forefather Abraham, claiming those promises from the sovereign God, and now have watched that land be taken away from them. Now they have watched their best and their brightest be carried off as slaves into Babylon. Now they look at the smoldering ash heap of their once proud country and think, how could this be? How could this have ever happened? It's a discouraged people who think that their God has forgotten them or is somehow incapable of keeping his promises to them. They're spiritually and literally destitute. And to them, Jeremiah speaks these amazing words of comfort. Do you see how those hit a little different for the Hebrew people who have been carried away as slaves to Babylon? Jeremiah tells them, God sees you. He knows you. He has not forgotten about you. He intends to keep his promises to you. Hang in there. Have faith. And see, we take that verse and we apply it to the immediate situation. We take that verse and we say, God has a plan for me. I'm going to get the job. God has a plan for me. This relationship is going to work out. God has a plan for me. I know this thing is going to work. I just walked through this tremendous loss, but I'm comforted by the fact that God has a plan for me. So he's going to restore that. And we take this promise that was made to the Hebrew people in the Old Testament who were destitute and enslaved, and we make it mean that we're going to do better in the job interview or that the relationship's going to work out or that we're going to close that deal or that this stress is going to go away in my life. Which brings me to my next point. The next danger of one-hit wonders is that we cheapen the text. We cheapen the text. Now, I've got to be honest with you. This last week, a buddy of mine made fun of me for using ridiculous words in my sermons. So this So this week, when I wrote these notes, I said, we impoverish the text. But I had his voice in my head, and I changed it to cheapen. So if you just want the authentic experience, you need to change that word cheapen to impoverished in your own notes, okay? And giggle at me for doing that, but I can't. Impoverish is such a better word, but I just, I got insecure about it, so we went with cheapen the text. It cheapens the text. We take what it does mean, and we reduce it to what we need it to mean, and when we do that, we cheapen it, we impoverish it, we make it so much weaker than it should be. To show you this, look with me at what Jeremiah writes after the famous verse, Jeremiah 29 29 11. We pick it up in verse 12. Then you will call, I know the plans I have for you, he says, here are the plans. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations. I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Let me tell you what my plans are. My plans are that when you cry out to me, I'm going to hear you. My plans are that when you draw near to me, I will draw near to you. My plans are that, listen to this, my plans are that you would know me. My plans are that I would draw you into a relationship with myself. That's what God says his plans are. The very first thing I know, don't worry. I have a hope and a future. I have plans for you. You know what my plans for you are? He tells them in the following verses, my plans are that you would know me, which I love because this is a theme throughout the Bible. It's all that God has ever wanted, that we would know him. This is when Paul prays in the New Testament, when he writes out greetings to the churches, and he tells them that he prays for them. The most explicit of this is in Ephesians chapter 3, where he says, And then the conclusion of the prayer is that you would know the richness of the depth of the knowledge of Christ and be filled with all the knowledge of God, that you would know him. It's this prayer for us that's echoed throughout the centuries, not just in Jeremiah 29, but we see it before that. We see it in the high priestly prayer that Jesus prays in John chapter 17. We see it at the end of the Bible when he brings us all to him, to know him. The plan that he has for the Hebrew people is the same plan that he has for you, that you would know him. That the creator God would have an intimate relationship with you and that you would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he cares about the smallest of details in your life. Scripture teaches us that not even a bird falls to the ground without the Father knowing, and that the very numbers of head, the very hair on your head is numbered. He knows you intimately, and He wants you to know Him that much. So does Jeremiah 29 11 apply to you? You're darn right it does. You're darn right it does, because his plan for them and for you is that you would know him. That's the plan. That the things in your life would be orchestrated to bring you down this path where you would know him and see him as the ultimate good. Are the things going to work out in the temporary? Maybe. I don't know. But if they don't, he's going to orchestrate and weave those things as one giant river that flows to him in eternity so that you might know him. That's what he's doing. I don't know what's going to happen in the temporary, but I do know that the result of them are going to be to funnel you towards God himself. And that's his plan for you, that he would know you. And listen to this cool thing. He says in verse 14, I will restore your fortunes and gather you from the nations and all the places where I've driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. I'm going to bring you back to Israel. I'm going to restore your fortune. I'm going to restore your family. Everything's going to be okay. And that's a great thought, and it's a comforting one for them. But listen to this, and this is why prophecy in the Old Testament is so cool. You know what happens in the last two chapters of the Bible? If you flip to the very end, Revelation 21, 22, you know what happens there? You're gonna, because I'm doing a series in Revelation in the fall. It's gonna be like seven weeks, October, November. Get pumped up. I'm gonna answer every question you've ever had about Revelation with absolute certainty. The last two chapters of the Bible, God creates a new heaven and a new earth and a new Jerusalem. And he gathers us to himself. And he restores our families. And he unites us. And he rejuvenates us and he completes his plan. His plan that he enacted when he promised it to Abraham, his plan that he reminded David of in 2 Samuel chapter 7 when he said the Messiah will sit on your throne, his plan that he told Mary about when he sent Jesus and his plan that seemed like it was done when Jesus hung on the cross and then the plan that the victory was won for on Easter when the tomb was empty. The plan that Jesus comes back for in Revelation 18 and 19 as the Lion of Judah, no longer the Lamb of God, when he makes all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, and then he claims his creation back to him, to the new heaven, the new earth, and the new Jerusalem as we surround the throne of God. That's his plan. And that's what he's enacted for you. And that's what he's done for them. That's the goal. That's what it's all about. And see, when we take Jeremiah 29, 11, and we make it mean this temporary situation is going to work out, we impoverish that text because it has such a greater meaning than that. It carries such greater significance than that. And in light of that, how much cooler is it that Haley gets to play that voicemail from her brother at her wedding because she knows that David knew Jesus. And the plan was murky and it was tough, but he's there waiting on her. And one day she will be restored. And one day they will be reunited. And one day they will see each other again because they each know Jesus because God's plan was to weave their lives back to him in such a way that they could spend eternity with him forever and he spent all of time acting out and initiating that plan for you and for them. When we do the work to understand the verses that mean so much to us, we will always find that there is more richness waiting there to be uncovered. So this morning, understand the dangers of plucking a verse out of context and throwing it on a t-shirt and letting it mean whatever we want it to mean. Because sometimes we mislead ourselves and others, and then even worse, we impoverish the text to such a degree that if we would just put in the time, I think we would be met with the richness and the fullness of God through his word as we are met with it over and over and over again. So listen, if you came in this morning and you love Jeremiah 29 11, take great comfort in Jeremiah 29 11. But take it in knowing that God's plan for you is that you know him. Take it in knowing that, yeah, God has a plan for you. It's to orchestrate everything in your life back to this wonderful tapestry so that you might know him. And I think that that's a pretty good plan. Let's pray. Father, I know that there are people here who are heartened by your eternal plan. But boy, God, if you could just kind of give them a temporary one, that'd be great too. So to those folks, I pray you would give them comfort and peace. For those folks, for all of us, I pray that we would see the things that we walk through in our life in light of eternity. In light of knowing that, yeah, you don't just have plans for us in this life, but God, you have a grand plan that you have been enacting since the dawn of time. And that one day you will restore us and return us all to the place, heaven, from which we have been exiled here. God, your word is amazing. I pray that we would all, every one of us, be more enthralled and awed by your word and that you would create within us a heart to mine it for all it's worth, God. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thanks for being here this morning. Apparently, what it takes to get Grace excited about church in June is a pandemic that lasts 18 months. Look at this. This is fantastic. We are in the second part of our series called One Hit Wonders, where we're basically, I said last week, we're basically just using this as a vehicle to look at some of the verses in the Bible that are pretty famous, pretty significant verses, ones that we treasure, but maybe a typical series doesn't hit on them, or even a typical Bible study might not arrive at these verses. So it's a time to kind of grab some of the verses and some of the passages out of Scripture that we may not land on in sermons and in Bible studies, but focus on them here in the summer as we come together each week. And so this week, I actually want to talk to you, ironically, about the danger of doing that. I want to talk to you about the danger of One-Hit Wonders, of just seeing a verse that we like. I like the words in this verse. I like what it says. I like what God is telling me. So I'm just going to grab it out of the Bible and I'm going to use it to encourage myself. This is a thing that brings encouragement to me and we kind of cling on to it. If you grew up in church, okay, how many of you, I want to see a show of hands actually. I didn't plan to do this, but I'm just now empirically interested. How many of you have ever heard someone else claim to have or have ever had your own life verse? How many of you have ever heard someone claim to have a life verse? Yes, this is a big time, this is a church thing, okay? If you're like, what in the world is that? You're one of the fortunate ones. But if you know what that is, to have a life verse, this is the verse, this is me. When I see this verse, I feel seen and heard. This is my life verse, okay? This is kind of my theme for life. And so what we do is we'll pull out these individual verses and we'll allow them to mean something of great significance to us. But sometimes when we do that, it can be dangerous. As I talk about this this morning, we're going to look at probably the most famous one of these verses. It's probably the most famous verse in the Old Testament, Jeremiah 29, 11. We're going to look at that verse today, and we're going to talk about why is it dangerous to just pull a single verse out of context. But I would preface it this way. My wife, Jen, she told me that I needed to be kind and gentle as I did this, because she noted that oftentimes I take glee in bursting people's bubbles. She may have cited the fact that every Christmas, I'd like to point out to you that the wise men were nowhere near the manger on Christmas and therefore all your nativity scenes are wrong and dumb. But I'm not allowed to crush this verse with that sort of careless flair. And I actually learned the lesson about this the hard way. Several years ago at my previous church, I was asked to come and give the devotional for the Loganville High School Red Devils baseball team. And you have no reason to know this. If you do know this and you're from North Carolina, you're weird, okay? But the Loganville Red Devils were really, really good at baseball. They won several state tournaments. They had a really good program over there. And their head coach was a guy named Brian Mills. And he went to our church and he asked me to come and give the devotional to the boys as they, because in Loganville, things are different. You can go talk about Jesus in public schools and everyone's just like, cool. That's not how it goes in Wake County. But I went out there, I went out there and I gave them a devotion, right? And they had this kid on their team named Clint Frazier, who at the time was the number one baseball prospect in the country, right? A big old mop of red hair. I never had any interactions with Clint, and this was the only time I ever really did get to interact with him. And I'm going to give a devotional to the team. And at the time, you may remember this, those of you who have been involved in church culture, there was actually an athletic gear, like Under Armour or Nike, like athletic apparel company called Phil 413, Philippians 413. And they would put Philippians 413 on all their stuff. And that's the verse, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me, right? And so they're giving it to athletes. You can run that mile through Christ who strengthens you. You're going to hit that jump shot. You're going to hit that home run. You're going to complete that pass, you know, or make that sweet set, volleyball players. You're going to do it through Christ who gives you strength, right? And so they're like claiming this. They're emblazing it on their chest and on their equipment and they're going and God is powering me and I'm going to do good here. But the verse really, it's written by Paul and it comes in this context where Paul has said, I have learned how to be joyful with plenty and I have learned how to be joyful with little in want. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. So he's saying no matter what the circumstances are in my life, I've learned how to find joy in want. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. So he's saying, no matter what the circumstances are in my life, I've learned how to find joy in God. I've learned how to find that contentment in him. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. And so really, if we wanted to apply it to a baseball team, I explained to them, it would be about being okay with winning or losing, being happy whether you win or whether you lose. And I said, it's not going to make you hit the ball harder. It's not going to make you throw it further. It's not the verse to claim for your playoff run. If you want a verse, and then I went to Proverbs, and it was a verse on hard work and how God honors hard work. So claim this verse and outwork the other teams. But don't claim that verse like it's going to make you a better athlete because it won't. The whole time I'm talking about this, the boys kind of just, they all just have this smirk on their face. They're all just kind of smiling at me, you know? And so when I'm done, I'm like, all right, look, what gives? What did I step in? What's going on? Clint Frazier walks up to me, and he pulls back his sleeve, and he freshly minted Philippians 4.13 tat on his forearm, just right there. And I'm like, oh my gosh, man, I'm so sorry. Clint is now the starting right fielder for the New York Yankees. I'm not making it up. You can look it up. He's there. He's a great ball player and he's still got the tattoo. So apparently I was wrong. It did make him hit the ball further and throw better. I don't know. But that was where I learned to be gentle as you talk about verses that are near and dear to people. And Jeremiah 29 11 is one that is really special to folks and really does give us a sense of hope and a sense of peace. You may know it. If you don't, you can turn your Bible there. If you don't have a Bible with you, it's in the seat back in front of you. But Jeremiah 29, 11 says, I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans for a hope and a future. It's a really great verse. I know the plans I have for you. Plans to prosper you, not to harm you. Plans for a hope and a future. If you're in a place where you feel uncertain, I don't know what's coming next. I need this relationship to work out. I don't know how in the world, in this market, I'm ever going to be able to afford a house. I don't know where the next job is going to come from. I don't know if I can close this deal. I don't know if this thing is going to work out with my kid. I don't know if this relationship is going to pan out. I don't know, God. And then for someone to speak that peace into your life, that God has a plan for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans for a hope and a future. That's a real hopeful, life-giving verse. And a lot of people claim it for those reasons, and that's great. I actually get to go and do a wedding here in a few weeks for Jen's cousin. Jen's my wife, by the way, not just a lady that I refer to in my sermons. I'm going to do a wedding for her cousin, and his bride is a girl named Haley. We were planning out the ceremony a couple of nights ago. And part of Haley's story is she had a brother named David growing up who struggled with addiction and depression. And David ended up taking his own life. And to honor him in the ceremony, she still has a voicemail from him where he reads her that verse. And they want it played in the ceremony. And that's a beautiful thing. Because God does have a plan for David. He does have a plan for Haley. He does have a plan for us. But I also think that it's important to understand what that plan is. And to understand what that verse really means. Because I think there's actually greater comfort waiting on us there than we've given that verse credit for. So I want to talk to you this morning about two dangers of one-hit wonders. Two dangers of grabbing a verse, plucking it out of the Bible, not reading anything around it and going, boom, this is what this means for me and my life. There's two big ways that we get in big trouble when we do that. So the first way and the first danger of just grabbing a verse out of context, when you hear someone grab a verse out of context, when you hear someone quote a verse, when you see something on a meme, when you see something on a t-shirt or whatever it is, we need to read it and look around it. And when we don't do that, we don't fully understand the verse, two really bad things can happen. The first one is we mislead ourselves and others. We just grab a verse out of the Bible and we apply it. It sounds nice. We mislead ourselves and others. And I say ourselves and others because each of us has a circle of influence. Sometimes we repeat what we hear to other people. I said something last week to a friend of mine and he goes, is that true? And I said, you know what? Honestly, I don't know. I heard it years ago and I've been parroting it ever since. I need to do some research on that. I have no idea. I think we do this sometimes. So when we just grab a verse out of context, we run the risk of misleading ourselves and others. I know of a church a few years ago that they were doing a building campaign. They were launching another campus. They were kind of relaunching their main campus. And they kind of grabbed a verse as the theme verse for the year. Look at what God is going to do at this place. And this is what's going to motivate us. And so the pastor was kind of casting vision for what's going to happen in the future. And then they found a nice verse to pair with it because when you're doing church right, that's what you do. You kind of decide what you think God wants you to do, and then you find a verse in the Bible that happens to coincide with the plans that you made. I'm kidding. That's not really a good way to go about applying Bible verses, but churches do this all the time, and so this church did it too, and they landed on this verse, Habakkuk 1.5. And Habakkuk 1.5, when you read it, it's like, oh, shoot. Look at what God's going to do here. There's going to be amazing things done in this place. Look at what Habakkuk 1 Ooh. Ooh, what if we did that at Grace? We're doing a building campaign. What if this home stretch? I said, guys, this is our verse that we are claiming. Look among the nations and see, wonder and be astounded, for I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told. I'm going to do something so amazing you wouldn't even believe it. If I told you what I was going to do you wouldn't believe it. And so the church, they claimed it, they put it on their literature, they piped it out there and everyone's like God's going to do amazing things here. We're not going to believe it. Even if he tells us what he's going to do we wouldn't believe him. And then one day somebody picked up their Bible and they read the rest of the verses. This is Habakkuk 1, 6 and following. Look at what the Lord will do here. He will bring great punishment upon our negligence. It's genuinely funny how opposite that verse is of what they wanted it to be. But it's also really sad. And I don't think that the pastor did this in any way to manipulate. I don't think he did it intentionally in any way. I think it was just lazy. Just kind of ignorant. I think he saw that verse somewhere. It was like, ooh, that's a good campaign verse. And then everybody started claiming it. Thinking that's what Habakkuk 1.5 meant. And it didn't. It meant, God, bring your punishment on us. Bring the Chaldeans and their violent faces. When we just pluck a verse out of context, we run a real risk of misleading ourselves and others. And so we don't want to do that with Jeremiah 29 11. We want to understand this verse in its proper context. And in its proper context, the prophet Jeremiah was writing this letter, the book of Jeremiah, to God's children, to the children of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, the Jews, the Hebrews, however it is you most easily refer to him, that's who he is writing to. And these people are people who are in captivity in Babylon. Israel, Jerusalem has been laid waste to. It has been conquered. It is left in smoke and ashes. And then Babylon carried away the best and the brightest. So the only people who were left in Israel were the old and the feeble and the young and the useless. Everybody else got taken away, right? And these people have a promise from God. Back in Genesis chapter 12, that God made to their forefather Abraham, where God promised Abraham, I will provide you with land, people, and blessing. One of your descendants will bless the whole earth. That's Jesus. That came true. Your descendants will be like the sand on the shore and the stars in the sky. There's a lot of Jewish people now. That came true. And I will give you the land of Canaan, the modern-day nation of Israel. So these people grew up being taught these promises of God that he made to their forefather Abraham, claiming those promises from the sovereign God, and now have watched that land be taken away from them. Now they have watched their best and their brightest be carried off as slaves into Babylon. Now they look at the smoldering ash heap of their once proud country and think, how could this be? How could this have ever happened? It's a discouraged people who think that their God has forgotten them or is somehow incapable of keeping his promises to them. They're spiritually and literally destitute. And to them, Jeremiah speaks these amazing words of comfort. Do you see how those hit a little different for the Hebrew people who have been carried away as slaves to Babylon? Jeremiah tells them, God sees you. He knows you. He has not forgotten about you. He intends to keep his promises to you. Hang in there. Have faith. And see, we take that verse and we apply it to the immediate situation. We take that verse and we say, God has a plan for me. I'm going to get the job. God has a plan for me. This relationship is going to work out. God has a plan for me. I know this thing is going to work. I just walked through this tremendous loss, but I'm comforted by the fact that God has a plan for me. So he's going to restore that. And we take this promise that was made to the Hebrew people in the Old Testament who were destitute and enslaved, and we make it mean that we're going to do better in the job interview or that the relationship's going to work out or that we're going to close that deal or that this stress is going to go away in my life. Which brings me to my next point. The next danger of one-hit wonders is that we cheapen the text. We cheapen the text. Now, I've got to be honest with you. This last week, a buddy of mine made fun of me for using ridiculous words in my sermons. So this So this week, when I wrote these notes, I said, we impoverish the text. But I had his voice in my head, and I changed it to cheapen. So if you just want the authentic experience, you need to change that word cheapen to impoverished in your own notes, okay? And giggle at me for doing that, but I can't. Impoverish is such a better word, but I just, I got insecure about it, so we went with cheapen the text. It cheapens the text. We take what it does mean, and we reduce it to what we need it to mean, and when we do that, we cheapen it, we impoverish it, we make it so much weaker than it should be. To show you this, look with me at what Jeremiah writes after the famous verse, Jeremiah 29 29 11. We pick it up in verse 12. Then you will call, I know the plans I have for you, he says, here are the plans. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations. I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Let me tell you what my plans are. My plans are that when you cry out to me, I'm going to hear you. My plans are that when you draw near to me, I will draw near to you. My plans are that, listen to this, my plans are that you would know me. My plans are that I would draw you into a relationship with myself. That's what God says his plans are. The very first thing I know, don't worry. I have a hope and a future. I have plans for you. You know what my plans for you are? He tells them in the following verses, my plans are that you would know me, which I love because this is a theme throughout the Bible. It's all that God has ever wanted, that we would know him. This is when Paul prays in the New Testament, when he writes out greetings to the churches, and he tells them that he prays for them. The most explicit of this is in Ephesians chapter 3, where he says, And then the conclusion of the prayer is that you would know the richness of the depth of the knowledge of Christ and be filled with all the knowledge of God, that you would know him. It's this prayer for us that's echoed throughout the centuries, not just in Jeremiah 29, but we see it before that. We see it in the high priestly prayer that Jesus prays in John chapter 17. We see it at the end of the Bible when he brings us all to him, to know him. The plan that he has for the Hebrew people is the same plan that he has for you, that you would know him. That the creator God would have an intimate relationship with you and that you would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he cares about the smallest of details in your life. Scripture teaches us that not even a bird falls to the ground without the Father knowing, and that the very numbers of head, the very hair on your head is numbered. He knows you intimately, and He wants you to know Him that much. So does Jeremiah 29 11 apply to you? You're darn right it does. You're darn right it does, because his plan for them and for you is that you would know him. That's the plan. That the things in your life would be orchestrated to bring you down this path where you would know him and see him as the ultimate good. Are the things going to work out in the temporary? Maybe. I don't know. But if they don't, he's going to orchestrate and weave those things as one giant river that flows to him in eternity so that you might know him. That's what he's doing. I don't know what's going to happen in the temporary, but I do know that the result of them are going to be to funnel you towards God himself. And that's his plan for you, that he would know you. And listen to this cool thing. He says in verse 14, I will restore your fortunes and gather you from the nations and all the places where I've driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. I'm going to bring you back to Israel. I'm going to restore your fortune. I'm going to restore your family. Everything's going to be okay. And that's a great thought, and it's a comforting one for them. But listen to this, and this is why prophecy in the Old Testament is so cool. You know what happens in the last two chapters of the Bible? If you flip to the very end, Revelation 21, 22, you know what happens there? You're gonna, because I'm doing a series in Revelation in the fall. It's gonna be like seven weeks, October, November. Get pumped up. I'm gonna answer every question you've ever had about Revelation with absolute certainty. The last two chapters of the Bible, God creates a new heaven and a new earth and a new Jerusalem. And he gathers us to himself. And he restores our families. And he unites us. And he rejuvenates us and he completes his plan. His plan that he enacted when he promised it to Abraham, his plan that he reminded David of in 2 Samuel chapter 7 when he said the Messiah will sit on your throne, his plan that he told Mary about when he sent Jesus and his plan that seemed like it was done when Jesus hung on the cross and then the plan that the victory was won for on Easter when the tomb was empty. The plan that Jesus comes back for in Revelation 18 and 19 as the Lion of Judah, no longer the Lamb of God, when he makes all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, and then he claims his creation back to him, to the new heaven, the new earth, and the new Jerusalem as we surround the throne of God. That's his plan. And that's what he's enacted for you. And that's what he's done for them. That's the goal. That's what it's all about. And see, when we take Jeremiah 29, 11, and we make it mean this temporary situation is going to work out, we impoverish that text because it has such a greater meaning than that. It carries such greater significance than that. And in light of that, how much cooler is it that Haley gets to play that voicemail from her brother at her wedding because she knows that David knew Jesus. And the plan was murky and it was tough, but he's there waiting on her. And one day she will be restored. And one day they will be reunited. And one day they will see each other again because they each know Jesus because God's plan was to weave their lives back to him in such a way that they could spend eternity with him forever and he spent all of time acting out and initiating that plan for you and for them. When we do the work to understand the verses that mean so much to us, we will always find that there is more richness waiting there to be uncovered. So this morning, understand the dangers of plucking a verse out of context and throwing it on a t-shirt and letting it mean whatever we want it to mean. Because sometimes we mislead ourselves and others, and then even worse, we impoverish the text to such a degree that if we would just put in the time, I think we would be met with the richness and the fullness of God through his word as we are met with it over and over and over again. So listen, if you came in this morning and you love Jeremiah 29 11, take great comfort in Jeremiah 29 11. But take it in knowing that God's plan for you is that you know him. Take it in knowing that, yeah, God has a plan for you. It's to orchestrate everything in your life back to this wonderful tapestry so that you might know him. And I think that that's a pretty good plan. Let's pray. Father, I know that there are people here who are heartened by your eternal plan. But boy, God, if you could just kind of give them a temporary one, that'd be great too. So to those folks, I pray you would give them comfort and peace. For those folks, for all of us, I pray that we would see the things that we walk through in our life in light of eternity. In light of knowing that, yeah, you don't just have plans for us in this life, but God, you have a grand plan that you have been enacting since the dawn of time. And that one day you will restore us and return us all to the place, heaven, from which we have been exiled here. God, your word is amazing. I pray that we would all, every one of us, be more enthralled and awed by your word and that you would create within us a heart to mine it for all it's worth, God. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday morning. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that after the service. Just a real quick tip of the cap to Carly, our female vocalist. She was hacking up a lung in the pre-service meeting. She just got a little nagging cough, and she said, I'm just praying that I make it through my song. She said, great job with Honey in the Rock. You made it. Now, I got things to get to. All right, settle down. But now, if you start to cough during the sermon, get out. Go. All right. Carly's the best. She's also our graphics person, and we love her. This is part two of our series called Transformed. Jordan, in the open, kind of told you guys a little bit of what it is about and what it's for. It's based on that verse in Romans chapter 12 that says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And so there's some things that we wanted to talk about over this series that will run into mid-October where maybe we can just shift our thinking a little bit. Maybe we can allow God to transform our mind in the way that we think about some things. And maybe that can actually transform our lives. And so this morning, we're going to talk about this transformation from comparison to contentment. One of the most, probably the most ubiquitous desires on the planet. Every person, every culture, everywhere wants happiness. Now we might put different words around that. We might describe it differently. I want to be safe. I want to be provided for. I want to have enough of this. I want to feel enough security here. I want to be loved. I want whatever it is, whatever the ingredients of happiness are for us. But everybody wants for themselves and for their children and for the people they love to be happy. It's a ubiquitous human desire. It is virtually universal. Now, because we're believers, most of us in this room would claim a faith in Christ. We know that the most important thing to desire is a relationship with him. We know that the thing that we want for our children is a relationship with Jesus. And so I'm not arguing that happiness should replace that. As a matter of fact, as believers, we know that happiness is only really achievable if we trust in Christ to bring that about. And that's one of the things we're going to see this morning. But if we think about happiness, what it means to be happy, it can't mean being a smiling idiot all the time, just grinning all the time. Every day is the best day ever. So it has to be something deeper than that. And the deeper foundation of happiness is contentment. It's being content, being content in the moment. This moment doesn't need any more. I love it the way it is. This situation, this season, this relationship doesn't need any more. I'm happy with the way that it is. It's to be content, to figure out how to be content. When we can do that, we can be happy. The problem is that we exist in a culture tailor-made to rob us of contentment. Would you agree with that? We exist in a culture and in a time where we are constantly and consistently berated with messages and images and comparisons that erode our contentment to a place where we are no longer happy and we spend our days wishing we had what we don't instead of being grateful for having what we do because we live in this culture that just perniciously eats away and erodes away at our own contentment. I was talking with a friend of mine and I asked her, what's the biggest threat to your contentment? And she very quickly said, social media, social media. I scroll Facebook, Instagram. Is it X now? I'm not on Twitter anymore. They went from Twitter to X. I scroll and I see other people who are doing better than me. Their SUV is bigger and wider than mine. And so now I feel like it fits nicely into parking spaces. Mine fits nicely into parking spaces. Theirs takes up two. So they are obviously having a better life than me. You know, their vacations are nicer than mine. They've got life figured out. They're in better shape than me. The scrolling relentlessly of social media and comparing ourselves to what we see chips away at a lot of our contentment. And to that, I would just offer this as an aside. Back at the beginning of the year, I think it's sometime in February, I realized that I was wasting so much time on my phone, just mindlessly scrolling apps for no good reason. And I would scroll at the time Twitter, and I would just be angry. I would be angry at the politics. I would be angry at Christians arguing with Christians. It would just make me mad. So then I would switch over to Facebook. Maybe this will be better. And then on Facebook, all it is, I don't know about your feed and your algorithm. All it is is a bunch of people from my life like 11 years ago that I no longer care about. Like, that's great that you were in the strawberry fields on Saturday. That's not what I want to see. That's not like engaging content for me. So I don't even know what's going on with Facebook. And it was a couple of days of scrolling and realizing, I don't know any of these people anymore. Why are they here? And then Instagram for me just became, the algorithm became falling videos and golf tutorials. That was it. That was all I got and the whole thing. And I'm like, this is a total waste of time. So I took everything off my phone, except for TikTok. I watch TikTok sometimes. That's kind of fun. But I took everything off my phone. And I'll tell you this, my happiness meter has gone up since doing that. So for some of y'all, I know I'm joking around a little bit, but for some of y'all, you may not need anything else in this sermon than just kind of a nudge. Why don't you think about taking that off your phone for a while? Is it making you happy? Is it bringing you joy? Is it making you more or less content? Why don't you take it off your phone and see if you engage more with the people around you? See if you look more at God's goodness in your life that's already there. See if you're more present for people. For at least somebody here, I know that that's all you need. I know that's what you need to hear today. Just try that out. See if it doesn't help a little bit. But if it's not online, it's in person, right? It's still, we can still play the comparison game and make ourselves unhappy with the things that we have. I remember in the summer of 2020, for the previous three years since I moved here, I had been driving a Nissan Leaf. And if you were here during that time, if you knew me during that time, you'd love to make fun of me for that because you hate the environment and fiscal savings. No, because I mean that you, if you listen, I drove one for three years. I'm just going to say this. If you drive a Leaf, you do deserve to get made fun of. That's, that's part of the deal. When I bought the car, I wasn't like, people are going to think this is awesome. Like I knew I was going to get made fun of. So when it came time to sell it and get something new, I thought, I want something nice. I want something that I like. For the first time in my life, I want to buy myself a nice car. And so I looked around, and I looked at a Tesla, the less expensive Tesla, but it was more expensive than the Accord that I was comparing it to. It was more money down, less miles a year, more money per month. And I thought, gosh, it's just not wise. I'm not going to do that. And so I leased an Accord. And it was the nicest car I ever had. When I got in it, I was like, I can't believe this is so nice. Like I was really, I was excited. Here's how excited I was about it. As a grown man, here's what I did. I drove I drove it to my neighborhood I parked it on a street I got out and I took pictures of it so I did I took pictures of my new car and then you know I texted them to my parents how lame is that what am I like 17 that's so embarrassing I remembered that I did that as I was prepping for the sermon I remember that's the thing that I did. And I'm like, what is the matter with you? But I did it. That's how proud I was of this car. I was so excited to drive in the lap of luxury of the Honda Accord XLE or whatever it was. EXL or I don't know. And then like a month later, my jerk friend Tyler got a Tesla. And he's like texting us pictures of it and videos. And it was so awesome. And it was way faster. And the whole roof of a Tesla is glass. And I had, I had a sunroof in my Accord, but it was one of the normal size ones from like 1987. Good job, you dope. That's the car you have now. Everything's controlled from a touch screen. I have to still touch buttons like it's 1998. This was terrible. And within a month, listen, I'm so proud of this car, I'm taking pictures of it. Within a month, I hate it. I want to take it back to the dealership and get a Tesla. I hated what I had. I wanted something new. Life just works that way, doesn't it? In the comparison game. I have a 28-inch black stone on my back porch. I like to cook on it. I go to somebody else's house. They got a 36. I'm like, dang, I got to get a 36. There's more quesadillas on there. The guy with the 36 goes over to his buddy's house. He's got a 36 inch blast stone, but it's in a permanent, it's got stone built up around. It's a permanent cook station outside. This is fancy. This is a big deal now. Then permanent blackstone station guy goes to somebody else's house and he's got a permanent kitchen set up with a smoker and a pool. And he's like, honey, we got to get a pool. And then the guy with the pool in the setup goes to his buddy's house and he's got an infinity pool. And he's like, oh, I got to get an infinity pool. And then that person goes to the bigger infinity pool and on and on and on it goes. And we can never just be satisfied with what we have because our culture that we exist in just chips away at our happiness through that comparison game. And here's another thing as an aside that the comparison game does. It is convinced. This is just for the young moms in the room. So basically, you, okay? It has convinced. I watch it happen. And you, okay? I didn't see you over there. It was Jordan Shaw. It's convinced the moms that they're not momming hard enough. That's what social media does. That's what the comparison thing does. It convinces moms and dads that they're not momming and dadding hard enough. They need to do more. Your cupcakes need to look better when you take them to the school. When your treats, when it's your week for snacks, for the soccer game, your cooler needs to be nice. It needs to be better than the other coolers. You need to engage in imaginative play. You need to do supportive discipline and never be angry at your kids. And only talk to them in soft tones because they're all little princes and princesses and they can't handle adversity in their life. So let's be very gentle. And let's not grade their papers in red. Let's use green and encouraging things and tones. Let's do that. And we're convinced, I see this in moms right now, that you're just not momming right. And you go to bed every night with this gross combination of mom guilt and mom exhaustion. I need to do more. I don't have one single ounce left to give, and I might hate my children. It's just this combo platter that's terrible. And here's what I want to tell you. Here's what I want to tell you, young moms. You are very likely a better mom to your children than your mom was to you. Very likely. It's just a generational thing. Jen and I are so much more present with our kids than our parents were with us. We just are. It's generational. It's just what this generation is doing. So let yourself off the hook a little bit. Now we won't know if we're doing it right until they're adults and they're not in prison, but for now it seems like we're doing a good job. You're doing a good job. Let yourself off the hook a little bit. Quit playing the comparison game. You're doing a good job with your kids. I actually watched a TED Talk a couple years ago, and it stuck with me. It's this guy doing studies on happiness. And he made the point that many of us, because of goal setting and attainment, have fundamentally eliminated the possibility of happiness from our life, which is kind of a crazy thought. But he says that when we set goals for ourselves and we say, when I get to those goals, I'm going to be happy. When I graduate college, I'll be happy. When I get a job, I'll be happy. Get the promotion, I'll be happy. When I meet the person, I'll be happy. When I get married, I'll be happy. When we have children, I'll be happy. When the children leave the house, I'll be happy, I meet the person I'll be happy when I get married I'll be happy when we have children I'll be happy when the children leave the house I'll be happy which is probably true and then when and then when when we get to be grandparents I'll be happy and what we do in life is we set the goalposts we set the marker for happy off in the distance and then we think I'm not happy now but when I get there I will be and then we get there what do we do the very second we arrive we move to the next thing. So I never spend any time in the joy that God brought me to. I only spend time anticipating the next thing I'm going to need to be happy. Whenever sit and revel in God's goodness now. So I think it's fair to say that we have a contentment issue. We always want the next thing. We always want a little bit more. Something a little bit bigger. Something a little bit shinier. Something a little bit more peaceful. We're always bugging God or ourselves for whatever could be next. Which is why I think this verse in Philippians is such a helpful verse for us this morning. It's actually, and then don't put that one up on the screen yet. I'm just gonna say 13 and then I'll read them all. It's actually one of the most misused verses in all of scripture. It's neck and neck Philippians 4.13 and Jeremiah 29.11. Philippians 4.13 says, I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength, or I can do all things through him who strengthens me. And we see people misuse this all the time. I can do anything I set my mind to with Christ powering me. In the name of Christ, I can do whatever I want to do. I've seen athletes with this tattooed on themselves somewhere. I'm going to complete the pass through Christ who gives me strength or score the goal or hit the home run or pitch the strikeout. Like I'm going to do this through Christ who gives me strength. There's even a Christian apparel line, like Under Armour, but for believers. So it means it's almost as good as the not believing material, but it's a little bit cheaper and a little bit poorly done. And it's got 413 all over it. These, these athletes are on high school fields all over the nation being powered by Christ and their teams are winning all of the state championships, of course, because they're powered by Jesus and he wants them to win. We misappropriate the verse all the time. It does not mean that through Christ who gives me strength, I can close the sale. I can accomplish this thing. I can do this deed. I can accomplish this act. It does not mean that. We have to be very careful when we pluck verses out of context and make them mean what only the sentence sounds like without anything else informing what that sentence actually means. And we use it to mean the opposite of what it really means. Here's what it really means. Here's the context of it. If we read verses 11 and 12, Paul writes this in Philippians. Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In's about learning in all seasons to trust God to provide what we need. And I love that the word learn shows up in here two times. I've learned to be in abundance and in need. I have learned to be in plenty and in want. I've learned these things through Christ who gives me strength. And it may seem like, well, man, it would be pretty easy. I don't know how tough that is, Paul. It'd be pretty, pretty easy to be content in abundance when you have plenty, when you don't want for anything, when you're, when you're living a life of luxury and you've got more than what you could ask for. It's got to be pretty easy to be content in that scenario. And to that thought, which isn't all the way incorrect, I would remind you of this proverb. I think about this proverb a lot. Proverbs 23, 1 through 5. When you sit down to eat with a ruler, observe carefully what is before you, and put a knife to your throat if you are given to appetite. Do not desire his delicacies, for they are deceptive food. Do not toil to acquire wealth. Be discerning enough to desist. When your eyes light on it, it is gone, for suddenly it sprouts wings, flying like an eagle toward heaven. That is a fancy, poetic way of saying this. Acc breeds more desire not less exposure to nice things a taste of the good life usually breeds a desire for more of that not less we have it pretty good then we go to someone else's house and they have it a little bit better and all of a a sudden we go home and we want what they want. Did you see that serving dish? I want that serving dish. My serving dish is from Kohl's. It is stupid. I would like a nice serving dish from like Nordstrom or something. I don't know. Crate and barrel. That's where you waste money on serving dishes. William Sonoma. That's right. That's a gold standard. That's all Jeffy has at his house. William Sonoma, everything. And Viking appliances, I'm sure. Yeah, because you can tell that the Viking stove heats up the ground beef better than just a regular GE stove, right? Yes, of course. But we all want those things. We all want those things. There's actually the effect of this that accumulation tends to make you want more. I heard this a while back. Steve Harvey, the host of Family Feud, was giving some people some financial advice. And he said, if you're just starting out in your career and you don't have a lot of money, he said, save up enough for a first class ticket somewhere and fly first class. Because once you fly first class, you will never want to fly coach again. And you will reorganize your life and be driven to make the money you need so that you can fly first class. And here's the thing. He's right. Have you ever flown first class? When you fly first class, you don't want to sit back there with the gen pop anymore. That's depressing. Now, here's what I've not done. And if I do this, I'm in big trouble. I've never flown in one of those pods internationally. If I fly in one of those pods where you get to stretch out and you get your own screen, like, I'm done for. But what you do when you get exposed, when you're at the king's table and you're around things that you don't have, is you begin to organize your life in such a way so that you can have those. When you see your friends taking nice vacations, you start to organize your life in such a way so you can too. When you see what you don't have, you start to organize your life in such a way that you can have what you want. And in organizing your life around the things that you want, around materials or experiences, we lose the contentment that's sitting right in front of us. So let's not think it's just a simple thing to learn to be content when you're surrounded with abundance, because it's not. It's really tricky, and it's really sneaky. Now the one that we would all agree is difficult is to be content when we have little. I kind of wondered as I read that, how can anyone be content in the midst of tragedy, loss, or loneliness? When you're sitting in the wake of a divorce, how can you claim in that moment to be content? When you are a freshly minted widow or widower, how can you claim in that moment to be content? When your children are walking through a tragically difficult time, how can you possibly claim to be content, to be happy? I need for nothing, when you clearly need for much. This is where that word learned comes into play, because somehow or another, Paul figured that one out. But that feels impossible. And it feels like really bad pastoral counsel. Someone's walking through a really difficult time in their life. They come to my office to see me, and they're crying about this hardship that they're enduring or that they're watching a loved one endure. And I point them to this verse and go, hey, you can be content through Christ who strengthens you. You should just be happy right now. How do we do that? How is that attainable? In the grace vine that I wrote for this week, I stated that this was a deeply personal sermon for me. Because this topic of contentment and happiness is actually something I think a great deal about. Because back in 2020, in the fall, I started to go to therapy. And I've mentioned before that I've done therapy, and I've mentioned before that I think everyone should do it. Everybody, you should go to preventative maintenance therapy. Most of us, all of us need more maintenance than we're willing to acknowledge anyways. Everyone should go. If you can afford therapy, you should go to therapy. I actually have a really good buddy here at the church. He's a big, tough guy, you know. He feels the only acceptable emotion to him is anger, and all other emotions are for sissies, all of them. And he decided he was going to start going to therapy, and I sent him to a guy, and he literally texts me every time he talks to this guy. Man, I love that guy so much. This is the best. I've never experienced anything like this in my life. Like, every time. Big tough guy loves therapy. You'd like it too. But I remember sitting in this guy's office, and I had kind of come to realize that in life, like, we all chase things. We all chase happiness. Some chase respect. Some chase security, stability, love, approval, just a sense of being enough and worthwhile. We're all chasing something. All adults are little more than just a pile, a comprising of insecurities and desires and ways that we try to cover those things up to make ourselves acceptable to the broader milieu. That's all we are. We're all chasing something. And I sat in his office, and he looked at me and he said, dude, when are you going to realize it? I said, realize what? He said, that thing that you're chasing, you have it. You have it. You have a wife who loves you. You guys laugh together every day. At the time we just had Lily, she said, you have a daughter who loves you, wants to spend time with you. You have rich friendships. People who support you, believe in you. You have a job that you love, a church that you love, and who seems to love you and support you too. When are you going to quit chasing it? You have it. It's right there if you'll just stop to look at it. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. And I realized, my goodness, I don't know why I'm striving so hard to get the thing that's going to make me happy. I have all the ingredients for happiness in my life right now if I'll just notice them. And I think that that's true of most of us. I think most of us already have all the ingredients for happiness available to us. We already have all the ingredients of happiness available to us right now. Even if it seems like there's this hole in our life, this thing that we want, and I won't be happy until I get it, I would push back and say, no, you have everything you need right now to be content in this moment. It doesn't mean that we should stop striving. It doesn't mean that we should stop trying. It doesn't mean that we should stop seeking, but we can be content in this moment because God has given us everything we need to be content. He's given us all the ingredients to make happy if we will just stop and slow down and see them. And since then, since realizing that, I've just done a lot of reflection on the transformative power of being content. On the transformative power of looking at your life and saying, thanks God, I have everything I need to be happy in you and content in you. And I would be willing to bet that whatever it is you're chasing, you've probably caught it. Whatever it is you think you need, you probably don't. And that all the things that you need in your life to make you content in the Lord, He has provided for you. And as this has washed over me, it's impacted me in profound ways. And so I sat down and I thought, how has just this arrival at contentment shaped me? How has it changed me? How has it impacted me? And I came up with this list. Contentment has transformed my gratitude, perspective, faith, sentimentality, and my prayer life. Most importantly, contentment has transformed my gratitude. It has transformed the way that I walk through life grateful for God's goodness in my life. Every time Jen, my wife, laughs at one of my jokes, I say a little prayer of gratitude to God. Because as long as she'll laugh at my jokes, I know we're good. When she stops laughing at my jokes, we're in in trouble because I don't really have any other tools in the tool belt besides trying to make her laugh. Like I'm not romantic. That's it. It's changed the way I think about my children and the moments that I'm grateful for with them because here's the reality. Parents with young kids. When that kid is crying and you have to walk in there at 3.30 in the morning when all you want in the whole world is to sleep and you pick them up and you calm them down and that little head is resting on your shoulder and that little arm is on the other shoulder and you calm them down and you get them back to sleep and you lay them back down in that bed. Let me tell you something that's super depressing. You won't know when it is the last time that you just did that. One of those times is going to be the last time and you won't know that it was. And there's a bunch of parents whose kids are grown up who would give anything in the world to have that moment with their kid one more time. So be grateful for those moments. Be grateful for the sleepless nights because you only get so many of them. I was sitting in my house the other day and John and Lily, Lily's seven, John's two, they're running around the downstairs. We asked Lily to vacuum the kitchen and we got this little thing that she can do it with. And she did for a second. And then she just started running laps around the kitchen and the dining room. And she's screaming and John's screaming and no work is getting done. And I'm sitting there. And Jen was a little bit exasperated with him. And I'm just grinning like an idiot. Because I think one day we're going to miss these days. One day I'm going to miss a noisy house. And when you're content, when you're determined to see the good and what God has provided for you right now, annoying things become moments of gratitude. Frustrating things become moments of peace and reflection. It transforms the way you walk through life. It was in this season that I stumbled upon this verse in John 1 16 that I say all the time. You guys have heard me say it. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I love that verse. From God's fullness, from his goodness, from his generosity and his mercy and his grace, he has given you so many blessings. And it's up to us in the moments to acknowledge those. Next time you're with friends and you have a great conversation and it's life-giving and dinner is good, be grateful for it. Tell them so. Thank God for them. Next time you get one of those good laughs where your eyes tear up and you can't stop and you go for so long that you can't remember why you started, even if it was about something inappropriate, anyways, still praise God for laughter in your life. It was good and those moments are sweet and we don't know how many of them we get. From his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. I know. Some of us are in hard seasons. Some of us are in seasons of abundance. But I know that we all have God's goodness in our life. We just sang that song. I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. And Aaron and the band laid out and I heard you guys saying that. If it's true, then be content in that goodness. And I love that line, why should I fear? The evidence is here. That's how it changed my faith. I said it affects my gratitude. It changes my faith. My faith in God. My faith in his goodness. I know that things are going to work out the way that he wants them to work out because he wants them to work out that way. He's inviting me into it. But I have nothing to fear from the future because God is orchestrating it and I am in his hands. And I've said last week we launched the part two of the campaign to build a building. And I said last week, and you'll hear me say a bunch, if God wants us to build it, we will. If he doesn't, we won't. But that doesn't change one little bit what I get to do and what he's called me to do. That doesn't change one little bit what he's called you guys to do, what he's called us to do as a church, which is make disciples and grow closer to him, connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. That's what he's called us to do. That mission doesn't change if we get into a building. It doesn't change if we stay. Now, if we go, I'll be excited. If we don't, I'll be sad. But not for very long on either way because if God wants us to do it, we will. If he doesn't, we won't. I'm content. I'm happy getting to do what God has asked us to do in whatever capacity, in whatever location he's asked us to do it. This God opening my eyes to contentment has changed my perspective on life. In the middle of this realization, we were walking through a season of need. It was a hard one. We were walking through pancreatic cancer with Jen's dad. We ended up losing him at the end of that year. It was not an easy time for everyone around us to be content. It wasn't an easy thing to watch my wife just be sad and try to be content with that. But one of the things I learned is that life has seasons. And sometimes they're abundant, and sometimes they're lacking. And in the abundant seasons, we should revel in them and praise God for them and find joy in them. And in the seasons of need and hurt and want, we can take solace that it's a season that every day won't feel like today. Every month won't feel like this month. And a lot of times I'm not even sure. Sometimes we operate as Christians that God takes us into hard seasons because he has a lesson that he wants us to learn. So we allow these things to happen to us. And I just kind of think that's a pretty myopic view of God's will. He's orchestrating all these other things and all these, all this ripple effect and all these other people's lives so that you can learn this lesson about being grateful. Maybe, maybe you're that important in God's kingdom. Or maybe life ebbs and flows and good seasons and bad seasons come and go. And when we're in a bad season, we just say, I'm in a bad season. This is tough. But I know that God is with me and I know that everything won't feel like this. It's changed my perspective. It's changed my sentimentality a lot, like a lot. Because of those sweet moments, from his fullness, we've all received grace upon grace. And you reflect upon those sweet things with friends or children or family or whatever it is, I cry all the time. Like, if I'm watching TV with John and he's on my lap and Lily sees it and gets jealous and she comes over and she puts her head right here and she says she wants snugs and now I'm cuddling with both of my children at the same time, I have the 100% chance I'm going to cry. I just will. I'll just sit there and I'll think, this is the good stuff. Like I'm such a sap. I don't know if I told you guys this already, but we got a piano in the house and Jen's playing just a little bit. And she was playing a hymn. I said, go play a hymn for me. She said, what hymn? I said, I don't care. I just want to hear you play a hymn. And she goes and she plays it. And I went and I stood next to the piano and she's playing the hymn. And I started crying and she was like, what are you, like, what's the matter with you? And I'm like trying to explain to her, like, I just imagined like 20 years down the road, John and Lily coming back with their kids and we're standing in this very dining room and we're singing Christmas carols and hymns. And she was like, you got to get it together, man. And she, I mean, she's right. But I've seen it revolutionize that in me too, savoring every moment as sweet and as God's blessing. And then lastly, I think that contentment radically changes our prayer life. I've talked about this a couple of times, but Jesus starts the Lord's Prayer with your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Over the years, my personal prayer life has gotten a lot shorter. The most words I use when I pray is when I pray in front of other people. It's not that I'm praying for shorter amounts of time. I just use a lot less words. Because I just pray, God, here's the thing. Would you do with this thing what you want? And would you help me to accept what that is? God, here's a concern. Would you be in this concern? And would you help me to be content in your answer? God, this person is sick. I'm just lifting them up to you. I don't know what to pray for them. But will your will be done in their life and in the life of their family? God, Lily's struggling. Will you help her? According to whatever your will is, because I know that this struggle might be important for who she's gonna become. But in all things, God, your will be done. And when you pray like that, then you can just kind of rest in the assurance that he will do his will. So I by no means have figured out contentment. And it certainly wasn't by my own desire that I arrived there. I didn't decide one day, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to be content. I'm just going to decide to be happy with my life. I didn't do that. It washed over me like a ton of bricks because someone was ministering to me and they said, hey, you have all the ingredients for happy in your life right now. Maybe you should stop reaching for other things. And so I would like to say that same thing to you. You very likely have all the ingredients you need right now to make happy. If we just stop reaching and grabbing. And then here's what happens. I said earlier, it's impossible. It feels impossible to be content in a season of want during loss or loneliness or tragedy. But what happens is when we learn to be people who are content, that word learn, Paul says it's a process. When we learn to be people who are content with what God has provided for us in this moment and in this season, then when we are in a season of need, when we are in a season of hurt, if you're sitting there and I'm like, hey, you've got all the ingredients you need to make happy, you're like, I don't. I don't. I've got a big hole in my life. If that's you, here's how being a content person even transforms that mindset. Trusting God and being content allows you to say, you know what? I might not have all the ingredients in my life. I think I need to be happy, but I have Jesus and he's enough. He has provided himself for me and he is enough. And I trust him that not all seasons will feel like this season. And then we come full circle back to the verse and make this point. True contentment is only possible through the sanctifying work of Jesus. Sanctify, I always say, is to become more like Christ in character. It's a process after we claim a faith in Christ and then we're taken up to heaven in glory. Everything that happens in between, the Holy Spirit is working in us to make us more like Christ in our character. That's a sanctification process. And that's only, true contentment is only accessible through the sanctifying work of Christ. That's why Paul says, I've learned to be content. How? Through Christ who gives me strength because he allows me to do all things. And when we find our contentment in Christ and in his strength, we come full circle and we get to say, along with Paul, I have learned in seasons of plenty and I have learned in seasons of little to be content and happy because I can do all things through Christ who gives you strength. Let's pray. Father, we do, we do. We see the evidence of your goodness all over our lives. Lord, I pray that we would look at your considerable gifts, at the fullness that has leaked out onto us, and we would see the good things that you've given us, the good friends who love us, the good family that supports us, the good job or the good role or the good thing in our identity that we get to do to express ourselves and exercise our gifts, God, would we look at the many, many rich blessings that we have in our lives and be grateful to you. Father, for those with us who don't feel content, who do feel sad, who do feel like they are lacking some essential ingredients. God, would they feel this morning that you really are enough? Would they feel this morning that Jesus really is enough? Would they trust that these seasons of need and want, they come and go, and that you're in these seasons with us just like you're in the seasons of abundance with us? Help us be a grateful people. Help us pray with faith and with trust. And God, help us learn like Paul did to be content in all seasons and to find that joy and that contentment in you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday morning. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that after the service. Just a real quick tip of the cap to Carly, our female vocalist. She was hacking up a lung in the pre-service meeting. She just got a little nagging cough, and she said, I'm just praying that I make it through my song. She said, great job with Honey in the Rock. You made it. Now, I got things to get to. All right, settle down. But now, if you start to cough during the sermon, get out. Go. All right. Carly's the best. She's also our graphics person, and we love her. This is part two of our series called Transformed. Jordan, in the open, kind of told you guys a little bit of what it is about and what it's for. It's based on that verse in Romans chapter 12 that says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And so there's some things that we wanted to talk about over this series that will run into mid-October where maybe we can just shift our thinking a little bit. Maybe we can allow God to transform our mind in the way that we think about some things. And maybe that can actually transform our lives. And so this morning, we're going to talk about this transformation from comparison to contentment. One of the most, probably the most ubiquitous desires on the planet. Every person, every culture, everywhere wants happiness. Now we might put different words around that. We might describe it differently. I want to be safe. I want to be provided for. I want to have enough of this. I want to feel enough security here. I want to be loved. I want whatever it is, whatever the ingredients of happiness are for us. But everybody wants for themselves and for their children and for the people they love to be happy. It's a ubiquitous human desire. It is virtually universal. Now, because we're believers, most of us in this room would claim a faith in Christ. We know that the most important thing to desire is a relationship with him. We know that the thing that we want for our children is a relationship with Jesus. And so I'm not arguing that happiness should replace that. As a matter of fact, as believers, we know that happiness is only really achievable if we trust in Christ to bring that about. And that's one of the things we're going to see this morning. But if we think about happiness, what it means to be happy, it can't mean being a smiling idiot all the time, just grinning all the time. Every day is the best day ever. So it has to be something deeper than that. And the deeper foundation of happiness is contentment. It's being content, being content in the moment. This moment doesn't need any more. I love it the way it is. This situation, this season, this relationship doesn't need any more. I'm happy with the way that it is. It's to be content, to figure out how to be content. When we can do that, we can be happy. The problem is that we exist in a culture tailor-made to rob us of contentment. Would you agree with that? We exist in a culture and in a time where we are constantly and consistently berated with messages and images and comparisons that erode our contentment to a place where we are no longer happy and we spend our days wishing we had what we don't instead of being grateful for having what we do because we live in this culture that just perniciously eats away and erodes away at our own contentment. I was talking with a friend of mine and I asked her, what's the biggest threat to your contentment? And she very quickly said, social media, social media. I scroll Facebook, Instagram. Is it X now? I'm not on Twitter anymore. They went from Twitter to X. I scroll and I see other people who are doing better than me. Their SUV is bigger and wider than mine. And so now I feel like it fits nicely into parking spaces. Mine fits nicely into parking spaces. Theirs takes up two. So they are obviously having a better life than me. You know, their vacations are nicer than mine. They've got life figured out. They're in better shape than me. The scrolling relentlessly of social media and comparing ourselves to what we see chips away at a lot of our contentment. And to that, I would just offer this as an aside. Back at the beginning of the year, I think it's sometime in February, I realized that I was wasting so much time on my phone, just mindlessly scrolling apps for no good reason. And I would scroll at the time Twitter, and I would just be angry. I would be angry at the politics. I would be angry at Christians arguing with Christians. It would just make me mad. So then I would switch over to Facebook. Maybe this will be better. And then on Facebook, all it is, I don't know about your feed and your algorithm. All it is is a bunch of people from my life like 11 years ago that I no longer care about. Like, that's great that you were in the strawberry fields on Saturday. That's not what I want to see. That's not like engaging content for me. So I don't even know what's going on with Facebook. And it was a couple of days of scrolling and realizing, I don't know any of these people anymore. Why are they here? And then Instagram for me just became, the algorithm became falling videos and golf tutorials. That was it. That was all I got and the whole thing. And I'm like, this is a total waste of time. So I took everything off my phone, except for TikTok. I watch TikTok sometimes. That's kind of fun. But I took everything off my phone. And I'll tell you this, my happiness meter has gone up since doing that. So for some of y'all, I know I'm joking around a little bit, but for some of y'all, you may not need anything else in this sermon than just kind of a nudge. Why don't you think about taking that off your phone for a while? Is it making you happy? Is it bringing you joy? Is it making you more or less content? Why don't you take it off your phone and see if you engage more with the people around you? See if you look more at God's goodness in your life that's already there. See if you're more present for people. For at least somebody here, I know that that's all you need. I know that's what you need to hear today. Just try that out. See if it doesn't help a little bit. But if it's not online, it's in person, right? It's still, we can still play the comparison game and make ourselves unhappy with the things that we have. I remember in the summer of 2020, for the previous three years since I moved here, I had been driving a Nissan Leaf. And if you were here during that time, if you knew me during that time, you'd love to make fun of me for that because you hate the environment and fiscal savings. No, because I mean that you, if you listen, I drove one for three years. I'm just going to say this. If you drive a Leaf, you do deserve to get made fun of. That's, that's part of the deal. When I bought the car, I wasn't like, people are going to think this is awesome. Like I knew I was going to get made fun of. So when it came time to sell it and get something new, I thought, I want something nice. I want something that I like. For the first time in my life, I want to buy myself a nice car. And so I looked around, and I looked at a Tesla, the less expensive Tesla, but it was more expensive than the Accord that I was comparing it to. It was more money down, less miles a year, more money per month. And I thought, gosh, it's just not wise. I'm not going to do that. And so I leased an Accord. And it was the nicest car I ever had. When I got in it, I was like, I can't believe this is so nice. Like I was really, I was excited. Here's how excited I was about it. As a grown man, here's what I did. I drove I drove it to my neighborhood I parked it on a street I got out and I took pictures of it so I did I took pictures of my new car and then you know I texted them to my parents how lame is that what am I like 17 that's so embarrassing I remembered that I did that as I was prepping for the sermon I remember that's the thing that I did. And I'm like, what is the matter with you? But I did it. That's how proud I was of this car. I was so excited to drive in the lap of luxury of the Honda Accord XLE or whatever it was. EXL or I don't know. And then like a month later, my jerk friend Tyler got a Tesla. And he's like texting us pictures of it and videos. And it was so awesome. And it was way faster. And the whole roof of a Tesla is glass. And I had, I had a sunroof in my Accord, but it was one of the normal size ones from like 1987. Good job, you dope. That's the car you have now. Everything's controlled from a touch screen. I have to still touch buttons like it's 1998. This was terrible. And within a month, listen, I'm so proud of this car, I'm taking pictures of it. Within a month, I hate it. I want to take it back to the dealership and get a Tesla. I hated what I had. I wanted something new. Life just works that way, doesn't it? In the comparison game. I have a 28-inch black stone on my back porch. I like to cook on it. I go to somebody else's house. They got a 36. I'm like, dang, I got to get a 36. There's more quesadillas on there. The guy with the 36 goes over to his buddy's house. He's got a 36 inch blast stone, but it's in a permanent, it's got stone built up around. It's a permanent cook station outside. This is fancy. This is a big deal now. Then permanent blackstone station guy goes to somebody else's house and he's got a permanent kitchen set up with a smoker and a pool. And he's like, honey, we got to get a pool. And then the guy with the pool in the setup goes to his buddy's house and he's got an infinity pool. And he's like, oh, I got to get an infinity pool. And then that person goes to the bigger infinity pool and on and on and on it goes. And we can never just be satisfied with what we have because our culture that we exist in just chips away at our happiness through that comparison game. And here's another thing as an aside that the comparison game does. It is convinced. This is just for the young moms in the room. So basically, you, okay? It has convinced. I watch it happen. And you, okay? I didn't see you over there. It was Jordan Shaw. It's convinced the moms that they're not momming hard enough. That's what social media does. That's what the comparison thing does. It convinces moms and dads that they're not momming and dadding hard enough. They need to do more. Your cupcakes need to look better when you take them to the school. When your treats, when it's your week for snacks, for the soccer game, your cooler needs to be nice. It needs to be better than the other coolers. You need to engage in imaginative play. You need to do supportive discipline and never be angry at your kids. And only talk to them in soft tones because they're all little princes and princesses and they can't handle adversity in their life. So let's be very gentle. And let's not grade their papers in red. Let's use green and encouraging things and tones. Let's do that. And we're convinced, I see this in moms right now, that you're just not momming right. And you go to bed every night with this gross combination of mom guilt and mom exhaustion. I need to do more. I don't have one single ounce left to give, and I might hate my children. It's just this combo platter that's terrible. And here's what I want to tell you. Here's what I want to tell you, young moms. You are very likely a better mom to your children than your mom was to you. Very likely. It's just a generational thing. Jen and I are so much more present with our kids than our parents were with us. We just are. It's generational. It's just what this generation is doing. So let yourself off the hook a little bit. Now we won't know if we're doing it right until they're adults and they're not in prison, but for now it seems like we're doing a good job. You're doing a good job. Let yourself off the hook a little bit. Quit playing the comparison game. You're doing a good job with your kids. I actually watched a TED Talk a couple years ago, and it stuck with me. It's this guy doing studies on happiness. And he made the point that many of us, because of goal setting and attainment, have fundamentally eliminated the possibility of happiness from our life, which is kind of a crazy thought. But he says that when we set goals for ourselves and we say, when I get to those goals, I'm going to be happy. When I graduate college, I'll be happy. When I get a job, I'll be happy. Get the promotion, I'll be happy. When I meet the person, I'll be happy. When I get married, I'll be happy. When we have children, I'll be happy. When the children leave the house, I'll be happy, I meet the person I'll be happy when I get married I'll be happy when we have children I'll be happy when the children leave the house I'll be happy which is probably true and then when and then when when we get to be grandparents I'll be happy and what we do in life is we set the goalposts we set the marker for happy off in the distance and then we think I'm not happy now but when I get there I will be and then we get there what do we do the very second we arrive we move to the next thing. So I never spend any time in the joy that God brought me to. I only spend time anticipating the next thing I'm going to need to be happy. Whenever sit and revel in God's goodness now. So I think it's fair to say that we have a contentment issue. We always want the next thing. We always want a little bit more. Something a little bit bigger. Something a little bit shinier. Something a little bit more peaceful. We're always bugging God or ourselves for whatever could be next. Which is why I think this verse in Philippians is such a helpful verse for us this morning. It's actually, and then don't put that one up on the screen yet. I'm just gonna say 13 and then I'll read them all. It's actually one of the most misused verses in all of scripture. It's neck and neck Philippians 4.13 and Jeremiah 29.11. Philippians 4.13 says, I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength, or I can do all things through him who strengthens me. And we see people misuse this all the time. I can do anything I set my mind to with Christ powering me. In the name of Christ, I can do whatever I want to do. I've seen athletes with this tattooed on themselves somewhere. I'm going to complete the pass through Christ who gives me strength or score the goal or hit the home run or pitch the strikeout. Like I'm going to do this through Christ who gives me strength. There's even a Christian apparel line, like Under Armour, but for believers. So it means it's almost as good as the not believing material, but it's a little bit cheaper and a little bit poorly done. And it's got 413 all over it. These, these athletes are on high school fields all over the nation being powered by Christ and their teams are winning all of the state championships, of course, because they're powered by Jesus and he wants them to win. We misappropriate the verse all the time. It does not mean that through Christ who gives me strength, I can close the sale. I can accomplish this thing. I can do this deed. I can accomplish this act. It does not mean that. We have to be very careful when we pluck verses out of context and make them mean what only the sentence sounds like without anything else informing what that sentence actually means. And we use it to mean the opposite of what it really means. Here's what it really means. Here's the context of it. If we read verses 11 and 12, Paul writes this in Philippians. Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In's about learning in all seasons to trust God to provide what we need. And I love that the word learn shows up in here two times. I've learned to be in abundance and in need. I have learned to be in plenty and in want. I've learned these things through Christ who gives me strength. And it may seem like, well, man, it would be pretty easy. I don't know how tough that is, Paul. It'd be pretty, pretty easy to be content in abundance when you have plenty, when you don't want for anything, when you're, when you're living a life of luxury and you've got more than what you could ask for. It's got to be pretty easy to be content in that scenario. And to that thought, which isn't all the way incorrect, I would remind you of this proverb. I think about this proverb a lot. Proverbs 23, 1 through 5. When you sit down to eat with a ruler, observe carefully what is before you, and put a knife to your throat if you are given to appetite. Do not desire his delicacies, for they are deceptive food. Do not toil to acquire wealth. Be discerning enough to desist. When your eyes light on it, it is gone, for suddenly it sprouts wings, flying like an eagle toward heaven. That is a fancy, poetic way of saying this. Acc breeds more desire not less exposure to nice things a taste of the good life usually breeds a desire for more of that not less we have it pretty good then we go to someone else's house and they have it a little bit better and all of a a sudden we go home and we want what they want. Did you see that serving dish? I want that serving dish. My serving dish is from Kohl's. It is stupid. I would like a nice serving dish from like Nordstrom or something. I don't know. Crate and barrel. That's where you waste money on serving dishes. William Sonoma. That's right. That's a gold standard. That's all Jeffy has at his house. William Sonoma, everything. And Viking appliances, I'm sure. Yeah, because you can tell that the Viking stove heats up the ground beef better than just a regular GE stove, right? Yes, of course. But we all want those things. We all want those things. There's actually the effect of this that accumulation tends to make you want more. I heard this a while back. Steve Harvey, the host of Family Feud, was giving some people some financial advice. And he said, if you're just starting out in your career and you don't have a lot of money, he said, save up enough for a first class ticket somewhere and fly first class. Because once you fly first class, you will never want to fly coach again. And you will reorganize your life and be driven to make the money you need so that you can fly first class. And here's the thing. He's right. Have you ever flown first class? When you fly first class, you don't want to sit back there with the gen pop anymore. That's depressing. Now, here's what I've not done. And if I do this, I'm in big trouble. I've never flown in one of those pods internationally. If I fly in one of those pods where you get to stretch out and you get your own screen, like, I'm done for. But what you do when you get exposed, when you're at the king's table and you're around things that you don't have, is you begin to organize your life in such a way so that you can have those. When you see your friends taking nice vacations, you start to organize your life in such a way so you can too. When you see what you don't have, you start to organize your life in such a way that you can have what you want. And in organizing your life around the things that you want, around materials or experiences, we lose the contentment that's sitting right in front of us. So let's not think it's just a simple thing to learn to be content when you're surrounded with abundance, because it's not. It's really tricky, and it's really sneaky. Now the one that we would all agree is difficult is to be content when we have little. I kind of wondered as I read that, how can anyone be content in the midst of tragedy, loss, or loneliness? When you're sitting in the wake of a divorce, how can you claim in that moment to be content? When you are a freshly minted widow or widower, how can you claim in that moment to be content? When your children are walking through a tragically difficult time, how can you possibly claim to be content, to be happy? I need for nothing, when you clearly need for much. This is where that word learned comes into play, because somehow or another, Paul figured that one out. But that feels impossible. And it feels like really bad pastoral counsel. Someone's walking through a really difficult time in their life. They come to my office to see me, and they're crying about this hardship that they're enduring or that they're watching a loved one endure. And I point them to this verse and go, hey, you can be content through Christ who strengthens you. You should just be happy right now. How do we do that? How is that attainable? In the grace vine that I wrote for this week, I stated that this was a deeply personal sermon for me. Because this topic of contentment and happiness is actually something I think a great deal about. Because back in 2020, in the fall, I started to go to therapy. And I've mentioned before that I've done therapy, and I've mentioned before that I think everyone should do it. Everybody, you should go to preventative maintenance therapy. Most of us, all of us need more maintenance than we're willing to acknowledge anyways. Everyone should go. If you can afford therapy, you should go to therapy. I actually have a really good buddy here at the church. He's a big, tough guy, you know. He feels the only acceptable emotion to him is anger, and all other emotions are for sissies, all of them. And he decided he was going to start going to therapy, and I sent him to a guy, and he literally texts me every time he talks to this guy. Man, I love that guy so much. This is the best. I've never experienced anything like this in my life. Like, every time. Big tough guy loves therapy. You'd like it too. But I remember sitting in this guy's office, and I had kind of come to realize that in life, like, we all chase things. We all chase happiness. Some chase respect. Some chase security, stability, love, approval, just a sense of being enough and worthwhile. We're all chasing something. All adults are little more than just a pile, a comprising of insecurities and desires and ways that we try to cover those things up to make ourselves acceptable to the broader milieu. That's all we are. We're all chasing something. And I sat in his office, and he looked at me and he said, dude, when are you going to realize it? I said, realize what? He said, that thing that you're chasing, you have it. You have it. You have a wife who loves you. You guys laugh together every day. At the time we just had Lily, she said, you have a daughter who loves you, wants to spend time with you. You have rich friendships. People who support you, believe in you. You have a job that you love, a church that you love, and who seems to love you and support you too. When are you going to quit chasing it? You have it. It's right there if you'll just stop to look at it. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. And I realized, my goodness, I don't know why I'm striving so hard to get the thing that's going to make me happy. I have all the ingredients for happiness in my life right now if I'll just notice them. And I think that that's true of most of us. I think most of us already have all the ingredients for happiness available to us. We already have all the ingredients of happiness available to us right now. Even if it seems like there's this hole in our life, this thing that we want, and I won't be happy until I get it, I would push back and say, no, you have everything you need right now to be content in this moment. It doesn't mean that we should stop striving. It doesn't mean that we should stop trying. It doesn't mean that we should stop seeking, but we can be content in this moment because God has given us everything we need to be content. He's given us all the ingredients to make happy if we will just stop and slow down and see them. And since then, since realizing that, I've just done a lot of reflection on the transformative power of being content. On the transformative power of looking at your life and saying, thanks God, I have everything I need to be happy in you and content in you. And I would be willing to bet that whatever it is you're chasing, you've probably caught it. Whatever it is you think you need, you probably don't. And that all the things that you need in your life to make you content in the Lord, He has provided for you. And as this has washed over me, it's impacted me in profound ways. And so I sat down and I thought, how has just this arrival at contentment shaped me? How has it changed me? How has it impacted me? And I came up with this list. Contentment has transformed my gratitude, perspective, faith, sentimentality, and my prayer life. Most importantly, contentment has transformed my gratitude. It has transformed the way that I walk through life grateful for God's goodness in my life. Every time Jen, my wife, laughs at one of my jokes, I say a little prayer of gratitude to God. Because as long as she'll laugh at my jokes, I know we're good. When she stops laughing at my jokes, we're in in trouble because I don't really have any other tools in the tool belt besides trying to make her laugh. Like I'm not romantic. That's it. It's changed the way I think about my children and the moments that I'm grateful for with them because here's the reality. Parents with young kids. When that kid is crying and you have to walk in there at 3.30 in the morning when all you want in the whole world is to sleep and you pick them up and you calm them down and that little head is resting on your shoulder and that little arm is on the other shoulder and you calm them down and you get them back to sleep and you lay them back down in that bed. Let me tell you something that's super depressing. You won't know when it is the last time that you just did that. One of those times is going to be the last time and you won't know that it was. And there's a bunch of parents whose kids are grown up who would give anything in the world to have that moment with their kid one more time. So be grateful for those moments. Be grateful for the sleepless nights because you only get so many of them. I was sitting in my house the other day and John and Lily, Lily's seven, John's two, they're running around the downstairs. We asked Lily to vacuum the kitchen and we got this little thing that she can do it with. And she did for a second. And then she just started running laps around the kitchen and the dining room. And she's screaming and John's screaming and no work is getting done. And I'm sitting there. And Jen was a little bit exasperated with him. And I'm just grinning like an idiot. Because I think one day we're going to miss these days. One day I'm going to miss a noisy house. And when you're content, when you're determined to see the good and what God has provided for you right now, annoying things become moments of gratitude. Frustrating things become moments of peace and reflection. It transforms the way you walk through life. It was in this season that I stumbled upon this verse in John 1 16 that I say all the time. You guys have heard me say it. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I love that verse. From God's fullness, from his goodness, from his generosity and his mercy and his grace, he has given you so many blessings. And it's up to us in the moments to acknowledge those. Next time you're with friends and you have a great conversation and it's life-giving and dinner is good, be grateful for it. Tell them so. Thank God for them. Next time you get one of those good laughs where your eyes tear up and you can't stop and you go for so long that you can't remember why you started, even if it was about something inappropriate, anyways, still praise God for laughter in your life. It was good and those moments are sweet and we don't know how many of them we get. From his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. I know. Some of us are in hard seasons. Some of us are in seasons of abundance. But I know that we all have God's goodness in our life. We just sang that song. I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. And Aaron and the band laid out and I heard you guys saying that. If it's true, then be content in that goodness. And I love that line, why should I fear? The evidence is here. That's how it changed my faith. I said it affects my gratitude. It changes my faith. My faith in God. My faith in his goodness. I know that things are going to work out the way that he wants them to work out because he wants them to work out that way. He's inviting me into it. But I have nothing to fear from the future because God is orchestrating it and I am in his hands. And I've said last week we launched the part two of the campaign to build a building. And I said last week, and you'll hear me say a bunch, if God wants us to build it, we will. If he doesn't, we won't. But that doesn't change one little bit what I get to do and what he's called me to do. That doesn't change one little bit what he's called you guys to do, what he's called us to do as a church, which is make disciples and grow closer to him, connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. That's what he's called us to do. That mission doesn't change if we get into a building. It doesn't change if we stay. Now, if we go, I'll be excited. If we don't, I'll be sad. But not for very long on either way because if God wants us to do it, we will. If he doesn't, we won't. I'm content. I'm happy getting to do what God has asked us to do in whatever capacity, in whatever location he's asked us to do it. This God opening my eyes to contentment has changed my perspective on life. In the middle of this realization, we were walking through a season of need. It was a hard one. We were walking through pancreatic cancer with Jen's dad. We ended up losing him at the end of that year. It was not an easy time for everyone around us to be content. It wasn't an easy thing to watch my wife just be sad and try to be content with that. But one of the things I learned is that life has seasons. And sometimes they're abundant, and sometimes they're lacking. And in the abundant seasons, we should revel in them and praise God for them and find joy in them. And in the seasons of need and hurt and want, we can take solace that it's a season that every day won't feel like today. Every month won't feel like this month. And a lot of times I'm not even sure. Sometimes we operate as Christians that God takes us into hard seasons because he has a lesson that he wants us to learn. So we allow these things to happen to us. And I just kind of think that's a pretty myopic view of God's will. He's orchestrating all these other things and all these, all this ripple effect and all these other people's lives so that you can learn this lesson about being grateful. Maybe, maybe you're that important in God's kingdom. Or maybe life ebbs and flows and good seasons and bad seasons come and go. And when we're in a bad season, we just say, I'm in a bad season. This is tough. But I know that God is with me and I know that everything won't feel like this. It's changed my perspective. It's changed my sentimentality a lot, like a lot. Because of those sweet moments, from his fullness, we've all received grace upon grace. And you reflect upon those sweet things with friends or children or family or whatever it is, I cry all the time. Like, if I'm watching TV with John and he's on my lap and Lily sees it and gets jealous and she comes over and she puts her head right here and she says she wants snugs and now I'm cuddling with both of my children at the same time, I have the 100% chance I'm going to cry. I just will. I'll just sit there and I'll think, this is the good stuff. Like I'm such a sap. I don't know if I told you guys this already, but we got a piano in the house and Jen's playing just a little bit. And she was playing a hymn. I said, go play a hymn for me. She said, what hymn? I said, I don't care. I just want to hear you play a hymn. And she goes and she plays it. And I went and I stood next to the piano and she's playing the hymn. And I started crying and she was like, what are you, like, what's the matter with you? And I'm like trying to explain to her, like, I just imagined like 20 years down the road, John and Lily coming back with their kids and we're standing in this very dining room and we're singing Christmas carols and hymns. And she was like, you got to get it together, man. And she, I mean, she's right. But I've seen it revolutionize that in me too, savoring every moment as sweet and as God's blessing. And then lastly, I think that contentment radically changes our prayer life. I've talked about this a couple of times, but Jesus starts the Lord's Prayer with your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Over the years, my personal prayer life has gotten a lot shorter. The most words I use when I pray is when I pray in front of other people. It's not that I'm praying for shorter amounts of time. I just use a lot less words. Because I just pray, God, here's the thing. Would you do with this thing what you want? And would you help me to accept what that is? God, here's a concern. Would you be in this concern? And would you help me to be content in your answer? God, this person is sick. I'm just lifting them up to you. I don't know what to pray for them. But will your will be done in their life and in the life of their family? God, Lily's struggling. Will you help her? According to whatever your will is, because I know that this struggle might be important for who she's gonna become. But in all things, God, your will be done. And when you pray like that, then you can just kind of rest in the assurance that he will do his will. So I by no means have figured out contentment. And it certainly wasn't by my own desire that I arrived there. I didn't decide one day, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to be content. I'm just going to decide to be happy with my life. I didn't do that. It washed over me like a ton of bricks because someone was ministering to me and they said, hey, you have all the ingredients for happy in your life right now. Maybe you should stop reaching for other things. And so I would like to say that same thing to you. You very likely have all the ingredients you need right now to make happy. If we just stop reaching and grabbing. And then here's what happens. I said earlier, it's impossible. It feels impossible to be content in a season of want during loss or loneliness or tragedy. But what happens is when we learn to be people who are content, that word learn, Paul says it's a process. When we learn to be people who are content with what God has provided for us in this moment and in this season, then when we are in a season of need, when we are in a season of hurt, if you're sitting there and I'm like, hey, you've got all the ingredients you need to make happy, you're like, I don't. I don't. I've got a big hole in my life. If that's you, here's how being a content person even transforms that mindset. Trusting God and being content allows you to say, you know what? I might not have all the ingredients in my life. I think I need to be happy, but I have Jesus and he's enough. He has provided himself for me and he is enough. And I trust him that not all seasons will feel like this season. And then we come full circle back to the verse and make this point. True contentment is only possible through the sanctifying work of Jesus. Sanctify, I always say, is to become more like Christ in character. It's a process after we claim a faith in Christ and then we're taken up to heaven in glory. Everything that happens in between, the Holy Spirit is working in us to make us more like Christ in our character. That's a sanctification process. And that's only, true contentment is only accessible through the sanctifying work of Christ. That's why Paul says, I've learned to be content. How? Through Christ who gives me strength because he allows me to do all things. And when we find our contentment in Christ and in his strength, we come full circle and we get to say, along with Paul, I have learned in seasons of plenty and I have learned in seasons of little to be content and happy because I can do all things through Christ who gives you strength. Let's pray. Father, we do, we do. We see the evidence of your goodness all over our lives. Lord, I pray that we would look at your considerable gifts, at the fullness that has leaked out onto us, and we would see the good things that you've given us, the good friends who love us, the good family that supports us, the good job or the good role or the good thing in our identity that we get to do to express ourselves and exercise our gifts, God, would we look at the many, many rich blessings that we have in our lives and be grateful to you. Father, for those with us who don't feel content, who do feel sad, who do feel like they are lacking some essential ingredients. God, would they feel this morning that you really are enough? Would they feel this morning that Jesus really is enough? Would they trust that these seasons of need and want, they come and go, and that you're in these seasons with us just like you're in the seasons of abundance with us? Help us be a grateful people. Help us pray with faith and with trust. And God, help us learn like Paul did to be content in all seasons and to find that joy and that contentment in you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday morning. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that after the service. Just a real quick tip of the cap to Carly, our female vocalist. She was hacking up a lung in the pre-service meeting. She just got a little nagging cough, and she said, I'm just praying that I make it through my song. She said, great job with Honey in the Rock. You made it. Now, I got things to get to. All right, settle down. But now, if you start to cough during the sermon, get out. Go. All right. Carly's the best. She's also our graphics person, and we love her. This is part two of our series called Transformed. Jordan, in the open, kind of told you guys a little bit of what it is about and what it's for. It's based on that verse in Romans chapter 12 that says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And so there's some things that we wanted to talk about over this series that will run into mid-October where maybe we can just shift our thinking a little bit. Maybe we can allow God to transform our mind in the way that we think about some things. And maybe that can actually transform our lives. And so this morning, we're going to talk about this transformation from comparison to contentment. One of the most, probably the most ubiquitous desires on the planet. Every person, every culture, everywhere wants happiness. Now we might put different words around that. We might describe it differently. I want to be safe. I want to be provided for. I want to have enough of this. I want to feel enough security here. I want to be loved. I want whatever it is, whatever the ingredients of happiness are for us. But everybody wants for themselves and for their children and for the people they love to be happy. It's a ubiquitous human desire. It is virtually universal. Now, because we're believers, most of us in this room would claim a faith in Christ. We know that the most important thing to desire is a relationship with him. We know that the thing that we want for our children is a relationship with Jesus. And so I'm not arguing that happiness should replace that. As a matter of fact, as believers, we know that happiness is only really achievable if we trust in Christ to bring that about. And that's one of the things we're going to see this morning. But if we think about happiness, what it means to be happy, it can't mean being a smiling idiot all the time, just grinning all the time. Every day is the best day ever. So it has to be something deeper than that. And the deeper foundation of happiness is contentment. It's being content, being content in the moment. This moment doesn't need any more. I love it the way it is. This situation, this season, this relationship doesn't need any more. I'm happy with the way that it is. It's to be content, to figure out how to be content. When we can do that, we can be happy. The problem is that we exist in a culture tailor-made to rob us of contentment. Would you agree with that? We exist in a culture and in a time where we are constantly and consistently berated with messages and images and comparisons that erode our contentment to a place where we are no longer happy and we spend our days wishing we had what we don't instead of being grateful for having what we do because we live in this culture that just perniciously eats away and erodes away at our own contentment. I was talking with a friend of mine and I asked her, what's the biggest threat to your contentment? And she very quickly said, social media, social media. I scroll Facebook, Instagram. Is it X now? I'm not on Twitter anymore. They went from Twitter to X. I scroll and I see other people who are doing better than me. Their SUV is bigger and wider than mine. And so now I feel like it fits nicely into parking spaces. Mine fits nicely into parking spaces. Theirs takes up two. So they are obviously having a better life than me. You know, their vacations are nicer than mine. They've got life figured out. They're in better shape than me. The scrolling relentlessly of social media and comparing ourselves to what we see chips away at a lot of our contentment. And to that, I would just offer this as an aside. Back at the beginning of the year, I think it's sometime in February, I realized that I was wasting so much time on my phone, just mindlessly scrolling apps for no good reason. And I would scroll at the time Twitter, and I would just be angry. I would be angry at the politics. I would be angry at Christians arguing with Christians. It would just make me mad. So then I would switch over to Facebook. Maybe this will be better. And then on Facebook, all it is, I don't know about your feed and your algorithm. All it is is a bunch of people from my life like 11 years ago that I no longer care about. Like, that's great that you were in the strawberry fields on Saturday. That's not what I want to see. That's not like engaging content for me. So I don't even know what's going on with Facebook. And it was a couple of days of scrolling and realizing, I don't know any of these people anymore. Why are they here? And then Instagram for me just became, the algorithm became falling videos and golf tutorials. That was it. That was all I got and the whole thing. And I'm like, this is a total waste of time. So I took everything off my phone, except for TikTok. I watch TikTok sometimes. That's kind of fun. But I took everything off my phone. And I'll tell you this, my happiness meter has gone up since doing that. So for some of y'all, I know I'm joking around a little bit, but for some of y'all, you may not need anything else in this sermon than just kind of a nudge. Why don't you think about taking that off your phone for a while? Is it making you happy? Is it bringing you joy? Is it making you more or less content? Why don't you take it off your phone and see if you engage more with the people around you? See if you look more at God's goodness in your life that's already there. See if you're more present for people. For at least somebody here, I know that that's all you need. I know that's what you need to hear today. Just try that out. See if it doesn't help a little bit. But if it's not online, it's in person, right? It's still, we can still play the comparison game and make ourselves unhappy with the things that we have. I remember in the summer of 2020, for the previous three years since I moved here, I had been driving a Nissan Leaf. And if you were here during that time, if you knew me during that time, you'd love to make fun of me for that because you hate the environment and fiscal savings. No, because I mean that you, if you listen, I drove one for three years. I'm just going to say this. If you drive a Leaf, you do deserve to get made fun of. That's, that's part of the deal. When I bought the car, I wasn't like, people are going to think this is awesome. Like I knew I was going to get made fun of. So when it came time to sell it and get something new, I thought, I want something nice. I want something that I like. For the first time in my life, I want to buy myself a nice car. And so I looked around, and I looked at a Tesla, the less expensive Tesla, but it was more expensive than the Accord that I was comparing it to. It was more money down, less miles a year, more money per month. And I thought, gosh, it's just not wise. I'm not going to do that. And so I leased an Accord. And it was the nicest car I ever had. When I got in it, I was like, I can't believe this is so nice. Like I was really, I was excited. Here's how excited I was about it. As a grown man, here's what I did. I drove I drove it to my neighborhood I parked it on a street I got out and I took pictures of it so I did I took pictures of my new car and then you know I texted them to my parents how lame is that what am I like 17 that's so embarrassing I remembered that I did that as I was prepping for the sermon I remember that's the thing that I did. And I'm like, what is the matter with you? But I did it. That's how proud I was of this car. I was so excited to drive in the lap of luxury of the Honda Accord XLE or whatever it was. EXL or I don't know. And then like a month later, my jerk friend Tyler got a Tesla. And he's like texting us pictures of it and videos. And it was so awesome. And it was way faster. And the whole roof of a Tesla is glass. And I had, I had a sunroof in my Accord, but it was one of the normal size ones from like 1987. Good job, you dope. That's the car you have now. Everything's controlled from a touch screen. I have to still touch buttons like it's 1998. This was terrible. And within a month, listen, I'm so proud of this car, I'm taking pictures of it. Within a month, I hate it. I want to take it back to the dealership and get a Tesla. I hated what I had. I wanted something new. Life just works that way, doesn't it? In the comparison game. I have a 28-inch black stone on my back porch. I like to cook on it. I go to somebody else's house. They got a 36. I'm like, dang, I got to get a 36. There's more quesadillas on there. The guy with the 36 goes over to his buddy's house. He's got a 36 inch blast stone, but it's in a permanent, it's got stone built up around. It's a permanent cook station outside. This is fancy. This is a big deal now. Then permanent blackstone station guy goes to somebody else's house and he's got a permanent kitchen set up with a smoker and a pool. And he's like, honey, we got to get a pool. And then the guy with the pool in the setup goes to his buddy's house and he's got an infinity pool. And he's like, oh, I got to get an infinity pool. And then that person goes to the bigger infinity pool and on and on and on it goes. And we can never just be satisfied with what we have because our culture that we exist in just chips away at our happiness through that comparison game. And here's another thing as an aside that the comparison game does. It is convinced. This is just for the young moms in the room. So basically, you, okay? It has convinced. I watch it happen. And you, okay? I didn't see you over there. It was Jordan Shaw. It's convinced the moms that they're not momming hard enough. That's what social media does. That's what the comparison thing does. It convinces moms and dads that they're not momming and dadding hard enough. They need to do more. Your cupcakes need to look better when you take them to the school. When your treats, when it's your week for snacks, for the soccer game, your cooler needs to be nice. It needs to be better than the other coolers. You need to engage in imaginative play. You need to do supportive discipline and never be angry at your kids. And only talk to them in soft tones because they're all little princes and princesses and they can't handle adversity in their life. So let's be very gentle. And let's not grade their papers in red. Let's use green and encouraging things and tones. Let's do that. And we're convinced, I see this in moms right now, that you're just not momming right. And you go to bed every night with this gross combination of mom guilt and mom exhaustion. I need to do more. I don't have one single ounce left to give, and I might hate my children. It's just this combo platter that's terrible. And here's what I want to tell you. Here's what I want to tell you, young moms. You are very likely a better mom to your children than your mom was to you. Very likely. It's just a generational thing. Jen and I are so much more present with our kids than our parents were with us. We just are. It's generational. It's just what this generation is doing. So let yourself off the hook a little bit. Now we won't know if we're doing it right until they're adults and they're not in prison, but for now it seems like we're doing a good job. You're doing a good job. Let yourself off the hook a little bit. Quit playing the comparison game. You're doing a good job with your kids. I actually watched a TED Talk a couple years ago, and it stuck with me. It's this guy doing studies on happiness. And he made the point that many of us, because of goal setting and attainment, have fundamentally eliminated the possibility of happiness from our life, which is kind of a crazy thought. But he says that when we set goals for ourselves and we say, when I get to those goals, I'm going to be happy. When I graduate college, I'll be happy. When I get a job, I'll be happy. Get the promotion, I'll be happy. When I meet the person, I'll be happy. When I get married, I'll be happy. When we have children, I'll be happy. When the children leave the house, I'll be happy, I meet the person I'll be happy when I get married I'll be happy when we have children I'll be happy when the children leave the house I'll be happy which is probably true and then when and then when when we get to be grandparents I'll be happy and what we do in life is we set the goalposts we set the marker for happy off in the distance and then we think I'm not happy now but when I get there I will be and then we get there what do we do the very second we arrive we move to the next thing. So I never spend any time in the joy that God brought me to. I only spend time anticipating the next thing I'm going to need to be happy. Whenever sit and revel in God's goodness now. So I think it's fair to say that we have a contentment issue. We always want the next thing. We always want a little bit more. Something a little bit bigger. Something a little bit shinier. Something a little bit more peaceful. We're always bugging God or ourselves for whatever could be next. Which is why I think this verse in Philippians is such a helpful verse for us this morning. It's actually, and then don't put that one up on the screen yet. I'm just gonna say 13 and then I'll read them all. It's actually one of the most misused verses in all of scripture. It's neck and neck Philippians 4.13 and Jeremiah 29.11. Philippians 4.13 says, I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength, or I can do all things through him who strengthens me. And we see people misuse this all the time. I can do anything I set my mind to with Christ powering me. In the name of Christ, I can do whatever I want to do. I've seen athletes with this tattooed on themselves somewhere. I'm going to complete the pass through Christ who gives me strength or score the goal or hit the home run or pitch the strikeout. Like I'm going to do this through Christ who gives me strength. There's even a Christian apparel line, like Under Armour, but for believers. So it means it's almost as good as the not believing material, but it's a little bit cheaper and a little bit poorly done. And it's got 413 all over it. These, these athletes are on high school fields all over the nation being powered by Christ and their teams are winning all of the state championships, of course, because they're powered by Jesus and he wants them to win. We misappropriate the verse all the time. It does not mean that through Christ who gives me strength, I can close the sale. I can accomplish this thing. I can do this deed. I can accomplish this act. It does not mean that. We have to be very careful when we pluck verses out of context and make them mean what only the sentence sounds like without anything else informing what that sentence actually means. And we use it to mean the opposite of what it really means. Here's what it really means. Here's the context of it. If we read verses 11 and 12, Paul writes this in Philippians. Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In's about learning in all seasons to trust God to provide what we need. And I love that the word learn shows up in here two times. I've learned to be in abundance and in need. I have learned to be in plenty and in want. I've learned these things through Christ who gives me strength. And it may seem like, well, man, it would be pretty easy. I don't know how tough that is, Paul. It'd be pretty, pretty easy to be content in abundance when you have plenty, when you don't want for anything, when you're, when you're living a life of luxury and you've got more than what you could ask for. It's got to be pretty easy to be content in that scenario. And to that thought, which isn't all the way incorrect, I would remind you of this proverb. I think about this proverb a lot. Proverbs 23, 1 through 5. When you sit down to eat with a ruler, observe carefully what is before you, and put a knife to your throat if you are given to appetite. Do not desire his delicacies, for they are deceptive food. Do not toil to acquire wealth. Be discerning enough to desist. When your eyes light on it, it is gone, for suddenly it sprouts wings, flying like an eagle toward heaven. That is a fancy, poetic way of saying this. Acc breeds more desire not less exposure to nice things a taste of the good life usually breeds a desire for more of that not less we have it pretty good then we go to someone else's house and they have it a little bit better and all of a a sudden we go home and we want what they want. Did you see that serving dish? I want that serving dish. My serving dish is from Kohl's. It is stupid. I would like a nice serving dish from like Nordstrom or something. I don't know. Crate and barrel. That's where you waste money on serving dishes. William Sonoma. That's right. That's a gold standard. That's all Jeffy has at his house. William Sonoma, everything. And Viking appliances, I'm sure. Yeah, because you can tell that the Viking stove heats up the ground beef better than just a regular GE stove, right? Yes, of course. But we all want those things. We all want those things. There's actually the effect of this that accumulation tends to make you want more. I heard this a while back. Steve Harvey, the host of Family Feud, was giving some people some financial advice. And he said, if you're just starting out in your career and you don't have a lot of money, he said, save up enough for a first class ticket somewhere and fly first class. Because once you fly first class, you will never want to fly coach again. And you will reorganize your life and be driven to make the money you need so that you can fly first class. And here's the thing. He's right. Have you ever flown first class? When you fly first class, you don't want to sit back there with the gen pop anymore. That's depressing. Now, here's what I've not done. And if I do this, I'm in big trouble. I've never flown in one of those pods internationally. If I fly in one of those pods where you get to stretch out and you get your own screen, like, I'm done for. But what you do when you get exposed, when you're at the king's table and you're around things that you don't have, is you begin to organize your life in such a way so that you can have those. When you see your friends taking nice vacations, you start to organize your life in such a way so you can too. When you see what you don't have, you start to organize your life in such a way that you can have what you want. And in organizing your life around the things that you want, around materials or experiences, we lose the contentment that's sitting right in front of us. So let's not think it's just a simple thing to learn to be content when you're surrounded with abundance, because it's not. It's really tricky, and it's really sneaky. Now the one that we would all agree is difficult is to be content when we have little. I kind of wondered as I read that, how can anyone be content in the midst of tragedy, loss, or loneliness? When you're sitting in the wake of a divorce, how can you claim in that moment to be content? When you are a freshly minted widow or widower, how can you claim in that moment to be content? When your children are walking through a tragically difficult time, how can you possibly claim to be content, to be happy? I need for nothing, when you clearly need for much. This is where that word learned comes into play, because somehow or another, Paul figured that one out. But that feels impossible. And it feels like really bad pastoral counsel. Someone's walking through a really difficult time in their life. They come to my office to see me, and they're crying about this hardship that they're enduring or that they're watching a loved one endure. And I point them to this verse and go, hey, you can be content through Christ who strengthens you. You should just be happy right now. How do we do that? How is that attainable? In the grace vine that I wrote for this week, I stated that this was a deeply personal sermon for me. Because this topic of contentment and happiness is actually something I think a great deal about. Because back in 2020, in the fall, I started to go to therapy. And I've mentioned before that I've done therapy, and I've mentioned before that I think everyone should do it. Everybody, you should go to preventative maintenance therapy. Most of us, all of us need more maintenance than we're willing to acknowledge anyways. Everyone should go. If you can afford therapy, you should go to therapy. I actually have a really good buddy here at the church. He's a big, tough guy, you know. He feels the only acceptable emotion to him is anger, and all other emotions are for sissies, all of them. And he decided he was going to start going to therapy, and I sent him to a guy, and he literally texts me every time he talks to this guy. Man, I love that guy so much. This is the best. I've never experienced anything like this in my life. Like, every time. Big tough guy loves therapy. You'd like it too. But I remember sitting in this guy's office, and I had kind of come to realize that in life, like, we all chase things. We all chase happiness. Some chase respect. Some chase security, stability, love, approval, just a sense of being enough and worthwhile. We're all chasing something. All adults are little more than just a pile, a comprising of insecurities and desires and ways that we try to cover those things up to make ourselves acceptable to the broader milieu. That's all we are. We're all chasing something. And I sat in his office, and he looked at me and he said, dude, when are you going to realize it? I said, realize what? He said, that thing that you're chasing, you have it. You have it. You have a wife who loves you. You guys laugh together every day. At the time we just had Lily, she said, you have a daughter who loves you, wants to spend time with you. You have rich friendships. People who support you, believe in you. You have a job that you love, a church that you love, and who seems to love you and support you too. When are you going to quit chasing it? You have it. It's right there if you'll just stop to look at it. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. And I realized, my goodness, I don't know why I'm striving so hard to get the thing that's going to make me happy. I have all the ingredients for happiness in my life right now if I'll just notice them. And I think that that's true of most of us. I think most of us already have all the ingredients for happiness available to us. We already have all the ingredients of happiness available to us right now. Even if it seems like there's this hole in our life, this thing that we want, and I won't be happy until I get it, I would push back and say, no, you have everything you need right now to be content in this moment. It doesn't mean that we should stop striving. It doesn't mean that we should stop trying. It doesn't mean that we should stop seeking, but we can be content in this moment because God has given us everything we need to be content. He's given us all the ingredients to make happy if we will just stop and slow down and see them. And since then, since realizing that, I've just done a lot of reflection on the transformative power of being content. On the transformative power of looking at your life and saying, thanks God, I have everything I need to be happy in you and content in you. And I would be willing to bet that whatever it is you're chasing, you've probably caught it. Whatever it is you think you need, you probably don't. And that all the things that you need in your life to make you content in the Lord, He has provided for you. And as this has washed over me, it's impacted me in profound ways. And so I sat down and I thought, how has just this arrival at contentment shaped me? How has it changed me? How has it impacted me? And I came up with this list. Contentment has transformed my gratitude, perspective, faith, sentimentality, and my prayer life. Most importantly, contentment has transformed my gratitude. It has transformed the way that I walk through life grateful for God's goodness in my life. Every time Jen, my wife, laughs at one of my jokes, I say a little prayer of gratitude to God. Because as long as she'll laugh at my jokes, I know we're good. When she stops laughing at my jokes, we're in in trouble because I don't really have any other tools in the tool belt besides trying to make her laugh. Like I'm not romantic. That's it. It's changed the way I think about my children and the moments that I'm grateful for with them because here's the reality. Parents with young kids. When that kid is crying and you have to walk in there at 3.30 in the morning when all you want in the whole world is to sleep and you pick them up and you calm them down and that little head is resting on your shoulder and that little arm is on the other shoulder and you calm them down and you get them back to sleep and you lay them back down in that bed. Let me tell you something that's super depressing. You won't know when it is the last time that you just did that. One of those times is going to be the last time and you won't know that it was. And there's a bunch of parents whose kids are grown up who would give anything in the world to have that moment with their kid one more time. So be grateful for those moments. Be grateful for the sleepless nights because you only get so many of them. I was sitting in my house the other day and John and Lily, Lily's seven, John's two, they're running around the downstairs. We asked Lily to vacuum the kitchen and we got this little thing that she can do it with. And she did for a second. And then she just started running laps around the kitchen and the dining room. And she's screaming and John's screaming and no work is getting done. And I'm sitting there. And Jen was a little bit exasperated with him. And I'm just grinning like an idiot. Because I think one day we're going to miss these days. One day I'm going to miss a noisy house. And when you're content, when you're determined to see the good and what God has provided for you right now, annoying things become moments of gratitude. Frustrating things become moments of peace and reflection. It transforms the way you walk through life. It was in this season that I stumbled upon this verse in John 1 16 that I say all the time. You guys have heard me say it. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I love that verse. From God's fullness, from his goodness, from his generosity and his mercy and his grace, he has given you so many blessings. And it's up to us in the moments to acknowledge those. Next time you're with friends and you have a great conversation and it's life-giving and dinner is good, be grateful for it. Tell them so. Thank God for them. Next time you get one of those good laughs where your eyes tear up and you can't stop and you go for so long that you can't remember why you started, even if it was about something inappropriate, anyways, still praise God for laughter in your life. It was good and those moments are sweet and we don't know how many of them we get. From his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. I know. Some of us are in hard seasons. Some of us are in seasons of abundance. But I know that we all have God's goodness in our life. We just sang that song. I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. And Aaron and the band laid out and I heard you guys saying that. If it's true, then be content in that goodness. And I love that line, why should I fear? The evidence is here. That's how it changed my faith. I said it affects my gratitude. It changes my faith. My faith in God. My faith in his goodness. I know that things are going to work out the way that he wants them to work out because he wants them to work out that way. He's inviting me into it. But I have nothing to fear from the future because God is orchestrating it and I am in his hands. And I've said last week we launched the part two of the campaign to build a building. And I said last week, and you'll hear me say a bunch, if God wants us to build it, we will. If he doesn't, we won't. But that doesn't change one little bit what I get to do and what he's called me to do. That doesn't change one little bit what he's called you guys to do, what he's called us to do as a church, which is make disciples and grow closer to him, connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. That's what he's called us to do. That mission doesn't change if we get into a building. It doesn't change if we stay. Now, if we go, I'll be excited. If we don't, I'll be sad. But not for very long on either way because if God wants us to do it, we will. If he doesn't, we won't. I'm content. I'm happy getting to do what God has asked us to do in whatever capacity, in whatever location he's asked us to do it. This God opening my eyes to contentment has changed my perspective on life. In the middle of this realization, we were walking through a season of need. It was a hard one. We were walking through pancreatic cancer with Jen's dad. We ended up losing him at the end of that year. It was not an easy time for everyone around us to be content. It wasn't an easy thing to watch my wife just be sad and try to be content with that. But one of the things I learned is that life has seasons. And sometimes they're abundant, and sometimes they're lacking. And in the abundant seasons, we should revel in them and praise God for them and find joy in them. And in the seasons of need and hurt and want, we can take solace that it's a season that every day won't feel like today. Every month won't feel like this month. And a lot of times I'm not even sure. Sometimes we operate as Christians that God takes us into hard seasons because he has a lesson that he wants us to learn. So we allow these things to happen to us. And I just kind of think that's a pretty myopic view of God's will. He's orchestrating all these other things and all these, all this ripple effect and all these other people's lives so that you can learn this lesson about being grateful. Maybe, maybe you're that important in God's kingdom. Or maybe life ebbs and flows and good seasons and bad seasons come and go. And when we're in a bad season, we just say, I'm in a bad season. This is tough. But I know that God is with me and I know that everything won't feel like this. It's changed my perspective. It's changed my sentimentality a lot, like a lot. Because of those sweet moments, from his fullness, we've all received grace upon grace. And you reflect upon those sweet things with friends or children or family or whatever it is, I cry all the time. Like, if I'm watching TV with John and he's on my lap and Lily sees it and gets jealous and she comes over and she puts her head right here and she says she wants snugs and now I'm cuddling with both of my children at the same time, I have the 100% chance I'm going to cry. I just will. I'll just sit there and I'll think, this is the good stuff. Like I'm such a sap. I don't know if I told you guys this already, but we got a piano in the house and Jen's playing just a little bit. And she was playing a hymn. I said, go play a hymn for me. She said, what hymn? I said, I don't care. I just want to hear you play a hymn. And she goes and she plays it. And I went and I stood next to the piano and she's playing the hymn. And I started crying and she was like, what are you, like, what's the matter with you? And I'm like trying to explain to her, like, I just imagined like 20 years down the road, John and Lily coming back with their kids and we're standing in this very dining room and we're singing Christmas carols and hymns. And she was like, you got to get it together, man. And she, I mean, she's right. But I've seen it revolutionize that in me too, savoring every moment as sweet and as God's blessing. And then lastly, I think that contentment radically changes our prayer life. I've talked about this a couple of times, but Jesus starts the Lord's Prayer with your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Over the years, my personal prayer life has gotten a lot shorter. The most words I use when I pray is when I pray in front of other people. It's not that I'm praying for shorter amounts of time. I just use a lot less words. Because I just pray, God, here's the thing. Would you do with this thing what you want? And would you help me to accept what that is? God, here's a concern. Would you be in this concern? And would you help me to be content in your answer? God, this person is sick. I'm just lifting them up to you. I don't know what to pray for them. But will your will be done in their life and in the life of their family? God, Lily's struggling. Will you help her? According to whatever your will is, because I know that this struggle might be important for who she's gonna become. But in all things, God, your will be done. And when you pray like that, then you can just kind of rest in the assurance that he will do his will. So I by no means have figured out contentment. And it certainly wasn't by my own desire that I arrived there. I didn't decide one day, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to be content. I'm just going to decide to be happy with my life. I didn't do that. It washed over me like a ton of bricks because someone was ministering to me and they said, hey, you have all the ingredients for happy in your life right now. Maybe you should stop reaching for other things. And so I would like to say that same thing to you. You very likely have all the ingredients you need right now to make happy. If we just stop reaching and grabbing. And then here's what happens. I said earlier, it's impossible. It feels impossible to be content in a season of want during loss or loneliness or tragedy. But what happens is when we learn to be people who are content, that word learn, Paul says it's a process. When we learn to be people who are content with what God has provided for us in this moment and in this season, then when we are in a season of need, when we are in a season of hurt, if you're sitting there and I'm like, hey, you've got all the ingredients you need to make happy, you're like, I don't. I don't. I've got a big hole in my life. If that's you, here's how being a content person even transforms that mindset. Trusting God and being content allows you to say, you know what? I might not have all the ingredients in my life. I think I need to be happy, but I have Jesus and he's enough. He has provided himself for me and he is enough. And I trust him that not all seasons will feel like this season. And then we come full circle back to the verse and make this point. True contentment is only possible through the sanctifying work of Jesus. Sanctify, I always say, is to become more like Christ in character. It's a process after we claim a faith in Christ and then we're taken up to heaven in glory. Everything that happens in between, the Holy Spirit is working in us to make us more like Christ in our character. That's a sanctification process. And that's only, true contentment is only accessible through the sanctifying work of Christ. That's why Paul says, I've learned to be content. How? Through Christ who gives me strength because he allows me to do all things. And when we find our contentment in Christ and in his strength, we come full circle and we get to say, along with Paul, I have learned in seasons of plenty and I have learned in seasons of little to be content and happy because I can do all things through Christ who gives you strength. Let's pray. Father, we do, we do. We see the evidence of your goodness all over our lives. Lord, I pray that we would look at your considerable gifts, at the fullness that has leaked out onto us, and we would see the good things that you've given us, the good friends who love us, the good family that supports us, the good job or the good role or the good thing in our identity that we get to do to express ourselves and exercise our gifts, God, would we look at the many, many rich blessings that we have in our lives and be grateful to you. Father, for those with us who don't feel content, who do feel sad, who do feel like they are lacking some essential ingredients. God, would they feel this morning that you really are enough? Would they feel this morning that Jesus really is enough? Would they trust that these seasons of need and want, they come and go, and that you're in these seasons with us just like you're in the seasons of abundance with us? Help us be a grateful people. Help us pray with faith and with trust. And God, help us learn like Paul did to be content in all seasons and to find that joy and that contentment in you. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making us a part of your Sunday morning. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that after the service. Just a real quick tip of the cap to Carly, our female vocalist. She was hacking up a lung in the pre-service meeting. She just got a little nagging cough, and she said, I'm just praying that I make it through my song. She said, great job with Honey in the Rock. You made it. Now, I got things to get to. All right, settle down. But now, if you start to cough during the sermon, get out. Go. All right. Carly's the best. She's also our graphics person, and we love her. This is part two of our series called Transformed. Jordan, in the open, kind of told you guys a little bit of what it is about and what it's for. It's based on that verse in Romans chapter 12 that says, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And so there's some things that we wanted to talk about over this series that will run into mid-October where maybe we can just shift our thinking a little bit. Maybe we can allow God to transform our mind in the way that we think about some things. And maybe that can actually transform our lives. And so this morning, we're going to talk about this transformation from comparison to contentment. One of the most, probably the most ubiquitous desires on the planet. Every person, every culture, everywhere wants happiness. Now we might put different words around that. We might describe it differently. I want to be safe. I want to be provided for. I want to have enough of this. I want to feel enough security here. I want to be loved. I want whatever it is, whatever the ingredients of happiness are for us. But everybody wants for themselves and for their children and for the people they love to be happy. It's a ubiquitous human desire. It is virtually universal. Now, because we're believers, most of us in this room would claim a faith in Christ. We know that the most important thing to desire is a relationship with him. We know that the thing that we want for our children is a relationship with Jesus. And so I'm not arguing that happiness should replace that. As a matter of fact, as believers, we know that happiness is only really achievable if we trust in Christ to bring that about. And that's one of the things we're going to see this morning. But if we think about happiness, what it means to be happy, it can't mean being a smiling idiot all the time, just grinning all the time. Every day is the best day ever. So it has to be something deeper than that. And the deeper foundation of happiness is contentment. It's being content, being content in the moment. This moment doesn't need any more. I love it the way it is. This situation, this season, this relationship doesn't need any more. I'm happy with the way that it is. It's to be content, to figure out how to be content. When we can do that, we can be happy. The problem is that we exist in a culture tailor-made to rob us of contentment. Would you agree with that? We exist in a culture and in a time where we are constantly and consistently berated with messages and images and comparisons that erode our contentment to a place where we are no longer happy and we spend our days wishing we had what we don't instead of being grateful for having what we do because we live in this culture that just perniciously eats away and erodes away at our own contentment. I was talking with a friend of mine and I asked her, what's the biggest threat to your contentment? And she very quickly said, social media, social media. I scroll Facebook, Instagram. Is it X now? I'm not on Twitter anymore. They went from Twitter to X. I scroll and I see other people who are doing better than me. Their SUV is bigger and wider than mine. And so now I feel like it fits nicely into parking spaces. Mine fits nicely into parking spaces. Theirs takes up two. So they are obviously having a better life than me. You know, their vacations are nicer than mine. They've got life figured out. They're in better shape than me. The scrolling relentlessly of social media and comparing ourselves to what we see chips away at a lot of our contentment. And to that, I would just offer this as an aside. Back at the beginning of the year, I think it's sometime in February, I realized that I was wasting so much time on my phone, just mindlessly scrolling apps for no good reason. And I would scroll at the time Twitter, and I would just be angry. I would be angry at the politics. I would be angry at Christians arguing with Christians. It would just make me mad. So then I would switch over to Facebook. Maybe this will be better. And then on Facebook, all it is, I don't know about your feed and your algorithm. All it is is a bunch of people from my life like 11 years ago that I no longer care about. Like, that's great that you were in the strawberry fields on Saturday. That's not what I want to see. That's not like engaging content for me. So I don't even know what's going on with Facebook. And it was a couple of days of scrolling and realizing, I don't know any of these people anymore. Why are they here? And then Instagram for me just became, the algorithm became falling videos and golf tutorials. That was it. That was all I got and the whole thing. And I'm like, this is a total waste of time. So I took everything off my phone, except for TikTok. I watch TikTok sometimes. That's kind of fun. But I took everything off my phone. And I'll tell you this, my happiness meter has gone up since doing that. So for some of y'all, I know I'm joking around a little bit, but for some of y'all, you may not need anything else in this sermon than just kind of a nudge. Why don't you think about taking that off your phone for a while? Is it making you happy? Is it bringing you joy? Is it making you more or less content? Why don't you take it off your phone and see if you engage more with the people around you? See if you look more at God's goodness in your life that's already there. See if you're more present for people. For at least somebody here, I know that that's all you need. I know that's what you need to hear today. Just try that out. See if it doesn't help a little bit. But if it's not online, it's in person, right? It's still, we can still play the comparison game and make ourselves unhappy with the things that we have. I remember in the summer of 2020, for the previous three years since I moved here, I had been driving a Nissan Leaf. And if you were here during that time, if you knew me during that time, you'd love to make fun of me for that because you hate the environment and fiscal savings. No, because I mean that you, if you listen, I drove one for three years. I'm just going to say this. If you drive a Leaf, you do deserve to get made fun of. That's, that's part of the deal. When I bought the car, I wasn't like, people are going to think this is awesome. Like I knew I was going to get made fun of. So when it came time to sell it and get something new, I thought, I want something nice. I want something that I like. For the first time in my life, I want to buy myself a nice car. And so I looked around, and I looked at a Tesla, the less expensive Tesla, but it was more expensive than the Accord that I was comparing it to. It was more money down, less miles a year, more money per month. And I thought, gosh, it's just not wise. I'm not going to do that. And so I leased an Accord. And it was the nicest car I ever had. When I got in it, I was like, I can't believe this is so nice. Like I was really, I was excited. Here's how excited I was about it. As a grown man, here's what I did. I drove I drove it to my neighborhood I parked it on a street I got out and I took pictures of it so I did I took pictures of my new car and then you know I texted them to my parents how lame is that what am I like 17 that's so embarrassing I remembered that I did that as I was prepping for the sermon I remember that's the thing that I did. And I'm like, what is the matter with you? But I did it. That's how proud I was of this car. I was so excited to drive in the lap of luxury of the Honda Accord XLE or whatever it was. EXL or I don't know. And then like a month later, my jerk friend Tyler got a Tesla. And he's like texting us pictures of it and videos. And it was so awesome. And it was way faster. And the whole roof of a Tesla is glass. And I had, I had a sunroof in my Accord, but it was one of the normal size ones from like 1987. Good job, you dope. That's the car you have now. Everything's controlled from a touch screen. I have to still touch buttons like it's 1998. This was terrible. And within a month, listen, I'm so proud of this car, I'm taking pictures of it. Within a month, I hate it. I want to take it back to the dealership and get a Tesla. I hated what I had. I wanted something new. Life just works that way, doesn't it? In the comparison game. I have a 28-inch black stone on my back porch. I like to cook on it. I go to somebody else's house. They got a 36. I'm like, dang, I got to get a 36. There's more quesadillas on there. The guy with the 36 goes over to his buddy's house. He's got a 36 inch blast stone, but it's in a permanent, it's got stone built up around. It's a permanent cook station outside. This is fancy. This is a big deal now. Then permanent blackstone station guy goes to somebody else's house and he's got a permanent kitchen set up with a smoker and a pool. And he's like, honey, we got to get a pool. And then the guy with the pool in the setup goes to his buddy's house and he's got an infinity pool. And he's like, oh, I got to get an infinity pool. And then that person goes to the bigger infinity pool and on and on and on it goes. And we can never just be satisfied with what we have because our culture that we exist in just chips away at our happiness through that comparison game. And here's another thing as an aside that the comparison game does. It is convinced. This is just for the young moms in the room. So basically, you, okay? It has convinced. I watch it happen. And you, okay? I didn't see you over there. It was Jordan Shaw. It's convinced the moms that they're not momming hard enough. That's what social media does. That's what the comparison thing does. It convinces moms and dads that they're not momming and dadding hard enough. They need to do more. Your cupcakes need to look better when you take them to the school. When your treats, when it's your week for snacks, for the soccer game, your cooler needs to be nice. It needs to be better than the other coolers. You need to engage in imaginative play. You need to do supportive discipline and never be angry at your kids. And only talk to them in soft tones because they're all little princes and princesses and they can't handle adversity in their life. So let's be very gentle. And let's not grade their papers in red. Let's use green and encouraging things and tones. Let's do that. And we're convinced, I see this in moms right now, that you're just not momming right. And you go to bed every night with this gross combination of mom guilt and mom exhaustion. I need to do more. I don't have one single ounce left to give, and I might hate my children. It's just this combo platter that's terrible. And here's what I want to tell you. Here's what I want to tell you, young moms. You are very likely a better mom to your children than your mom was to you. Very likely. It's just a generational thing. Jen and I are so much more present with our kids than our parents were with us. We just are. It's generational. It's just what this generation is doing. So let yourself off the hook a little bit. Now we won't know if we're doing it right until they're adults and they're not in prison, but for now it seems like we're doing a good job. You're doing a good job. Let yourself off the hook a little bit. Quit playing the comparison game. You're doing a good job with your kids. I actually watched a TED Talk a couple years ago, and it stuck with me. It's this guy doing studies on happiness. And he made the point that many of us, because of goal setting and attainment, have fundamentally eliminated the possibility of happiness from our life, which is kind of a crazy thought. But he says that when we set goals for ourselves and we say, when I get to those goals, I'm going to be happy. When I graduate college, I'll be happy. When I get a job, I'll be happy. Get the promotion, I'll be happy. When I meet the person, I'll be happy. When I get married, I'll be happy. When we have children, I'll be happy. When the children leave the house, I'll be happy, I meet the person I'll be happy when I get married I'll be happy when we have children I'll be happy when the children leave the house I'll be happy which is probably true and then when and then when when we get to be grandparents I'll be happy and what we do in life is we set the goalposts we set the marker for happy off in the distance and then we think I'm not happy now but when I get there I will be and then we get there what do we do the very second we arrive we move to the next thing. So I never spend any time in the joy that God brought me to. I only spend time anticipating the next thing I'm going to need to be happy. Whenever sit and revel in God's goodness now. So I think it's fair to say that we have a contentment issue. We always want the next thing. We always want a little bit more. Something a little bit bigger. Something a little bit shinier. Something a little bit more peaceful. We're always bugging God or ourselves for whatever could be next. Which is why I think this verse in Philippians is such a helpful verse for us this morning. It's actually, and then don't put that one up on the screen yet. I'm just gonna say 13 and then I'll read them all. It's actually one of the most misused verses in all of scripture. It's neck and neck Philippians 4.13 and Jeremiah 29.11. Philippians 4.13 says, I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength, or I can do all things through him who strengthens me. And we see people misuse this all the time. I can do anything I set my mind to with Christ powering me. In the name of Christ, I can do whatever I want to do. I've seen athletes with this tattooed on themselves somewhere. I'm going to complete the pass through Christ who gives me strength or score the goal or hit the home run or pitch the strikeout. Like I'm going to do this through Christ who gives me strength. There's even a Christian apparel line, like Under Armour, but for believers. So it means it's almost as good as the not believing material, but it's a little bit cheaper and a little bit poorly done. And it's got 413 all over it. These, these athletes are on high school fields all over the nation being powered by Christ and their teams are winning all of the state championships, of course, because they're powered by Jesus and he wants them to win. We misappropriate the verse all the time. It does not mean that through Christ who gives me strength, I can close the sale. I can accomplish this thing. I can do this deed. I can accomplish this act. It does not mean that. We have to be very careful when we pluck verses out of context and make them mean what only the sentence sounds like without anything else informing what that sentence actually means. And we use it to mean the opposite of what it really means. Here's what it really means. Here's the context of it. If we read verses 11 and 12, Paul writes this in Philippians. Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In's about learning in all seasons to trust God to provide what we need. And I love that the word learn shows up in here two times. I've learned to be in abundance and in need. I have learned to be in plenty and in want. I've learned these things through Christ who gives me strength. And it may seem like, well, man, it would be pretty easy. I don't know how tough that is, Paul. It'd be pretty, pretty easy to be content in abundance when you have plenty, when you don't want for anything, when you're, when you're living a life of luxury and you've got more than what you could ask for. It's got to be pretty easy to be content in that scenario. And to that thought, which isn't all the way incorrect, I would remind you of this proverb. I think about this proverb a lot. Proverbs 23, 1 through 5. When you sit down to eat with a ruler, observe carefully what is before you, and put a knife to your throat if you are given to appetite. Do not desire his delicacies, for they are deceptive food. Do not toil to acquire wealth. Be discerning enough to desist. When your eyes light on it, it is gone, for suddenly it sprouts wings, flying like an eagle toward heaven. That is a fancy, poetic way of saying this. Acc breeds more desire not less exposure to nice things a taste of the good life usually breeds a desire for more of that not less we have it pretty good then we go to someone else's house and they have it a little bit better and all of a a sudden we go home and we want what they want. Did you see that serving dish? I want that serving dish. My serving dish is from Kohl's. It is stupid. I would like a nice serving dish from like Nordstrom or something. I don't know. Crate and barrel. That's where you waste money on serving dishes. William Sonoma. That's right. That's a gold standard. That's all Jeffy has at his house. William Sonoma, everything. And Viking appliances, I'm sure. Yeah, because you can tell that the Viking stove heats up the ground beef better than just a regular GE stove, right? Yes, of course. But we all want those things. We all want those things. There's actually the effect of this that accumulation tends to make you want more. I heard this a while back. Steve Harvey, the host of Family Feud, was giving some people some financial advice. And he said, if you're just starting out in your career and you don't have a lot of money, he said, save up enough for a first class ticket somewhere and fly first class. Because once you fly first class, you will never want to fly coach again. And you will reorganize your life and be driven to make the money you need so that you can fly first class. And here's the thing. He's right. Have you ever flown first class? When you fly first class, you don't want to sit back there with the gen pop anymore. That's depressing. Now, here's what I've not done. And if I do this, I'm in big trouble. I've never flown in one of those pods internationally. If I fly in one of those pods where you get to stretch out and you get your own screen, like, I'm done for. But what you do when you get exposed, when you're at the king's table and you're around things that you don't have, is you begin to organize your life in such a way so that you can have those. When you see your friends taking nice vacations, you start to organize your life in such a way so you can too. When you see what you don't have, you start to organize your life in such a way that you can have what you want. And in organizing your life around the things that you want, around materials or experiences, we lose the contentment that's sitting right in front of us. So let's not think it's just a simple thing to learn to be content when you're surrounded with abundance, because it's not. It's really tricky, and it's really sneaky. Now the one that we would all agree is difficult is to be content when we have little. I kind of wondered as I read that, how can anyone be content in the midst of tragedy, loss, or loneliness? When you're sitting in the wake of a divorce, how can you claim in that moment to be content? When you are a freshly minted widow or widower, how can you claim in that moment to be content? When your children are walking through a tragically difficult time, how can you possibly claim to be content, to be happy? I need for nothing, when you clearly need for much. This is where that word learned comes into play, because somehow or another, Paul figured that one out. But that feels impossible. And it feels like really bad pastoral counsel. Someone's walking through a really difficult time in their life. They come to my office to see me, and they're crying about this hardship that they're enduring or that they're watching a loved one endure. And I point them to this verse and go, hey, you can be content through Christ who strengthens you. You should just be happy right now. How do we do that? How is that attainable? In the grace vine that I wrote for this week, I stated that this was a deeply personal sermon for me. Because this topic of contentment and happiness is actually something I think a great deal about. Because back in 2020, in the fall, I started to go to therapy. And I've mentioned before that I've done therapy, and I've mentioned before that I think everyone should do it. Everybody, you should go to preventative maintenance therapy. Most of us, all of us need more maintenance than we're willing to acknowledge anyways. Everyone should go. If you can afford therapy, you should go to therapy. I actually have a really good buddy here at the church. He's a big, tough guy, you know. He feels the only acceptable emotion to him is anger, and all other emotions are for sissies, all of them. And he decided he was going to start going to therapy, and I sent him to a guy, and he literally texts me every time he talks to this guy. Man, I love that guy so much. This is the best. I've never experienced anything like this in my life. Like, every time. Big tough guy loves therapy. You'd like it too. But I remember sitting in this guy's office, and I had kind of come to realize that in life, like, we all chase things. We all chase happiness. Some chase respect. Some chase security, stability, love, approval, just a sense of being enough and worthwhile. We're all chasing something. All adults are little more than just a pile, a comprising of insecurities and desires and ways that we try to cover those things up to make ourselves acceptable to the broader milieu. That's all we are. We're all chasing something. And I sat in his office, and he looked at me and he said, dude, when are you going to realize it? I said, realize what? He said, that thing that you're chasing, you have it. You have it. You have a wife who loves you. You guys laugh together every day. At the time we just had Lily, she said, you have a daughter who loves you, wants to spend time with you. You have rich friendships. People who support you, believe in you. You have a job that you love, a church that you love, and who seems to love you and support you too. When are you going to quit chasing it? You have it. It's right there if you'll just stop to look at it. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. And I realized, my goodness, I don't know why I'm striving so hard to get the thing that's going to make me happy. I have all the ingredients for happiness in my life right now if I'll just notice them. And I think that that's true of most of us. I think most of us already have all the ingredients for happiness available to us. We already have all the ingredients of happiness available to us right now. Even if it seems like there's this hole in our life, this thing that we want, and I won't be happy until I get it, I would push back and say, no, you have everything you need right now to be content in this moment. It doesn't mean that we should stop striving. It doesn't mean that we should stop trying. It doesn't mean that we should stop seeking, but we can be content in this moment because God has given us everything we need to be content. He's given us all the ingredients to make happy if we will just stop and slow down and see them. And since then, since realizing that, I've just done a lot of reflection on the transformative power of being content. On the transformative power of looking at your life and saying, thanks God, I have everything I need to be happy in you and content in you. And I would be willing to bet that whatever it is you're chasing, you've probably caught it. Whatever it is you think you need, you probably don't. And that all the things that you need in your life to make you content in the Lord, He has provided for you. And as this has washed over me, it's impacted me in profound ways. And so I sat down and I thought, how has just this arrival at contentment shaped me? How has it changed me? How has it impacted me? And I came up with this list. Contentment has transformed my gratitude, perspective, faith, sentimentality, and my prayer life. Most importantly, contentment has transformed my gratitude. It has transformed the way that I walk through life grateful for God's goodness in my life. Every time Jen, my wife, laughs at one of my jokes, I say a little prayer of gratitude to God. Because as long as she'll laugh at my jokes, I know we're good. When she stops laughing at my jokes, we're in in trouble because I don't really have any other tools in the tool belt besides trying to make her laugh. Like I'm not romantic. That's it. It's changed the way I think about my children and the moments that I'm grateful for with them because here's the reality. Parents with young kids. When that kid is crying and you have to walk in there at 3.30 in the morning when all you want in the whole world is to sleep and you pick them up and you calm them down and that little head is resting on your shoulder and that little arm is on the other shoulder and you calm them down and you get them back to sleep and you lay them back down in that bed. Let me tell you something that's super depressing. You won't know when it is the last time that you just did that. One of those times is going to be the last time and you won't know that it was. And there's a bunch of parents whose kids are grown up who would give anything in the world to have that moment with their kid one more time. So be grateful for those moments. Be grateful for the sleepless nights because you only get so many of them. I was sitting in my house the other day and John and Lily, Lily's seven, John's two, they're running around the downstairs. We asked Lily to vacuum the kitchen and we got this little thing that she can do it with. And she did for a second. And then she just started running laps around the kitchen and the dining room. And she's screaming and John's screaming and no work is getting done. And I'm sitting there. And Jen was a little bit exasperated with him. And I'm just grinning like an idiot. Because I think one day we're going to miss these days. One day I'm going to miss a noisy house. And when you're content, when you're determined to see the good and what God has provided for you right now, annoying things become moments of gratitude. Frustrating things become moments of peace and reflection. It transforms the way you walk through life. It was in this season that I stumbled upon this verse in John 1 16 that I say all the time. You guys have heard me say it. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I love that verse. From God's fullness, from his goodness, from his generosity and his mercy and his grace, he has given you so many blessings. And it's up to us in the moments to acknowledge those. Next time you're with friends and you have a great conversation and it's life-giving and dinner is good, be grateful for it. Tell them so. Thank God for them. Next time you get one of those good laughs where your eyes tear up and you can't stop and you go for so long that you can't remember why you started, even if it was about something inappropriate, anyways, still praise God for laughter in your life. It was good and those moments are sweet and we don't know how many of them we get. From his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. I know. Some of us are in hard seasons. Some of us are in seasons of abundance. But I know that we all have God's goodness in our life. We just sang that song. I see the evidence of your goodness all over my life. And Aaron and the band laid out and I heard you guys saying that. If it's true, then be content in that goodness. And I love that line, why should I fear? The evidence is here. That's how it changed my faith. I said it affects my gratitude. It changes my faith. My faith in God. My faith in his goodness. I know that things are going to work out the way that he wants them to work out because he wants them to work out that way. He's inviting me into it. But I have nothing to fear from the future because God is orchestrating it and I am in his hands. And I've said last week we launched the part two of the campaign to build a building. And I said last week, and you'll hear me say a bunch, if God wants us to build it, we will. If he doesn't, we won't. But that doesn't change one little bit what I get to do and what he's called me to do. That doesn't change one little bit what he's called you guys to do, what he's called us to do as a church, which is make disciples and grow closer to him, connect people to Jesus and connect people to people. That's what he's called us to do. That mission doesn't change if we get into a building. It doesn't change if we stay. Now, if we go, I'll be excited. If we don't, I'll be sad. But not for very long on either way because if God wants us to do it, we will. If he doesn't, we won't. I'm content. I'm happy getting to do what God has asked us to do in whatever capacity, in whatever location he's asked us to do it. This God opening my eyes to contentment has changed my perspective on life. In the middle of this realization, we were walking through a season of need. It was a hard one. We were walking through pancreatic cancer with Jen's dad. We ended up losing him at the end of that year. It was not an easy time for everyone around us to be content. It wasn't an easy thing to watch my wife just be sad and try to be content with that. But one of the things I learned is that life has seasons. And sometimes they're abundant, and sometimes they're lacking. And in the abundant seasons, we should revel in them and praise God for them and find joy in them. And in the seasons of need and hurt and want, we can take solace that it's a season that every day won't feel like today. Every month won't feel like this month. And a lot of times I'm not even sure. Sometimes we operate as Christians that God takes us into hard seasons because he has a lesson that he wants us to learn. So we allow these things to happen to us. And I just kind of think that's a pretty myopic view of God's will. He's orchestrating all these other things and all these, all this ripple effect and all these other people's lives so that you can learn this lesson about being grateful. Maybe, maybe you're that important in God's kingdom. Or maybe life ebbs and flows and good seasons and bad seasons come and go. And when we're in a bad season, we just say, I'm in a bad season. This is tough. But I know that God is with me and I know that everything won't feel like this. It's changed my perspective. It's changed my sentimentality a lot, like a lot. Because of those sweet moments, from his fullness, we've all received grace upon grace. And you reflect upon those sweet things with friends or children or family or whatever it is, I cry all the time. Like, if I'm watching TV with John and he's on my lap and Lily sees it and gets jealous and she comes over and she puts her head right here and she says she wants snugs and now I'm cuddling with both of my children at the same time, I have the 100% chance I'm going to cry. I just will. I'll just sit there and I'll think, this is the good stuff. Like I'm such a sap. I don't know if I told you guys this already, but we got a piano in the house and Jen's playing just a little bit. And she was playing a hymn. I said, go play a hymn for me. She said, what hymn? I said, I don't care. I just want to hear you play a hymn. And she goes and she plays it. And I went and I stood next to the piano and she's playing the hymn. And I started crying and she was like, what are you, like, what's the matter with you? And I'm like trying to explain to her, like, I just imagined like 20 years down the road, John and Lily coming back with their kids and we're standing in this very dining room and we're singing Christmas carols and hymns. And she was like, you got to get it together, man. And she, I mean, she's right. But I've seen it revolutionize that in me too, savoring every moment as sweet and as God's blessing. And then lastly, I think that contentment radically changes our prayer life. I've talked about this a couple of times, but Jesus starts the Lord's Prayer with your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Over the years, my personal prayer life has gotten a lot shorter. The most words I use when I pray is when I pray in front of other people. It's not that I'm praying for shorter amounts of time. I just use a lot less words. Because I just pray, God, here's the thing. Would you do with this thing what you want? And would you help me to accept what that is? God, here's a concern. Would you be in this concern? And would you help me to be content in your answer? God, this person is sick. I'm just lifting them up to you. I don't know what to pray for them. But will your will be done in their life and in the life of their family? God, Lily's struggling. Will you help her? According to whatever your will is, because I know that this struggle might be important for who she's gonna become. But in all things, God, your will be done. And when you pray like that, then you can just kind of rest in the assurance that he will do his will. So I by no means have figured out contentment. And it certainly wasn't by my own desire that I arrived there. I didn't decide one day, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to be content. I'm just going to decide to be happy with my life. I didn't do that. It washed over me like a ton of bricks because someone was ministering to me and they said, hey, you have all the ingredients for happy in your life right now. Maybe you should stop reaching for other things. And so I would like to say that same thing to you. You very likely have all the ingredients you need right now to make happy. If we just stop reaching and grabbing. And then here's what happens. I said earlier, it's impossible. It feels impossible to be content in a season of want during loss or loneliness or tragedy. But what happens is when we learn to be people who are content, that word learn, Paul says it's a process. When we learn to be people who are content with what God has provided for us in this moment and in this season, then when we are in a season of need, when we are in a season of hurt, if you're sitting there and I'm like, hey, you've got all the ingredients you need to make happy, you're like, I don't. I don't. I've got a big hole in my life. If that's you, here's how being a content person even transforms that mindset. Trusting God and being content allows you to say, you know what? I might not have all the ingredients in my life. I think I need to be happy, but I have Jesus and he's enough. He has provided himself for me and he is enough. And I trust him that not all seasons will feel like this season. And then we come full circle back to the verse and make this point. True contentment is only possible through the sanctifying work of Jesus. Sanctify, I always say, is to become more like Christ in character. It's a process after we claim a faith in Christ and then we're taken up to heaven in glory. Everything that happens in between, the Holy Spirit is working in us to make us more like Christ in our character. That's a sanctification process. And that's only, true contentment is only accessible through the sanctifying work of Christ. That's why Paul says, I've learned to be content. How? Through Christ who gives me strength because he allows me to do all things. And when we find our contentment in Christ and in his strength, we come full circle and we get to say, along with Paul, I have learned in seasons of plenty and I have learned in seasons of little to be content and happy because I can do all things through Christ who gives you strength. Let's pray. Father, we do, we do. We see the evidence of your goodness all over our lives. Lord, I pray that we would look at your considerable gifts, at the fullness that has leaked out onto us, and we would see the good things that you've given us, the good friends who love us, the good family that supports us, the good job or the good role or the good thing in our identity that we get to do to express ourselves and exercise our gifts, God, would we look at the many, many rich blessings that we have in our lives and be grateful to you. Father, for those with us who don't feel content, who do feel sad, who do feel like they are lacking some essential ingredients. God, would they feel this morning that you really are enough? Would they feel this morning that Jesus really is enough? Would they trust that these seasons of need and want, they come and go, and that you're in these seasons with us just like you're in the seasons of abundance with us? Help us be a grateful people. Help us pray with faith and with trust. And God, help us learn like Paul did to be content in all seasons and to find that joy and that contentment in you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. Oh, look at that. See, they clap and they answer. I don't know how I did that, but thank you all for being here. As Nate said, I'm Erin. I am the children's pastor, so I'm very excited to be out of little church and part of big church this morning. It's kind of a fun place to be. I'm also a little apprehensive to stand up here for a couple of different reasons. One, there's people in the audience that I didn't expect to be here, so that one adds a whole other layer to my morning, which is fun. But the other one too is that the book of Philippians that we get to talk about today is a really cool book, and it's a lot of fun, but it's also a very personal book. And I found it to be very personal for Paul as well as for me. So as I jumped in and started to study, I came very quickly upon the area that I felt is where I wanted to land. And so I continued to study. I continued to do my research. And then on top of it, I met with Nate, who helped me to even narrow my focus a little bit more. Because you guys know me. I have lots of words. He does not. And so the two of us hopefully could, yeah, pare it down just a little. But I got all of that together. So I now have my outline. I'm so excited. And I sat down to try to write, and I had no words. Zero. And again, if you know me, that's a rarity. And so I struggled for a long time, and there was one night after a particularly hard day of no words, I came home and I was talking to Harris, my sweet husband, lamenting the fact that I had no words. And he stops me in my tracks and he says, hey, Aaron, have you ever thought about the fact that you have no words because you're trying to protect yourself? And I said, what? No, I don't do that. And he said, well, yeah. He goes, you have been trying in all of your power to live out what you want to talk about for the last two and a half years. And he said, maybe it's time for you to break down the walls that you're using to protect yourself and put your words on paper. And so I took his great advice, And I must admit he was right. It's hard to say that. No, I'm kidding. But seriously, I took his advice. And the next day I looked at the passage with new eyes. And the words began to flow. So to you, Nate, a small apology. Because this may not be exactly what we talked about, but I hope that what I do get to present today is honoring to Paul and Paul's message to the Philippians, which I think is also very relevant to us today. So, let's jump in. One of the things about me that you may or may not know also is I am a huge history lover. I actually went to school to teach history. I never actually did that officially, but that's okay. But I believe that in history, in order to completely understand it, sometimes you have to get a full, like the back story. And then it all starts to make a whole lot more sense. So in our morning this morning, you're going to hear some of the backstory about the book of Philippians, so hopefully we understand where Paul is writing from. So we'll start though with the book of Philippians. Paul, it's AD 62. Paul is in a prison cell in Rome awaiting trial. This beautiful trial is going to basically allow, tell him whether he's going to live or die. That's kind of what he's waiting on. So in order to pass the time, he is ministering to those people who are visiting him. He is writing letters of correction and encouragement to his churches. Now, the prison cell that he sits in is not like anything we would understand today. He's in shackles all of the time, most likely shackled to a Roman soldier. And then the Roman penal system required him to provide his own room and board. So he sits in a prison cell, can't go anywhere, can't do anything, but they expect him to be able to pay his way. So he is completely and totally reliant on people for his care. This is where the sweet church of Philippi actually comes in. So now if we back up 10 years, we find Paul and Silas and Timothy and Luke all heading out on their second missionary journey. And as they have gone to left Antioch, they're in Galatia, they're running around Galatia, they've done their thing. They say, I want to move west. And so they try to go westward. And every time they make that trip towards the west, which would be Asia, they run into these roadblocks. And if you go into Acts 16, which is where this story is, you find out Paul attributes every single one of those roadblocks to the Holy Spirit, saying it's not time for you guys to go to Asia yet. And so like every good southerner, Paul and his friends decide to regroup and they head to the beach. They head to a little town called Troas, which sits on the Aegean Sea. And they camp out there for a while to try to discern what their next steps are. And then one night, Paul has a dream. And in this dream, there's a Macedonian man who appears to him and begs him to come to Macedonia. So you know where this is headed. He tells his friends. They get into a boat. They cross the Aegean Sea, and they head to Macedonia. The really cool side note to this is Macedonia is present-day Europe. So what we're talking about now is the first time the gospel has ever reached Europe, which I just think that's really, really cool. So they end up on the coast. They get off. They jump on what's called the Ignatian, if I pronounced that right. Who knows? Way. Which was a road that was constructed by the Roman Empire to connect all of the Roman colonies. One of those Roman colonies was Philippi. Philippi had become a Roman colony at the end of a civil war. The winner of the civil war had then become emperor. And he chose Philippi as a colony because it was rich in gold. It had fabulous location to the coast. And he'd also then decided that it was a great retirement location for all the Roman soldiers. So kind of like the villages in Florida. So this Philippi that Paul and his friends would have been walking up on held great prominence in Macedonia. They would have walked up to these amazing walls that were there to protect the city and a spectacular road system, which was all testimony to its strategic importance and all of the Roman influence. And then as they walked down the city streets, they would see this amazing Roman architecture. There would be temples to the Roman gods. There would be a bustling city life. And on top of that, the population would have been pretty diverse. You would have had the retired Roman soldiers. You also would have had other Roman citizens that had come to Philippi because, you know, it's kind of a cool city. And then on top of it, you're going to have the local Greek population. The one thing, however, that there were, I guess I should say, there were a few things that were missing. So as Paul and his friends are in the middle of Philippi, it becomes the Sabbath and they go to look for a place to worship. Now, Paul and the previous places that he would visit, they would always head to a synagogue as a place of worship. There was not a single synagogue in Philippi. And so the interesting part to this is it only takes 10 Jewish men in order to be classified as a synagogue. So there's a whole population of people that would have been familiar to Paul and his friends that are completely missing. So Paul leaves. He heads outside the city and goes to the river to worship. When he gets to the river, he meets a woman by the name of Lydia and some of her followers or her friends. They were all followers of God. He had a moment with them. Their hearts were open. He was able to preach the gospel. Lydia and her entire family are baptized. They come to know Christ. They are now officially the first recorded believers of Christ in Europe. I think that's just really cool. And so then you have this moment. Lydia says, okay, you guys now have to use my house. It needs to be your headquarters. You can just come and rest and eat and do all that stuff and travel and whatever you need to do. This is where you need to go. So they did. They used her house as headquarters. They ran back and forth. They continued to preach and they teach. They managed to get themselves in more trouble. Paul and Silas end up in jail again. Paul seems to like jail. It's just a good thing for him. But he ends up in jail again. Something about a slave girl and a demon. He cast them out and made people mad. I don't know. They ended up in jail. But while he's in jail, there's an earthquake. And because of that earthquake, the jailer and his whole family come to Jesus. So now all of a sudden we have two groups of people that are going to come together to form this beautiful church of Philippi. And so at this, he is released from jail and he decides it's probably a good idea if he leaves Philippi. They're not sure that they really like him there. So as they pack up to leave, he leaves Lydia and her family and the Roman soldier and his family to form this sweet church of Philippi. And so it's a church that sits in a city of prominence. It's a church full of believers that are now going to face a great deal of resistance and a great deal of persecution. If you go back to what we're looking at, Roman soldiers who believe in the Roman Empire, they believe in the Roman Emperor as God. There's going to be a lot of resistance. There'll be a lot of persecution, but they're in it. So here we now find Paul sitting and writing letters, and he picks to write a letter to his friends in Philippi. But the really cool thing about this letter is that it's really, really different from all of the other letters that he's written. You heard from both Aaron and Doug on Galatians and Ephesians, and there was moments of correction in there. He had heard that there were things going wrong in these churches, and he needed to correct it. That's not what this letter's about. This letter, Paul's basically, it's like you would sit down to write a letter to a friend. How are you doing? This is what I've been up to. What have you been up to? I hope you are well. Thank you so much for the gift that you sent me. It's done X, Y, and Z to help me. And that's what he does here. Because see, the church of Philippi had been a partner with Paul from the very beginning in his spread of the gospel. They had supported him in every way possible, whether it was people, whether it was money, whatever Paul needed, the Church of Philippi was consistent in their support. And so this letter shows that as he writes to them. You can also tell through the words that he uses and the way that the letter is phrased that he knows that he's writing to a mature group of Christians, a group of Christians who totally understand who the person of Christ is, the sacrifice that he made, as well as understanding that their citizenship is not quite here. It's in heaven. But also knowing that they have to figure out how to live in the here and now, in the city where it's full of the struggle of temptations of the flesh, its struggle with the constant fears of persecution. And so I can also say it kind of sounds like the world we live in today, right? We're believers. We sit knowing who Christ is. We sit understanding what he did for us, but also knowing our citizenship's in heaven. But how do I live right here and right now? We live in a world with a 24-hour news cycle. There's a little fear there, right? We live in the world with social media that can make us feel so often about that we're just not good enough. We've lived through a pandemic. We've come out the other side. It may have given us a few layers of fear now. Also can it happen again. And what's it going to be like if it does. And then if you're a parent or a grandparent. There may be a whole other layer of fear that you have. Because you are talking about your kids. Or your grandkids. And what the world is like. And the things that they have to face. So in this thank you note, Paul says to them as well as to us, it becomes this letter of an encouragement. And he says, you need to hold fast and hold strong. And you need to be there with a mindset like Christ, because he knows if you can control, if they can control their thoughts, that they can change the direction of their lives. He knows that the renewed mind leads to a life transformed. And this is what he actually says that the Christ-like mindset is. If you look at Philippians chapter 4, verse 8, it states, Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about these things. So Paul says to him, you need to shift your focus and fill your thoughts with the truth of God's word. You need to look at the world with the eyes and the lens of humility, of justice, of finding ways that your thoughts and your actions are attractive to others, that they're filled with gratitude and praise, and that you're grounding yourself in this present moment that we live in and finding God in the circumstances. I believe Paul knew his audience exceptionally well, because as I read this, and I imagine the Philippians heard it as well in his letter and went, hmm, that might be easier said than done. And it's true. This is not easy. But I believe Paul then gives us an action plan to help us learn how to renew our minds. And it's important to note that like any other action plan that you may have in your life, like to lose weight or to exercise more, whatever it may be, if you're not consistent in it and if you don't put in the time and the energy and the work, it's not going to do anything. So we need to be focused on it. So if you want to renew your mind so that you live a transformed life, the first thing that he talks about is that we must learn to choose joy. And if you look at Philippians chapter four, verse four, he says it, rejoice in the Lord always. I say it again, rejoice. And like any good pastor, if he wants you to remember it, he says it twice. Rejoice. I say it again, rejoice. I was in a small group leader for many years for a really cool group of girls. And from 6th grade to 12th grade for them. And when they graduated, they gave me a ring, which I still wear periodically. Inscribed on the ring, it says, choose joy. Come to find out, this may have been one my favorite phrases for them because, you know, sixth to 12th grade is the crazy time anyway. And what I wanted them to understand, and that's what Paul talks about in this passage, is the fact that you don't always have control over your circumstances. Circumstances change all the time. We may not be able to control them, but we do have control how we choose to respond to that circumstance. So, you know, we'd hear it from them. But, you know, I can't have joy because so-and-so broke up with me. Or I can't have joy because I can't go to the party next week or in our situation it may be more things like I can't have joy because I just got that medical diagnosis. I can't have joy because I lost my job. But my response to that is this is where we get to choose to have joy. I can't, I can't help the medical diagnosis, but I can shift my focus and choose to have joy in that moment. And what this comes down to is that we change our thinking from the what, which is very temporal, to the who, which is very internal, our joy abounds. I can have joy in that situation because he is the author and perfecter of my faith. I can have joy in that situation because he says he will never leave me nor forsake me. So, choose joy. The next thing he says that we need to do is we need to learn to release it. And I'm not talking about releasing your joy. We want to hold on to that joy. What he's talking about here is releasing your control. Let me, let me expand upon that. Verse six in Philippians four says, So we walk in a world today where we face stress, we face anxiety, we face fear, we face worry. It's all very normal. The thing that isn't is when it has control over us. And I think as a side note I need to put in here is that this anxiety, this fear, this worry that I speak of is the stuff that we just normally have as a human being living in the world, the fallen world that we live in today. There are other people who fear, worry, and anxiety are actually part of a mental health situation. And to them, I say, what we talk about today, it helps. But your medication and your therapist and everything else that you're doing helps also. You bring God into the situation, but you don't. I'm not going to stand up here and say you're praying away anything because that's not true. Okay. So now I come back to where I was. So fear, anxiety, et cetera, the world we live in, it causes it. It's normal. We don't want it to have control over us. That's just what we don't, we don't want to do it. Um, and when it starts to have control over us, what we start to see is because we're humans and because we hate pain and we want to do everything in our life to avoid pain, we will try to control or we will try to fix the situation that we're in. Because that pain of failure, that pain of loss, that pain of rejection is too much. So we choose to hold on super, super tight to it. Because then that way it's safe, right? I'm safe. I'm not hurt. But guess what? I'm exhausted because I'm working so hard not to release it, but to control it and to hold on to it. And, you know, it also states in Scripture, God says, cast all your cares on me because he cares for you. And so he cares so much he sent Jesus to die for you. So why are you still holding on to it? And if you look at verse 7, and then it puts up protectors around your heart and around your mind. So the next time you walk into the next situation, that peace is there if you're willing to let go of the control and stop thinking that you can hold on to it. So what circumstance is it that you are holding on to and refusing to allow God to work in it? What situation keeps you up at night? Who's had that 3 a.m. wake up call? I know. Go ahead and nod your head because it happens. But what are you holding on to so tightly that you can't allow God's peace to enter into it because you want to control it? Think about what would happen if you gave it all over to him. Because here's the thing, when we're in those situations where we're stressed, we're worried, we're anxious, etc. How are you as a person? How do you respond to your family? I don't know. Harris has seen it before. The more stress I'm under, the shorter I am, the grumpier I am, the angrier I can be. But yet if the peace comes in, now what happens? Then I'm hopefully responding to situations where I'm annoyed with a little bit more patience. Or maybe some more joy or love or gentleness or kindness or whatever it is. So when we talk about renewing your mind to transform your life, this is the kind of things that we're talking about. The change that can happen inside of relationships just because. You may not realize it, but that angst that you have, that stress that you're carrying is affecting those around you. And so by accepting God's peace and walking in it, it changes that. So this also then brings us back to where we started in verse 8. Because here we are. We now know that we want to choose joy. We now know that we want to release it all. But that still does not really help us out with, again, that mindset and how to live directly in the here and now. Because, again, we live here. You're going to have thoughts, right? The world that we live in today, there are a thousand things vying for your attention and your thought life. But guess what? I'm going to tell you again. You have control over your thought life. Huh? And I know that one seems big, but you really and truly do. You get to choose and decide what takes up real estate in your brain. You get to choose and decide what it is that you want to focus your thoughts on. The thing about the human brain is the way that it's actually wired is to conserve energy. So if your normal thought pattern is kind of negative, goes down that what-if trail often, so every time thoughts come in, that's where they're going to go. So this is the renewing of the mind part is that we don't want it to go down a negative path anymore. We want to renew it so it has the mindset of Christ so that we're now, when the thoughts come in, they take a different path because that's become the easy path. So what's that filter? That filter again is verse eight. You think about these things. You run all of those thoughts through what verse eight says. The truth of God. You have the truth of God in your hands. If it doesn't meet up with the truth of God, throw it away and don't give it time in your thoughts. If it isn't lovely, if it isn't pure, if it isn't honoring, if it isn't praiseworthy, just don't even give it your time or your attention. Is it going to be easy? No, it's not. Because again, what's the easiest thing for us to think on? Right? Where's your brain? The easiest place to think on quite often for us is the what ifs and the oh noes because that's where we've been. Another way to possibly think about this that I love is we are our own worst critic, right? So we have to stop listening to ourselves and start talking to ourselves instead. Quit listening to the lies that the world tells us. Quit listening to that little voice inside your head that tells you you're not enough, you're not good enough. You can't stand up in front of all those people. Like whatever it is that that little voice is telling you, you got to push it aside. And when I say you start talking to yourself, start talking to yourself through the lens of 4-8. Start talking to yourself like a coach. Yeah, we messed up this time. But guess what? We're going to get it right next time. And soon, you'll be hearing the words of God reiterating who you are in him. That you are capable. That you are lovely. That you are worthy, that he loves you. And that you can trust him. That even though my circumstances stink, he's right here with me. And then eventually we begin to interpret our circumstances through the goodness of God. And as we step into truth, we hear his voice and the words of scripture and we learn to trust. A few years ago, my circumstances changed. My parents were living part-time lives halfway in Florida, halfway in North Carolina. They were in their 80s and very independent and doing exceptionally well. Then one summer when my mom was home, we had some health issues. There was a fall,ed up with a little memory issues, kind of hiccups, whatever you want to call them. They made the decision not to go down to Florida that summer. And instead, or that winter, I should say. Instead, hang out in North Carolina and see if we could see where we were headed, right? Needless to say, her health continued to decline some. Dad made the decision, we're done, sold the place in Florida. They're now in Pinehurst full-time. It's fabulous because they're close, and we get to run back and forth. We get to hang out together, and the world is really good. But my mom's health and her mobility continued to decline over this time. And then in my dad, I began to see a lot of what we talked about today. His circumstances were not ones he wanted to be living in. And the fear of losing my mom did this to him. And he tried to control and fix all the things. Because, you know, she was his best friend. She was his soulmate. They had been together at this point like 62 years. And so he's holding on like this. And what he was doing by holding on like this, he turned into somebody who, for us, was hard to deal with sometimes. He got kind of, there were moments of anger. There were moments just pure frustration. We also had anxiety. It was all there, all the things that we've talked about. And he was grumpy, which if you've ever met my dad, grumpy was not a word that you would have used to describe him. So he's holding on for dear life. And in turn, I'm caught in the middle because I'm dealing with my mom as well as my dad and all of the frustrations that come trying to not choose sides. I can see his side. I can see hers. I'm trying to, you know, all the things, right? And the other thing I was trying to do too was fix it and control it. There were days that I will stand up before you and honestly admit I did not choose joy. There were days that trying to think about that which was true and lovely and pure and honest, and that just was not thoughts that crossed my brain. I tried, but it's not things that always came easy. Stress levels continued to increase. Then my dad had some health issues. We go down that rabbit trail because my mom's of no help, so it falls on my shoulders to help manage his care as well. So lots of running back and forth, lots of doing all that. The end of 2022 is the beginning of my mom's major decline. We end up in the hospital for many days. The hospice is called in. And then my mom passes away at the beginning of December of 2022. My dad was wrecked. The grief that hit my father at that point in time was beyond anything I'd had experienced. His wife of 63 years, it was hard. And again, he still had hoped so much to control, and that control just didn't work. So as you can only guess, I jumped in because he's a mess and he needs somebody to take care of him. So I went immediately into caregiver mode. I took off. We had to find him a place up here because, you know, he can't be in Pounders by himself. So thankfully I was gifted with, right? We found a really cool independent living community. He's actually across the street from me. We get him up here. We get him settled. And it is good. So I call this kind of our year of temporary peace. His veil of grief lifts a little. He makes friends. He's hanging out. He finds his new routine. He misses my mom every single day. But he's enjoying his time with us and we're loving having him with us. He's there for all of the birthdays and the holidays. We got to celebrate his 90th and it was fantastic. He was here when Haley and Zach got engaged. It was just an amazing year together. I think at this point in time for all of us, joy became a little easier to choose. We may have let go of control just a little bit. Because the one thing that I probably didn't mention about me and my control was this, to me me became my lifeline. Because the one thing I knew in dealing with both my mommy and my dad was that if I let go of this in my heart, in my brain, I felt I would drown. And so I held on with everything that I had because I, yeah, I was scared to death to let go for fear of not being able to come back up. And so last, this past April, my dad had a fall. So my temporary peace has now gone to here. It wasn't a big fall. It scared us all a little. It wasn't a big deal. We moved on. Harris and I are going out of town. We came back from out of town. My dad is in basically excruciating back pain. There's no explanation for it. So we spent the next week trying to figure out what's going on. Thought we were headed towards some answers and then we had another fall. Ended up in the hospital because of the fall. That was on a Monday. That Wednesday evening and the hospital stays were something that's for a whole other sermon. But that Wednesday evening, we finally got him to a place of rest. I kissed him on the top of his head. I told him I loved him, and I said, I'll see you tomorrow. Remember, I've got you. I went home. I went to bed. Middle of the night, I got a phone call. Your dad's taking a turn. We need you to come to the hospital. I'm holding at this point in time. Still holding on as tight as I can. But y'all, I got into that car and said, I can't do this. And I let go. And the whole way to the hospital, I just prayed, Lord, your will, not mine. Lord, I need you to be my rock and my strength in this moment. Your will, not mine. Now, come to find out, I pulled into the parking lot at Wake Med. And I know now that that was when my daddy went and met Jesus. And so when I walked into his room, y'all, he had a smile on his face. And I know in my heart that daddy came to his peace in the arms of Jesus. And he saw my mama. And the thing is, I found my peace too. I released it. I let it go and I let him have it. And that one moment of release was what I needed. Now, my circumstances are, I don't know that they've changed. I can't say that they've changed. They're just different. I now stand before you. I've lost both of my parents in the last 17 months. I'm dealing with all of the things related to dad and what's left behind. But the one thing I do know is that I live each day now in the moment. I don't focus on the what ifs. I don't go to those things that I can't, I have no control over. I try to stay grounded, choosing my joy, choosing to come at it with prayer and open hands and trying my very best that when those thoughts and those what ifs and all the things try to come into my brain, that I don't let it take up real estate and I push it aside. It's not easy. But the peace that I have when I do make those choices, I want more of. And so the daily, the hourly exercise of doing that, I will continue to do. And so here we have five little verses tucked at the back of this beautiful letter and thank you note that Paul wrote that act for us as an action plan so we can renew our minds to live a transformed life. Sounds easy. It's going to take lots of work. That day-to-day commitment about choosing joy releasing it and then I'm being very intentional about what comes into our thoughts so I want to ask you Grace Raleigh as we close it all up today where are you stuck in your circumstances so stuck that you've lost your joy or that you're finding that you want to control or hold on to your situation so much so that you're exhausted and you don't know what to do with it. Where are you allowing the world to influence your thoughts, to allow your thoughts to become that vicious cycle of fear and worry and anxiety? So can you instead release it knowing that when you release it, you will find his peace, a peace beyond all understanding that will guard your heart and guard your mind as you walk into your next circumstance. Will you all pray with me? Lord, thank you. Thank you for today. Thank you for your peace. And for Paul knowing that a renewed mind leads to a transformed life. So Lord, thank you that we have your words and that we have you by our side to know how to choose your peace, to choose your joy, and most of all, in all situations, to choose you. We just ask that you help each and every one of us, Lord, to be able to walk this action plan with intentionality and to live in your peace. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning, Grace. Oh, look at that. See, they clap and they answer. I don't know how I did that, but thank you all for being here. As Nate said, I'm Erin. I am the children's pastor, so I'm very excited to be out of little church and part of big church this morning. It's kind of a fun place to be. I'm also a little apprehensive to stand up here for a couple of different reasons. One, there's people in the audience that I didn't expect to be here, so that one adds a whole other layer to my morning, which is fun. But the other one too is that the book of Philippians that we get to talk about today is a really cool book, and it's a lot of fun, but it's also a very personal book. And I found it to be very personal for Paul as well as for me. So as I jumped in and started to study, I came very quickly upon the area that I felt is where I wanted to land. And so I continued to study. I continued to do my research. And then on top of it, I met with Nate, who helped me to even narrow my focus a little bit more. Because you guys know me. I have lots of words. He does not. And so the two of us hopefully could, yeah, pare it down just a little. But I got all of that together. So I now have my outline. I'm so excited. And I sat down to try to write, and I had no words. Zero. And again, if you know me, that's a rarity. And so I struggled for a long time, and there was one night after a particularly hard day of no words, I came home and I was talking to Harris, my sweet husband, lamenting the fact that I had no words. And he stops me in my tracks and he says, hey, Aaron, have you ever thought about the fact that you have no words because you're trying to protect yourself? And I said, what? No, I don't do that. And he said, well, yeah. He goes, you have been trying in all of your power to live out what you want to talk about for the last two and a half years. And he said, maybe it's time for you to break down the walls that you're using to protect yourself and put your words on paper. And so I took his great advice, And I must admit he was right. It's hard to say that. No, I'm kidding. But seriously, I took his advice. And the next day I looked at the passage with new eyes. And the words began to flow. So to you, Nate, a small apology. Because this may not be exactly what we talked about, but I hope that what I do get to present today is honoring to Paul and Paul's message to the Philippians, which I think is also very relevant to us today. So, let's jump in. One of the things about me that you may or may not know also is I am a huge history lover. I actually went to school to teach history. I never actually did that officially, but that's okay. But I believe that in history, in order to completely understand it, sometimes you have to get a full, like the back story. And then it all starts to make a whole lot more sense. So in our morning this morning, you're going to hear some of the backstory about the book of Philippians, so hopefully we understand where Paul is writing from. So we'll start though with the book of Philippians. Paul, it's AD 62. Paul is in a prison cell in Rome awaiting trial. This beautiful trial is going to basically allow, tell him whether he's going to live or die. That's kind of what he's waiting on. So in order to pass the time, he is ministering to those people who are visiting him. He is writing letters of correction and encouragement to his churches. Now, the prison cell that he sits in is not like anything we would understand today. He's in shackles all of the time, most likely shackled to a Roman soldier. And then the Roman penal system required him to provide his own room and board. So he sits in a prison cell, can't go anywhere, can't do anything, but they expect him to be able to pay his way. So he is completely and totally reliant on people for his care. This is where the sweet church of Philippi actually comes in. So now if we back up 10 years, we find Paul and Silas and Timothy and Luke all heading out on their second missionary journey. And as they have gone to left Antioch, they're in Galatia, they're running around Galatia, they've done their thing. They say, I want to move west. And so they try to go westward. And every time they make that trip towards the west, which would be Asia, they run into these roadblocks. And if you go into Acts 16, which is where this story is, you find out Paul attributes every single one of those roadblocks to the Holy Spirit, saying it's not time for you guys to go to Asia yet. And so like every good southerner, Paul and his friends decide to regroup and they head to the beach. They head to a little town called Troas, which sits on the Aegean Sea. And they camp out there for a while to try to discern what their next steps are. And then one night, Paul has a dream. And in this dream, there's a Macedonian man who appears to him and begs him to come to Macedonia. So you know where this is headed. He tells his friends. They get into a boat. They cross the Aegean Sea, and they head to Macedonia. The really cool side note to this is Macedonia is present-day Europe. So what we're talking about now is the first time the gospel has ever reached Europe, which I just think that's really, really cool. So they end up on the coast. They get off. They jump on what's called the Ignatian, if I pronounced that right. Who knows? Way. Which was a road that was constructed by the Roman Empire to connect all of the Roman colonies. One of those Roman colonies was Philippi. Philippi had become a Roman colony at the end of a civil war. The winner of the civil war had then become emperor. And he chose Philippi as a colony because it was rich in gold. It had fabulous location to the coast. And he'd also then decided that it was a great retirement location for all the Roman soldiers. So kind of like the villages in Florida. So this Philippi that Paul and his friends would have been walking up on held great prominence in Macedonia. They would have walked up to these amazing walls that were there to protect the city and a spectacular road system, which was all testimony to its strategic importance and all of the Roman influence. And then as they walked down the city streets, they would see this amazing Roman architecture. There would be temples to the Roman gods. There would be a bustling city life. And on top of that, the population would have been pretty diverse. You would have had the retired Roman soldiers. You also would have had other Roman citizens that had come to Philippi because, you know, it's kind of a cool city. And then on top of it, you're going to have the local Greek population. The one thing, however, that there were, I guess I should say, there were a few things that were missing. So as Paul and his friends are in the middle of Philippi, it becomes the Sabbath and they go to look for a place to worship. Now, Paul and the previous places that he would visit, they would always head to a synagogue as a place of worship. There was not a single synagogue in Philippi. And so the interesting part to this is it only takes 10 Jewish men in order to be classified as a synagogue. So there's a whole population of people that would have been familiar to Paul and his friends that are completely missing. So Paul leaves. He heads outside the city and goes to the river to worship. When he gets to the river, he meets a woman by the name of Lydia and some of her followers or her friends. They were all followers of God. He had a moment with them. Their hearts were open. He was able to preach the gospel. Lydia and her entire family are baptized. They come to know Christ. They are now officially the first recorded believers of Christ in Europe. I think that's just really cool. And so then you have this moment. Lydia says, okay, you guys now have to use my house. It needs to be your headquarters. You can just come and rest and eat and do all that stuff and travel and whatever you need to do. This is where you need to go. So they did. They used her house as headquarters. They ran back and forth. They continued to preach and they teach. They managed to get themselves in more trouble. Paul and Silas end up in jail again. Paul seems to like jail. It's just a good thing for him. But he ends up in jail again. Something about a slave girl and a demon. He cast them out and made people mad. I don't know. They ended up in jail. But while he's in jail, there's an earthquake. And because of that earthquake, the jailer and his whole family come to Jesus. So now all of a sudden we have two groups of people that are going to come together to form this beautiful church of Philippi. And so at this, he is released from jail and he decides it's probably a good idea if he leaves Philippi. They're not sure that they really like him there. So as they pack up to leave, he leaves Lydia and her family and the Roman soldier and his family to form this sweet church of Philippi. And so it's a church that sits in a city of prominence. It's a church full of believers that are now going to face a great deal of resistance and a great deal of persecution. If you go back to what we're looking at, Roman soldiers who believe in the Roman Empire, they believe in the Roman Emperor as God. There's going to be a lot of resistance. There'll be a lot of persecution, but they're in it. So here we now find Paul sitting and writing letters, and he picks to write a letter to his friends in Philippi. But the really cool thing about this letter is that it's really, really different from all of the other letters that he's written. You heard from both Aaron and Doug on Galatians and Ephesians, and there was moments of correction in there. He had heard that there were things going wrong in these churches, and he needed to correct it. That's not what this letter's about. This letter, Paul's basically, it's like you would sit down to write a letter to a friend. How are you doing? This is what I've been up to. What have you been up to? I hope you are well. Thank you so much for the gift that you sent me. It's done X, Y, and Z to help me. And that's what he does here. Because see, the church of Philippi had been a partner with Paul from the very beginning in his spread of the gospel. They had supported him in every way possible, whether it was people, whether it was money, whatever Paul needed, the Church of Philippi was consistent in their support. And so this letter shows that as he writes to them. You can also tell through the words that he uses and the way that the letter is phrased that he knows that he's writing to a mature group of Christians, a group of Christians who totally understand who the person of Christ is, the sacrifice that he made, as well as understanding that their citizenship is not quite here. It's in heaven. But also knowing that they have to figure out how to live in the here and now, in the city where it's full of the struggle of temptations of the flesh, its struggle with the constant fears of persecution. And so I can also say it kind of sounds like the world we live in today, right? We're believers. We sit knowing who Christ is. We sit understanding what he did for us, but also knowing our citizenship's in heaven. But how do I live right here and right now? We live in a world with a 24-hour news cycle. There's a little fear there, right? We live in the world with social media that can make us feel so often about that we're just not good enough. We've lived through a pandemic. We've come out the other side. It may have given us a few layers of fear now. Also can it happen again. And what's it going to be like if it does. And then if you're a parent or a grandparent. There may be a whole other layer of fear that you have. Because you are talking about your kids. Or your grandkids. And what the world is like. And the things that they have to face. So in this thank you note, Paul says to them as well as to us, it becomes this letter of an encouragement. And he says, you need to hold fast and hold strong. And you need to be there with a mindset like Christ, because he knows if you can control, if they can control their thoughts, that they can change the direction of their lives. He knows that the renewed mind leads to a life transformed. And this is what he actually says that the Christ-like mindset is. If you look at Philippians chapter 4, verse 8, it states, Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about these things. So Paul says to him, you need to shift your focus and fill your thoughts with the truth of God's word. You need to look at the world with the eyes and the lens of humility, of justice, of finding ways that your thoughts and your actions are attractive to others, that they're filled with gratitude and praise, and that you're grounding yourself in this present moment that we live in and finding God in the circumstances. I believe Paul knew his audience exceptionally well, because as I read this, and I imagine the Philippians heard it as well in his letter and went, hmm, that might be easier said than done. And it's true. This is not easy. But I believe Paul then gives us an action plan to help us learn how to renew our minds. And it's important to note that like any other action plan that you may have in your life, like to lose weight or to exercise more, whatever it may be, if you're not consistent in it and if you don't put in the time and the energy and the work, it's not going to do anything. So we need to be focused on it. So if you want to renew your mind so that you live a transformed life, the first thing that he talks about is that we must learn to choose joy. And if you look at Philippians chapter four, verse four, he says it, rejoice in the Lord always. I say it again, rejoice. And like any good pastor, if he wants you to remember it, he says it twice. Rejoice. I say it again, rejoice. I was in a small group leader for many years for a really cool group of girls. And from 6th grade to 12th grade for them. And when they graduated, they gave me a ring, which I still wear periodically. Inscribed on the ring, it says, choose joy. Come to find out, this may have been one my favorite phrases for them because, you know, sixth to 12th grade is the crazy time anyway. And what I wanted them to understand, and that's what Paul talks about in this passage, is the fact that you don't always have control over your circumstances. Circumstances change all the time. We may not be able to control them, but we do have control how we choose to respond to that circumstance. So, you know, we'd hear it from them. But, you know, I can't have joy because so-and-so broke up with me. Or I can't have joy because I can't go to the party next week or in our situation it may be more things like I can't have joy because I just got that medical diagnosis. I can't have joy because I lost my job. But my response to that is this is where we get to choose to have joy. I can't, I can't help the medical diagnosis, but I can shift my focus and choose to have joy in that moment. And what this comes down to is that we change our thinking from the what, which is very temporal, to the who, which is very internal, our joy abounds. I can have joy in that situation because he is the author and perfecter of my faith. I can have joy in that situation because he says he will never leave me nor forsake me. So, choose joy. The next thing he says that we need to do is we need to learn to release it. And I'm not talking about releasing your joy. We want to hold on to that joy. What he's talking about here is releasing your control. Let me, let me expand upon that. Verse six in Philippians four says, So we walk in a world today where we face stress, we face anxiety, we face fear, we face worry. It's all very normal. The thing that isn't is when it has control over us. And I think as a side note I need to put in here is that this anxiety, this fear, this worry that I speak of is the stuff that we just normally have as a human being living in the world, the fallen world that we live in today. There are other people who fear, worry, and anxiety are actually part of a mental health situation. And to them, I say, what we talk about today, it helps. But your medication and your therapist and everything else that you're doing helps also. You bring God into the situation, but you don't. I'm not going to stand up here and say you're praying away anything because that's not true. Okay. So now I come back to where I was. So fear, anxiety, et cetera, the world we live in, it causes it. It's normal. We don't want it to have control over us. That's just what we don't, we don't want to do it. Um, and when it starts to have control over us, what we start to see is because we're humans and because we hate pain and we want to do everything in our life to avoid pain, we will try to control or we will try to fix the situation that we're in. Because that pain of failure, that pain of loss, that pain of rejection is too much. So we choose to hold on super, super tight to it. Because then that way it's safe, right? I'm safe. I'm not hurt. But guess what? I'm exhausted because I'm working so hard not to release it, but to control it and to hold on to it. And, you know, it also states in Scripture, God says, cast all your cares on me because he cares for you. And so he cares so much he sent Jesus to die for you. So why are you still holding on to it? And if you look at verse 7, and then it puts up protectors around your heart and around your mind. So the next time you walk into the next situation, that peace is there if you're willing to let go of the control and stop thinking that you can hold on to it. So what circumstance is it that you are holding on to and refusing to allow God to work in it? What situation keeps you up at night? Who's had that 3 a.m. wake up call? I know. Go ahead and nod your head because it happens. But what are you holding on to so tightly that you can't allow God's peace to enter into it because you want to control it? Think about what would happen if you gave it all over to him. Because here's the thing, when we're in those situations where we're stressed, we're worried, we're anxious, etc. How are you as a person? How do you respond to your family? I don't know. Harris has seen it before. The more stress I'm under, the shorter I am, the grumpier I am, the angrier I can be. But yet if the peace comes in, now what happens? Then I'm hopefully responding to situations where I'm annoyed with a little bit more patience. Or maybe some more joy or love or gentleness or kindness or whatever it is. So when we talk about renewing your mind to transform your life, this is the kind of things that we're talking about. The change that can happen inside of relationships just because. You may not realize it, but that angst that you have, that stress that you're carrying is affecting those around you. And so by accepting God's peace and walking in it, it changes that. So this also then brings us back to where we started in verse 8. Because here we are. We now know that we want to choose joy. We now know that we want to release it all. But that still does not really help us out with, again, that mindset and how to live directly in the here and now. Because, again, we live here. You're going to have thoughts, right? The world that we live in today, there are a thousand things vying for your attention and your thought life. But guess what? I'm going to tell you again. You have control over your thought life. Huh? And I know that one seems big, but you really and truly do. You get to choose and decide what takes up real estate in your brain. You get to choose and decide what it is that you want to focus your thoughts on. The thing about the human brain is the way that it's actually wired is to conserve energy. So if your normal thought pattern is kind of negative, goes down that what-if trail often, so every time thoughts come in, that's where they're going to go. So this is the renewing of the mind part is that we don't want it to go down a negative path anymore. We want to renew it so it has the mindset of Christ so that we're now, when the thoughts come in, they take a different path because that's become the easy path. So what's that filter? That filter again is verse eight. You think about these things. You run all of those thoughts through what verse eight says. The truth of God. You have the truth of God in your hands. If it doesn't meet up with the truth of God, throw it away and don't give it time in your thoughts. If it isn't lovely, if it isn't pure, if it isn't honoring, if it isn't praiseworthy, just don't even give it your time or your attention. Is it going to be easy? No, it's not. Because again, what's the easiest thing for us to think on? Right? Where's your brain? The easiest place to think on quite often for us is the what ifs and the oh noes because that's where we've been. Another way to possibly think about this that I love is we are our own worst critic, right? So we have to stop listening to ourselves and start talking to ourselves instead. Quit listening to the lies that the world tells us. Quit listening to that little voice inside your head that tells you you're not enough, you're not good enough. You can't stand up in front of all those people. Like whatever it is that that little voice is telling you, you got to push it aside. And when I say you start talking to yourself, start talking to yourself through the lens of 4-8. Start talking to yourself like a coach. Yeah, we messed up this time. But guess what? We're going to get it right next time. And soon, you'll be hearing the words of God reiterating who you are in him. That you are capable. That you are lovely. That you are worthy, that he loves you. And that you can trust him. That even though my circumstances stink, he's right here with me. And then eventually we begin to interpret our circumstances through the goodness of God. And as we step into truth, we hear his voice and the words of scripture and we learn to trust. A few years ago, my circumstances changed. My parents were living part-time lives halfway in Florida, halfway in North Carolina. They were in their 80s and very independent and doing exceptionally well. Then one summer when my mom was home, we had some health issues. There was a fall,ed up with a little memory issues, kind of hiccups, whatever you want to call them. They made the decision not to go down to Florida that summer. And instead, or that winter, I should say. Instead, hang out in North Carolina and see if we could see where we were headed, right? Needless to say, her health continued to decline some. Dad made the decision, we're done, sold the place in Florida. They're now in Pinehurst full-time. It's fabulous because they're close, and we get to run back and forth. We get to hang out together, and the world is really good. But my mom's health and her mobility continued to decline over this time. And then in my dad, I began to see a lot of what we talked about today. His circumstances were not ones he wanted to be living in. And the fear of losing my mom did this to him. And he tried to control and fix all the things. Because, you know, she was his best friend. She was his soulmate. They had been together at this point like 62 years. And so he's holding on like this. And what he was doing by holding on like this, he turned into somebody who, for us, was hard to deal with sometimes. He got kind of, there were moments of anger. There were moments just pure frustration. We also had anxiety. It was all there, all the things that we've talked about. And he was grumpy, which if you've ever met my dad, grumpy was not a word that you would have used to describe him. So he's holding on for dear life. And in turn, I'm caught in the middle because I'm dealing with my mom as well as my dad and all of the frustrations that come trying to not choose sides. I can see his side. I can see hers. I'm trying to, you know, all the things, right? And the other thing I was trying to do too was fix it and control it. There were days that I will stand up before you and honestly admit I did not choose joy. There were days that trying to think about that which was true and lovely and pure and honest, and that just was not thoughts that crossed my brain. I tried, but it's not things that always came easy. Stress levels continued to increase. Then my dad had some health issues. We go down that rabbit trail because my mom's of no help, so it falls on my shoulders to help manage his care as well. So lots of running back and forth, lots of doing all that. The end of 2022 is the beginning of my mom's major decline. We end up in the hospital for many days. The hospice is called in. And then my mom passes away at the beginning of December of 2022. My dad was wrecked. The grief that hit my father at that point in time was beyond anything I'd had experienced. His wife of 63 years, it was hard. And again, he still had hoped so much to control, and that control just didn't work. So as you can only guess, I jumped in because he's a mess and he needs somebody to take care of him. So I went immediately into caregiver mode. I took off. We had to find him a place up here because, you know, he can't be in Pounders by himself. So thankfully I was gifted with, right? We found a really cool independent living community. He's actually across the street from me. We get him up here. We get him settled. And it is good. So I call this kind of our year of temporary peace. His veil of grief lifts a little. He makes friends. He's hanging out. He finds his new routine. He misses my mom every single day. But he's enjoying his time with us and we're loving having him with us. He's there for all of the birthdays and the holidays. We got to celebrate his 90th and it was fantastic. He was here when Haley and Zach got engaged. It was just an amazing year together. I think at this point in time for all of us, joy became a little easier to choose. We may have let go of control just a little bit. Because the one thing that I probably didn't mention about me and my control was this, to me me became my lifeline. Because the one thing I knew in dealing with both my mommy and my dad was that if I let go of this in my heart, in my brain, I felt I would drown. And so I held on with everything that I had because I, yeah, I was scared to death to let go for fear of not being able to come back up. And so last, this past April, my dad had a fall. So my temporary peace has now gone to here. It wasn't a big fall. It scared us all a little. It wasn't a big deal. We moved on. Harris and I are going out of town. We came back from out of town. My dad is in basically excruciating back pain. There's no explanation for it. So we spent the next week trying to figure out what's going on. Thought we were headed towards some answers and then we had another fall. Ended up in the hospital because of the fall. That was on a Monday. That Wednesday evening and the hospital stays were something that's for a whole other sermon. But that Wednesday evening, we finally got him to a place of rest. I kissed him on the top of his head. I told him I loved him, and I said, I'll see you tomorrow. Remember, I've got you. I went home. I went to bed. Middle of the night, I got a phone call. Your dad's taking a turn. We need you to come to the hospital. I'm holding at this point in time. Still holding on as tight as I can. But y'all, I got into that car and said, I can't do this. And I let go. And the whole way to the hospital, I just prayed, Lord, your will, not mine. Lord, I need you to be my rock and my strength in this moment. Your will, not mine. Now, come to find out, I pulled into the parking lot at Wake Med. And I know now that that was when my daddy went and met Jesus. And so when I walked into his room, y'all, he had a smile on his face. And I know in my heart that daddy came to his peace in the arms of Jesus. And he saw my mama. And the thing is, I found my peace too. I released it. I let it go and I let him have it. And that one moment of release was what I needed. Now, my circumstances are, I don't know that they've changed. I can't say that they've changed. They're just different. I now stand before you. I've lost both of my parents in the last 17 months. I'm dealing with all of the things related to dad and what's left behind. But the one thing I do know is that I live each day now in the moment. I don't focus on the what ifs. I don't go to those things that I can't, I have no control over. I try to stay grounded, choosing my joy, choosing to come at it with prayer and open hands and trying my very best that when those thoughts and those what ifs and all the things try to come into my brain, that I don't let it take up real estate and I push it aside. It's not easy. But the peace that I have when I do make those choices, I want more of. And so the daily, the hourly exercise of doing that, I will continue to do. And so here we have five little verses tucked at the back of this beautiful letter and thank you note that Paul wrote that act for us as an action plan so we can renew our minds to live a transformed life. Sounds easy. It's going to take lots of work. That day-to-day commitment about choosing joy releasing it and then I'm being very intentional about what comes into our thoughts so I want to ask you Grace Raleigh as we close it all up today where are you stuck in your circumstances so stuck that you've lost your joy or that you're finding that you want to control or hold on to your situation so much so that you're exhausted and you don't know what to do with it. Where are you allowing the world to influence your thoughts, to allow your thoughts to become that vicious cycle of fear and worry and anxiety? So can you instead release it knowing that when you release it, you will find his peace, a peace beyond all understanding that will guard your heart and guard your mind as you walk into your next circumstance. Will you all pray with me? Lord, thank you. Thank you for today. Thank you for your peace. And for Paul knowing that a renewed mind leads to a transformed life. So Lord, thank you that we have your words and that we have you by our side to know how to choose your peace, to choose your joy, and most of all, in all situations, to choose you. We just ask that you help each and every one of us, Lord, to be able to walk this action plan with intentionality and to live in your peace. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.