Proverbs 13

Have you ever wondered if it was all worth it? All the emails and phone calls, special projects, late meetings, early mornings and out-of-town trips? Frantically shuttling bodies back and forth and cobbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be with you in person. It's good to be with you online. Thank you for continuing to join us in that way. As Michelle just said, it is nice to have faces. They're hidden behind masks, which gives me the benefit of pretending like you're all just smiling at me the whole time. So that's how I'm picturing you. It's just nice and friendly and kind, so I appreciate that. Last week, we started our series called Vapor, which is a study through the book of Ecclesiastes. So I would actually say this, if you're catching up later this week, if you're listening to this on like a Tuesday, or you're watching online and you didn't catch last week, stop. I would encourage you to stop and go back and listen to last week. Do it on double speed, or if you really want a good laugh, listen to my voice on half speed, because that sounds funny. But listen to the last one and then catch up with this week. Because again, this is a series and it's not really made to stand independently of one another. We kind of need all of the parts to understand the four separate parts. And so last week was a downer. Last week was a bummer. I warned you ahead of time that you're not going to feel good at the end of that sermon. This one is not much different, all right? So just buckle up. This is Ecclesiastes, and I think it's good and ecclesiastical for us to sit in the difficult sometimes, for us to sit in hard reality sometimes. And what we said is that this is the bleakest book for the bleakest month. And I don't think I need much of a backup. This winter has been terrible, just gray and dark and rainy. It's the perfect time to go through Ecclesiastes. Solomon is the author of Ecclesiastes, and he writes it towards the end of his life and just hits us with some stark realities. And I continue to contend that on the other side of these realities, if we can accept the reality that we talked about last week, which is the idea that most Americans, most people in our culture are wasting our lives. He calls it vanity of vanities of striving after the wind. It's vapor. That's why the series is called Vapor. It's that Hebrew word, a hevel, that means vapor or smoke. Here one minute, gone the next. Seems like you can reach out and grab success or grab happiness or grab something worth pursuing and that when you get to it, it's gone. It slips through your fingers and we don't have it anymore. So the difficult reality that we confronted last week was just that, that most of life is vapor. Most pursuits, when we get to the end of them, we will find them to be empty. That's a difficult reality, but it's an essential one. We're going to face another reality this week, and I continue to believe if we will face these bravely, that what we'll find on the other end of them is this immutable joy, this joy that can be untouched by circumstance. I believe that we'll find the satisfaction on the other side of these realities that really is abiding. I think that we'll become more grateful for God and more desirous of Jesus for him to come and for our relationship with him. And so we're going to wade through these things as a church. Now, I ended last week with that thought, that it's my belief that Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes, would tell most Americans, a vast majority of people in our culture, that you're wasting your life. You're chasing vapor. And then I said, well, God gives us something that is worth chasing. What is that? And I said, we're going to talk about it next week. And then I prayed and we went home. Or, well, I went home. You guys just stayed where you were. So this week we want to start off by answering that question that we left off with. What is the thing worth pursuing? If it's not ambition, if it's not career, if it's not pleasures, if it's not monuments to ourselves, if it's not security, if it's not the book knowledge and general wisdom, what is it that's worth investing our life in? Well, I think that Solomon would answer that question like this. He concludes, based on my reading of Ecclesiastes, Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. The best investment of your life, the best way to spend your days and get to the end of your years and not wonder, did I waste my life, is to spend those days pleasing God. The best way to reach joy, to grab onto something that's not vapor, that is substantive, is to spend your days pleasing God. That's what he says. And I believe that he intends that because he says it multiple times throughout the book. Look with me at what he writes in Ecclesiastes. We'll start in chapter 8 and then we'll be in chapter 12. He says, And then in chapter 8, And then he ends the book this way, Ecclesiastes 12, 13. He sums up all the teachings and he says this, Fear God, keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. If you were to go to Solomon, the author of Ecclesiastes, and say, what's worth it? What should I do? He would say, fear God and keep his commands. We can talk about everything. We can talk about all the different pursuits. We can talk about all the different realities. We can be confronted with all the difficult things in life. We can accept the problem of pain and the vexation of wisdom. We can do all of that. But at the end of the day, here's what matters. Pursue God, keep his commands. This is the whole duty of man. That's what we are to do. That's what he has tasked us with. And this is Solomon's, I think, tip of the cap. It's his acknowledgement of what's called in theological circles, proverbial wisdom. Solomon also wrote the book of Proverbs. And in the book of Proverbs, there's a lot of if-then statements. If you do these good things, God will bless you with these good things. If you make choices like this, you will reap blessings like this. If you do dumb things, you will reap a bad harvest. If you choose folly, if you choose foolishness, if you choose sin and indulgence, then you will reap a harvest that is equitable to those indulgences. One of the ones that I think of is there is a verse in Proverbs that I've always loved because I truly believe in that phrase, you show me your friends and I'll show you your future. We're the average of the five people that we spend our most time around, all of that stuff. There's a verse in Proverbs that says that the companion of the wise will become wise and the companion of fools will suffer harm. And that's generally true, isn't it? If you hang out with people who are wise, who make good choices, eventually you're going to start making good choices like them. If you hang out with knuckleheads who make bad choices and have bad priorities, eventually you're going to start making bad choices like them. And the result of their bad choices and the result of your bad choices is going to be the harm that you suffer. And so in general, that's true, isn't it? That if we hang around with good people who we want to be like, we look at them and they have things in our life that we want, we'll begin to adopt their values and we'll take on some of their characteristics. Similarly, if we spend our time with people that don't share our priorities and make bad decisions, we're going to continue to make those bad decisions. Some of you guys have lived this out in your life, right? I mean, for some of you, your story is you were hanging out with people who are not bad people. They just have different priorities than someone who's just become a believer. And you become a believer, and now you have different priorities in your life, and you come to the painful realization of, gosh, I need another set of friends. I don't want to just walk away from these people. I love these people, but I need other folks speaking into my life who share the priorities that I do. For many of you, that's why you found church. Not that your friends are bad people. They just no longer share your priorities. And so you want to hang out with other people who do share your priorities. And Proverbs tells us that if you'll be the companion of wise people, that you'll be wise. If you'll be the companion of foolish people who make bad choices, then you're going to suffer the consequences of those choices. Likewise, all throughout Proverbs, another one of those if-then transactions is. I don't have a specific verse. I should be a better pastor who looks one up, but I didn't, so just go with me. It says in plenty of places the idea that if you work hard, if you put your head down and work hard and be humble, then at the end of your life, you will reap a harvest of wealth and security. If you work hard, you do your job, consider the ant that works even when it doesn't have to. If you'll do that, then by the end of your life, you will have amassed and built up, and God will honor your good work and your toil. Likewise, if you are lazy, a little sleeping, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come on you like an armed man, okay, says Proverbs. So if you're lazy and you just kind of want money to come to you, you just feel entitled and you deserve all this stuff, then you're never going to reap the benefit of wealth and security. And so here's what Solomon is saying in Ecclesiastes. That proverbial wisdom, if you please God, your life will go better for you. If you surround yourself with wise people, then you're more likely to prosper. If you do work hard and put your head down, then you're likely to build up. You're likely to be successful. Solomon acknowledges that. The end of the matter is this. Fear God, keep his commandments. Pursue him, do the right things. Honor that proverbial wisdom. But then he gives us this other reality. Then he gives us this caveat to that. Because what we know is that we need a caveat there. Because plenty of us know people who have hung around good friends, who are surrounded with wise folks, and have made terrible choices. Plenty of us know good people who are surrounded with other good people who have experienced what we would consider an unfair amount of pain, pain that seems like it would be waiting on folks who invest their lives around bad people. Likewise, we all know people who spend their time around knuckleheads and seem to be doing great. We also know people who have worked really hard, who have kept their head down, who have done their part. They get to the end of their life and they're still living hand to mouth because of a bad deal or because of a child that costs a lot of money or because of difficult diagnosis or whatever it is. And we know people who have been lazy and do seem prosperous. And that causes us to go, what gives? What do we do when proverbial wisdom doesn't ring true to us? We turn to Ecclesiastes, where I think Solomon writes this book later in his life. And what he says is, yeah, proverbial wisdom, those traditional accepted teachings of living a moral life and God honoring that and us being honored for it, that's true. But he wants us to know something. Even if you live that life. There's a whole section in my Bible where it says the vexation of wisdom, where he says, I even pursued wisdom. I did the right things. I honored God. I kept my nose clean. I walked the straight and narrow. I pursued purity. And even in that, you know what I found? A degree of vanity, a degree of vapor, a degree of chasing after the wind. And so the other reality that I want us to confront this morning in Ecclesiastes is this. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Somewhere in our faith and in our churches, we've gotten this idea that the more I clean, I keep my nose, the more God will protect me from pain in my life. The more I walk the straight and narrow, the agreement is, God, I'm gonna follow your rules and you're gonna offer me protection. This is why when someone who is good and is wonderful and is loving and seems to be all the things that maybe we feel like we're not, when we watch them get sick or we watch them pass away or we watch bad things happen to them, we kind of feel this sense of unfairness, right? We kind of feel this sense of, why is that allowed to happen? Well, Solomon says it happens because our obedience does not protect us from pain. It doesn't opt us out of it. It doesn't opt us out of struggle. I think one of the most dangerous, pernicious lies in Christendom is that the more I honor God with my life, the more He'll protect me with His sovereignty. And it is not true. We do not get that idea anywhere in the Bible. As a matter of fact, this is what Solomon says. This is what he has to say. And this is why I believe that that's his point. He makes this point that obedience will not protect us from pain multiple times in the book. He says it over in chapter 5. I'm sorry, chapter 9, verse 11. He says, You think you're really smart and that's why you're successful. No. You think you're dumb and and that's why you can't seem to make a way. No. Time and chance happen to us all. No one dodges the raindrops of tragedy and pain in their life. He says it over and over again in the book, but the best way he says it, the most profound way he says it, in chapter three, the first eight verses of chapter three. If you have a Bible, I would encourage you to look at that passage with me. And normally I don't read eight verses in a row in church service because I find it disengaging sometimes when pastors do that. But this is so beautiful and so poignant and so important that it felt unfair to you guys to pick out one as a synopsis. So we're going to read it all together. Not aloud, that would be weird. I don't do that kind of weird stuff, but we're going to read it together as I read. Ready? For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to break down and a time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to cast stones away and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, like pandemics. A time to seek and a time to refrain from embracing like pandemics, a time to seek and a time to lose, a time to keep and a time to cast away, a time to tear and a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. It's such a beautiful, elegant truth that he details out for us there. And there is a place where I want us to land, but there is another takeaway from there. It's not the point of the sermon, but I thought I would be remiss if I didn't make this point as we go through this beautiful passage together. There's a time for everything, and we ought to let those seasons have their time. We shouldn't jump from one to another. What makes me think of this is this. This last fall, I had a bunch of buddies come in town, and we all kind of took a weekend and just hung out. It's just a guy's weekend. We were supposed to golf most of the time, and it rained, so we just sat around. But it was fun. My friends and I, that's what we like to do anyways. We're just old men. But I have one friend named Dan, and Dan, he is the opposite of me. He is enthusiastic. He is on fire all the time. He loves to yell and be loud and celebrate things and cheer and be happy. He never meets a stranger. Dan is a weirdo that talks to people in elevators and I'll never understand it. He'll just chat up whoever is around him, right? And I love Dan. I had lunch with Dan the other day, but on that particular trip, Dan at the time had a pregnant wife and three small children and had just moved across the country. And both he and his wife were looking for jobs, and they're looking for houses, and they're trying to figure out how to get their kids in school. So when he came to that weekend, his life had been a pressure cooker, and he needed to release, right? So Dan wanted to dance, and he wanted to yell, and he wanted to scream, and he wanted to be be excited and I didn't want to do any of that. I just wanted to sit there and be quiet and have no one ask me any questions. And Dan's like, Nate, come on, let's go. And we're watching some dumb game and he wants me to be invested in it and I don't care. And there was a tension there. And I felt in my soul, as I frequently do, my grumpiness well up. And all I wanted to do was say, Dan, why don't you shut up for like maybe 30 minutes, dude? Can we just chill out? But I kept talking myself out of doing that. Because what I realized is, Dan's my buddy. And what he needs is to blow off some steam. It's his time to dance. It's his time to yell and be boisterous. It's his time to be loud and to laugh and to be joyful. That's his time. And if I rain on that parade, I am the worst of friends. If I don't recognize in myself that it's his soul's time for those things, and I don't allow him that time, I am the jerk of all jerks. So I just sucked it up, and now we joke around about it. Likewise, when someone around us is sad, when someone around us is mourning, when someone around us needs to cry, shame on us for robbing them of that time too. And shame on you for attempting to rob yourself of that time. You guys know that we just walked through something pretty difficult as a family, and that we lost Jen's dad. And there were days when she would just look at me and she would say, I'm sad. I'm just sad. And I would say, then be sad. Then today's the day to be sad. And that's all right. And there will be more days when we're sad. Our souls need those days. They're cathartic for us. They're required by us. And shame on us if we try to rob our friends and our loved ones of the sad days that they need too. Those ought to take their time and have their season. I think what we try to do is we try to skip the bad ones, right? We try to skip past, I don't like this time of mourning. I want to skip to my time of laughter. I don't like this time of stillness. I want to skip to the time of dancing. I don't like this time of sadness. I want to skip to my time of joy. And what Solomon is saying is, no, there's a time for both. You can't experience true joy if you don't let yourself walk through true grief. The dancing isn't as joyful if you haven't set in pensive silence. Right? So I didn't want to move past this passage without making the point to you guys, without imploring you, let the seasons have their time. When it's a time for dying, let it be a time for dying. When it's a time for birth, let it be that. If someone you love needs to be sad, let them be sad. Don't be the clumsy moron that tries to convince them that what they're going through is not that sad. Our souls need the good times and the hard times, and we shouldn't skip them. But what I really want you to see from this passage today is that if what he writes is true, there's a time for mourning, and there's a time for joy, and there's a time for gladness, and there's a time for sorrow true, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for joy and there's a time for gladness and there's a time for sorrow and there's a time for dancing and there's a time for stillness. If that's true, then all of those times are coming for all of us. Do you understand? It doesn't say for the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous there are more times to laugh. For the righteous there are more times to build things up. For the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous, there are more times to laugh. For the righteous, there are more times to build things up. For the righteous, there are more times for embracing. No, it just says that this is objectively true. Everybody walks through these seasons. The righteous and the unrighteous. The godly and the ungodly. The devout Christian and the militant atheist. All of us walk through these seasons. And it may feel weird to you that I'm hammering this point home that like, hey, guess what, guys? At some point or another, life is cruddy for everybody. But it is. It's also joyful for everybody. But no one dodges the raindrops of pain and tragedy in their life. Nobody. And if we will accept that, then what we can learn and see from this passage is pain is not punitive. Pain, hurt, struggle, hardship, that's not punitive. That's not God exacting revenge on you for a failure in your morality somewhere. That's not God punishing you. Pain is not punitive. It is the result of brokenness. We don't experience pain and hardship in our life because at some point in our past, we displeased God with the choices that we make, and now he's exacting his revenge on us. That's not how it works. Pain is not punitive. Pain is a result of brokenness. We've talked about this before, but God created heaven and earth, and he created it perfect, and then sin ruined that perfection. And ever since then, the world is broken. And in a broken world, divorces happen and abuse happens and people get cancer and we have to watch Parkinson's and all these other diseases eat away at people that we love. In a broken world, cruddy things happen. And what Solomon is acknowledging is not only do they happen, but they happen to everybody. And yes, in general, proverbial wisdom is true. In general, if you honor God in the way that you make your choices, then you will be honored as well. But just understand that that isn't a blanket insurance policy against pain because time and chance happen to us all. And we walk through all these seasons equally. And it's important to know when we get there that that pain is not punitive. That pain isn't something that we warrant with our behavior. This actually shows up in the New Testament. Someone is blind, and the disciples look at the blind man, and they say, what happened to him? What did his parents do that he's been blinded like this way? They thought pain was punitive. They thought his actions warranted, or his parents' actions warranted what he did. And Jesus says, now this world is just broken. He says what Solomon says. In this world where we wait for Jesus to come back, like Romans 8 talks about all of creation groans for the return of the Savior, for the return of the King, for Jesus to come and make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And spoiler alert, this is where we're going to finish the series. But while we wait, we all walk through these seasons. And it's so important for us to understand that pain is not punitive. Here's why I think this. I don't know if I have permission to share her story. If I don't, I'm sorry. Kay Gamble also sits on our finance committee and approves my expenses on a monthly basis. So, you know, she has a way to nail me if she doesn't appreciate me sharing this story. But Kay is a wonderful lady who goes here and a few months ago was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctor looked at the breast cancer and said, I think it's offerable. I think we can get it. I think it's going to be okay. She went in. She got it. And Kay, if you know her, she's quiet. Of course, she doesn't tell anybody about this. I only hear about this after the fact. They go in. They get it. Everything's good. Doctor says, we got it all. I think you're going to be in good shape. You don't have to do chemo or anything like that. We're going to give you a pill to kind of be on the safe side. You'll take that for five years, but you're good. You can go on with life as normal. So there's some pain and then a relief. Everything's good. Then she gets a call a couple of days later. The doctor said, hey, we took another look at that cancer, and it's the kind that likes to spread a lot. So we're going to have to be pretty aggressive with this, and we're going to need you to start doing chemo. Man, we're all old enough to know what chemo is. We know what that does. We know what that looks like. And we know the kinds of days that Kay is facing. And that stinks because Kay's good. And I want her to know that those cruddy days that she has to walk through are not God punishing her. That's not punitive. She doesn't have to search her soul and say, God, what have I done in the last 10, 20 years of my life to warrant this pain? What have I done to warrant this bad news? How did I disappoint you? How did I displease you? What would you like me to do now, God? Would you like me to give more, serve more, or love more? Which the answer is always yes to that. He would always like us to give and love and serve more. But not as a shield to pain. And how crushing would it be to go through life thinking that every time we experience some form of difficulty, some form of grief, that that was somehow God turning the screws on us so that we learned our lesson better. What I want Kay to understand in this season of cruddiness amidst the chemo is that it's just simply her turn. It's her turn. Her life stinks for a little bit. And guess what? All of our lives stink for a little bit sometimes. They have before, and here's the fun thing, they're going to again. It just will. It's Kay's turn. Recently, it was our turn. For some of you, it's still your turn. I know stories of people and loss and tragedy that we've experienced just in this church. And I just think that there is something tremendously comforting about looking at a season of grief with the understanding of, it's my turn right now. It's my time to mourn. But what I know is, eventually it'll be my time to sing. It's my time to tear things down. But eventually, if I put my head down, it'll be my time to build things up. And in this way, and I think that this is beautiful, Ecclesiastes empathizes with our experiences. It actually empathizes with us. It's a brave, bold thing to say. To admit, yeah, we should obey God. We should pursue the proverbial wisdom. But what a wonderful admission in the Bible that actually syncs up with our experience to say sometimes bad things happen to good people. I've told you before, I had a roommate in college who was a better person than me in every way possible. He graduated. He became a pastor. He was leading churches before I was, and I always admired him more than I cared to admit, and he dropped dead at 30 of a widow-maker heart attack playing ultimate frisbee with his friends. It will never make any sense to me how he left and I stayed, and how his wife Carla and his boys had to walk through that. I remember his five-year-old knocking on his coffin wondering when he was going to wake up. But what Ecclesiastes says is, it was Chris's time to die. It was Carla's turn to walk that hard road. Sometimes bad things happen. And even though the best possible investment of our life is to pursue God and godliness, we need to do it eyes wide open knowing that that does not protect us from tragedy. We're never told that it does. That time and chance happen to us all. What a difficult thing it would be to have to try to sync up my faith to somehow explain away Chris's death as deserved. What a difficult thing it would be to try to help Carla find a path back to faith, which she has found, if part of that explanation would be, well, you guys deserve this because of your behavior. Ecclesiastes looks around and goes, yeah, sometimes life doesn't make sense. Sometimes it seems unfair. And sometimes it's just our turn. And we understand that everybody takes a turn. But here's the thing. I have been kind of sitting in that reality for a while in my personal life. It's been our turn recently. Our turn's still not over. And I've been studying this book, which is stark, man. But somehow, despite all of that, in thinking about what awaits us in the next two weeks and allowing my life to sit in that. And we're going to come back next week. Next week's going to be happy, I promise. Next week's going to be great, all right? We're going to cry some happy tears next week. It's going to feel better than this. In the midst of everything that we have been walking through, because of the promises that are in Ecclesiastes and because of the encouraging things that he writes that we're going to talk about next week. I can honestly tell you that for me personally, I am sitting in the middle of a time of more profound joy than I think I've ever experienced in my life, of more gratitude for my God, more gratitude for my Savior, more of a desire for Him. And I want you guys to experience that joy too. And so next week we're going to come back and I'm going to tell you all about it. Let's pray. Father, life's hard sometimes. We are so thankful that you gave your servant Solomon the courage to admit that. Father, we all have to hurt sometimes. We are thankful that we have a Jesus who weeps with us in our pain. Lord, if it is someone's season to be sad right now, I pray that they would just be sad. And that that would run the course that it needs to run. God, if it is someone's time for joy right now, let them be joyful. Let them be exuberant. Let them feel your presence and your joy. For those of us who are walking through a hard time, Lord, I pray that we would be comforted by this stark knowledge that sometimes it's just our turn. And I know there are folks who feel like, gosh, it feels like it's been my turn a lot lately. Lord, I pray that you would give them lots of turns of joy too. Let all of this, our pain, our triumph, our struggle, and our joy, draw us near to you. Either in gratitude or in need, Father, draw us near to you. And Father, I pray that in that drawing that we would find what David describes as the fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. Help us see more and more our gratitude for you and our need for you. It's in your son's name that we pray. Amen.

Have you ever wondered if it was all worth it? All the emails and phone calls, special projects, late meetings, early mornings and out-of-town trips? Frantically shuttling bodies back and forth and cobbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be with you in person. It's good to be with you online. Thank you for continuing to join us in that way. As Michelle just said, it is nice to have faces. They're hidden behind masks, which gives me the benefit of pretending like you're all just smiling at me the whole time. So that's how I'm picturing you. It's just nice and friendly and kind, so I appreciate that. Last week, we started our series called Vapor, which is a study through the book of Ecclesiastes. So I would actually say this, if you're catching up later this week, if you're listening to this on like a Tuesday, or you're watching online and you didn't catch last week, stop. I would encourage you to stop and go back and listen to last week. Do it on double speed, or if you really want a good laugh, listen to my voice on half speed, because that sounds funny. But listen to the last one and then catch up with this week. Because again, this is a series and it's not really made to stand independently of one another. We kind of need all of the parts to understand the four separate parts. And so last week was a downer. Last week was a bummer. I warned you ahead of time that you're not going to feel good at the end of that sermon. This one is not much different, all right? So just buckle up. This is Ecclesiastes, and I think it's good and ecclesiastical for us to sit in the difficult sometimes, for us to sit in hard reality sometimes. And what we said is that this is the bleakest book for the bleakest month. And I don't think I need much of a backup. This winter has been terrible, just gray and dark and rainy. It's the perfect time to go through Ecclesiastes. Solomon is the author of Ecclesiastes, and he writes it towards the end of his life and just hits us with some stark realities. And I continue to contend that on the other side of these realities, if we can accept the reality that we talked about last week, which is the idea that most Americans, most people in our culture are wasting our lives. He calls it vanity of vanities of striving after the wind. It's vapor. That's why the series is called Vapor. It's that Hebrew word, a hevel, that means vapor or smoke. Here one minute, gone the next. Seems like you can reach out and grab success or grab happiness or grab something worth pursuing and that when you get to it, it's gone. It slips through your fingers and we don't have it anymore. So the difficult reality that we confronted last week was just that, that most of life is vapor. Most pursuits, when we get to the end of them, we will find them to be empty. That's a difficult reality, but it's an essential one. We're going to face another reality this week, and I continue to believe if we will face these bravely, that what we'll find on the other end of them is this immutable joy, this joy that can be untouched by circumstance. I believe that we'll find the satisfaction on the other side of these realities that really is abiding. I think that we'll become more grateful for God and more desirous of Jesus for him to come and for our relationship with him. And so we're going to wade through these things as a church. Now, I ended last week with that thought, that it's my belief that Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes, would tell most Americans, a vast majority of people in our culture, that you're wasting your life. You're chasing vapor. And then I said, well, God gives us something that is worth chasing. What is that? And I said, we're going to talk about it next week. And then I prayed and we went home. Or, well, I went home. You guys just stayed where you were. So this week we want to start off by answering that question that we left off with. What is the thing worth pursuing? If it's not ambition, if it's not career, if it's not pleasures, if it's not monuments to ourselves, if it's not security, if it's not the book knowledge and general wisdom, what is it that's worth investing our life in? Well, I think that Solomon would answer that question like this. He concludes, based on my reading of Ecclesiastes, Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. The best investment of your life, the best way to spend your days and get to the end of your years and not wonder, did I waste my life, is to spend those days pleasing God. The best way to reach joy, to grab onto something that's not vapor, that is substantive, is to spend your days pleasing God. That's what he says. And I believe that he intends that because he says it multiple times throughout the book. Look with me at what he writes in Ecclesiastes. We'll start in chapter 8 and then we'll be in chapter 12. He says, And then in chapter 8, And then he ends the book this way, Ecclesiastes 12, 13. He sums up all the teachings and he says this, Fear God, keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. If you were to go to Solomon, the author of Ecclesiastes, and say, what's worth it? What should I do? He would say, fear God and keep his commands. We can talk about everything. We can talk about all the different pursuits. We can talk about all the different realities. We can be confronted with all the difficult things in life. We can accept the problem of pain and the vexation of wisdom. We can do all of that. But at the end of the day, here's what matters. Pursue God, keep his commands. This is the whole duty of man. That's what we are to do. That's what he has tasked us with. And this is Solomon's, I think, tip of the cap. It's his acknowledgement of what's called in theological circles, proverbial wisdom. Solomon also wrote the book of Proverbs. And in the book of Proverbs, there's a lot of if-then statements. If you do these good things, God will bless you with these good things. If you make choices like this, you will reap blessings like this. If you do dumb things, you will reap a bad harvest. If you choose folly, if you choose foolishness, if you choose sin and indulgence, then you will reap a harvest that is equitable to those indulgences. One of the ones that I think of is there is a verse in Proverbs that I've always loved because I truly believe in that phrase, you show me your friends and I'll show you your future. We're the average of the five people that we spend our most time around, all of that stuff. There's a verse in Proverbs that says that the companion of the wise will become wise and the companion of fools will suffer harm. And that's generally true, isn't it? If you hang out with people who are wise, who make good choices, eventually you're going to start making good choices like them. If you hang out with knuckleheads who make bad choices and have bad priorities, eventually you're going to start making bad choices like them. And the result of their bad choices and the result of your bad choices is going to be the harm that you suffer. And so in general, that's true, isn't it? That if we hang around with good people who we want to be like, we look at them and they have things in our life that we want, we'll begin to adopt their values and we'll take on some of their characteristics. Similarly, if we spend our time with people that don't share our priorities and make bad decisions, we're going to continue to make those bad decisions. Some of you guys have lived this out in your life, right? I mean, for some of you, your story is you were hanging out with people who are not bad people. They just have different priorities than someone who's just become a believer. And you become a believer, and now you have different priorities in your life, and you come to the painful realization of, gosh, I need another set of friends. I don't want to just walk away from these people. I love these people, but I need other folks speaking into my life who share the priorities that I do. For many of you, that's why you found church. Not that your friends are bad people. They just no longer share your priorities. And so you want to hang out with other people who do share your priorities. And Proverbs tells us that if you'll be the companion of wise people, that you'll be wise. If you'll be the companion of foolish people who make bad choices, then you're going to suffer the consequences of those choices. Likewise, all throughout Proverbs, another one of those if-then transactions is. I don't have a specific verse. I should be a better pastor who looks one up, but I didn't, so just go with me. It says in plenty of places the idea that if you work hard, if you put your head down and work hard and be humble, then at the end of your life, you will reap a harvest of wealth and security. If you work hard, you do your job, consider the ant that works even when it doesn't have to. If you'll do that, then by the end of your life, you will have amassed and built up, and God will honor your good work and your toil. Likewise, if you are lazy, a little sleeping, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come on you like an armed man, okay, says Proverbs. So if you're lazy and you just kind of want money to come to you, you just feel entitled and you deserve all this stuff, then you're never going to reap the benefit of wealth and security. And so here's what Solomon is saying in Ecclesiastes. That proverbial wisdom, if you please God, your life will go better for you. If you surround yourself with wise people, then you're more likely to prosper. If you do work hard and put your head down, then you're likely to build up. You're likely to be successful. Solomon acknowledges that. The end of the matter is this. Fear God, keep his commandments. Pursue him, do the right things. Honor that proverbial wisdom. But then he gives us this other reality. Then he gives us this caveat to that. Because what we know is that we need a caveat there. Because plenty of us know people who have hung around good friends, who are surrounded with wise folks, and have made terrible choices. Plenty of us know good people who are surrounded with other good people who have experienced what we would consider an unfair amount of pain, pain that seems like it would be waiting on folks who invest their lives around bad people. Likewise, we all know people who spend their time around knuckleheads and seem to be doing great. We also know people who have worked really hard, who have kept their head down, who have done their part. They get to the end of their life and they're still living hand to mouth because of a bad deal or because of a child that costs a lot of money or because of difficult diagnosis or whatever it is. And we know people who have been lazy and do seem prosperous. And that causes us to go, what gives? What do we do when proverbial wisdom doesn't ring true to us? We turn to Ecclesiastes, where I think Solomon writes this book later in his life. And what he says is, yeah, proverbial wisdom, those traditional accepted teachings of living a moral life and God honoring that and us being honored for it, that's true. But he wants us to know something. Even if you live that life. There's a whole section in my Bible where it says the vexation of wisdom, where he says, I even pursued wisdom. I did the right things. I honored God. I kept my nose clean. I walked the straight and narrow. I pursued purity. And even in that, you know what I found? A degree of vanity, a degree of vapor, a degree of chasing after the wind. And so the other reality that I want us to confront this morning in Ecclesiastes is this. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Somewhere in our faith and in our churches, we've gotten this idea that the more I clean, I keep my nose, the more God will protect me from pain in my life. The more I walk the straight and narrow, the agreement is, God, I'm gonna follow your rules and you're gonna offer me protection. This is why when someone who is good and is wonderful and is loving and seems to be all the things that maybe we feel like we're not, when we watch them get sick or we watch them pass away or we watch bad things happen to them, we kind of feel this sense of unfairness, right? We kind of feel this sense of, why is that allowed to happen? Well, Solomon says it happens because our obedience does not protect us from pain. It doesn't opt us out of it. It doesn't opt us out of struggle. I think one of the most dangerous, pernicious lies in Christendom is that the more I honor God with my life, the more He'll protect me with His sovereignty. And it is not true. We do not get that idea anywhere in the Bible. As a matter of fact, this is what Solomon says. This is what he has to say. And this is why I believe that that's his point. He makes this point that obedience will not protect us from pain multiple times in the book. He says it over in chapter 5. I'm sorry, chapter 9, verse 11. He says, You think you're really smart and that's why you're successful. No. You think you're dumb and and that's why you can't seem to make a way. No. Time and chance happen to us all. No one dodges the raindrops of tragedy and pain in their life. He says it over and over again in the book, but the best way he says it, the most profound way he says it, in chapter three, the first eight verses of chapter three. If you have a Bible, I would encourage you to look at that passage with me. And normally I don't read eight verses in a row in church service because I find it disengaging sometimes when pastors do that. But this is so beautiful and so poignant and so important that it felt unfair to you guys to pick out one as a synopsis. So we're going to read it all together. Not aloud, that would be weird. I don't do that kind of weird stuff, but we're going to read it together as I read. Ready? For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to break down and a time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to cast stones away and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, like pandemics. A time to seek and a time to refrain from embracing like pandemics, a time to seek and a time to lose, a time to keep and a time to cast away, a time to tear and a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. It's such a beautiful, elegant truth that he details out for us there. And there is a place where I want us to land, but there is another takeaway from there. It's not the point of the sermon, but I thought I would be remiss if I didn't make this point as we go through this beautiful passage together. There's a time for everything, and we ought to let those seasons have their time. We shouldn't jump from one to another. What makes me think of this is this. This last fall, I had a bunch of buddies come in town, and we all kind of took a weekend and just hung out. It's just a guy's weekend. We were supposed to golf most of the time, and it rained, so we just sat around. But it was fun. My friends and I, that's what we like to do anyways. We're just old men. But I have one friend named Dan, and Dan, he is the opposite of me. He is enthusiastic. He is on fire all the time. He loves to yell and be loud and celebrate things and cheer and be happy. He never meets a stranger. Dan is a weirdo that talks to people in elevators and I'll never understand it. He'll just chat up whoever is around him, right? And I love Dan. I had lunch with Dan the other day, but on that particular trip, Dan at the time had a pregnant wife and three small children and had just moved across the country. And both he and his wife were looking for jobs, and they're looking for houses, and they're trying to figure out how to get their kids in school. So when he came to that weekend, his life had been a pressure cooker, and he needed to release, right? So Dan wanted to dance, and he wanted to yell, and he wanted to scream, and he wanted to be be excited and I didn't want to do any of that. I just wanted to sit there and be quiet and have no one ask me any questions. And Dan's like, Nate, come on, let's go. And we're watching some dumb game and he wants me to be invested in it and I don't care. And there was a tension there. And I felt in my soul, as I frequently do, my grumpiness well up. And all I wanted to do was say, Dan, why don't you shut up for like maybe 30 minutes, dude? Can we just chill out? But I kept talking myself out of doing that. Because what I realized is, Dan's my buddy. And what he needs is to blow off some steam. It's his time to dance. It's his time to yell and be boisterous. It's his time to be loud and to laugh and to be joyful. That's his time. And if I rain on that parade, I am the worst of friends. If I don't recognize in myself that it's his soul's time for those things, and I don't allow him that time, I am the jerk of all jerks. So I just sucked it up, and now we joke around about it. Likewise, when someone around us is sad, when someone around us is mourning, when someone around us needs to cry, shame on us for robbing them of that time too. And shame on you for attempting to rob yourself of that time. You guys know that we just walked through something pretty difficult as a family, and that we lost Jen's dad. And there were days when she would just look at me and she would say, I'm sad. I'm just sad. And I would say, then be sad. Then today's the day to be sad. And that's all right. And there will be more days when we're sad. Our souls need those days. They're cathartic for us. They're required by us. And shame on us if we try to rob our friends and our loved ones of the sad days that they need too. Those ought to take their time and have their season. I think what we try to do is we try to skip the bad ones, right? We try to skip past, I don't like this time of mourning. I want to skip to my time of laughter. I don't like this time of stillness. I want to skip to the time of dancing. I don't like this time of sadness. I want to skip to my time of joy. And what Solomon is saying is, no, there's a time for both. You can't experience true joy if you don't let yourself walk through true grief. The dancing isn't as joyful if you haven't set in pensive silence. Right? So I didn't want to move past this passage without making the point to you guys, without imploring you, let the seasons have their time. When it's a time for dying, let it be a time for dying. When it's a time for birth, let it be that. If someone you love needs to be sad, let them be sad. Don't be the clumsy moron that tries to convince them that what they're going through is not that sad. Our souls need the good times and the hard times, and we shouldn't skip them. But what I really want you to see from this passage today is that if what he writes is true, there's a time for mourning, and there's a time for joy, and there's a time for gladness, and there's a time for sorrow true, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for joy and there's a time for gladness and there's a time for sorrow and there's a time for dancing and there's a time for stillness. If that's true, then all of those times are coming for all of us. Do you understand? It doesn't say for the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous there are more times to laugh. For the righteous there are more times to build things up. For the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous, there are more times to laugh. For the righteous, there are more times to build things up. For the righteous, there are more times for embracing. No, it just says that this is objectively true. Everybody walks through these seasons. The righteous and the unrighteous. The godly and the ungodly. The devout Christian and the militant atheist. All of us walk through these seasons. And it may feel weird to you that I'm hammering this point home that like, hey, guess what, guys? At some point or another, life is cruddy for everybody. But it is. It's also joyful for everybody. But no one dodges the raindrops of pain and tragedy in their life. Nobody. And if we will accept that, then what we can learn and see from this passage is pain is not punitive. Pain, hurt, struggle, hardship, that's not punitive. That's not God exacting revenge on you for a failure in your morality somewhere. That's not God punishing you. Pain is not punitive. It is the result of brokenness. We don't experience pain and hardship in our life because at some point in our past, we displeased God with the choices that we make, and now he's exacting his revenge on us. That's not how it works. Pain is not punitive. Pain is a result of brokenness. We've talked about this before, but God created heaven and earth, and he created it perfect, and then sin ruined that perfection. And ever since then, the world is broken. And in a broken world, divorces happen and abuse happens and people get cancer and we have to watch Parkinson's and all these other diseases eat away at people that we love. In a broken world, cruddy things happen. And what Solomon is acknowledging is not only do they happen, but they happen to everybody. And yes, in general, proverbial wisdom is true. In general, if you honor God in the way that you make your choices, then you will be honored as well. But just understand that that isn't a blanket insurance policy against pain because time and chance happen to us all. And we walk through all these seasons equally. And it's important to know when we get there that that pain is not punitive. That pain isn't something that we warrant with our behavior. This actually shows up in the New Testament. Someone is blind, and the disciples look at the blind man, and they say, what happened to him? What did his parents do that he's been blinded like this way? They thought pain was punitive. They thought his actions warranted, or his parents' actions warranted what he did. And Jesus says, now this world is just broken. He says what Solomon says. In this world where we wait for Jesus to come back, like Romans 8 talks about all of creation groans for the return of the Savior, for the return of the King, for Jesus to come and make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And spoiler alert, this is where we're going to finish the series. But while we wait, we all walk through these seasons. And it's so important for us to understand that pain is not punitive. Here's why I think this. I don't know if I have permission to share her story. If I don't, I'm sorry. Kay Gamble also sits on our finance committee and approves my expenses on a monthly basis. So, you know, she has a way to nail me if she doesn't appreciate me sharing this story. But Kay is a wonderful lady who goes here and a few months ago was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctor looked at the breast cancer and said, I think it's offerable. I think we can get it. I think it's going to be okay. She went in. She got it. And Kay, if you know her, she's quiet. Of course, she doesn't tell anybody about this. I only hear about this after the fact. They go in. They get it. Everything's good. Doctor says, we got it all. I think you're going to be in good shape. You don't have to do chemo or anything like that. We're going to give you a pill to kind of be on the safe side. You'll take that for five years, but you're good. You can go on with life as normal. So there's some pain and then a relief. Everything's good. Then she gets a call a couple of days later. The doctor said, hey, we took another look at that cancer, and it's the kind that likes to spread a lot. So we're going to have to be pretty aggressive with this, and we're going to need you to start doing chemo. Man, we're all old enough to know what chemo is. We know what that does. We know what that looks like. And we know the kinds of days that Kay is facing. And that stinks because Kay's good. And I want her to know that those cruddy days that she has to walk through are not God punishing her. That's not punitive. She doesn't have to search her soul and say, God, what have I done in the last 10, 20 years of my life to warrant this pain? What have I done to warrant this bad news? How did I disappoint you? How did I displease you? What would you like me to do now, God? Would you like me to give more, serve more, or love more? Which the answer is always yes to that. He would always like us to give and love and serve more. But not as a shield to pain. And how crushing would it be to go through life thinking that every time we experience some form of difficulty, some form of grief, that that was somehow God turning the screws on us so that we learned our lesson better. What I want Kay to understand in this season of cruddiness amidst the chemo is that it's just simply her turn. It's her turn. Her life stinks for a little bit. And guess what? All of our lives stink for a little bit sometimes. They have before, and here's the fun thing, they're going to again. It just will. It's Kay's turn. Recently, it was our turn. For some of you, it's still your turn. I know stories of people and loss and tragedy that we've experienced just in this church. And I just think that there is something tremendously comforting about looking at a season of grief with the understanding of, it's my turn right now. It's my time to mourn. But what I know is, eventually it'll be my time to sing. It's my time to tear things down. But eventually, if I put my head down, it'll be my time to build things up. And in this way, and I think that this is beautiful, Ecclesiastes empathizes with our experiences. It actually empathizes with us. It's a brave, bold thing to say. To admit, yeah, we should obey God. We should pursue the proverbial wisdom. But what a wonderful admission in the Bible that actually syncs up with our experience to say sometimes bad things happen to good people. I've told you before, I had a roommate in college who was a better person than me in every way possible. He graduated. He became a pastor. He was leading churches before I was, and I always admired him more than I cared to admit, and he dropped dead at 30 of a widow-maker heart attack playing ultimate frisbee with his friends. It will never make any sense to me how he left and I stayed, and how his wife Carla and his boys had to walk through that. I remember his five-year-old knocking on his coffin wondering when he was going to wake up. But what Ecclesiastes says is, it was Chris's time to die. It was Carla's turn to walk that hard road. Sometimes bad things happen. And even though the best possible investment of our life is to pursue God and godliness, we need to do it eyes wide open knowing that that does not protect us from tragedy. We're never told that it does. That time and chance happen to us all. What a difficult thing it would be to have to try to sync up my faith to somehow explain away Chris's death as deserved. What a difficult thing it would be to try to help Carla find a path back to faith, which she has found, if part of that explanation would be, well, you guys deserve this because of your behavior. Ecclesiastes looks around and goes, yeah, sometimes life doesn't make sense. Sometimes it seems unfair. And sometimes it's just our turn. And we understand that everybody takes a turn. But here's the thing. I have been kind of sitting in that reality for a while in my personal life. It's been our turn recently. Our turn's still not over. And I've been studying this book, which is stark, man. But somehow, despite all of that, in thinking about what awaits us in the next two weeks and allowing my life to sit in that. And we're going to come back next week. Next week's going to be happy, I promise. Next week's going to be great, all right? We're going to cry some happy tears next week. It's going to feel better than this. In the midst of everything that we have been walking through, because of the promises that are in Ecclesiastes and because of the encouraging things that he writes that we're going to talk about next week. I can honestly tell you that for me personally, I am sitting in the middle of a time of more profound joy than I think I've ever experienced in my life, of more gratitude for my God, more gratitude for my Savior, more of a desire for Him. And I want you guys to experience that joy too. And so next week we're going to come back and I'm going to tell you all about it. Let's pray. Father, life's hard sometimes. We are so thankful that you gave your servant Solomon the courage to admit that. Father, we all have to hurt sometimes. We are thankful that we have a Jesus who weeps with us in our pain. Lord, if it is someone's season to be sad right now, I pray that they would just be sad. And that that would run the course that it needs to run. God, if it is someone's time for joy right now, let them be joyful. Let them be exuberant. Let them feel your presence and your joy. For those of us who are walking through a hard time, Lord, I pray that we would be comforted by this stark knowledge that sometimes it's just our turn. And I know there are folks who feel like, gosh, it feels like it's been my turn a lot lately. Lord, I pray that you would give them lots of turns of joy too. Let all of this, our pain, our triumph, our struggle, and our joy, draw us near to you. Either in gratitude or in need, Father, draw us near to you. And Father, I pray that in that drawing that we would find what David describes as the fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. Help us see more and more our gratitude for you and our need for you. It's in your son's name that we pray. Amen.

Have you ever wondered if it was all worth it? All the emails and phone calls, special projects, late meetings, early mornings and out-of-town trips? Frantically shuttling bodies back and forth and cobbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be with you in person. It's good to be with you online. Thank you for continuing to join us in that way. As Michelle just said, it is nice to have faces. They're hidden behind masks, which gives me the benefit of pretending like you're all just smiling at me the whole time. So that's how I'm picturing you. It's just nice and friendly and kind, so I appreciate that. Last week, we started our series called Vapor, which is a study through the book of Ecclesiastes. So I would actually say this, if you're catching up later this week, if you're listening to this on like a Tuesday, or you're watching online and you didn't catch last week, stop. I would encourage you to stop and go back and listen to last week. Do it on double speed, or if you really want a good laugh, listen to my voice on half speed, because that sounds funny. But listen to the last one and then catch up with this week. Because again, this is a series and it's not really made to stand independently of one another. We kind of need all of the parts to understand the four separate parts. And so last week was a downer. Last week was a bummer. I warned you ahead of time that you're not going to feel good at the end of that sermon. This one is not much different, all right? So just buckle up. This is Ecclesiastes, and I think it's good and ecclesiastical for us to sit in the difficult sometimes, for us to sit in hard reality sometimes. And what we said is that this is the bleakest book for the bleakest month. And I don't think I need much of a backup. This winter has been terrible, just gray and dark and rainy. It's the perfect time to go through Ecclesiastes. Solomon is the author of Ecclesiastes, and he writes it towards the end of his life and just hits us with some stark realities. And I continue to contend that on the other side of these realities, if we can accept the reality that we talked about last week, which is the idea that most Americans, most people in our culture are wasting our lives. He calls it vanity of vanities of striving after the wind. It's vapor. That's why the series is called Vapor. It's that Hebrew word, a hevel, that means vapor or smoke. Here one minute, gone the next. Seems like you can reach out and grab success or grab happiness or grab something worth pursuing and that when you get to it, it's gone. It slips through your fingers and we don't have it anymore. So the difficult reality that we confronted last week was just that, that most of life is vapor. Most pursuits, when we get to the end of them, we will find them to be empty. That's a difficult reality, but it's an essential one. We're going to face another reality this week, and I continue to believe if we will face these bravely, that what we'll find on the other end of them is this immutable joy, this joy that can be untouched by circumstance. I believe that we'll find the satisfaction on the other side of these realities that really is abiding. I think that we'll become more grateful for God and more desirous of Jesus for him to come and for our relationship with him. And so we're going to wade through these things as a church. Now, I ended last week with that thought, that it's my belief that Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes, would tell most Americans, a vast majority of people in our culture, that you're wasting your life. You're chasing vapor. And then I said, well, God gives us something that is worth chasing. What is that? And I said, we're going to talk about it next week. And then I prayed and we went home. Or, well, I went home. You guys just stayed where you were. So this week we want to start off by answering that question that we left off with. What is the thing worth pursuing? If it's not ambition, if it's not career, if it's not pleasures, if it's not monuments to ourselves, if it's not security, if it's not the book knowledge and general wisdom, what is it that's worth investing our life in? Well, I think that Solomon would answer that question like this. He concludes, based on my reading of Ecclesiastes, Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. The best investment of your life, the best way to spend your days and get to the end of your years and not wonder, did I waste my life, is to spend those days pleasing God. The best way to reach joy, to grab onto something that's not vapor, that is substantive, is to spend your days pleasing God. That's what he says. And I believe that he intends that because he says it multiple times throughout the book. Look with me at what he writes in Ecclesiastes. We'll start in chapter 8 and then we'll be in chapter 12. He says, And then in chapter 8, And then he ends the book this way, Ecclesiastes 12, 13. He sums up all the teachings and he says this, Fear God, keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. If you were to go to Solomon, the author of Ecclesiastes, and say, what's worth it? What should I do? He would say, fear God and keep his commands. We can talk about everything. We can talk about all the different pursuits. We can talk about all the different realities. We can be confronted with all the difficult things in life. We can accept the problem of pain and the vexation of wisdom. We can do all of that. But at the end of the day, here's what matters. Pursue God, keep his commands. This is the whole duty of man. That's what we are to do. That's what he has tasked us with. And this is Solomon's, I think, tip of the cap. It's his acknowledgement of what's called in theological circles, proverbial wisdom. Solomon also wrote the book of Proverbs. And in the book of Proverbs, there's a lot of if-then statements. If you do these good things, God will bless you with these good things. If you make choices like this, you will reap blessings like this. If you do dumb things, you will reap a bad harvest. If you choose folly, if you choose foolishness, if you choose sin and indulgence, then you will reap a harvest that is equitable to those indulgences. One of the ones that I think of is there is a verse in Proverbs that I've always loved because I truly believe in that phrase, you show me your friends and I'll show you your future. We're the average of the five people that we spend our most time around, all of that stuff. There's a verse in Proverbs that says that the companion of the wise will become wise and the companion of fools will suffer harm. And that's generally true, isn't it? If you hang out with people who are wise, who make good choices, eventually you're going to start making good choices like them. If you hang out with knuckleheads who make bad choices and have bad priorities, eventually you're going to start making bad choices like them. And the result of their bad choices and the result of your bad choices is going to be the harm that you suffer. And so in general, that's true, isn't it? That if we hang around with good people who we want to be like, we look at them and they have things in our life that we want, we'll begin to adopt their values and we'll take on some of their characteristics. Similarly, if we spend our time with people that don't share our priorities and make bad decisions, we're going to continue to make those bad decisions. Some of you guys have lived this out in your life, right? I mean, for some of you, your story is you were hanging out with people who are not bad people. They just have different priorities than someone who's just become a believer. And you become a believer, and now you have different priorities in your life, and you come to the painful realization of, gosh, I need another set of friends. I don't want to just walk away from these people. I love these people, but I need other folks speaking into my life who share the priorities that I do. For many of you, that's why you found church. Not that your friends are bad people. They just no longer share your priorities. And so you want to hang out with other people who do share your priorities. And Proverbs tells us that if you'll be the companion of wise people, that you'll be wise. If you'll be the companion of foolish people who make bad choices, then you're going to suffer the consequences of those choices. Likewise, all throughout Proverbs, another one of those if-then transactions is. I don't have a specific verse. I should be a better pastor who looks one up, but I didn't, so just go with me. It says in plenty of places the idea that if you work hard, if you put your head down and work hard and be humble, then at the end of your life, you will reap a harvest of wealth and security. If you work hard, you do your job, consider the ant that works even when it doesn't have to. If you'll do that, then by the end of your life, you will have amassed and built up, and God will honor your good work and your toil. Likewise, if you are lazy, a little sleeping, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come on you like an armed man, okay, says Proverbs. So if you're lazy and you just kind of want money to come to you, you just feel entitled and you deserve all this stuff, then you're never going to reap the benefit of wealth and security. And so here's what Solomon is saying in Ecclesiastes. That proverbial wisdom, if you please God, your life will go better for you. If you surround yourself with wise people, then you're more likely to prosper. If you do work hard and put your head down, then you're likely to build up. You're likely to be successful. Solomon acknowledges that. The end of the matter is this. Fear God, keep his commandments. Pursue him, do the right things. Honor that proverbial wisdom. But then he gives us this other reality. Then he gives us this caveat to that. Because what we know is that we need a caveat there. Because plenty of us know people who have hung around good friends, who are surrounded with wise folks, and have made terrible choices. Plenty of us know good people who are surrounded with other good people who have experienced what we would consider an unfair amount of pain, pain that seems like it would be waiting on folks who invest their lives around bad people. Likewise, we all know people who spend their time around knuckleheads and seem to be doing great. We also know people who have worked really hard, who have kept their head down, who have done their part. They get to the end of their life and they're still living hand to mouth because of a bad deal or because of a child that costs a lot of money or because of difficult diagnosis or whatever it is. And we know people who have been lazy and do seem prosperous. And that causes us to go, what gives? What do we do when proverbial wisdom doesn't ring true to us? We turn to Ecclesiastes, where I think Solomon writes this book later in his life. And what he says is, yeah, proverbial wisdom, those traditional accepted teachings of living a moral life and God honoring that and us being honored for it, that's true. But he wants us to know something. Even if you live that life. There's a whole section in my Bible where it says the vexation of wisdom, where he says, I even pursued wisdom. I did the right things. I honored God. I kept my nose clean. I walked the straight and narrow. I pursued purity. And even in that, you know what I found? A degree of vanity, a degree of vapor, a degree of chasing after the wind. And so the other reality that I want us to confront this morning in Ecclesiastes is this. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Somewhere in our faith and in our churches, we've gotten this idea that the more I clean, I keep my nose, the more God will protect me from pain in my life. The more I walk the straight and narrow, the agreement is, God, I'm gonna follow your rules and you're gonna offer me protection. This is why when someone who is good and is wonderful and is loving and seems to be all the things that maybe we feel like we're not, when we watch them get sick or we watch them pass away or we watch bad things happen to them, we kind of feel this sense of unfairness, right? We kind of feel this sense of, why is that allowed to happen? Well, Solomon says it happens because our obedience does not protect us from pain. It doesn't opt us out of it. It doesn't opt us out of struggle. I think one of the most dangerous, pernicious lies in Christendom is that the more I honor God with my life, the more He'll protect me with His sovereignty. And it is not true. We do not get that idea anywhere in the Bible. As a matter of fact, this is what Solomon says. This is what he has to say. And this is why I believe that that's his point. He makes this point that obedience will not protect us from pain multiple times in the book. He says it over in chapter 5. I'm sorry, chapter 9, verse 11. He says, You think you're really smart and that's why you're successful. No. You think you're dumb and and that's why you can't seem to make a way. No. Time and chance happen to us all. No one dodges the raindrops of tragedy and pain in their life. He says it over and over again in the book, but the best way he says it, the most profound way he says it, in chapter three, the first eight verses of chapter three. If you have a Bible, I would encourage you to look at that passage with me. And normally I don't read eight verses in a row in church service because I find it disengaging sometimes when pastors do that. But this is so beautiful and so poignant and so important that it felt unfair to you guys to pick out one as a synopsis. So we're going to read it all together. Not aloud, that would be weird. I don't do that kind of weird stuff, but we're going to read it together as I read. Ready? For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to break down and a time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to cast stones away and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, like pandemics. A time to seek and a time to refrain from embracing like pandemics, a time to seek and a time to lose, a time to keep and a time to cast away, a time to tear and a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. It's such a beautiful, elegant truth that he details out for us there. And there is a place where I want us to land, but there is another takeaway from there. It's not the point of the sermon, but I thought I would be remiss if I didn't make this point as we go through this beautiful passage together. There's a time for everything, and we ought to let those seasons have their time. We shouldn't jump from one to another. What makes me think of this is this. This last fall, I had a bunch of buddies come in town, and we all kind of took a weekend and just hung out. It's just a guy's weekend. We were supposed to golf most of the time, and it rained, so we just sat around. But it was fun. My friends and I, that's what we like to do anyways. We're just old men. But I have one friend named Dan, and Dan, he is the opposite of me. He is enthusiastic. He is on fire all the time. He loves to yell and be loud and celebrate things and cheer and be happy. He never meets a stranger. Dan is a weirdo that talks to people in elevators and I'll never understand it. He'll just chat up whoever is around him, right? And I love Dan. I had lunch with Dan the other day, but on that particular trip, Dan at the time had a pregnant wife and three small children and had just moved across the country. And both he and his wife were looking for jobs, and they're looking for houses, and they're trying to figure out how to get their kids in school. So when he came to that weekend, his life had been a pressure cooker, and he needed to release, right? So Dan wanted to dance, and he wanted to yell, and he wanted to scream, and he wanted to be be excited and I didn't want to do any of that. I just wanted to sit there and be quiet and have no one ask me any questions. And Dan's like, Nate, come on, let's go. And we're watching some dumb game and he wants me to be invested in it and I don't care. And there was a tension there. And I felt in my soul, as I frequently do, my grumpiness well up. And all I wanted to do was say, Dan, why don't you shut up for like maybe 30 minutes, dude? Can we just chill out? But I kept talking myself out of doing that. Because what I realized is, Dan's my buddy. And what he needs is to blow off some steam. It's his time to dance. It's his time to yell and be boisterous. It's his time to be loud and to laugh and to be joyful. That's his time. And if I rain on that parade, I am the worst of friends. If I don't recognize in myself that it's his soul's time for those things, and I don't allow him that time, I am the jerk of all jerks. So I just sucked it up, and now we joke around about it. Likewise, when someone around us is sad, when someone around us is mourning, when someone around us needs to cry, shame on us for robbing them of that time too. And shame on you for attempting to rob yourself of that time. You guys know that we just walked through something pretty difficult as a family, and that we lost Jen's dad. And there were days when she would just look at me and she would say, I'm sad. I'm just sad. And I would say, then be sad. Then today's the day to be sad. And that's all right. And there will be more days when we're sad. Our souls need those days. They're cathartic for us. They're required by us. And shame on us if we try to rob our friends and our loved ones of the sad days that they need too. Those ought to take their time and have their season. I think what we try to do is we try to skip the bad ones, right? We try to skip past, I don't like this time of mourning. I want to skip to my time of laughter. I don't like this time of stillness. I want to skip to the time of dancing. I don't like this time of sadness. I want to skip to my time of joy. And what Solomon is saying is, no, there's a time for both. You can't experience true joy if you don't let yourself walk through true grief. The dancing isn't as joyful if you haven't set in pensive silence. Right? So I didn't want to move past this passage without making the point to you guys, without imploring you, let the seasons have their time. When it's a time for dying, let it be a time for dying. When it's a time for birth, let it be that. If someone you love needs to be sad, let them be sad. Don't be the clumsy moron that tries to convince them that what they're going through is not that sad. Our souls need the good times and the hard times, and we shouldn't skip them. But what I really want you to see from this passage today is that if what he writes is true, there's a time for mourning, and there's a time for joy, and there's a time for gladness, and there's a time for sorrow true, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for joy and there's a time for gladness and there's a time for sorrow and there's a time for dancing and there's a time for stillness. If that's true, then all of those times are coming for all of us. Do you understand? It doesn't say for the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous there are more times to laugh. For the righteous there are more times to build things up. For the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous, there are more times to laugh. For the righteous, there are more times to build things up. For the righteous, there are more times for embracing. No, it just says that this is objectively true. Everybody walks through these seasons. The righteous and the unrighteous. The godly and the ungodly. The devout Christian and the militant atheist. All of us walk through these seasons. And it may feel weird to you that I'm hammering this point home that like, hey, guess what, guys? At some point or another, life is cruddy for everybody. But it is. It's also joyful for everybody. But no one dodges the raindrops of pain and tragedy in their life. Nobody. And if we will accept that, then what we can learn and see from this passage is pain is not punitive. Pain, hurt, struggle, hardship, that's not punitive. That's not God exacting revenge on you for a failure in your morality somewhere. That's not God punishing you. Pain is not punitive. It is the result of brokenness. We don't experience pain and hardship in our life because at some point in our past, we displeased God with the choices that we make, and now he's exacting his revenge on us. That's not how it works. Pain is not punitive. Pain is a result of brokenness. We've talked about this before, but God created heaven and earth, and he created it perfect, and then sin ruined that perfection. And ever since then, the world is broken. And in a broken world, divorces happen and abuse happens and people get cancer and we have to watch Parkinson's and all these other diseases eat away at people that we love. In a broken world, cruddy things happen. And what Solomon is acknowledging is not only do they happen, but they happen to everybody. And yes, in general, proverbial wisdom is true. In general, if you honor God in the way that you make your choices, then you will be honored as well. But just understand that that isn't a blanket insurance policy against pain because time and chance happen to us all. And we walk through all these seasons equally. And it's important to know when we get there that that pain is not punitive. That pain isn't something that we warrant with our behavior. This actually shows up in the New Testament. Someone is blind, and the disciples look at the blind man, and they say, what happened to him? What did his parents do that he's been blinded like this way? They thought pain was punitive. They thought his actions warranted, or his parents' actions warranted what he did. And Jesus says, now this world is just broken. He says what Solomon says. In this world where we wait for Jesus to come back, like Romans 8 talks about all of creation groans for the return of the Savior, for the return of the King, for Jesus to come and make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And spoiler alert, this is where we're going to finish the series. But while we wait, we all walk through these seasons. And it's so important for us to understand that pain is not punitive. Here's why I think this. I don't know if I have permission to share her story. If I don't, I'm sorry. Kay Gamble also sits on our finance committee and approves my expenses on a monthly basis. So, you know, she has a way to nail me if she doesn't appreciate me sharing this story. But Kay is a wonderful lady who goes here and a few months ago was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctor looked at the breast cancer and said, I think it's offerable. I think we can get it. I think it's going to be okay. She went in. She got it. And Kay, if you know her, she's quiet. Of course, she doesn't tell anybody about this. I only hear about this after the fact. They go in. They get it. Everything's good. Doctor says, we got it all. I think you're going to be in good shape. You don't have to do chemo or anything like that. We're going to give you a pill to kind of be on the safe side. You'll take that for five years, but you're good. You can go on with life as normal. So there's some pain and then a relief. Everything's good. Then she gets a call a couple of days later. The doctor said, hey, we took another look at that cancer, and it's the kind that likes to spread a lot. So we're going to have to be pretty aggressive with this, and we're going to need you to start doing chemo. Man, we're all old enough to know what chemo is. We know what that does. We know what that looks like. And we know the kinds of days that Kay is facing. And that stinks because Kay's good. And I want her to know that those cruddy days that she has to walk through are not God punishing her. That's not punitive. She doesn't have to search her soul and say, God, what have I done in the last 10, 20 years of my life to warrant this pain? What have I done to warrant this bad news? How did I disappoint you? How did I displease you? What would you like me to do now, God? Would you like me to give more, serve more, or love more? Which the answer is always yes to that. He would always like us to give and love and serve more. But not as a shield to pain. And how crushing would it be to go through life thinking that every time we experience some form of difficulty, some form of grief, that that was somehow God turning the screws on us so that we learned our lesson better. What I want Kay to understand in this season of cruddiness amidst the chemo is that it's just simply her turn. It's her turn. Her life stinks for a little bit. And guess what? All of our lives stink for a little bit sometimes. They have before, and here's the fun thing, they're going to again. It just will. It's Kay's turn. Recently, it was our turn. For some of you, it's still your turn. I know stories of people and loss and tragedy that we've experienced just in this church. And I just think that there is something tremendously comforting about looking at a season of grief with the understanding of, it's my turn right now. It's my time to mourn. But what I know is, eventually it'll be my time to sing. It's my time to tear things down. But eventually, if I put my head down, it'll be my time to build things up. And in this way, and I think that this is beautiful, Ecclesiastes empathizes with our experiences. It actually empathizes with us. It's a brave, bold thing to say. To admit, yeah, we should obey God. We should pursue the proverbial wisdom. But what a wonderful admission in the Bible that actually syncs up with our experience to say sometimes bad things happen to good people. I've told you before, I had a roommate in college who was a better person than me in every way possible. He graduated. He became a pastor. He was leading churches before I was, and I always admired him more than I cared to admit, and he dropped dead at 30 of a widow-maker heart attack playing ultimate frisbee with his friends. It will never make any sense to me how he left and I stayed, and how his wife Carla and his boys had to walk through that. I remember his five-year-old knocking on his coffin wondering when he was going to wake up. But what Ecclesiastes says is, it was Chris's time to die. It was Carla's turn to walk that hard road. Sometimes bad things happen. And even though the best possible investment of our life is to pursue God and godliness, we need to do it eyes wide open knowing that that does not protect us from tragedy. We're never told that it does. That time and chance happen to us all. What a difficult thing it would be to have to try to sync up my faith to somehow explain away Chris's death as deserved. What a difficult thing it would be to try to help Carla find a path back to faith, which she has found, if part of that explanation would be, well, you guys deserve this because of your behavior. Ecclesiastes looks around and goes, yeah, sometimes life doesn't make sense. Sometimes it seems unfair. And sometimes it's just our turn. And we understand that everybody takes a turn. But here's the thing. I have been kind of sitting in that reality for a while in my personal life. It's been our turn recently. Our turn's still not over. And I've been studying this book, which is stark, man. But somehow, despite all of that, in thinking about what awaits us in the next two weeks and allowing my life to sit in that. And we're going to come back next week. Next week's going to be happy, I promise. Next week's going to be great, all right? We're going to cry some happy tears next week. It's going to feel better than this. In the midst of everything that we have been walking through, because of the promises that are in Ecclesiastes and because of the encouraging things that he writes that we're going to talk about next week. I can honestly tell you that for me personally, I am sitting in the middle of a time of more profound joy than I think I've ever experienced in my life, of more gratitude for my God, more gratitude for my Savior, more of a desire for Him. And I want you guys to experience that joy too. And so next week we're going to come back and I'm going to tell you all about it. Let's pray. Father, life's hard sometimes. We are so thankful that you gave your servant Solomon the courage to admit that. Father, we all have to hurt sometimes. We are thankful that we have a Jesus who weeps with us in our pain. Lord, if it is someone's season to be sad right now, I pray that they would just be sad. And that that would run the course that it needs to run. God, if it is someone's time for joy right now, let them be joyful. Let them be exuberant. Let them feel your presence and your joy. For those of us who are walking through a hard time, Lord, I pray that we would be comforted by this stark knowledge that sometimes it's just our turn. And I know there are folks who feel like, gosh, it feels like it's been my turn a lot lately. Lord, I pray that you would give them lots of turns of joy too. Let all of this, our pain, our triumph, our struggle, and our joy, draw us near to you. Either in gratitude or in need, Father, draw us near to you. And Father, I pray that in that drawing that we would find what David describes as the fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. Help us see more and more our gratitude for you and our need for you. It's in your son's name that we pray. Amen.

Have you ever wondered if it was all worth it? All the emails and phone calls, special projects, late meetings, early mornings and out-of-town trips? Frantically shuttling bodies back and forth and cobbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be with you in person. It's good to be with you online. Thank you for continuing to join us in that way. As Michelle just said, it is nice to have faces. They're hidden behind masks, which gives me the benefit of pretending like you're all just smiling at me the whole time. So that's how I'm picturing you. It's just nice and friendly and kind, so I appreciate that. Last week, we started our series called Vapor, which is a study through the book of Ecclesiastes. So I would actually say this, if you're catching up later this week, if you're listening to this on like a Tuesday, or you're watching online and you didn't catch last week, stop. I would encourage you to stop and go back and listen to last week. Do it on double speed, or if you really want a good laugh, listen to my voice on half speed, because that sounds funny. But listen to the last one and then catch up with this week. Because again, this is a series and it's not really made to stand independently of one another. We kind of need all of the parts to understand the four separate parts. And so last week was a downer. Last week was a bummer. I warned you ahead of time that you're not going to feel good at the end of that sermon. This one is not much different, all right? So just buckle up. This is Ecclesiastes, and I think it's good and ecclesiastical for us to sit in the difficult sometimes, for us to sit in hard reality sometimes. And what we said is that this is the bleakest book for the bleakest month. And I don't think I need much of a backup. This winter has been terrible, just gray and dark and rainy. It's the perfect time to go through Ecclesiastes. Solomon is the author of Ecclesiastes, and he writes it towards the end of his life and just hits us with some stark realities. And I continue to contend that on the other side of these realities, if we can accept the reality that we talked about last week, which is the idea that most Americans, most people in our culture are wasting our lives. He calls it vanity of vanities of striving after the wind. It's vapor. That's why the series is called Vapor. It's that Hebrew word, a hevel, that means vapor or smoke. Here one minute, gone the next. Seems like you can reach out and grab success or grab happiness or grab something worth pursuing and that when you get to it, it's gone. It slips through your fingers and we don't have it anymore. So the difficult reality that we confronted last week was just that, that most of life is vapor. Most pursuits, when we get to the end of them, we will find them to be empty. That's a difficult reality, but it's an essential one. We're going to face another reality this week, and I continue to believe if we will face these bravely, that what we'll find on the other end of them is this immutable joy, this joy that can be untouched by circumstance. I believe that we'll find the satisfaction on the other side of these realities that really is abiding. I think that we'll become more grateful for God and more desirous of Jesus for him to come and for our relationship with him. And so we're going to wade through these things as a church. Now, I ended last week with that thought, that it's my belief that Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes, would tell most Americans, a vast majority of people in our culture, that you're wasting your life. You're chasing vapor. And then I said, well, God gives us something that is worth chasing. What is that? And I said, we're going to talk about it next week. And then I prayed and we went home. Or, well, I went home. You guys just stayed where you were. So this week we want to start off by answering that question that we left off with. What is the thing worth pursuing? If it's not ambition, if it's not career, if it's not pleasures, if it's not monuments to ourselves, if it's not security, if it's not the book knowledge and general wisdom, what is it that's worth investing our life in? Well, I think that Solomon would answer that question like this. He concludes, based on my reading of Ecclesiastes, Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. The best investment of your life, the best way to spend your days and get to the end of your years and not wonder, did I waste my life, is to spend those days pleasing God. The best way to reach joy, to grab onto something that's not vapor, that is substantive, is to spend your days pleasing God. That's what he says. And I believe that he intends that because he says it multiple times throughout the book. Look with me at what he writes in Ecclesiastes. We'll start in chapter 8 and then we'll be in chapter 12. He says, And then in chapter 8, And then he ends the book this way, Ecclesiastes 12, 13. He sums up all the teachings and he says this, Fear God, keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. If you were to go to Solomon, the author of Ecclesiastes, and say, what's worth it? What should I do? He would say, fear God and keep his commands. We can talk about everything. We can talk about all the different pursuits. We can talk about all the different realities. We can be confronted with all the difficult things in life. We can accept the problem of pain and the vexation of wisdom. We can do all of that. But at the end of the day, here's what matters. Pursue God, keep his commands. This is the whole duty of man. That's what we are to do. That's what he has tasked us with. And this is Solomon's, I think, tip of the cap. It's his acknowledgement of what's called in theological circles, proverbial wisdom. Solomon also wrote the book of Proverbs. And in the book of Proverbs, there's a lot of if-then statements. If you do these good things, God will bless you with these good things. If you make choices like this, you will reap blessings like this. If you do dumb things, you will reap a bad harvest. If you choose folly, if you choose foolishness, if you choose sin and indulgence, then you will reap a harvest that is equitable to those indulgences. One of the ones that I think of is there is a verse in Proverbs that I've always loved because I truly believe in that phrase, you show me your friends and I'll show you your future. We're the average of the five people that we spend our most time around, all of that stuff. There's a verse in Proverbs that says that the companion of the wise will become wise and the companion of fools will suffer harm. And that's generally true, isn't it? If you hang out with people who are wise, who make good choices, eventually you're going to start making good choices like them. If you hang out with knuckleheads who make bad choices and have bad priorities, eventually you're going to start making bad choices like them. And the result of their bad choices and the result of your bad choices is going to be the harm that you suffer. And so in general, that's true, isn't it? That if we hang around with good people who we want to be like, we look at them and they have things in our life that we want, we'll begin to adopt their values and we'll take on some of their characteristics. Similarly, if we spend our time with people that don't share our priorities and make bad decisions, we're going to continue to make those bad decisions. Some of you guys have lived this out in your life, right? I mean, for some of you, your story is you were hanging out with people who are not bad people. They just have different priorities than someone who's just become a believer. And you become a believer, and now you have different priorities in your life, and you come to the painful realization of, gosh, I need another set of friends. I don't want to just walk away from these people. I love these people, but I need other folks speaking into my life who share the priorities that I do. For many of you, that's why you found church. Not that your friends are bad people. They just no longer share your priorities. And so you want to hang out with other people who do share your priorities. And Proverbs tells us that if you'll be the companion of wise people, that you'll be wise. If you'll be the companion of foolish people who make bad choices, then you're going to suffer the consequences of those choices. Likewise, all throughout Proverbs, another one of those if-then transactions is. I don't have a specific verse. I should be a better pastor who looks one up, but I didn't, so just go with me. It says in plenty of places the idea that if you work hard, if you put your head down and work hard and be humble, then at the end of your life, you will reap a harvest of wealth and security. If you work hard, you do your job, consider the ant that works even when it doesn't have to. If you'll do that, then by the end of your life, you will have amassed and built up, and God will honor your good work and your toil. Likewise, if you are lazy, a little sleeping, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come on you like an armed man, okay, says Proverbs. So if you're lazy and you just kind of want money to come to you, you just feel entitled and you deserve all this stuff, then you're never going to reap the benefit of wealth and security. And so here's what Solomon is saying in Ecclesiastes. That proverbial wisdom, if you please God, your life will go better for you. If you surround yourself with wise people, then you're more likely to prosper. If you do work hard and put your head down, then you're likely to build up. You're likely to be successful. Solomon acknowledges that. The end of the matter is this. Fear God, keep his commandments. Pursue him, do the right things. Honor that proverbial wisdom. But then he gives us this other reality. Then he gives us this caveat to that. Because what we know is that we need a caveat there. Because plenty of us know people who have hung around good friends, who are surrounded with wise folks, and have made terrible choices. Plenty of us know good people who are surrounded with other good people who have experienced what we would consider an unfair amount of pain, pain that seems like it would be waiting on folks who invest their lives around bad people. Likewise, we all know people who spend their time around knuckleheads and seem to be doing great. We also know people who have worked really hard, who have kept their head down, who have done their part. They get to the end of their life and they're still living hand to mouth because of a bad deal or because of a child that costs a lot of money or because of difficult diagnosis or whatever it is. And we know people who have been lazy and do seem prosperous. And that causes us to go, what gives? What do we do when proverbial wisdom doesn't ring true to us? We turn to Ecclesiastes, where I think Solomon writes this book later in his life. And what he says is, yeah, proverbial wisdom, those traditional accepted teachings of living a moral life and God honoring that and us being honored for it, that's true. But he wants us to know something. Even if you live that life. There's a whole section in my Bible where it says the vexation of wisdom, where he says, I even pursued wisdom. I did the right things. I honored God. I kept my nose clean. I walked the straight and narrow. I pursued purity. And even in that, you know what I found? A degree of vanity, a degree of vapor, a degree of chasing after the wind. And so the other reality that I want us to confront this morning in Ecclesiastes is this. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Somewhere in our faith and in our churches, we've gotten this idea that the more I clean, I keep my nose, the more God will protect me from pain in my life. The more I walk the straight and narrow, the agreement is, God, I'm gonna follow your rules and you're gonna offer me protection. This is why when someone who is good and is wonderful and is loving and seems to be all the things that maybe we feel like we're not, when we watch them get sick or we watch them pass away or we watch bad things happen to them, we kind of feel this sense of unfairness, right? We kind of feel this sense of, why is that allowed to happen? Well, Solomon says it happens because our obedience does not protect us from pain. It doesn't opt us out of it. It doesn't opt us out of struggle. I think one of the most dangerous, pernicious lies in Christendom is that the more I honor God with my life, the more He'll protect me with His sovereignty. And it is not true. We do not get that idea anywhere in the Bible. As a matter of fact, this is what Solomon says. This is what he has to say. And this is why I believe that that's his point. He makes this point that obedience will not protect us from pain multiple times in the book. He says it over in chapter 5. I'm sorry, chapter 9, verse 11. He says, You think you're really smart and that's why you're successful. No. You think you're dumb and and that's why you can't seem to make a way. No. Time and chance happen to us all. No one dodges the raindrops of tragedy and pain in their life. He says it over and over again in the book, but the best way he says it, the most profound way he says it, in chapter three, the first eight verses of chapter three. If you have a Bible, I would encourage you to look at that passage with me. And normally I don't read eight verses in a row in church service because I find it disengaging sometimes when pastors do that. But this is so beautiful and so poignant and so important that it felt unfair to you guys to pick out one as a synopsis. So we're going to read it all together. Not aloud, that would be weird. I don't do that kind of weird stuff, but we're going to read it together as I read. Ready? For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to break down and a time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to cast stones away and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, like pandemics. A time to seek and a time to refrain from embracing like pandemics, a time to seek and a time to lose, a time to keep and a time to cast away, a time to tear and a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. It's such a beautiful, elegant truth that he details out for us there. And there is a place where I want us to land, but there is another takeaway from there. It's not the point of the sermon, but I thought I would be remiss if I didn't make this point as we go through this beautiful passage together. There's a time for everything, and we ought to let those seasons have their time. We shouldn't jump from one to another. What makes me think of this is this. This last fall, I had a bunch of buddies come in town, and we all kind of took a weekend and just hung out. It's just a guy's weekend. We were supposed to golf most of the time, and it rained, so we just sat around. But it was fun. My friends and I, that's what we like to do anyways. We're just old men. But I have one friend named Dan, and Dan, he is the opposite of me. He is enthusiastic. He is on fire all the time. He loves to yell and be loud and celebrate things and cheer and be happy. He never meets a stranger. Dan is a weirdo that talks to people in elevators and I'll never understand it. He'll just chat up whoever is around him, right? And I love Dan. I had lunch with Dan the other day, but on that particular trip, Dan at the time had a pregnant wife and three small children and had just moved across the country. And both he and his wife were looking for jobs, and they're looking for houses, and they're trying to figure out how to get their kids in school. So when he came to that weekend, his life had been a pressure cooker, and he needed to release, right? So Dan wanted to dance, and he wanted to yell, and he wanted to scream, and he wanted to be be excited and I didn't want to do any of that. I just wanted to sit there and be quiet and have no one ask me any questions. And Dan's like, Nate, come on, let's go. And we're watching some dumb game and he wants me to be invested in it and I don't care. And there was a tension there. And I felt in my soul, as I frequently do, my grumpiness well up. And all I wanted to do was say, Dan, why don't you shut up for like maybe 30 minutes, dude? Can we just chill out? But I kept talking myself out of doing that. Because what I realized is, Dan's my buddy. And what he needs is to blow off some steam. It's his time to dance. It's his time to yell and be boisterous. It's his time to be loud and to laugh and to be joyful. That's his time. And if I rain on that parade, I am the worst of friends. If I don't recognize in myself that it's his soul's time for those things, and I don't allow him that time, I am the jerk of all jerks. So I just sucked it up, and now we joke around about it. Likewise, when someone around us is sad, when someone around us is mourning, when someone around us needs to cry, shame on us for robbing them of that time too. And shame on you for attempting to rob yourself of that time. You guys know that we just walked through something pretty difficult as a family, and that we lost Jen's dad. And there were days when she would just look at me and she would say, I'm sad. I'm just sad. And I would say, then be sad. Then today's the day to be sad. And that's all right. And there will be more days when we're sad. Our souls need those days. They're cathartic for us. They're required by us. And shame on us if we try to rob our friends and our loved ones of the sad days that they need too. Those ought to take their time and have their season. I think what we try to do is we try to skip the bad ones, right? We try to skip past, I don't like this time of mourning. I want to skip to my time of laughter. I don't like this time of stillness. I want to skip to the time of dancing. I don't like this time of sadness. I want to skip to my time of joy. And what Solomon is saying is, no, there's a time for both. You can't experience true joy if you don't let yourself walk through true grief. The dancing isn't as joyful if you haven't set in pensive silence. Right? So I didn't want to move past this passage without making the point to you guys, without imploring you, let the seasons have their time. When it's a time for dying, let it be a time for dying. When it's a time for birth, let it be that. If someone you love needs to be sad, let them be sad. Don't be the clumsy moron that tries to convince them that what they're going through is not that sad. Our souls need the good times and the hard times, and we shouldn't skip them. But what I really want you to see from this passage today is that if what he writes is true, there's a time for mourning, and there's a time for joy, and there's a time for gladness, and there's a time for sorrow true, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for joy and there's a time for gladness and there's a time for sorrow and there's a time for dancing and there's a time for stillness. If that's true, then all of those times are coming for all of us. Do you understand? It doesn't say for the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous there are more times to laugh. For the righteous there are more times to build things up. For the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous, there are more times to laugh. For the righteous, there are more times to build things up. For the righteous, there are more times for embracing. No, it just says that this is objectively true. Everybody walks through these seasons. The righteous and the unrighteous. The godly and the ungodly. The devout Christian and the militant atheist. All of us walk through these seasons. And it may feel weird to you that I'm hammering this point home that like, hey, guess what, guys? At some point or another, life is cruddy for everybody. But it is. It's also joyful for everybody. But no one dodges the raindrops of pain and tragedy in their life. Nobody. And if we will accept that, then what we can learn and see from this passage is pain is not punitive. Pain, hurt, struggle, hardship, that's not punitive. That's not God exacting revenge on you for a failure in your morality somewhere. That's not God punishing you. Pain is not punitive. It is the result of brokenness. We don't experience pain and hardship in our life because at some point in our past, we displeased God with the choices that we make, and now he's exacting his revenge on us. That's not how it works. Pain is not punitive. Pain is a result of brokenness. We've talked about this before, but God created heaven and earth, and he created it perfect, and then sin ruined that perfection. And ever since then, the world is broken. And in a broken world, divorces happen and abuse happens and people get cancer and we have to watch Parkinson's and all these other diseases eat away at people that we love. In a broken world, cruddy things happen. And what Solomon is acknowledging is not only do they happen, but they happen to everybody. And yes, in general, proverbial wisdom is true. In general, if you honor God in the way that you make your choices, then you will be honored as well. But just understand that that isn't a blanket insurance policy against pain because time and chance happen to us all. And we walk through all these seasons equally. And it's important to know when we get there that that pain is not punitive. That pain isn't something that we warrant with our behavior. This actually shows up in the New Testament. Someone is blind, and the disciples look at the blind man, and they say, what happened to him? What did his parents do that he's been blinded like this way? They thought pain was punitive. They thought his actions warranted, or his parents' actions warranted what he did. And Jesus says, now this world is just broken. He says what Solomon says. In this world where we wait for Jesus to come back, like Romans 8 talks about all of creation groans for the return of the Savior, for the return of the King, for Jesus to come and make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And spoiler alert, this is where we're going to finish the series. But while we wait, we all walk through these seasons. And it's so important for us to understand that pain is not punitive. Here's why I think this. I don't know if I have permission to share her story. If I don't, I'm sorry. Kay Gamble also sits on our finance committee and approves my expenses on a monthly basis. So, you know, she has a way to nail me if she doesn't appreciate me sharing this story. But Kay is a wonderful lady who goes here and a few months ago was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctor looked at the breast cancer and said, I think it's offerable. I think we can get it. I think it's going to be okay. She went in. She got it. And Kay, if you know her, she's quiet. Of course, she doesn't tell anybody about this. I only hear about this after the fact. They go in. They get it. Everything's good. Doctor says, we got it all. I think you're going to be in good shape. You don't have to do chemo or anything like that. We're going to give you a pill to kind of be on the safe side. You'll take that for five years, but you're good. You can go on with life as normal. So there's some pain and then a relief. Everything's good. Then she gets a call a couple of days later. The doctor said, hey, we took another look at that cancer, and it's the kind that likes to spread a lot. So we're going to have to be pretty aggressive with this, and we're going to need you to start doing chemo. Man, we're all old enough to know what chemo is. We know what that does. We know what that looks like. And we know the kinds of days that Kay is facing. And that stinks because Kay's good. And I want her to know that those cruddy days that she has to walk through are not God punishing her. That's not punitive. She doesn't have to search her soul and say, God, what have I done in the last 10, 20 years of my life to warrant this pain? What have I done to warrant this bad news? How did I disappoint you? How did I displease you? What would you like me to do now, God? Would you like me to give more, serve more, or love more? Which the answer is always yes to that. He would always like us to give and love and serve more. But not as a shield to pain. And how crushing would it be to go through life thinking that every time we experience some form of difficulty, some form of grief, that that was somehow God turning the screws on us so that we learned our lesson better. What I want Kay to understand in this season of cruddiness amidst the chemo is that it's just simply her turn. It's her turn. Her life stinks for a little bit. And guess what? All of our lives stink for a little bit sometimes. They have before, and here's the fun thing, they're going to again. It just will. It's Kay's turn. Recently, it was our turn. For some of you, it's still your turn. I know stories of people and loss and tragedy that we've experienced just in this church. And I just think that there is something tremendously comforting about looking at a season of grief with the understanding of, it's my turn right now. It's my time to mourn. But what I know is, eventually it'll be my time to sing. It's my time to tear things down. But eventually, if I put my head down, it'll be my time to build things up. And in this way, and I think that this is beautiful, Ecclesiastes empathizes with our experiences. It actually empathizes with us. It's a brave, bold thing to say. To admit, yeah, we should obey God. We should pursue the proverbial wisdom. But what a wonderful admission in the Bible that actually syncs up with our experience to say sometimes bad things happen to good people. I've told you before, I had a roommate in college who was a better person than me in every way possible. He graduated. He became a pastor. He was leading churches before I was, and I always admired him more than I cared to admit, and he dropped dead at 30 of a widow-maker heart attack playing ultimate frisbee with his friends. It will never make any sense to me how he left and I stayed, and how his wife Carla and his boys had to walk through that. I remember his five-year-old knocking on his coffin wondering when he was going to wake up. But what Ecclesiastes says is, it was Chris's time to die. It was Carla's turn to walk that hard road. Sometimes bad things happen. And even though the best possible investment of our life is to pursue God and godliness, we need to do it eyes wide open knowing that that does not protect us from tragedy. We're never told that it does. That time and chance happen to us all. What a difficult thing it would be to have to try to sync up my faith to somehow explain away Chris's death as deserved. What a difficult thing it would be to try to help Carla find a path back to faith, which she has found, if part of that explanation would be, well, you guys deserve this because of your behavior. Ecclesiastes looks around and goes, yeah, sometimes life doesn't make sense. Sometimes it seems unfair. And sometimes it's just our turn. And we understand that everybody takes a turn. But here's the thing. I have been kind of sitting in that reality for a while in my personal life. It's been our turn recently. Our turn's still not over. And I've been studying this book, which is stark, man. But somehow, despite all of that, in thinking about what awaits us in the next two weeks and allowing my life to sit in that. And we're going to come back next week. Next week's going to be happy, I promise. Next week's going to be great, all right? We're going to cry some happy tears next week. It's going to feel better than this. In the midst of everything that we have been walking through, because of the promises that are in Ecclesiastes and because of the encouraging things that he writes that we're going to talk about next week. I can honestly tell you that for me personally, I am sitting in the middle of a time of more profound joy than I think I've ever experienced in my life, of more gratitude for my God, more gratitude for my Savior, more of a desire for Him. And I want you guys to experience that joy too. And so next week we're going to come back and I'm going to tell you all about it. Let's pray. Father, life's hard sometimes. We are so thankful that you gave your servant Solomon the courage to admit that. Father, we all have to hurt sometimes. We are thankful that we have a Jesus who weeps with us in our pain. Lord, if it is someone's season to be sad right now, I pray that they would just be sad. And that that would run the course that it needs to run. God, if it is someone's time for joy right now, let them be joyful. Let them be exuberant. Let them feel your presence and your joy. For those of us who are walking through a hard time, Lord, I pray that we would be comforted by this stark knowledge that sometimes it's just our turn. And I know there are folks who feel like, gosh, it feels like it's been my turn a lot lately. Lord, I pray that you would give them lots of turns of joy too. Let all of this, our pain, our triumph, our struggle, and our joy, draw us near to you. Either in gratitude or in need, Father, draw us near to you. And Father, I pray that in that drawing that we would find what David describes as the fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. Help us see more and more our gratitude for you and our need for you. It's in your son's name that we pray. Amen.

Have you ever wondered if it was all worth it? All the emails and phone calls, special projects, late meetings, early mornings and out-of-town trips? Frantically shuttling bodies back and forth and cobbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be with you in person. It's good to be with you online. Thank you for continuing to join us in that way. As Michelle just said, it is nice to have faces. They're hidden behind masks, which gives me the benefit of pretending like you're all just smiling at me the whole time. So that's how I'm picturing you. It's just nice and friendly and kind, so I appreciate that. Last week, we started our series called Vapor, which is a study through the book of Ecclesiastes. So I would actually say this, if you're catching up later this week, if you're listening to this on like a Tuesday, or you're watching online and you didn't catch last week, stop. I would encourage you to stop and go back and listen to last week. Do it on double speed, or if you really want a good laugh, listen to my voice on half speed, because that sounds funny. But listen to the last one and then catch up with this week. Because again, this is a series and it's not really made to stand independently of one another. We kind of need all of the parts to understand the four separate parts. And so last week was a downer. Last week was a bummer. I warned you ahead of time that you're not going to feel good at the end of that sermon. This one is not much different, all right? So just buckle up. This is Ecclesiastes, and I think it's good and ecclesiastical for us to sit in the difficult sometimes, for us to sit in hard reality sometimes. And what we said is that this is the bleakest book for the bleakest month. And I don't think I need much of a backup. This winter has been terrible, just gray and dark and rainy. It's the perfect time to go through Ecclesiastes. Solomon is the author of Ecclesiastes, and he writes it towards the end of his life and just hits us with some stark realities. And I continue to contend that on the other side of these realities, if we can accept the reality that we talked about last week, which is the idea that most Americans, most people in our culture are wasting our lives. He calls it vanity of vanities of striving after the wind. It's vapor. That's why the series is called Vapor. It's that Hebrew word, a hevel, that means vapor or smoke. Here one minute, gone the next. Seems like you can reach out and grab success or grab happiness or grab something worth pursuing and that when you get to it, it's gone. It slips through your fingers and we don't have it anymore. So the difficult reality that we confronted last week was just that, that most of life is vapor. Most pursuits, when we get to the end of them, we will find them to be empty. That's a difficult reality, but it's an essential one. We're going to face another reality this week, and I continue to believe if we will face these bravely, that what we'll find on the other end of them is this immutable joy, this joy that can be untouched by circumstance. I believe that we'll find the satisfaction on the other side of these realities that really is abiding. I think that we'll become more grateful for God and more desirous of Jesus for him to come and for our relationship with him. And so we're going to wade through these things as a church. Now, I ended last week with that thought, that it's my belief that Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes, would tell most Americans, a vast majority of people in our culture, that you're wasting your life. You're chasing vapor. And then I said, well, God gives us something that is worth chasing. What is that? And I said, we're going to talk about it next week. And then I prayed and we went home. Or, well, I went home. You guys just stayed where you were. So this week we want to start off by answering that question that we left off with. What is the thing worth pursuing? If it's not ambition, if it's not career, if it's not pleasures, if it's not monuments to ourselves, if it's not security, if it's not the book knowledge and general wisdom, what is it that's worth investing our life in? Well, I think that Solomon would answer that question like this. He concludes, based on my reading of Ecclesiastes, Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. The best investment of your life, the best way to spend your days and get to the end of your years and not wonder, did I waste my life, is to spend those days pleasing God. The best way to reach joy, to grab onto something that's not vapor, that is substantive, is to spend your days pleasing God. That's what he says. And I believe that he intends that because he says it multiple times throughout the book. Look with me at what he writes in Ecclesiastes. We'll start in chapter 8 and then we'll be in chapter 12. He says, And then in chapter 8, And then he ends the book this way, Ecclesiastes 12, 13. He sums up all the teachings and he says this, Fear God, keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. If you were to go to Solomon, the author of Ecclesiastes, and say, what's worth it? What should I do? He would say, fear God and keep his commands. We can talk about everything. We can talk about all the different pursuits. We can talk about all the different realities. We can be confronted with all the difficult things in life. We can accept the problem of pain and the vexation of wisdom. We can do all of that. But at the end of the day, here's what matters. Pursue God, keep his commands. This is the whole duty of man. That's what we are to do. That's what he has tasked us with. And this is Solomon's, I think, tip of the cap. It's his acknowledgement of what's called in theological circles, proverbial wisdom. Solomon also wrote the book of Proverbs. And in the book of Proverbs, there's a lot of if-then statements. If you do these good things, God will bless you with these good things. If you make choices like this, you will reap blessings like this. If you do dumb things, you will reap a bad harvest. If you choose folly, if you choose foolishness, if you choose sin and indulgence, then you will reap a harvest that is equitable to those indulgences. One of the ones that I think of is there is a verse in Proverbs that I've always loved because I truly believe in that phrase, you show me your friends and I'll show you your future. We're the average of the five people that we spend our most time around, all of that stuff. There's a verse in Proverbs that says that the companion of the wise will become wise and the companion of fools will suffer harm. And that's generally true, isn't it? If you hang out with people who are wise, who make good choices, eventually you're going to start making good choices like them. If you hang out with knuckleheads who make bad choices and have bad priorities, eventually you're going to start making bad choices like them. And the result of their bad choices and the result of your bad choices is going to be the harm that you suffer. And so in general, that's true, isn't it? That if we hang around with good people who we want to be like, we look at them and they have things in our life that we want, we'll begin to adopt their values and we'll take on some of their characteristics. Similarly, if we spend our time with people that don't share our priorities and make bad decisions, we're going to continue to make those bad decisions. Some of you guys have lived this out in your life, right? I mean, for some of you, your story is you were hanging out with people who are not bad people. They just have different priorities than someone who's just become a believer. And you become a believer, and now you have different priorities in your life, and you come to the painful realization of, gosh, I need another set of friends. I don't want to just walk away from these people. I love these people, but I need other folks speaking into my life who share the priorities that I do. For many of you, that's why you found church. Not that your friends are bad people. They just no longer share your priorities. And so you want to hang out with other people who do share your priorities. And Proverbs tells us that if you'll be the companion of wise people, that you'll be wise. If you'll be the companion of foolish people who make bad choices, then you're going to suffer the consequences of those choices. Likewise, all throughout Proverbs, another one of those if-then transactions is. I don't have a specific verse. I should be a better pastor who looks one up, but I didn't, so just go with me. It says in plenty of places the idea that if you work hard, if you put your head down and work hard and be humble, then at the end of your life, you will reap a harvest of wealth and security. If you work hard, you do your job, consider the ant that works even when it doesn't have to. If you'll do that, then by the end of your life, you will have amassed and built up, and God will honor your good work and your toil. Likewise, if you are lazy, a little sleeping, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come on you like an armed man, okay, says Proverbs. So if you're lazy and you just kind of want money to come to you, you just feel entitled and you deserve all this stuff, then you're never going to reap the benefit of wealth and security. And so here's what Solomon is saying in Ecclesiastes. That proverbial wisdom, if you please God, your life will go better for you. If you surround yourself with wise people, then you're more likely to prosper. If you do work hard and put your head down, then you're likely to build up. You're likely to be successful. Solomon acknowledges that. The end of the matter is this. Fear God, keep his commandments. Pursue him, do the right things. Honor that proverbial wisdom. But then he gives us this other reality. Then he gives us this caveat to that. Because what we know is that we need a caveat there. Because plenty of us know people who have hung around good friends, who are surrounded with wise folks, and have made terrible choices. Plenty of us know good people who are surrounded with other good people who have experienced what we would consider an unfair amount of pain, pain that seems like it would be waiting on folks who invest their lives around bad people. Likewise, we all know people who spend their time around knuckleheads and seem to be doing great. We also know people who have worked really hard, who have kept their head down, who have done their part. They get to the end of their life and they're still living hand to mouth because of a bad deal or because of a child that costs a lot of money or because of difficult diagnosis or whatever it is. And we know people who have been lazy and do seem prosperous. And that causes us to go, what gives? What do we do when proverbial wisdom doesn't ring true to us? We turn to Ecclesiastes, where I think Solomon writes this book later in his life. And what he says is, yeah, proverbial wisdom, those traditional accepted teachings of living a moral life and God honoring that and us being honored for it, that's true. But he wants us to know something. Even if you live that life. There's a whole section in my Bible where it says the vexation of wisdom, where he says, I even pursued wisdom. I did the right things. I honored God. I kept my nose clean. I walked the straight and narrow. I pursued purity. And even in that, you know what I found? A degree of vanity, a degree of vapor, a degree of chasing after the wind. And so the other reality that I want us to confront this morning in Ecclesiastes is this. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Somewhere in our faith and in our churches, we've gotten this idea that the more I clean, I keep my nose, the more God will protect me from pain in my life. The more I walk the straight and narrow, the agreement is, God, I'm gonna follow your rules and you're gonna offer me protection. This is why when someone who is good and is wonderful and is loving and seems to be all the things that maybe we feel like we're not, when we watch them get sick or we watch them pass away or we watch bad things happen to them, we kind of feel this sense of unfairness, right? We kind of feel this sense of, why is that allowed to happen? Well, Solomon says it happens because our obedience does not protect us from pain. It doesn't opt us out of it. It doesn't opt us out of struggle. I think one of the most dangerous, pernicious lies in Christendom is that the more I honor God with my life, the more He'll protect me with His sovereignty. And it is not true. We do not get that idea anywhere in the Bible. As a matter of fact, this is what Solomon says. This is what he has to say. And this is why I believe that that's his point. He makes this point that obedience will not protect us from pain multiple times in the book. He says it over in chapter 5. I'm sorry, chapter 9, verse 11. He says, You think you're really smart and that's why you're successful. No. You think you're dumb and and that's why you can't seem to make a way. No. Time and chance happen to us all. No one dodges the raindrops of tragedy and pain in their life. He says it over and over again in the book, but the best way he says it, the most profound way he says it, in chapter three, the first eight verses of chapter three. If you have a Bible, I would encourage you to look at that passage with me. And normally I don't read eight verses in a row in church service because I find it disengaging sometimes when pastors do that. But this is so beautiful and so poignant and so important that it felt unfair to you guys to pick out one as a synopsis. So we're going to read it all together. Not aloud, that would be weird. I don't do that kind of weird stuff, but we're going to read it together as I read. Ready? For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to break down and a time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to cast stones away and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, like pandemics. A time to seek and a time to refrain from embracing like pandemics, a time to seek and a time to lose, a time to keep and a time to cast away, a time to tear and a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. It's such a beautiful, elegant truth that he details out for us there. And there is a place where I want us to land, but there is another takeaway from there. It's not the point of the sermon, but I thought I would be remiss if I didn't make this point as we go through this beautiful passage together. There's a time for everything, and we ought to let those seasons have their time. We shouldn't jump from one to another. What makes me think of this is this. This last fall, I had a bunch of buddies come in town, and we all kind of took a weekend and just hung out. It's just a guy's weekend. We were supposed to golf most of the time, and it rained, so we just sat around. But it was fun. My friends and I, that's what we like to do anyways. We're just old men. But I have one friend named Dan, and Dan, he is the opposite of me. He is enthusiastic. He is on fire all the time. He loves to yell and be loud and celebrate things and cheer and be happy. He never meets a stranger. Dan is a weirdo that talks to people in elevators and I'll never understand it. He'll just chat up whoever is around him, right? And I love Dan. I had lunch with Dan the other day, but on that particular trip, Dan at the time had a pregnant wife and three small children and had just moved across the country. And both he and his wife were looking for jobs, and they're looking for houses, and they're trying to figure out how to get their kids in school. So when he came to that weekend, his life had been a pressure cooker, and he needed to release, right? So Dan wanted to dance, and he wanted to yell, and he wanted to scream, and he wanted to be be excited and I didn't want to do any of that. I just wanted to sit there and be quiet and have no one ask me any questions. And Dan's like, Nate, come on, let's go. And we're watching some dumb game and he wants me to be invested in it and I don't care. And there was a tension there. And I felt in my soul, as I frequently do, my grumpiness well up. And all I wanted to do was say, Dan, why don't you shut up for like maybe 30 minutes, dude? Can we just chill out? But I kept talking myself out of doing that. Because what I realized is, Dan's my buddy. And what he needs is to blow off some steam. It's his time to dance. It's his time to yell and be boisterous. It's his time to be loud and to laugh and to be joyful. That's his time. And if I rain on that parade, I am the worst of friends. If I don't recognize in myself that it's his soul's time for those things, and I don't allow him that time, I am the jerk of all jerks. So I just sucked it up, and now we joke around about it. Likewise, when someone around us is sad, when someone around us is mourning, when someone around us needs to cry, shame on us for robbing them of that time too. And shame on you for attempting to rob yourself of that time. You guys know that we just walked through something pretty difficult as a family, and that we lost Jen's dad. And there were days when she would just look at me and she would say, I'm sad. I'm just sad. And I would say, then be sad. Then today's the day to be sad. And that's all right. And there will be more days when we're sad. Our souls need those days. They're cathartic for us. They're required by us. And shame on us if we try to rob our friends and our loved ones of the sad days that they need too. Those ought to take their time and have their season. I think what we try to do is we try to skip the bad ones, right? We try to skip past, I don't like this time of mourning. I want to skip to my time of laughter. I don't like this time of stillness. I want to skip to the time of dancing. I don't like this time of sadness. I want to skip to my time of joy. And what Solomon is saying is, no, there's a time for both. You can't experience true joy if you don't let yourself walk through true grief. The dancing isn't as joyful if you haven't set in pensive silence. Right? So I didn't want to move past this passage without making the point to you guys, without imploring you, let the seasons have their time. When it's a time for dying, let it be a time for dying. When it's a time for birth, let it be that. If someone you love needs to be sad, let them be sad. Don't be the clumsy moron that tries to convince them that what they're going through is not that sad. Our souls need the good times and the hard times, and we shouldn't skip them. But what I really want you to see from this passage today is that if what he writes is true, there's a time for mourning, and there's a time for joy, and there's a time for gladness, and there's a time for sorrow true, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for joy and there's a time for gladness and there's a time for sorrow and there's a time for dancing and there's a time for stillness. If that's true, then all of those times are coming for all of us. Do you understand? It doesn't say for the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous there are more times to laugh. For the righteous there are more times to build things up. For the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous, there are more times to laugh. For the righteous, there are more times to build things up. For the righteous, there are more times for embracing. No, it just says that this is objectively true. Everybody walks through these seasons. The righteous and the unrighteous. The godly and the ungodly. The devout Christian and the militant atheist. All of us walk through these seasons. And it may feel weird to you that I'm hammering this point home that like, hey, guess what, guys? At some point or another, life is cruddy for everybody. But it is. It's also joyful for everybody. But no one dodges the raindrops of pain and tragedy in their life. Nobody. And if we will accept that, then what we can learn and see from this passage is pain is not punitive. Pain, hurt, struggle, hardship, that's not punitive. That's not God exacting revenge on you for a failure in your morality somewhere. That's not God punishing you. Pain is not punitive. It is the result of brokenness. We don't experience pain and hardship in our life because at some point in our past, we displeased God with the choices that we make, and now he's exacting his revenge on us. That's not how it works. Pain is not punitive. Pain is a result of brokenness. We've talked about this before, but God created heaven and earth, and he created it perfect, and then sin ruined that perfection. And ever since then, the world is broken. And in a broken world, divorces happen and abuse happens and people get cancer and we have to watch Parkinson's and all these other diseases eat away at people that we love. In a broken world, cruddy things happen. And what Solomon is acknowledging is not only do they happen, but they happen to everybody. And yes, in general, proverbial wisdom is true. In general, if you honor God in the way that you make your choices, then you will be honored as well. But just understand that that isn't a blanket insurance policy against pain because time and chance happen to us all. And we walk through all these seasons equally. And it's important to know when we get there that that pain is not punitive. That pain isn't something that we warrant with our behavior. This actually shows up in the New Testament. Someone is blind, and the disciples look at the blind man, and they say, what happened to him? What did his parents do that he's been blinded like this way? They thought pain was punitive. They thought his actions warranted, or his parents' actions warranted what he did. And Jesus says, now this world is just broken. He says what Solomon says. In this world where we wait for Jesus to come back, like Romans 8 talks about all of creation groans for the return of the Savior, for the return of the King, for Jesus to come and make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And spoiler alert, this is where we're going to finish the series. But while we wait, we all walk through these seasons. And it's so important for us to understand that pain is not punitive. Here's why I think this. I don't know if I have permission to share her story. If I don't, I'm sorry. Kay Gamble also sits on our finance committee and approves my expenses on a monthly basis. So, you know, she has a way to nail me if she doesn't appreciate me sharing this story. But Kay is a wonderful lady who goes here and a few months ago was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctor looked at the breast cancer and said, I think it's offerable. I think we can get it. I think it's going to be okay. She went in. She got it. And Kay, if you know her, she's quiet. Of course, she doesn't tell anybody about this. I only hear about this after the fact. They go in. They get it. Everything's good. Doctor says, we got it all. I think you're going to be in good shape. You don't have to do chemo or anything like that. We're going to give you a pill to kind of be on the safe side. You'll take that for five years, but you're good. You can go on with life as normal. So there's some pain and then a relief. Everything's good. Then she gets a call a couple of days later. The doctor said, hey, we took another look at that cancer, and it's the kind that likes to spread a lot. So we're going to have to be pretty aggressive with this, and we're going to need you to start doing chemo. Man, we're all old enough to know what chemo is. We know what that does. We know what that looks like. And we know the kinds of days that Kay is facing. And that stinks because Kay's good. And I want her to know that those cruddy days that she has to walk through are not God punishing her. That's not punitive. She doesn't have to search her soul and say, God, what have I done in the last 10, 20 years of my life to warrant this pain? What have I done to warrant this bad news? How did I disappoint you? How did I displease you? What would you like me to do now, God? Would you like me to give more, serve more, or love more? Which the answer is always yes to that. He would always like us to give and love and serve more. But not as a shield to pain. And how crushing would it be to go through life thinking that every time we experience some form of difficulty, some form of grief, that that was somehow God turning the screws on us so that we learned our lesson better. What I want Kay to understand in this season of cruddiness amidst the chemo is that it's just simply her turn. It's her turn. Her life stinks for a little bit. And guess what? All of our lives stink for a little bit sometimes. They have before, and here's the fun thing, they're going to again. It just will. It's Kay's turn. Recently, it was our turn. For some of you, it's still your turn. I know stories of people and loss and tragedy that we've experienced just in this church. And I just think that there is something tremendously comforting about looking at a season of grief with the understanding of, it's my turn right now. It's my time to mourn. But what I know is, eventually it'll be my time to sing. It's my time to tear things down. But eventually, if I put my head down, it'll be my time to build things up. And in this way, and I think that this is beautiful, Ecclesiastes empathizes with our experiences. It actually empathizes with us. It's a brave, bold thing to say. To admit, yeah, we should obey God. We should pursue the proverbial wisdom. But what a wonderful admission in the Bible that actually syncs up with our experience to say sometimes bad things happen to good people. I've told you before, I had a roommate in college who was a better person than me in every way possible. He graduated. He became a pastor. He was leading churches before I was, and I always admired him more than I cared to admit, and he dropped dead at 30 of a widow-maker heart attack playing ultimate frisbee with his friends. It will never make any sense to me how he left and I stayed, and how his wife Carla and his boys had to walk through that. I remember his five-year-old knocking on his coffin wondering when he was going to wake up. But what Ecclesiastes says is, it was Chris's time to die. It was Carla's turn to walk that hard road. Sometimes bad things happen. And even though the best possible investment of our life is to pursue God and godliness, we need to do it eyes wide open knowing that that does not protect us from tragedy. We're never told that it does. That time and chance happen to us all. What a difficult thing it would be to have to try to sync up my faith to somehow explain away Chris's death as deserved. What a difficult thing it would be to try to help Carla find a path back to faith, which she has found, if part of that explanation would be, well, you guys deserve this because of your behavior. Ecclesiastes looks around and goes, yeah, sometimes life doesn't make sense. Sometimes it seems unfair. And sometimes it's just our turn. And we understand that everybody takes a turn. But here's the thing. I have been kind of sitting in that reality for a while in my personal life. It's been our turn recently. Our turn's still not over. And I've been studying this book, which is stark, man. But somehow, despite all of that, in thinking about what awaits us in the next two weeks and allowing my life to sit in that. And we're going to come back next week. Next week's going to be happy, I promise. Next week's going to be great, all right? We're going to cry some happy tears next week. It's going to feel better than this. In the midst of everything that we have been walking through, because of the promises that are in Ecclesiastes and because of the encouraging things that he writes that we're going to talk about next week. I can honestly tell you that for me personally, I am sitting in the middle of a time of more profound joy than I think I've ever experienced in my life, of more gratitude for my God, more gratitude for my Savior, more of a desire for Him. And I want you guys to experience that joy too. And so next week we're going to come back and I'm going to tell you all about it. Let's pray. Father, life's hard sometimes. We are so thankful that you gave your servant Solomon the courage to admit that. Father, we all have to hurt sometimes. We are thankful that we have a Jesus who weeps with us in our pain. Lord, if it is someone's season to be sad right now, I pray that they would just be sad. And that that would run the course that it needs to run. God, if it is someone's time for joy right now, let them be joyful. Let them be exuberant. Let them feel your presence and your joy. For those of us who are walking through a hard time, Lord, I pray that we would be comforted by this stark knowledge that sometimes it's just our turn. And I know there are folks who feel like, gosh, it feels like it's been my turn a lot lately. Lord, I pray that you would give them lots of turns of joy too. Let all of this, our pain, our triumph, our struggle, and our joy, draw us near to you. Either in gratitude or in need, Father, draw us near to you. And Father, I pray that in that drawing that we would find what David describes as the fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. Help us see more and more our gratitude for you and our need for you. It's in your son's name that we pray. Amen.

Have you ever wondered if it was all worth it? All the emails and phone calls, special projects, late meetings, early mornings and out-of-town trips? Frantically shuttling bodies back and forth and cobbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be with you in person. It's good to be with you online. Thank you for continuing to join us in that way. As Michelle just said, it is nice to have faces. They're hidden behind masks, which gives me the benefit of pretending like you're all just smiling at me the whole time. So that's how I'm picturing you. It's just nice and friendly and kind, so I appreciate that. Last week, we started our series called Vapor, which is a study through the book of Ecclesiastes. So I would actually say this, if you're catching up later this week, if you're listening to this on like a Tuesday, or you're watching online and you didn't catch last week, stop. I would encourage you to stop and go back and listen to last week. Do it on double speed, or if you really want a good laugh, listen to my voice on half speed, because that sounds funny. But listen to the last one and then catch up with this week. Because again, this is a series and it's not really made to stand independently of one another. We kind of need all of the parts to understand the four separate parts. And so last week was a downer. Last week was a bummer. I warned you ahead of time that you're not going to feel good at the end of that sermon. This one is not much different, all right? So just buckle up. This is Ecclesiastes, and I think it's good and ecclesiastical for us to sit in the difficult sometimes, for us to sit in hard reality sometimes. And what we said is that this is the bleakest book for the bleakest month. And I don't think I need much of a backup. This winter has been terrible, just gray and dark and rainy. It's the perfect time to go through Ecclesiastes. Solomon is the author of Ecclesiastes, and he writes it towards the end of his life and just hits us with some stark realities. And I continue to contend that on the other side of these realities, if we can accept the reality that we talked about last week, which is the idea that most Americans, most people in our culture are wasting our lives. He calls it vanity of vanities of striving after the wind. It's vapor. That's why the series is called Vapor. It's that Hebrew word, a hevel, that means vapor or smoke. Here one minute, gone the next. Seems like you can reach out and grab success or grab happiness or grab something worth pursuing and that when you get to it, it's gone. It slips through your fingers and we don't have it anymore. So the difficult reality that we confronted last week was just that, that most of life is vapor. Most pursuits, when we get to the end of them, we will find them to be empty. That's a difficult reality, but it's an essential one. We're going to face another reality this week, and I continue to believe if we will face these bravely, that what we'll find on the other end of them is this immutable joy, this joy that can be untouched by circumstance. I believe that we'll find the satisfaction on the other side of these realities that really is abiding. I think that we'll become more grateful for God and more desirous of Jesus for him to come and for our relationship with him. And so we're going to wade through these things as a church. Now, I ended last week with that thought, that it's my belief that Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes, would tell most Americans, a vast majority of people in our culture, that you're wasting your life. You're chasing vapor. And then I said, well, God gives us something that is worth chasing. What is that? And I said, we're going to talk about it next week. And then I prayed and we went home. Or, well, I went home. You guys just stayed where you were. So this week we want to start off by answering that question that we left off with. What is the thing worth pursuing? If it's not ambition, if it's not career, if it's not pleasures, if it's not monuments to ourselves, if it's not security, if it's not the book knowledge and general wisdom, what is it that's worth investing our life in? Well, I think that Solomon would answer that question like this. He concludes, based on my reading of Ecclesiastes, Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. The best investment of your life, the best way to spend your days and get to the end of your years and not wonder, did I waste my life, is to spend those days pleasing God. The best way to reach joy, to grab onto something that's not vapor, that is substantive, is to spend your days pleasing God. That's what he says. And I believe that he intends that because he says it multiple times throughout the book. Look with me at what he writes in Ecclesiastes. We'll start in chapter 8 and then we'll be in chapter 12. He says, And then in chapter 8, And then he ends the book this way, Ecclesiastes 12, 13. He sums up all the teachings and he says this, Fear God, keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. If you were to go to Solomon, the author of Ecclesiastes, and say, what's worth it? What should I do? He would say, fear God and keep his commands. We can talk about everything. We can talk about all the different pursuits. We can talk about all the different realities. We can be confronted with all the difficult things in life. We can accept the problem of pain and the vexation of wisdom. We can do all of that. But at the end of the day, here's what matters. Pursue God, keep his commands. This is the whole duty of man. That's what we are to do. That's what he has tasked us with. And this is Solomon's, I think, tip of the cap. It's his acknowledgement of what's called in theological circles, proverbial wisdom. Solomon also wrote the book of Proverbs. And in the book of Proverbs, there's a lot of if-then statements. If you do these good things, God will bless you with these good things. If you make choices like this, you will reap blessings like this. If you do dumb things, you will reap a bad harvest. If you choose folly, if you choose foolishness, if you choose sin and indulgence, then you will reap a harvest that is equitable to those indulgences. One of the ones that I think of is there is a verse in Proverbs that I've always loved because I truly believe in that phrase, you show me your friends and I'll show you your future. We're the average of the five people that we spend our most time around, all of that stuff. There's a verse in Proverbs that says that the companion of the wise will become wise and the companion of fools will suffer harm. And that's generally true, isn't it? If you hang out with people who are wise, who make good choices, eventually you're going to start making good choices like them. If you hang out with knuckleheads who make bad choices and have bad priorities, eventually you're going to start making bad choices like them. And the result of their bad choices and the result of your bad choices is going to be the harm that you suffer. And so in general, that's true, isn't it? That if we hang around with good people who we want to be like, we look at them and they have things in our life that we want, we'll begin to adopt their values and we'll take on some of their characteristics. Similarly, if we spend our time with people that don't share our priorities and make bad decisions, we're going to continue to make those bad decisions. Some of you guys have lived this out in your life, right? I mean, for some of you, your story is you were hanging out with people who are not bad people. They just have different priorities than someone who's just become a believer. And you become a believer, and now you have different priorities in your life, and you come to the painful realization of, gosh, I need another set of friends. I don't want to just walk away from these people. I love these people, but I need other folks speaking into my life who share the priorities that I do. For many of you, that's why you found church. Not that your friends are bad people. They just no longer share your priorities. And so you want to hang out with other people who do share your priorities. And Proverbs tells us that if you'll be the companion of wise people, that you'll be wise. If you'll be the companion of foolish people who make bad choices, then you're going to suffer the consequences of those choices. Likewise, all throughout Proverbs, another one of those if-then transactions is. I don't have a specific verse. I should be a better pastor who looks one up, but I didn't, so just go with me. It says in plenty of places the idea that if you work hard, if you put your head down and work hard and be humble, then at the end of your life, you will reap a harvest of wealth and security. If you work hard, you do your job, consider the ant that works even when it doesn't have to. If you'll do that, then by the end of your life, you will have amassed and built up, and God will honor your good work and your toil. Likewise, if you are lazy, a little sleeping, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come on you like an armed man, okay, says Proverbs. So if you're lazy and you just kind of want money to come to you, you just feel entitled and you deserve all this stuff, then you're never going to reap the benefit of wealth and security. And so here's what Solomon is saying in Ecclesiastes. That proverbial wisdom, if you please God, your life will go better for you. If you surround yourself with wise people, then you're more likely to prosper. If you do work hard and put your head down, then you're likely to build up. You're likely to be successful. Solomon acknowledges that. The end of the matter is this. Fear God, keep his commandments. Pursue him, do the right things. Honor that proverbial wisdom. But then he gives us this other reality. Then he gives us this caveat to that. Because what we know is that we need a caveat there. Because plenty of us know people who have hung around good friends, who are surrounded with wise folks, and have made terrible choices. Plenty of us know good people who are surrounded with other good people who have experienced what we would consider an unfair amount of pain, pain that seems like it would be waiting on folks who invest their lives around bad people. Likewise, we all know people who spend their time around knuckleheads and seem to be doing great. We also know people who have worked really hard, who have kept their head down, who have done their part. They get to the end of their life and they're still living hand to mouth because of a bad deal or because of a child that costs a lot of money or because of difficult diagnosis or whatever it is. And we know people who have been lazy and do seem prosperous. And that causes us to go, what gives? What do we do when proverbial wisdom doesn't ring true to us? We turn to Ecclesiastes, where I think Solomon writes this book later in his life. And what he says is, yeah, proverbial wisdom, those traditional accepted teachings of living a moral life and God honoring that and us being honored for it, that's true. But he wants us to know something. Even if you live that life. There's a whole section in my Bible where it says the vexation of wisdom, where he says, I even pursued wisdom. I did the right things. I honored God. I kept my nose clean. I walked the straight and narrow. I pursued purity. And even in that, you know what I found? A degree of vanity, a degree of vapor, a degree of chasing after the wind. And so the other reality that I want us to confront this morning in Ecclesiastes is this. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Somewhere in our faith and in our churches, we've gotten this idea that the more I clean, I keep my nose, the more God will protect me from pain in my life. The more I walk the straight and narrow, the agreement is, God, I'm gonna follow your rules and you're gonna offer me protection. This is why when someone who is good and is wonderful and is loving and seems to be all the things that maybe we feel like we're not, when we watch them get sick or we watch them pass away or we watch bad things happen to them, we kind of feel this sense of unfairness, right? We kind of feel this sense of, why is that allowed to happen? Well, Solomon says it happens because our obedience does not protect us from pain. It doesn't opt us out of it. It doesn't opt us out of struggle. I think one of the most dangerous, pernicious lies in Christendom is that the more I honor God with my life, the more He'll protect me with His sovereignty. And it is not true. We do not get that idea anywhere in the Bible. As a matter of fact, this is what Solomon says. This is what he has to say. And this is why I believe that that's his point. He makes this point that obedience will not protect us from pain multiple times in the book. He says it over in chapter 5. I'm sorry, chapter 9, verse 11. He says, You think you're really smart and that's why you're successful. No. You think you're dumb and and that's why you can't seem to make a way. No. Time and chance happen to us all. No one dodges the raindrops of tragedy and pain in their life. He says it over and over again in the book, but the best way he says it, the most profound way he says it, in chapter three, the first eight verses of chapter three. If you have a Bible, I would encourage you to look at that passage with me. And normally I don't read eight verses in a row in church service because I find it disengaging sometimes when pastors do that. But this is so beautiful and so poignant and so important that it felt unfair to you guys to pick out one as a synopsis. So we're going to read it all together. Not aloud, that would be weird. I don't do that kind of weird stuff, but we're going to read it together as I read. Ready? For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to break down and a time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to cast stones away and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, like pandemics. A time to seek and a time to refrain from embracing like pandemics, a time to seek and a time to lose, a time to keep and a time to cast away, a time to tear and a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. It's such a beautiful, elegant truth that he details out for us there. And there is a place where I want us to land, but there is another takeaway from there. It's not the point of the sermon, but I thought I would be remiss if I didn't make this point as we go through this beautiful passage together. There's a time for everything, and we ought to let those seasons have their time. We shouldn't jump from one to another. What makes me think of this is this. This last fall, I had a bunch of buddies come in town, and we all kind of took a weekend and just hung out. It's just a guy's weekend. We were supposed to golf most of the time, and it rained, so we just sat around. But it was fun. My friends and I, that's what we like to do anyways. We're just old men. But I have one friend named Dan, and Dan, he is the opposite of me. He is enthusiastic. He is on fire all the time. He loves to yell and be loud and celebrate things and cheer and be happy. He never meets a stranger. Dan is a weirdo that talks to people in elevators and I'll never understand it. He'll just chat up whoever is around him, right? And I love Dan. I had lunch with Dan the other day, but on that particular trip, Dan at the time had a pregnant wife and three small children and had just moved across the country. And both he and his wife were looking for jobs, and they're looking for houses, and they're trying to figure out how to get their kids in school. So when he came to that weekend, his life had been a pressure cooker, and he needed to release, right? So Dan wanted to dance, and he wanted to yell, and he wanted to scream, and he wanted to be be excited and I didn't want to do any of that. I just wanted to sit there and be quiet and have no one ask me any questions. And Dan's like, Nate, come on, let's go. And we're watching some dumb game and he wants me to be invested in it and I don't care. And there was a tension there. And I felt in my soul, as I frequently do, my grumpiness well up. And all I wanted to do was say, Dan, why don't you shut up for like maybe 30 minutes, dude? Can we just chill out? But I kept talking myself out of doing that. Because what I realized is, Dan's my buddy. And what he needs is to blow off some steam. It's his time to dance. It's his time to yell and be boisterous. It's his time to be loud and to laugh and to be joyful. That's his time. And if I rain on that parade, I am the worst of friends. If I don't recognize in myself that it's his soul's time for those things, and I don't allow him that time, I am the jerk of all jerks. So I just sucked it up, and now we joke around about it. Likewise, when someone around us is sad, when someone around us is mourning, when someone around us needs to cry, shame on us for robbing them of that time too. And shame on you for attempting to rob yourself of that time. You guys know that we just walked through something pretty difficult as a family, and that we lost Jen's dad. And there were days when she would just look at me and she would say, I'm sad. I'm just sad. And I would say, then be sad. Then today's the day to be sad. And that's all right. And there will be more days when we're sad. Our souls need those days. They're cathartic for us. They're required by us. And shame on us if we try to rob our friends and our loved ones of the sad days that they need too. Those ought to take their time and have their season. I think what we try to do is we try to skip the bad ones, right? We try to skip past, I don't like this time of mourning. I want to skip to my time of laughter. I don't like this time of stillness. I want to skip to the time of dancing. I don't like this time of sadness. I want to skip to my time of joy. And what Solomon is saying is, no, there's a time for both. You can't experience true joy if you don't let yourself walk through true grief. The dancing isn't as joyful if you haven't set in pensive silence. Right? So I didn't want to move past this passage without making the point to you guys, without imploring you, let the seasons have their time. When it's a time for dying, let it be a time for dying. When it's a time for birth, let it be that. If someone you love needs to be sad, let them be sad. Don't be the clumsy moron that tries to convince them that what they're going through is not that sad. Our souls need the good times and the hard times, and we shouldn't skip them. But what I really want you to see from this passage today is that if what he writes is true, there's a time for mourning, and there's a time for joy, and there's a time for gladness, and there's a time for sorrow true, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for joy and there's a time for gladness and there's a time for sorrow and there's a time for dancing and there's a time for stillness. If that's true, then all of those times are coming for all of us. Do you understand? It doesn't say for the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous there are more times to laugh. For the righteous there are more times to build things up. For the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous, there are more times to laugh. For the righteous, there are more times to build things up. For the righteous, there are more times for embracing. No, it just says that this is objectively true. Everybody walks through these seasons. The righteous and the unrighteous. The godly and the ungodly. The devout Christian and the militant atheist. All of us walk through these seasons. And it may feel weird to you that I'm hammering this point home that like, hey, guess what, guys? At some point or another, life is cruddy for everybody. But it is. It's also joyful for everybody. But no one dodges the raindrops of pain and tragedy in their life. Nobody. And if we will accept that, then what we can learn and see from this passage is pain is not punitive. Pain, hurt, struggle, hardship, that's not punitive. That's not God exacting revenge on you for a failure in your morality somewhere. That's not God punishing you. Pain is not punitive. It is the result of brokenness. We don't experience pain and hardship in our life because at some point in our past, we displeased God with the choices that we make, and now he's exacting his revenge on us. That's not how it works. Pain is not punitive. Pain is a result of brokenness. We've talked about this before, but God created heaven and earth, and he created it perfect, and then sin ruined that perfection. And ever since then, the world is broken. And in a broken world, divorces happen and abuse happens and people get cancer and we have to watch Parkinson's and all these other diseases eat away at people that we love. In a broken world, cruddy things happen. And what Solomon is acknowledging is not only do they happen, but they happen to everybody. And yes, in general, proverbial wisdom is true. In general, if you honor God in the way that you make your choices, then you will be honored as well. But just understand that that isn't a blanket insurance policy against pain because time and chance happen to us all. And we walk through all these seasons equally. And it's important to know when we get there that that pain is not punitive. That pain isn't something that we warrant with our behavior. This actually shows up in the New Testament. Someone is blind, and the disciples look at the blind man, and they say, what happened to him? What did his parents do that he's been blinded like this way? They thought pain was punitive. They thought his actions warranted, or his parents' actions warranted what he did. And Jesus says, now this world is just broken. He says what Solomon says. In this world where we wait for Jesus to come back, like Romans 8 talks about all of creation groans for the return of the Savior, for the return of the King, for Jesus to come and make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And spoiler alert, this is where we're going to finish the series. But while we wait, we all walk through these seasons. And it's so important for us to understand that pain is not punitive. Here's why I think this. I don't know if I have permission to share her story. If I don't, I'm sorry. Kay Gamble also sits on our finance committee and approves my expenses on a monthly basis. So, you know, she has a way to nail me if she doesn't appreciate me sharing this story. But Kay is a wonderful lady who goes here and a few months ago was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctor looked at the breast cancer and said, I think it's offerable. I think we can get it. I think it's going to be okay. She went in. She got it. And Kay, if you know her, she's quiet. Of course, she doesn't tell anybody about this. I only hear about this after the fact. They go in. They get it. Everything's good. Doctor says, we got it all. I think you're going to be in good shape. You don't have to do chemo or anything like that. We're going to give you a pill to kind of be on the safe side. You'll take that for five years, but you're good. You can go on with life as normal. So there's some pain and then a relief. Everything's good. Then she gets a call a couple of days later. The doctor said, hey, we took another look at that cancer, and it's the kind that likes to spread a lot. So we're going to have to be pretty aggressive with this, and we're going to need you to start doing chemo. Man, we're all old enough to know what chemo is. We know what that does. We know what that looks like. And we know the kinds of days that Kay is facing. And that stinks because Kay's good. And I want her to know that those cruddy days that she has to walk through are not God punishing her. That's not punitive. She doesn't have to search her soul and say, God, what have I done in the last 10, 20 years of my life to warrant this pain? What have I done to warrant this bad news? How did I disappoint you? How did I displease you? What would you like me to do now, God? Would you like me to give more, serve more, or love more? Which the answer is always yes to that. He would always like us to give and love and serve more. But not as a shield to pain. And how crushing would it be to go through life thinking that every time we experience some form of difficulty, some form of grief, that that was somehow God turning the screws on us so that we learned our lesson better. What I want Kay to understand in this season of cruddiness amidst the chemo is that it's just simply her turn. It's her turn. Her life stinks for a little bit. And guess what? All of our lives stink for a little bit sometimes. They have before, and here's the fun thing, they're going to again. It just will. It's Kay's turn. Recently, it was our turn. For some of you, it's still your turn. I know stories of people and loss and tragedy that we've experienced just in this church. And I just think that there is something tremendously comforting about looking at a season of grief with the understanding of, it's my turn right now. It's my time to mourn. But what I know is, eventually it'll be my time to sing. It's my time to tear things down. But eventually, if I put my head down, it'll be my time to build things up. And in this way, and I think that this is beautiful, Ecclesiastes empathizes with our experiences. It actually empathizes with us. It's a brave, bold thing to say. To admit, yeah, we should obey God. We should pursue the proverbial wisdom. But what a wonderful admission in the Bible that actually syncs up with our experience to say sometimes bad things happen to good people. I've told you before, I had a roommate in college who was a better person than me in every way possible. He graduated. He became a pastor. He was leading churches before I was, and I always admired him more than I cared to admit, and he dropped dead at 30 of a widow-maker heart attack playing ultimate frisbee with his friends. It will never make any sense to me how he left and I stayed, and how his wife Carla and his boys had to walk through that. I remember his five-year-old knocking on his coffin wondering when he was going to wake up. But what Ecclesiastes says is, it was Chris's time to die. It was Carla's turn to walk that hard road. Sometimes bad things happen. And even though the best possible investment of our life is to pursue God and godliness, we need to do it eyes wide open knowing that that does not protect us from tragedy. We're never told that it does. That time and chance happen to us all. What a difficult thing it would be to have to try to sync up my faith to somehow explain away Chris's death as deserved. What a difficult thing it would be to try to help Carla find a path back to faith, which she has found, if part of that explanation would be, well, you guys deserve this because of your behavior. Ecclesiastes looks around and goes, yeah, sometimes life doesn't make sense. Sometimes it seems unfair. And sometimes it's just our turn. And we understand that everybody takes a turn. But here's the thing. I have been kind of sitting in that reality for a while in my personal life. It's been our turn recently. Our turn's still not over. And I've been studying this book, which is stark, man. But somehow, despite all of that, in thinking about what awaits us in the next two weeks and allowing my life to sit in that. And we're going to come back next week. Next week's going to be happy, I promise. Next week's going to be great, all right? We're going to cry some happy tears next week. It's going to feel better than this. In the midst of everything that we have been walking through, because of the promises that are in Ecclesiastes and because of the encouraging things that he writes that we're going to talk about next week. I can honestly tell you that for me personally, I am sitting in the middle of a time of more profound joy than I think I've ever experienced in my life, of more gratitude for my God, more gratitude for my Savior, more of a desire for Him. And I want you guys to experience that joy too. And so next week we're going to come back and I'm going to tell you all about it. Let's pray. Father, life's hard sometimes. We are so thankful that you gave your servant Solomon the courage to admit that. Father, we all have to hurt sometimes. We are thankful that we have a Jesus who weeps with us in our pain. Lord, if it is someone's season to be sad right now, I pray that they would just be sad. And that that would run the course that it needs to run. God, if it is someone's time for joy right now, let them be joyful. Let them be exuberant. Let them feel your presence and your joy. For those of us who are walking through a hard time, Lord, I pray that we would be comforted by this stark knowledge that sometimes it's just our turn. And I know there are folks who feel like, gosh, it feels like it's been my turn a lot lately. Lord, I pray that you would give them lots of turns of joy too. Let all of this, our pain, our triumph, our struggle, and our joy, draw us near to you. Either in gratitude or in need, Father, draw us near to you. And Father, I pray that in that drawing that we would find what David describes as the fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. Help us see more and more our gratitude for you and our need for you. It's in your son's name that we pray. Amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everyone. It's good to see you. Thanks for being here. Happy New Year's. I'm so grateful that you've chosen to make grace not just a part of your Sunday, but by being here the first Sunday of the year, you're at least, some of us are going, and you know, I didn't go to church enough last year, so I'm going to come more this year. Great. Go Bills back there, by the way. Go Bills up here. By the way, who do you all play in today? The other team. I hope you beat the other team. That's great. And today's a fun day for me as a Falcons fan because all you jerk Panthers fans that cheer for an Arena League team now have to cheer for my team so you can make the playoffs. So go Falcons today. Yeah, we can get behind it. Yes. All right. Good deal. Well, listen, thanks for making church a part of your year and a part of your Sunday. I hope we don't let you down. If you're watching online, wherever you are, whatever you may be doing, thank you for doing that. This is the time of year where everybody, for the most part, assesses the person that they are and thinks about the kind of person that they'd like to become or that they'd like to be. And so this is the time of year when we tend to set goals for ourselves, whether you're comfortable with the idea of New Year's resolutions or just in general setting goals that we have for ourselves, this is the time of year when we do that. If you haven't thought about that, if you're not doing that, if this has not occurred to you, then I can only assume about you that either you think you're nailing it, like you're just so good at life, no notes, no changes. I hope the next year is just as good as the last four years. And if that's you, you're a jerk. All right. There's some notes for you. Or you've given up, which I wouldn't blame you for. But maybe let's try to log in and set some goals and think about the kind of people that we want to be in the new year. We've done that in our house. We've set some goals. Jen wants to be a more supportive and loving wife, and I'm so grateful that she has set that goal for us this year. I'm trying to be a more accepting husband of her faults. And so in that way, we're hoping for a better marriage in 20... I'm so sorry, Jen. I'm sorry for all of that. So in that vein, in thinking about how we want to be in the new year, the series that we're going to be in for the next four weeks is simply called You'll Be Glad You Did. And what we're going to do is look at some proverbial wisdom from the book of Proverbs written by King Solomon, who is, we are told, the wisest man to ever live. And just look at his wisdom and with the premise of if we'll simply listen to him and take his advice this year, we'll be glad we did. And one of the reasons I wanted to open the year with it is simply this. I don't know where you are spiritually. I don't know where you are on that journey. I don't know how much of what we're selling you're buying, I don't know. Many of you who are here are Christians. You would call yourself a Christian. God is your Father. Jesus is your Savior. Wonderful. Some of you may be kicking the tires going, is church worth it? When I get to talk to those people, I used to lead high school Bible studies. I was close with the high school football coaches at my last church, and I would go lead Bible studies for the football teams, optional, after practice on a certain day of the week. And I would always start with them with Proverbs. Because in Proverbs, you don't have to believe in everything to follow the advice that we find there. But here's what I will posit to you. If you listen to the wisdom of Solomon in Proverbs, you'll be glad you did. I hope that you'll listen to that wisdom. And for those of you who don't yet know Jesus, I hope that by listening to that wisdom, it gives you more trust in the other words in this book, and you come to faith in Jesus, and you come to call yourself a Christian and believe in God as your Father and Jesus as your Savior, because you entered in from this perspective of Proverbs, which is simply, if we listen to the wisest man who's ever lived, who points us towards Jesus, we will be glad we did. So that's all I'm inviting you to do today. And this morning, I'm particularly excited about the topic, because it's one that is very dear to me. And so I'll just say this up front. Here's my goal this morning. I'm going to say this and then preach to it. And we'll return to it in 25 minutes or so. But here's my goal for you this year. Set some friend goals this year. We all have goals that we're setting. I hope you do. I hope there are things that you want to accomplish in your life. I hope there's some goals that you're setting for yourself. I'm going to exercise. I'm not going to eat sugar. I'm not going to drink this. I'm not going to ingest that. I'm going to show up at work and actually care about what I'm doing. Whatever it is that might be your goal, I hope you're setting some goals this year. But what I would like to encourage you to do is to set some friend goals this year. And this is something that means so much to me. I never, and you guys who have been here a long time, you know this to be true. I never ever establish myself as moral exemplar. I'm the pastor. Don't giggle, Zach. I'm making a point. This is important. Shut up. I never approach talking to you as if I am on some moral high ground and I'm trying to help you get on my level. Ever. I think that's disrespectful. I've actually said that I live my life the way that I do as a favor to you so it's easy to not put me on a pedestal. I'm helping you in that way. That's why I cuss. Just not on stage. But here's what I would say about this one this week. I know how to be a good friend. I know how to be a friend. Friendship is one of the most important things to me in my life. As a matter of fact, I've told Jen, you can ask her afterwards, because the other thing I said about her is absolutely not true, but this is true. I've told her, in the case of my untimely demise, the only thing I want on my headstone, if we can afford one, is Nate was a friend. That's what I want. Nate was a friend to his wife, to his church, to his co-workers, to his children, to his parents, to his friends. Nate was a friend. It's deeply important to me. And I hope that friendship is deeply important to you. And here's what I would say as a person who is fortunate enough to have some good, deep friendships. As a matter of fact, Jen and I were driving back this Christmas. Excuse me. We were driving back home. When you come from Atlanta, really it's from Athens, there's two ways to come home. The fast way is to come just straight 85, and we do that every time. But this time, judge me if you'd like, and you probably should, but we chose to go the long way, 20 to Florence and then 95 north. Do you know why? Who knows why? Who knows why we went that way? Does anybody know? Buc-ee's. Yes, ma'am. Buc-ee's. That's why. We wasted 30 minutes of our lives so that we could take our children to Buc-ee's and buy beef jerky that I still have at the house. No, I will not share it because it was hard-earned. It was a stupid decision. I'll never make it again. But as I was driving, I had set my cruise at 8 over. That's just what I do. I set it at 78. I don't know if our resident highway patrol officer is in the crowd, but I don't think he would pull me over for that. I set it at 78. So I'm going, and I'm speeding. I know I'm speeding, but I'm not speeding by a lot. Like, come on, get over it. It's fine. I'm just trying to get home. And I pass a cop. And, of course, I'm in my rearview mirror. Is this cop following me? Am I about to get pulled over? And so then I start the doom spiral. If he pulls me over, I don't have a license. Okay? I have a license. I'm a licensed driver. Don't worry about that. I just lost it. And I lost it weeks ago. And I went online. Get this. This is just my personal complaint. This doesn't need to be in a sermon. I'm just telling you. I went online to try to replace my lost license. And as a part of that, they asked me for my license number. How am I going to know that? I lost it. Do any of you take a picture of your license and save it just in case? Like, no. So I don't have a license right now. Okay. And I'm like, if I get pulled over, he's going to ask for my license and I'm going to have to say, I don't, I don't have one officer. And then he's going to say, and this is further judgment, I understand. Then he's going to say, well, do you have a proof of insurance? I'm going to say, no, I don't carry that around. I assume you have a database you can look it up in. And then at that point, he's going to arrest me in front of my family. He's going to pull me out of the car and he's going to put handcuffs on me and arrest me in front of my family. At this point, I'm about in Goldsboro, North Carolina, just past Fort Bragg. I have no idea how Fort Bragg and Fayetteville has that many exits on 95. Jen and I felt like we were in a Twilight Zone doom loop coming home trying to get through Fort Bragg. But we had just gotten through and I'm like, I'm going to get arrested and they're going to take me to jail and I'm going to look at Jen and I'm going to say, let's just be calm, just take it easy, just get the kids home. We don't need to upset them for this. I'm going to be fine. They're going to take me to jail. And I thought to myself, who am I going to call? And I thought, I'm going to call Harris Winston. I'm going to call Harris. Because I know if I call Harris, I'm going to say, hey, dude, I'm in jail in Goldsboro. I need you to come bail me out. And Harris, at 9 o'clock at night, is going to go, and I would have called Chris, except I knew he'd be asleep. That's useless. I knew that Harris would be like, all right, dude, I'll see you in 45 minutes. And come down there and bail me out, no questions asked. And then in the car, as we're driving home, he would go, what did you do? I know I have those kinds of friends. Everybody needs those kinds of friends. The people you can call at any hour of the night who will show up and help you. There's this great line from a movie, and I don't remember the movie or the actors, but I just know that the main character walks into a room and says something to the effect of, hey, I need you to come with me. We're going to hurt some people and do illegal things, and you can't ask any questions about it, or you enter out. And the person that he's speaking to says, whose car do you want to take? Those are the kinds of friends we need. I'm not standing here supporting your illegal activities. I'm just hypothetically saying if you wanted to engage in them, you need some friends who will without asking questions. We need those kinds of friends in our life. But here's what I know. And I have those and I'm so grateful for them. But here's what I know about friends. Okay? Friends are like children. They are fundamentally inconvenient. Okay? Friends are like children. They are fundamentally inconvenient. You'll hear this side isn't laughing because you think it's inappropriate. This side that has young children is they're all giggling because they know it's true. I heard a comedian in an interview on a podcast say that children are fundamentally inconvenient, and I thought, well, that's absolutely true. John and Lily, my two children, they inconvenience me every day. They're looking forward to inconveniencing me when I'm done doing this. But friends are like that. They're fundamentally inconvenient. Just this last weekend, John and Lily had some friends over. For the sake of anonymity, we'll call them Chandler and Jackson Johnson. And they were over, and John comes downstairs crying. Jen had absconded and gone to the grocery store, leaving me with the children by myself. And I was watching them diligently. And John comes downstairs and is upset and he's crying. And I said, what's wrong, buddy? John's four and a half, so when you're four and a half, you cry about anything with no regard to reality. And I said, what's wrong, buddy? And he said that he was upset and I got it out of him. He was upset because Jackson wasn't playing right. Because John got a castle for Christmas that had knights and a wizard and a king and a queen and a dragon, and they all have certain roles to play. And in John's mind, clearly the dragon's the enemy attacking the castle. But he had decided that the wizard was team dragon instead of team castle. And Jackson really was ardent in his belief that the wizard was pro-castle and anti-dragon, which I've got to say, I think Jackson's right on this one. But he wasn't playing right. Meaning, he's not playing the way I want him to play. He's not listening to me and letting me boss him around. And I told him, yeah, son, that's what friends are. They don't always play right. But if you want to be a good friend, then you have to learn to play the way that they want to play. And this doesn't change as adults. Our friends don't always play right. If you go golfing with your friend, they might reach a level of anger that is unwarranted based on their level of practice. But you have to deal with it because they may not know how to play right. They may play too fast or too slow. I say, when you golf and you address the ball, the longer it takes you to hit it, the better that shot needs to be. Otherwise, just be bad quickly and let's move forward. Some of our friends don't gossip enough for our tastes. All right? We like to get some more deets. Some gossip too much, and we're like, that's enough, and I don't trust you. Some friends show up late. Some friends, like Keith Cathcart, when he texts you, will text you 95 times in a row until you have to silence the messages because I'm doing other stuff, Keith, and I don't care about the Steelers right now. Thank you, Jeff. Our friends don't play right, but it's still worth it to invest in them. It's still worth it to have them. And we still need to consider who our friends are. And that's not something that I just think from living life. That's something that has been ingrained in me since I was a child. And it starts with this verse in Proverbs 13, verse 20, which says, Now, when I memorized it, I memorized it this way. The companion of the wise will become wise, and the companion of fools will suffer harm. Growing up in my house, what was told to me over and over again is this simple thought, which is simply, show me your friends, and I'll show you your future. Statistically speaking, it's true empirically that we become the average of the five people that we spend the most time around. And so this morning, as we begin the year, I want to ask you, who are your closest friends? Who's the person you would call if you got arrested in Goldsboro? Who's the person that you could call in the middle of the night that would answer their phone and show up where you needed them to be? Who are the people that when your spouse goes out of town and you want to have a fun hang, you go, hey, and you text, let's do steaks, let's go out, let's play golf, let's go watch a movie. Let's go, I don't know what girls do. Let's brush each other's hair for fun. Whatever it is. Who are the people that you call and say, I've got some free time. Let's hang. Who are those folks? Who are the people that on Christmas you texted? Said, hey, I'm grateful for you. Merry Christmas. Who are the people on January 1st you texted? Hey, I'm grateful for you. Happy New Year. Who are your friends? Not your acquaintances. We all have acquaintances. Who are your friends? Who are the people that show up for you no matter what? Who are the people that you love? And here's this. This is going to be harder for the men than the women. And you may reject it on its face. That's fine. That's your issue to deal with in therapy. Who are the people that you have told them, I love you? I love you. I'm grateful for you. Men, men, be man enough to tell the people in your life that you love that you love them. Make sure they know. And make sure you show it. And so this morning I'm asking you, men and women, who are the five people that you spend the most time with? Who are you becoming like? Who is shaping you inexorably into the person that you are becoming? Because I remind you, and I'm asking you that question here at the top of the year, so you can think about it as you go through 2026. Who are the people that you spend the most time around who are shaping the person that you are becoming? Here's why I ask this and why I think it's important and worth talking about on Sunday. I say to you often, I quote this verse all the time. It's one of my favorite ones, Ephesians 2.10. You are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that you might walk in them. Parents. Phil, nodding your head. Your son Wyatt is 10. Is he 10 yet? A couple weeks. Lily, too. Do you know what my job is and your job is? It's not to get them to behave as a 10-year-old, although you're doing great at that. No thanks to faith. It is your job and my job to help Wyatt and Lily identify their good works and empower them to walk in those. Man to man, I'm emotional as I say it. You guys too. That's our job. How do we help our children identify their good works and walk in them? That's the job of parents. Your job as adults, what are your good works? What did God create you to do? And how might you walk in them? Whatever those are. And I'm not here today to expound on that or articulate upon those. But I want us to capture that idea. Because as we think about our friends, I think this question is important. Who can I surround myself with that will help me become the person God created me to be? Who can I surround myself with that will help me become the person that God created me to be. Now I was talking to Jen about this sermon this week and she made a great point to me to answer this question. Who can I surround myself with that will help me become the person that God created me to be? If it is true that I become the average of the five people that I spend the most time with, then who should I be spending my time with? And here's what she says is the mark of a good friend. A good friend listens to everything you have to say. You go get dinner, you call on the phone, whatever it is, you go grab a drink and you're talking and you say everything you need to say. Here's what's happening at work. Here's what's happening in my marriage. Here's where I don't like my kids. Here's what's going on with other people in my life. Here's all the things. And you just kind of unload, right, on your friend because that's what friends do. Friends listen. But here's the mark of a good friend. They don't just listen to you, but they hear you and then they take you and they point you back to Jesus. I hear all of that. I'm so sorry for what's happening at your work. I'm so sorry that your husband or your wife is disappointing you in that way. I'm so sorry that your kids are so difficult in this season of life. I'm so sorry that that amount of stress is on you right now. That's a big decision that you have to make, and I'm not sure I can correctly advise you on how to make it. But where do we see Jesus in this? Where do we see him talking to us? Where is he guiding you spiritually? What do you think God's plan is in this? What do you think God's purpose is in allowing this to go on in your life? Let me tell you something. That's another level of friend. And that's what I want you to have. Is the people that you go to and you say all the things you need to say and they hear you and they listen and then they love you enough to grab your face. Theoretically. Hopefully they're not grabbing your face. That's weird. But they love you enough to grab your face and orient it towards Christ. And say, what is he teaching you through this? Those are your true friends. Those are the ones that you can walk through fire with. Those are the ones that you need. So who do you have in your life who can grab you and hear you, who will answer the call at 3 a.m., who will come bail you out of jail if you need it, who will engage in illegal activities if they benefit you, but at the end of all of that will grab your face and point you towards Jesus. Who do you have in your life that will do that? And here's what I would say before moving on. The only thing worse than having bad friends is having no friends. The only thing worse than having bad friends is having no friends. Maybe you're sitting here this morning and I'm asking you to do a friend inventory. And you're thinking about the people in your life that you could call, the people in your life that you talk to. And you're like, man, they don't point me towards Jesus. If anything, they point me away from Jesus. They don't help me spiritually at all. I don't have good friends in my life. My friends don't point me towards him. They're not good friends. They're bad friends. They discourage me. But here's what I would tell you. At least you have some. The only thing worse than having bad friends is having no friends. I came across a statistic recently and I double checked it because it sounded absurd. But there are more people every year that die due to loneliness than people who die due to lung issues dealing with smoking. Meaning, it is statistically true that it is more dangerous to not have any friends than it is to smoke a pack a day. By being lonely, you are more at risk for mortality than you are if you smoke a pack a day. Which brings me back to this idea of needing friends. This is the whole ethic of grace, by the way. Every week we say from stage, at Grace we exist to connect people to Jesus and connect people to? Yes. This is the whole ethic of grace. I tell my non-believing friends, even if you don't buy what we are selling, it's best for you and your family to come because of the benefits you get from the community, of people investing in you and you investing in them. And I hope, as I say that, that eventually they'll believe what we believe. But even if you don't, it's better for you and your family to be a part of a church so that you're engaged in friendships, so that people look out for you, people care about you and point you towards Christ. So two thoughts quickly there. If you are someone who would say, and this is, I've done some research on it, this is largely, this is more prevalent in the male community than the female community. There's a preponderance of men in their 60s who report, I have no one that I would call a close friend. It's so sad. There's even more men that would say, I've made no new friends since my 20s. Men are bad at being friends. Do you know why? Because other people don't play right. Because you're five. That's why. You're a dope. Sorry, I don't mean that. I don't mean that. Men have a hard time making friends because to be a true friend requires some emotional vulnerability. We have to put ourselves out there. We have to share our weaknesses. And we have to trust that we're going to be met with kindness. Men are taught not to show weakness, not to show need, to be self-sufficient, to take care of ourselves. And those things are not conducive to real friendship. To be a friend, Proverbs says, to be a friend, you must show thyself friendly. We have to do that. And so, men, here's what I would tell you. Leaders lead in vulnerability. You want friends? 2026? Go make some. Put yourself out there. Invite somebody to lunch. Dude, that's going to be weird. What if they tell me that they don't want to eat lunch with me? Well, then they're not going to be your friend. Be a grown-up. Invite the next person. We need these people in our lives. And here's the other place where I would challenge you, men and women alike. I'd be willing to bet that you have people in your life that you know and you care for and you respect and you wish you were better friends with them. I bet that's true. I know that's true for us because yesterday, out of conviction, I texted another couple in the church and I said I said hey tomorrow I'm going to be preaching about friend goals and you guys are ours we love you and don't spend enough time with you or your family can you come over and hang out the only thing I'm going to ask is that you not wear Panthers gear when you come and they wouldn't even agree to that So I don't know if we're off to a great start. But I bet you have people in your life that you respect and you know would point you towards Jesus and would listen to your things. But because of your own insecurities, because of your own uncertainties, because friends are fundamentally inconvenient. I mean, listen, listen, listen. Sometimes Tuesday Nate makes plans for Friday Nate. And when Friday Nate wakes up and is reminded of Tuesday Nate's commitment, he's ticked. Because I don't want to get, like I don't want to shower and go see you people. I don't want you to come over to the house that I now have to clean maniacally. I don't want to do that. Until you get there and then Friday Nate's happy again because now I'm with my friends. It's hard to spend the time that we should spend investing in relationships with other people, but it's absolutely worth it. And so this year I started out, set some friend goals. I bet you know people who you respect, who you care for, who would point you towards Christ, and maybe you're not as close with them as you'd like to be. Let me challenge you to take steps this year. Let me challenge you to engage in more new friendships. My friends who are over 50, okay? Just talking to my over 50 crowd here. When's the last time you made a new friend? Do you have some friendships in your life that are dear to you that have slipped away? That you could re-engage? Statistics tell me that that's very likely. Who are the people that you know already that you can engage with who will point you towards Jesus and be there for you? It's worth the investment and here's one of the big reasons why. Proverbs 24 6. Surely you need guidance to wage war and victory is won through many advisors. Now I'm not espousing that any of us are about to declare war. If I were preaching at a church in Washington, D.C., I might have to couch this a little bit differently, but in Raleigh, none of us have that capacity. But the point of the verse is not really about waging war. It's about doing the wise thing in the challenge that we're facing. And Solomon's point is, the more counsel that we have, the wiser choices that we will make. And when you have friends in your life who point you towards Jesus, they will offer you wise counsel, and that counsel is invaluable. It cannot be quantified. Just in 2025, and I'm not saying this to aggrandize myself and my friendships. I'm just saying it to be a real human. In 2025, I have friends that I texted at 7.30 in the morning and I said, I need to come over. I need to talk. And when I got there, they hugged me and we all cried because of stuff that was happening in my life. They were there for me, drop of a hat, in the morning. Those are friends. I have friends that I texted. I said, I just need to process some things. Can we do dinner soon? And within a night or two, I was having beef bourbignon at La Coquette, crying over our issues with a friend that made time for me. I have a friend in my life named Trip that when I call, he answers. And when he calls, I answer. No questions asked. He called yesterday. I was working. I said, hey, man, what's up? And he goes, nothing, I'm just bored. And I said, well, then I don't have any time for you. And I hung up on him. We have not talked since. I don't care to until there's a good reason for it. But if he calls today, I will answer. And so will he. We need those friends. So the simple message for you today, who are you getting counsel from? Who is loving you? Who is pointing you towards Jesus? And most importantly, what friends do you have that will take everything from you and at the end of the conversation say, yes, I hear you. What is Jesus saying to you in this moment? What people do you have in your life that you can turn to who will turn your face towards Christ? And what kinds of people should you be pursuing in 2026? Here's the question. Who should I be friends with in 2026? And here's my point. If you think about that critically and meaningfully and act on those decisions, you'll be glad you did. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for this church family, for bringing us together and allowing us to enjoy one another. God, thank you for friends and the gift that they are. Thank you for connecting us and giving us the capacity for love and relationship and friendship. Father, I ask that everybody here would have a friend that loves them dearly, that accepts them completely, and that points them towards Christ. May we all enjoy those kinds of friendships. And God, for those of us in this room who feel lonely, I pray that that would be solved this year and that would not be a thing that we need to carry forward. And for those of us who have put up walls and maybe don't have the depth of friends that we know that we need, God, would you help us to have the courage to tear those down and invite people into our lives who point us towards you so that we might become the version of ourselves that you intended us to be. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everyone. It's good to see you. Thanks for being here. Happy New Year's. I'm so grateful that you've chosen to make grace not just a part of your Sunday, but by being here the first Sunday of the year, you're at least, some of us are going, and you know, I didn't go to church enough last year, so I'm going to come more this year. Great. Go Bills back there, by the way. Go Bills up here. By the way, who do you all play in today? The other team. I hope you beat the other team. That's great. And today's a fun day for me as a Falcons fan because all you jerk Panthers fans that cheer for an Arena League team now have to cheer for my team so you can make the playoffs. So go Falcons today. Yeah, we can get behind it. Yes. All right. Good deal. Well, listen, thanks for making church a part of your year and a part of your Sunday. I hope we don't let you down. If you're watching online, wherever you are, whatever you may be doing, thank you for doing that. This is the time of year where everybody, for the most part, assesses the person that they are and thinks about the kind of person that they'd like to become or that they'd like to be. And so this is the time of year when we tend to set goals for ourselves, whether you're comfortable with the idea of New Year's resolutions or just in general setting goals that we have for ourselves, this is the time of year when we do that. If you haven't thought about that, if you're not doing that, if this has not occurred to you, then I can only assume about you that either you think you're nailing it, like you're just so good at life, no notes, no changes. I hope the next year is just as good as the last four years. And if that's you, you're a jerk. All right. There's some notes for you. Or you've given up, which I wouldn't blame you for. But maybe let's try to log in and set some goals and think about the kind of people that we want to be in the new year. We've done that in our house. We've set some goals. Jen wants to be a more supportive and loving wife, and I'm so grateful that she has set that goal for us this year. I'm trying to be a more accepting husband of her faults. And so in that way, we're hoping for a better marriage in 20... I'm so sorry, Jen. I'm sorry for all of that. So in that vein, in thinking about how we want to be in the new year, the series that we're going to be in for the next four weeks is simply called You'll Be Glad You Did. And what we're going to do is look at some proverbial wisdom from the book of Proverbs written by King Solomon, who is, we are told, the wisest man to ever live. And just look at his wisdom and with the premise of if we'll simply listen to him and take his advice this year, we'll be glad we did. And one of the reasons I wanted to open the year with it is simply this. I don't know where you are spiritually. I don't know where you are on that journey. I don't know how much of what we're selling you're buying, I don't know. Many of you who are here are Christians. You would call yourself a Christian. God is your Father. Jesus is your Savior. Wonderful. Some of you may be kicking the tires going, is church worth it? When I get to talk to those people, I used to lead high school Bible studies. I was close with the high school football coaches at my last church, and I would go lead Bible studies for the football teams, optional, after practice on a certain day of the week. And I would always start with them with Proverbs. Because in Proverbs, you don't have to believe in everything to follow the advice that we find there. But here's what I will posit to you. If you listen to the wisdom of Solomon in Proverbs, you'll be glad you did. I hope that you'll listen to that wisdom. And for those of you who don't yet know Jesus, I hope that by listening to that wisdom, it gives you more trust in the other words in this book, and you come to faith in Jesus, and you come to call yourself a Christian and believe in God as your Father and Jesus as your Savior, because you entered in from this perspective of Proverbs, which is simply, if we listen to the wisest man who's ever lived, who points us towards Jesus, we will be glad we did. So that's all I'm inviting you to do today. And this morning, I'm particularly excited about the topic, because it's one that is very dear to me. And so I'll just say this up front. Here's my goal this morning. I'm going to say this and then preach to it. And we'll return to it in 25 minutes or so. But here's my goal for you this year. Set some friend goals this year. We all have goals that we're setting. I hope you do. I hope there are things that you want to accomplish in your life. I hope there's some goals that you're setting for yourself. I'm going to exercise. I'm not going to eat sugar. I'm not going to drink this. I'm not going to ingest that. I'm going to show up at work and actually care about what I'm doing. Whatever it is that might be your goal, I hope you're setting some goals this year. But what I would like to encourage you to do is to set some friend goals this year. And this is something that means so much to me. I never, and you guys who have been here a long time, you know this to be true. I never ever establish myself as moral exemplar. I'm the pastor. Don't giggle, Zach. I'm making a point. This is important. Shut up. I never approach talking to you as if I am on some moral high ground and I'm trying to help you get on my level. Ever. I think that's disrespectful. I've actually said that I live my life the way that I do as a favor to you so it's easy to not put me on a pedestal. I'm helping you in that way. That's why I cuss. Just not on stage. But here's what I would say about this one this week. I know how to be a good friend. I know how to be a friend. Friendship is one of the most important things to me in my life. As a matter of fact, I've told Jen, you can ask her afterwards, because the other thing I said about her is absolutely not true, but this is true. I've told her, in the case of my untimely demise, the only thing I want on my headstone, if we can afford one, is Nate was a friend. That's what I want. Nate was a friend to his wife, to his church, to his co-workers, to his children, to his parents, to his friends. Nate was a friend. It's deeply important to me. And I hope that friendship is deeply important to you. And here's what I would say as a person who is fortunate enough to have some good, deep friendships. As a matter of fact, Jen and I were driving back this Christmas. Excuse me. We were driving back home. When you come from Atlanta, really it's from Athens, there's two ways to come home. The fast way is to come just straight 85, and we do that every time. But this time, judge me if you'd like, and you probably should, but we chose to go the long way, 20 to Florence and then 95 north. Do you know why? Who knows why? Who knows why we went that way? Does anybody know? Buc-ee's. Yes, ma'am. Buc-ee's. That's why. We wasted 30 minutes of our lives so that we could take our children to Buc-ee's and buy beef jerky that I still have at the house. No, I will not share it because it was hard-earned. It was a stupid decision. I'll never make it again. But as I was driving, I had set my cruise at 8 over. That's just what I do. I set it at 78. I don't know if our resident highway patrol officer is in the crowd, but I don't think he would pull me over for that. I set it at 78. So I'm going, and I'm speeding. I know I'm speeding, but I'm not speeding by a lot. Like, come on, get over it. It's fine. I'm just trying to get home. And I pass a cop. And, of course, I'm in my rearview mirror. Is this cop following me? Am I about to get pulled over? And so then I start the doom spiral. If he pulls me over, I don't have a license. Okay? I have a license. I'm a licensed driver. Don't worry about that. I just lost it. And I lost it weeks ago. And I went online. Get this. This is just my personal complaint. This doesn't need to be in a sermon. I'm just telling you. I went online to try to replace my lost license. And as a part of that, they asked me for my license number. How am I going to know that? I lost it. Do any of you take a picture of your license and save it just in case? Like, no. So I don't have a license right now. Okay. And I'm like, if I get pulled over, he's going to ask for my license and I'm going to have to say, I don't, I don't have one officer. And then he's going to say, and this is further judgment, I understand. Then he's going to say, well, do you have a proof of insurance? I'm going to say, no, I don't carry that around. I assume you have a database you can look it up in. And then at that point, he's going to arrest me in front of my family. He's going to pull me out of the car and he's going to put handcuffs on me and arrest me in front of my family. At this point, I'm about in Goldsboro, North Carolina, just past Fort Bragg. I have no idea how Fort Bragg and Fayetteville has that many exits on 95. Jen and I felt like we were in a Twilight Zone doom loop coming home trying to get through Fort Bragg. But we had just gotten through and I'm like, I'm going to get arrested and they're going to take me to jail and I'm going to look at Jen and I'm going to say, let's just be calm, just take it easy, just get the kids home. We don't need to upset them for this. I'm going to be fine. They're going to take me to jail. And I thought to myself, who am I going to call? And I thought, I'm going to call Harris Winston. I'm going to call Harris. Because I know if I call Harris, I'm going to say, hey, dude, I'm in jail in Goldsboro. I need you to come bail me out. And Harris, at 9 o'clock at night, is going to go, and I would have called Chris, except I knew he'd be asleep. That's useless. I knew that Harris would be like, all right, dude, I'll see you in 45 minutes. And come down there and bail me out, no questions asked. And then in the car, as we're driving home, he would go, what did you do? I know I have those kinds of friends. Everybody needs those kinds of friends. The people you can call at any hour of the night who will show up and help you. There's this great line from a movie, and I don't remember the movie or the actors, but I just know that the main character walks into a room and says something to the effect of, hey, I need you to come with me. We're going to hurt some people and do illegal things, and you can't ask any questions about it, or you enter out. And the person that he's speaking to says, whose car do you want to take? Those are the kinds of friends we need. I'm not standing here supporting your illegal activities. I'm just hypothetically saying if you wanted to engage in them, you need some friends who will without asking questions. We need those kinds of friends in our life. But here's what I know. And I have those and I'm so grateful for them. But here's what I know about friends. Okay? Friends are like children. They are fundamentally inconvenient. Okay? Friends are like children. They are fundamentally inconvenient. You'll hear this side isn't laughing because you think it's inappropriate. This side that has young children is they're all giggling because they know it's true. I heard a comedian in an interview on a podcast say that children are fundamentally inconvenient, and I thought, well, that's absolutely true. John and Lily, my two children, they inconvenience me every day. They're looking forward to inconveniencing me when I'm done doing this. But friends are like that. They're fundamentally inconvenient. Just this last weekend, John and Lily had some friends over. For the sake of anonymity, we'll call them Chandler and Jackson Johnson. And they were over, and John comes downstairs crying. Jen had absconded and gone to the grocery store, leaving me with the children by myself. And I was watching them diligently. And John comes downstairs and is upset and he's crying. And I said, what's wrong, buddy? John's four and a half, so when you're four and a half, you cry about anything with no regard to reality. And I said, what's wrong, buddy? And he said that he was upset and I got it out of him. He was upset because Jackson wasn't playing right. Because John got a castle for Christmas that had knights and a wizard and a king and a queen and a dragon, and they all have certain roles to play. And in John's mind, clearly the dragon's the enemy attacking the castle. But he had decided that the wizard was team dragon instead of team castle. And Jackson really was ardent in his belief that the wizard was pro-castle and anti-dragon, which I've got to say, I think Jackson's right on this one. But he wasn't playing right. Meaning, he's not playing the way I want him to play. He's not listening to me and letting me boss him around. And I told him, yeah, son, that's what friends are. They don't always play right. But if you want to be a good friend, then you have to learn to play the way that they want to play. And this doesn't change as adults. Our friends don't always play right. If you go golfing with your friend, they might reach a level of anger that is unwarranted based on their level of practice. But you have to deal with it because they may not know how to play right. They may play too fast or too slow. I say, when you golf and you address the ball, the longer it takes you to hit it, the better that shot needs to be. Otherwise, just be bad quickly and let's move forward. Some of our friends don't gossip enough for our tastes. All right? We like to get some more deets. Some gossip too much, and we're like, that's enough, and I don't trust you. Some friends show up late. Some friends, like Keith Cathcart, when he texts you, will text you 95 times in a row until you have to silence the messages because I'm doing other stuff, Keith, and I don't care about the Steelers right now. Thank you, Jeff. Our friends don't play right, but it's still worth it to invest in them. It's still worth it to have them. And we still need to consider who our friends are. And that's not something that I just think from living life. That's something that has been ingrained in me since I was a child. And it starts with this verse in Proverbs 13, verse 20, which says, Now, when I memorized it, I memorized it this way. The companion of the wise will become wise, and the companion of fools will suffer harm. Growing up in my house, what was told to me over and over again is this simple thought, which is simply, show me your friends, and I'll show you your future. Statistically speaking, it's true empirically that we become the average of the five people that we spend the most time around. And so this morning, as we begin the year, I want to ask you, who are your closest friends? Who's the person you would call if you got arrested in Goldsboro? Who's the person that you could call in the middle of the night that would answer their phone and show up where you needed them to be? Who are the people that when your spouse goes out of town and you want to have a fun hang, you go, hey, and you text, let's do steaks, let's go out, let's play golf, let's go watch a movie. Let's go, I don't know what girls do. Let's brush each other's hair for fun. Whatever it is. Who are the people that you call and say, I've got some free time. Let's hang. Who are those folks? Who are the people that on Christmas you texted? Said, hey, I'm grateful for you. Merry Christmas. Who are the people on January 1st you texted? Hey, I'm grateful for you. Happy New Year. Who are your friends? Not your acquaintances. We all have acquaintances. Who are your friends? Who are the people that show up for you no matter what? Who are the people that you love? And here's this. This is going to be harder for the men than the women. And you may reject it on its face. That's fine. That's your issue to deal with in therapy. Who are the people that you have told them, I love you? I love you. I'm grateful for you. Men, men, be man enough to tell the people in your life that you love that you love them. Make sure they know. And make sure you show it. And so this morning I'm asking you, men and women, who are the five people that you spend the most time with? Who are you becoming like? Who is shaping you inexorably into the person that you are becoming? Because I remind you, and I'm asking you that question here at the top of the year, so you can think about it as you go through 2026. Who are the people that you spend the most time around who are shaping the person that you are becoming? Here's why I ask this and why I think it's important and worth talking about on Sunday. I say to you often, I quote this verse all the time. It's one of my favorite ones, Ephesians 2.10. You are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that you might walk in them. Parents. Phil, nodding your head. Your son Wyatt is 10. Is he 10 yet? A couple weeks. Lily, too. Do you know what my job is and your job is? It's not to get them to behave as a 10-year-old, although you're doing great at that. No thanks to faith. It is your job and my job to help Wyatt and Lily identify their good works and empower them to walk in those. Man to man, I'm emotional as I say it. You guys too. That's our job. How do we help our children identify their good works and walk in them? That's the job of parents. Your job as adults, what are your good works? What did God create you to do? And how might you walk in them? Whatever those are. And I'm not here today to expound on that or articulate upon those. But I want us to capture that idea. Because as we think about our friends, I think this question is important. Who can I surround myself with that will help me become the person God created me to be? Who can I surround myself with that will help me become the person that God created me to be. Now I was talking to Jen about this sermon this week and she made a great point to me to answer this question. Who can I surround myself with that will help me become the person that God created me to be? If it is true that I become the average of the five people that I spend the most time with, then who should I be spending my time with? And here's what she says is the mark of a good friend. A good friend listens to everything you have to say. You go get dinner, you call on the phone, whatever it is, you go grab a drink and you're talking and you say everything you need to say. Here's what's happening at work. Here's what's happening in my marriage. Here's where I don't like my kids. Here's what's going on with other people in my life. Here's all the things. And you just kind of unload, right, on your friend because that's what friends do. Friends listen. But here's the mark of a good friend. They don't just listen to you, but they hear you and then they take you and they point you back to Jesus. I hear all of that. I'm so sorry for what's happening at your work. I'm so sorry that your husband or your wife is disappointing you in that way. I'm so sorry that your kids are so difficult in this season of life. I'm so sorry that that amount of stress is on you right now. That's a big decision that you have to make, and I'm not sure I can correctly advise you on how to make it. But where do we see Jesus in this? Where do we see him talking to us? Where is he guiding you spiritually? What do you think God's plan is in this? What do you think God's purpose is in allowing this to go on in your life? Let me tell you something. That's another level of friend. And that's what I want you to have. Is the people that you go to and you say all the things you need to say and they hear you and they listen and then they love you enough to grab your face. Theoretically. Hopefully they're not grabbing your face. That's weird. But they love you enough to grab your face and orient it towards Christ. And say, what is he teaching you through this? Those are your true friends. Those are the ones that you can walk through fire with. Those are the ones that you need. So who do you have in your life who can grab you and hear you, who will answer the call at 3 a.m., who will come bail you out of jail if you need it, who will engage in illegal activities if they benefit you, but at the end of all of that will grab your face and point you towards Jesus. Who do you have in your life that will do that? And here's what I would say before moving on. The only thing worse than having bad friends is having no friends. The only thing worse than having bad friends is having no friends. Maybe you're sitting here this morning and I'm asking you to do a friend inventory. And you're thinking about the people in your life that you could call, the people in your life that you talk to. And you're like, man, they don't point me towards Jesus. If anything, they point me away from Jesus. They don't help me spiritually at all. I don't have good friends in my life. My friends don't point me towards him. They're not good friends. They're bad friends. They discourage me. But here's what I would tell you. At least you have some. The only thing worse than having bad friends is having no friends. I came across a statistic recently and I double checked it because it sounded absurd. But there are more people every year that die due to loneliness than people who die due to lung issues dealing with smoking. Meaning, it is statistically true that it is more dangerous to not have any friends than it is to smoke a pack a day. By being lonely, you are more at risk for mortality than you are if you smoke a pack a day. Which brings me back to this idea of needing friends. This is the whole ethic of grace, by the way. Every week we say from stage, at Grace we exist to connect people to Jesus and connect people to? Yes. This is the whole ethic of grace. I tell my non-believing friends, even if you don't buy what we are selling, it's best for you and your family to come because of the benefits you get from the community, of people investing in you and you investing in them. And I hope, as I say that, that eventually they'll believe what we believe. But even if you don't, it's better for you and your family to be a part of a church so that you're engaged in friendships, so that people look out for you, people care about you and point you towards Christ. So two thoughts quickly there. If you are someone who would say, and this is, I've done some research on it, this is largely, this is more prevalent in the male community than the female community. There's a preponderance of men in their 60s who report, I have no one that I would call a close friend. It's so sad. There's even more men that would say, I've made no new friends since my 20s. Men are bad at being friends. Do you know why? Because other people don't play right. Because you're five. That's why. You're a dope. Sorry, I don't mean that. I don't mean that. Men have a hard time making friends because to be a true friend requires some emotional vulnerability. We have to put ourselves out there. We have to share our weaknesses. And we have to trust that we're going to be met with kindness. Men are taught not to show weakness, not to show need, to be self-sufficient, to take care of ourselves. And those things are not conducive to real friendship. To be a friend, Proverbs says, to be a friend, you must show thyself friendly. We have to do that. And so, men, here's what I would tell you. Leaders lead in vulnerability. You want friends? 2026? Go make some. Put yourself out there. Invite somebody to lunch. Dude, that's going to be weird. What if they tell me that they don't want to eat lunch with me? Well, then they're not going to be your friend. Be a grown-up. Invite the next person. We need these people in our lives. And here's the other place where I would challenge you, men and women alike. I'd be willing to bet that you have people in your life that you know and you care for and you respect and you wish you were better friends with them. I bet that's true. I know that's true for us because yesterday, out of conviction, I texted another couple in the church and I said I said hey tomorrow I'm going to be preaching about friend goals and you guys are ours we love you and don't spend enough time with you or your family can you come over and hang out the only thing I'm going to ask is that you not wear Panthers gear when you come and they wouldn't even agree to that So I don't know if we're off to a great start. But I bet you have people in your life that you respect and you know would point you towards Jesus and would listen to your things. But because of your own insecurities, because of your own uncertainties, because friends are fundamentally inconvenient. I mean, listen, listen, listen. Sometimes Tuesday Nate makes plans for Friday Nate. And when Friday Nate wakes up and is reminded of Tuesday Nate's commitment, he's ticked. Because I don't want to get, like I don't want to shower and go see you people. I don't want you to come over to the house that I now have to clean maniacally. I don't want to do that. Until you get there and then Friday Nate's happy again because now I'm with my friends. It's hard to spend the time that we should spend investing in relationships with other people, but it's absolutely worth it. And so this year I started out, set some friend goals. I bet you know people who you respect, who you care for, who would point you towards Christ, and maybe you're not as close with them as you'd like to be. Let me challenge you to take steps this year. Let me challenge you to engage in more new friendships. My friends who are over 50, okay? Just talking to my over 50 crowd here. When's the last time you made a new friend? Do you have some friendships in your life that are dear to you that have slipped away? That you could re-engage? Statistics tell me that that's very likely. Who are the people that you know already that you can engage with who will point you towards Jesus and be there for you? It's worth the investment and here's one of the big reasons why. Proverbs 24 6. Surely you need guidance to wage war and victory is won through many advisors. Now I'm not espousing that any of us are about to declare war. If I were preaching at a church in Washington, D.C., I might have to couch this a little bit differently, but in Raleigh, none of us have that capacity. But the point of the verse is not really about waging war. It's about doing the wise thing in the challenge that we're facing. And Solomon's point is, the more counsel that we have, the wiser choices that we will make. And when you have friends in your life who point you towards Jesus, they will offer you wise counsel, and that counsel is invaluable. It cannot be quantified. Just in 2025, and I'm not saying this to aggrandize myself and my friendships. I'm just saying it to be a real human. In 2025, I have friends that I texted at 7.30 in the morning and I said, I need to come over. I need to talk. And when I got there, they hugged me and we all cried because of stuff that was happening in my life. They were there for me, drop of a hat, in the morning. Those are friends. I have friends that I texted. I said, I just need to process some things. Can we do dinner soon? And within a night or two, I was having beef bourbignon at La Coquette, crying over our issues with a friend that made time for me. I have a friend in my life named Trip that when I call, he answers. And when he calls, I answer. No questions asked. He called yesterday. I was working. I said, hey, man, what's up? And he goes, nothing, I'm just bored. And I said, well, then I don't have any time for you. And I hung up on him. We have not talked since. I don't care to until there's a good reason for it. But if he calls today, I will answer. And so will he. We need those friends. So the simple message for you today, who are you getting counsel from? Who is loving you? Who is pointing you towards Jesus? And most importantly, what friends do you have that will take everything from you and at the end of the conversation say, yes, I hear you. What is Jesus saying to you in this moment? What people do you have in your life that you can turn to who will turn your face towards Christ? And what kinds of people should you be pursuing in 2026? Here's the question. Who should I be friends with in 2026? And here's my point. If you think about that critically and meaningfully and act on those decisions, you'll be glad you did. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for this church family, for bringing us together and allowing us to enjoy one another. God, thank you for friends and the gift that they are. Thank you for connecting us and giving us the capacity for love and relationship and friendship. Father, I ask that everybody here would have a friend that loves them dearly, that accepts them completely, and that points them towards Christ. May we all enjoy those kinds of friendships. And God, for those of us in this room who feel lonely, I pray that that would be solved this year and that would not be a thing that we need to carry forward. And for those of us who have put up walls and maybe don't have the depth of friends that we know that we need, God, would you help us to have the courage to tear those down and invite people into our lives who point us towards you so that we might become the version of ourselves that you intended us to be. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right. Well, good morning, everyone. It's good to see you. Thanks for being here. Happy New Year's. I'm so grateful that you've chosen to make grace not just a part of your Sunday, but by being here the first Sunday of the year, you're at least, some of us are going, and you know, I didn't go to church enough last year, so I'm going to come more this year. Great. Go Bills back there, by the way. Go Bills up here. By the way, who do you all play in today? The other team. I hope you beat the other team. That's great. And today's a fun day for me as a Falcons fan because all you jerk Panthers fans that cheer for an Arena League team now have to cheer for my team so you can make the playoffs. So go Falcons today. Yeah, we can get behind it. Yes. All right. Good deal. Well, listen, thanks for making church a part of your year and a part of your Sunday. I hope we don't let you down. If you're watching online, wherever you are, whatever you may be doing, thank you for doing that. This is the time of year where everybody, for the most part, assesses the person that they are and thinks about the kind of person that they'd like to become or that they'd like to be. And so this is the time of year when we tend to set goals for ourselves, whether you're comfortable with the idea of New Year's resolutions or just in general setting goals that we have for ourselves, this is the time of year when we do that. If you haven't thought about that, if you're not doing that, if this has not occurred to you, then I can only assume about you that either you think you're nailing it, like you're just so good at life, no notes, no changes. I hope the next year is just as good as the last four years. And if that's you, you're a jerk. All right. There's some notes for you. Or you've given up, which I wouldn't blame you for. But maybe let's try to log in and set some goals and think about the kind of people that we want to be in the new year. We've done that in our house. We've set some goals. Jen wants to be a more supportive and loving wife, and I'm so grateful that she has set that goal for us this year. I'm trying to be a more accepting husband of her faults. And so in that way, we're hoping for a better marriage in 20... I'm so sorry, Jen. I'm sorry for all of that. So in that vein, in thinking about how we want to be in the new year, the series that we're going to be in for the next four weeks is simply called You'll Be Glad You Did. And what we're going to do is look at some proverbial wisdom from the book of Proverbs written by King Solomon, who is, we are told, the wisest man to ever live. And just look at his wisdom and with the premise of if we'll simply listen to him and take his advice this year, we'll be glad we did. And one of the reasons I wanted to open the year with it is simply this. I don't know where you are spiritually. I don't know where you are on that journey. I don't know how much of what we're selling you're buying, I don't know. Many of you who are here are Christians. You would call yourself a Christian. God is your Father. Jesus is your Savior. Wonderful. Some of you may be kicking the tires going, is church worth it? When I get to talk to those people, I used to lead high school Bible studies. I was close with the high school football coaches at my last church, and I would go lead Bible studies for the football teams, optional, after practice on a certain day of the week. And I would always start with them with Proverbs. Because in Proverbs, you don't have to believe in everything to follow the advice that we find there. But here's what I will posit to you. If you listen to the wisdom of Solomon in Proverbs, you'll be glad you did. I hope that you'll listen to that wisdom. And for those of you who don't yet know Jesus, I hope that by listening to that wisdom, it gives you more trust in the other words in this book, and you come to faith in Jesus, and you come to call yourself a Christian and believe in God as your Father and Jesus as your Savior, because you entered in from this perspective of Proverbs, which is simply, if we listen to the wisest man who's ever lived, who points us towards Jesus, we will be glad we did. So that's all I'm inviting you to do today. And this morning, I'm particularly excited about the topic, because it's one that is very dear to me. And so I'll just say this up front. Here's my goal this morning. I'm going to say this and then preach to it. And we'll return to it in 25 minutes or so. But here's my goal for you this year. Set some friend goals this year. We all have goals that we're setting. I hope you do. I hope there are things that you want to accomplish in your life. I hope there's some goals that you're setting for yourself. I'm going to exercise. I'm not going to eat sugar. I'm not going to drink this. I'm not going to ingest that. I'm going to show up at work and actually care about what I'm doing. Whatever it is that might be your goal, I hope you're setting some goals this year. But what I would like to encourage you to do is to set some friend goals this year. And this is something that means so much to me. I never, and you guys who have been here a long time, you know this to be true. I never ever establish myself as moral exemplar. I'm the pastor. Don't giggle, Zach. I'm making a point. This is important. Shut up. I never approach talking to you as if I am on some moral high ground and I'm trying to help you get on my level. Ever. I think that's disrespectful. I've actually said that I live my life the way that I do as a favor to you so it's easy to not put me on a pedestal. I'm helping you in that way. That's why I cuss. Just not on stage. But here's what I would say about this one this week. I know how to be a good friend. I know how to be a friend. Friendship is one of the most important things to me in my life. As a matter of fact, I've told Jen, you can ask her afterwards, because the other thing I said about her is absolutely not true, but this is true. I've told her, in the case of my untimely demise, the only thing I want on my headstone, if we can afford one, is Nate was a friend. That's what I want. Nate was a friend to his wife, to his church, to his co-workers, to his children, to his parents, to his friends. Nate was a friend. It's deeply important to me. And I hope that friendship is deeply important to you. And here's what I would say as a person who is fortunate enough to have some good, deep friendships. As a matter of fact, Jen and I were driving back this Christmas. Excuse me. We were driving back home. When you come from Atlanta, really it's from Athens, there's two ways to come home. The fast way is to come just straight 85, and we do that every time. But this time, judge me if you'd like, and you probably should, but we chose to go the long way, 20 to Florence and then 95 north. Do you know why? Who knows why? Who knows why we went that way? Does anybody know? Buc-ee's. Yes, ma'am. Buc-ee's. That's why. We wasted 30 minutes of our lives so that we could take our children to Buc-ee's and buy beef jerky that I still have at the house. No, I will not share it because it was hard-earned. It was a stupid decision. I'll never make it again. But as I was driving, I had set my cruise at 8 over. That's just what I do. I set it at 78. I don't know if our resident highway patrol officer is in the crowd, but I don't think he would pull me over for that. I set it at 78. So I'm going, and I'm speeding. I know I'm speeding, but I'm not speeding by a lot. Like, come on, get over it. It's fine. I'm just trying to get home. And I pass a cop. And, of course, I'm in my rearview mirror. Is this cop following me? Am I about to get pulled over? And so then I start the doom spiral. If he pulls me over, I don't have a license. Okay? I have a license. I'm a licensed driver. Don't worry about that. I just lost it. And I lost it weeks ago. And I went online. Get this. This is just my personal complaint. This doesn't need to be in a sermon. I'm just telling you. I went online to try to replace my lost license. And as a part of that, they asked me for my license number. How am I going to know that? I lost it. Do any of you take a picture of your license and save it just in case? Like, no. So I don't have a license right now. Okay. And I'm like, if I get pulled over, he's going to ask for my license and I'm going to have to say, I don't, I don't have one officer. And then he's going to say, and this is further judgment, I understand. Then he's going to say, well, do you have a proof of insurance? I'm going to say, no, I don't carry that around. I assume you have a database you can look it up in. And then at that point, he's going to arrest me in front of my family. He's going to pull me out of the car and he's going to put handcuffs on me and arrest me in front of my family. At this point, I'm about in Goldsboro, North Carolina, just past Fort Bragg. I have no idea how Fort Bragg and Fayetteville has that many exits on 95. Jen and I felt like we were in a Twilight Zone doom loop coming home trying to get through Fort Bragg. But we had just gotten through and I'm like, I'm going to get arrested and they're going to take me to jail and I'm going to look at Jen and I'm going to say, let's just be calm, just take it easy, just get the kids home. We don't need to upset them for this. I'm going to be fine. They're going to take me to jail. And I thought to myself, who am I going to call? And I thought, I'm going to call Harris Winston. I'm going to call Harris. Because I know if I call Harris, I'm going to say, hey, dude, I'm in jail in Goldsboro. I need you to come bail me out. And Harris, at 9 o'clock at night, is going to go, and I would have called Chris, except I knew he'd be asleep. That's useless. I knew that Harris would be like, all right, dude, I'll see you in 45 minutes. And come down there and bail me out, no questions asked. And then in the car, as we're driving home, he would go, what did you do? I know I have those kinds of friends. Everybody needs those kinds of friends. The people you can call at any hour of the night who will show up and help you. There's this great line from a movie, and I don't remember the movie or the actors, but I just know that the main character walks into a room and says something to the effect of, hey, I need you to come with me. We're going to hurt some people and do illegal things, and you can't ask any questions about it, or you enter out. And the person that he's speaking to says, whose car do you want to take? Those are the kinds of friends we need. I'm not standing here supporting your illegal activities. I'm just hypothetically saying if you wanted to engage in them, you need some friends who will without asking questions. We need those kinds of friends in our life. But here's what I know. And I have those and I'm so grateful for them. But here's what I know about friends. Okay? Friends are like children. They are fundamentally inconvenient. Okay? Friends are like children. They are fundamentally inconvenient. You'll hear this side isn't laughing because you think it's inappropriate. This side that has young children is they're all giggling because they know it's true. I heard a comedian in an interview on a podcast say that children are fundamentally inconvenient, and I thought, well, that's absolutely true. John and Lily, my two children, they inconvenience me every day. They're looking forward to inconveniencing me when I'm done doing this. But friends are like that. They're fundamentally inconvenient. Just this last weekend, John and Lily had some friends over. For the sake of anonymity, we'll call them Chandler and Jackson Johnson. And they were over, and John comes downstairs crying. Jen had absconded and gone to the grocery store, leaving me with the children by myself. And I was watching them diligently. And John comes downstairs and is upset and he's crying. And I said, what's wrong, buddy? John's four and a half, so when you're four and a half, you cry about anything with no regard to reality. And I said, what's wrong, buddy? And he said that he was upset and I got it out of him. He was upset because Jackson wasn't playing right. Because John got a castle for Christmas that had knights and a wizard and a king and a queen and a dragon, and they all have certain roles to play. And in John's mind, clearly the dragon's the enemy attacking the castle. But he had decided that the wizard was team dragon instead of team castle. And Jackson really was ardent in his belief that the wizard was pro-castle and anti-dragon, which I've got to say, I think Jackson's right on this one. But he wasn't playing right. Meaning, he's not playing the way I want him to play. He's not listening to me and letting me boss him around. And I told him, yeah, son, that's what friends are. They don't always play right. But if you want to be a good friend, then you have to learn to play the way that they want to play. And this doesn't change as adults. Our friends don't always play right. If you go golfing with your friend, they might reach a level of anger that is unwarranted based on their level of practice. But you have to deal with it because they may not know how to play right. They may play too fast or too slow. I say, when you golf and you address the ball, the longer it takes you to hit it, the better that shot needs to be. Otherwise, just be bad quickly and let's move forward. Some of our friends don't gossip enough for our tastes. All right? We like to get some more deets. Some gossip too much, and we're like, that's enough, and I don't trust you. Some friends show up late. Some friends, like Keith Cathcart, when he texts you, will text you 95 times in a row until you have to silence the messages because I'm doing other stuff, Keith, and I don't care about the Steelers right now. Thank you, Jeff. Our friends don't play right, but it's still worth it to invest in them. It's still worth it to have them. And we still need to consider who our friends are. And that's not something that I just think from living life. That's something that has been ingrained in me since I was a child. And it starts with this verse in Proverbs 13, verse 20, which says, Now, when I memorized it, I memorized it this way. The companion of the wise will become wise, and the companion of fools will suffer harm. Growing up in my house, what was told to me over and over again is this simple thought, which is simply, show me your friends, and I'll show you your future. Statistically speaking, it's true empirically that we become the average of the five people that we spend the most time around. And so this morning, as we begin the year, I want to ask you, who are your closest friends? Who's the person you would call if you got arrested in Goldsboro? Who's the person that you could call in the middle of the night that would answer their phone and show up where you needed them to be? Who are the people that when your spouse goes out of town and you want to have a fun hang, you go, hey, and you text, let's do steaks, let's go out, let's play golf, let's go watch a movie. Let's go, I don't know what girls do. Let's brush each other's hair for fun. Whatever it is. Who are the people that you call and say, I've got some free time. Let's hang. Who are those folks? Who are the people that on Christmas you texted? Said, hey, I'm grateful for you. Merry Christmas. Who are the people on January 1st you texted? Hey, I'm grateful for you. Happy New Year. Who are your friends? Not your acquaintances. We all have acquaintances. Who are your friends? Who are the people that show up for you no matter what? Who are the people that you love? And here's this. This is going to be harder for the men than the women. And you may reject it on its face. That's fine. That's your issue to deal with in therapy. Who are the people that you have told them, I love you? I love you. I'm grateful for you. Men, men, be man enough to tell the people in your life that you love that you love them. Make sure they know. And make sure you show it. And so this morning I'm asking you, men and women, who are the five people that you spend the most time with? Who are you becoming like? Who is shaping you inexorably into the person that you are becoming? Because I remind you, and I'm asking you that question here at the top of the year, so you can think about it as you go through 2026. Who are the people that you spend the most time around who are shaping the person that you are becoming? Here's why I ask this and why I think it's important and worth talking about on Sunday. I say to you often, I quote this verse all the time. It's one of my favorite ones, Ephesians 2.10. You are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that you might walk in them. Parents. Phil, nodding your head. Your son Wyatt is 10. Is he 10 yet? A couple weeks. Lily, too. Do you know what my job is and your job is? It's not to get them to behave as a 10-year-old, although you're doing great at that. No thanks to faith. It is your job and my job to help Wyatt and Lily identify their good works and empower them to walk in those. Man to man, I'm emotional as I say it. You guys too. That's our job. How do we help our children identify their good works and walk in them? That's the job of parents. Your job as adults, what are your good works? What did God create you to do? And how might you walk in them? Whatever those are. And I'm not here today to expound on that or articulate upon those. But I want us to capture that idea. Because as we think about our friends, I think this question is important. Who can I surround myself with that will help me become the person God created me to be? Who can I surround myself with that will help me become the person that God created me to be. Now I was talking to Jen about this sermon this week and she made a great point to me to answer this question. Who can I surround myself with that will help me become the person that God created me to be? If it is true that I become the average of the five people that I spend the most time with, then who should I be spending my time with? And here's what she says is the mark of a good friend. A good friend listens to everything you have to say. You go get dinner, you call on the phone, whatever it is, you go grab a drink and you're talking and you say everything you need to say. Here's what's happening at work. Here's what's happening in my marriage. Here's where I don't like my kids. Here's what's going on with other people in my life. Here's all the things. And you just kind of unload, right, on your friend because that's what friends do. Friends listen. But here's the mark of a good friend. They don't just listen to you, but they hear you and then they take you and they point you back to Jesus. I hear all of that. I'm so sorry for what's happening at your work. I'm so sorry that your husband or your wife is disappointing you in that way. I'm so sorry that your kids are so difficult in this season of life. I'm so sorry that that amount of stress is on you right now. That's a big decision that you have to make, and I'm not sure I can correctly advise you on how to make it. But where do we see Jesus in this? Where do we see him talking to us? Where is he guiding you spiritually? What do you think God's plan is in this? What do you think God's purpose is in allowing this to go on in your life? Let me tell you something. That's another level of friend. And that's what I want you to have. Is the people that you go to and you say all the things you need to say and they hear you and they listen and then they love you enough to grab your face. Theoretically. Hopefully they're not grabbing your face. That's weird. But they love you enough to grab your face and orient it towards Christ. And say, what is he teaching you through this? Those are your true friends. Those are the ones that you can walk through fire with. Those are the ones that you need. So who do you have in your life who can grab you and hear you, who will answer the call at 3 a.m., who will come bail you out of jail if you need it, who will engage in illegal activities if they benefit you, but at the end of all of that will grab your face and point you towards Jesus. Who do you have in your life that will do that? And here's what I would say before moving on. The only thing worse than having bad friends is having no friends. The only thing worse than having bad friends is having no friends. Maybe you're sitting here this morning and I'm asking you to do a friend inventory. And you're thinking about the people in your life that you could call, the people in your life that you talk to. And you're like, man, they don't point me towards Jesus. If anything, they point me away from Jesus. They don't help me spiritually at all. I don't have good friends in my life. My friends don't point me towards him. They're not good friends. They're bad friends. They discourage me. But here's what I would tell you. At least you have some. The only thing worse than having bad friends is having no friends. I came across a statistic recently and I double checked it because it sounded absurd. But there are more people every year that die due to loneliness than people who die due to lung issues dealing with smoking. Meaning, it is statistically true that it is more dangerous to not have any friends than it is to smoke a pack a day. By being lonely, you are more at risk for mortality than you are if you smoke a pack a day. Which brings me back to this idea of needing friends. This is the whole ethic of grace, by the way. Every week we say from stage, at Grace we exist to connect people to Jesus and connect people to? Yes. This is the whole ethic of grace. I tell my non-believing friends, even if you don't buy what we are selling, it's best for you and your family to come because of the benefits you get from the community, of people investing in you and you investing in them. And I hope, as I say that, that eventually they'll believe what we believe. But even if you don't, it's better for you and your family to be a part of a church so that you're engaged in friendships, so that people look out for you, people care about you and point you towards Christ. So two thoughts quickly there. If you are someone who would say, and this is, I've done some research on it, this is largely, this is more prevalent in the male community than the female community. There's a preponderance of men in their 60s who report, I have no one that I would call a close friend. It's so sad. There's even more men that would say, I've made no new friends since my 20s. Men are bad at being friends. Do you know why? Because other people don't play right. Because you're five. That's why. You're a dope. Sorry, I don't mean that. I don't mean that. Men have a hard time making friends because to be a true friend requires some emotional vulnerability. We have to put ourselves out there. We have to share our weaknesses. And we have to trust that we're going to be met with kindness. Men are taught not to show weakness, not to show need, to be self-sufficient, to take care of ourselves. And those things are not conducive to real friendship. To be a friend, Proverbs says, to be a friend, you must show thyself friendly. We have to do that. And so, men, here's what I would tell you. Leaders lead in vulnerability. You want friends? 2026? Go make some. Put yourself out there. Invite somebody to lunch. Dude, that's going to be weird. What if they tell me that they don't want to eat lunch with me? Well, then they're not going to be your friend. Be a grown-up. Invite the next person. We need these people in our lives. And here's the other place where I would challenge you, men and women alike. I'd be willing to bet that you have people in your life that you know and you care for and you respect and you wish you were better friends with them. I bet that's true. I know that's true for us because yesterday, out of conviction, I texted another couple in the church and I said I said hey tomorrow I'm going to be preaching about friend goals and you guys are ours we love you and don't spend enough time with you or your family can you come over and hang out the only thing I'm going to ask is that you not wear Panthers gear when you come and they wouldn't even agree to that So I don't know if we're off to a great start. But I bet you have people in your life that you respect and you know would point you towards Jesus and would listen to your things. But because of your own insecurities, because of your own uncertainties, because friends are fundamentally inconvenient. I mean, listen, listen, listen. Sometimes Tuesday Nate makes plans for Friday Nate. And when Friday Nate wakes up and is reminded of Tuesday Nate's commitment, he's ticked. Because I don't want to get, like I don't want to shower and go see you people. I don't want you to come over to the house that I now have to clean maniacally. I don't want to do that. Until you get there and then Friday Nate's happy again because now I'm with my friends. It's hard to spend the time that we should spend investing in relationships with other people, but it's absolutely worth it. And so this year I started out, set some friend goals. I bet you know people who you respect, who you care for, who would point you towards Christ, and maybe you're not as close with them as you'd like to be. Let me challenge you to take steps this year. Let me challenge you to engage in more new friendships. My friends who are over 50, okay? Just talking to my over 50 crowd here. When's the last time you made a new friend? Do you have some friendships in your life that are dear to you that have slipped away? That you could re-engage? Statistics tell me that that's very likely. Who are the people that you know already that you can engage with who will point you towards Jesus and be there for you? It's worth the investment and here's one of the big reasons why. Proverbs 24 6. Surely you need guidance to wage war and victory is won through many advisors. Now I'm not espousing that any of us are about to declare war. If I were preaching at a church in Washington, D.C., I might have to couch this a little bit differently, but in Raleigh, none of us have that capacity. But the point of the verse is not really about waging war. It's about doing the wise thing in the challenge that we're facing. And Solomon's point is, the more counsel that we have, the wiser choices that we will make. And when you have friends in your life who point you towards Jesus, they will offer you wise counsel, and that counsel is invaluable. It cannot be quantified. Just in 2025, and I'm not saying this to aggrandize myself and my friendships. I'm just saying it to be a real human. In 2025, I have friends that I texted at 7.30 in the morning and I said, I need to come over. I need to talk. And when I got there, they hugged me and we all cried because of stuff that was happening in my life. They were there for me, drop of a hat, in the morning. Those are friends. I have friends that I texted. I said, I just need to process some things. Can we do dinner soon? And within a night or two, I was having beef bourbignon at La Coquette, crying over our issues with a friend that made time for me. I have a friend in my life named Trip that when I call, he answers. And when he calls, I answer. No questions asked. He called yesterday. I was working. I said, hey, man, what's up? And he goes, nothing, I'm just bored. And I said, well, then I don't have any time for you. And I hung up on him. We have not talked since. I don't care to until there's a good reason for it. But if he calls today, I will answer. And so will he. We need those friends. So the simple message for you today, who are you getting counsel from? Who is loving you? Who is pointing you towards Jesus? And most importantly, what friends do you have that will take everything from you and at the end of the conversation say, yes, I hear you. What is Jesus saying to you in this moment? What people do you have in your life that you can turn to who will turn your face towards Christ? And what kinds of people should you be pursuing in 2026? Here's the question. Who should I be friends with in 2026? And here's my point. If you think about that critically and meaningfully and act on those decisions, you'll be glad you did. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for this church family, for bringing us together and allowing us to enjoy one another. God, thank you for friends and the gift that they are. Thank you for connecting us and giving us the capacity for love and relationship and friendship. Father, I ask that everybody here would have a friend that loves them dearly, that accepts them completely, and that points them towards Christ. May we all enjoy those kinds of friendships. And God, for those of us in this room who feel lonely, I pray that that would be solved this year and that would not be a thing that we need to carry forward. And for those of us who have put up walls and maybe don't have the depth of friends that we know that we need, God, would you help us to have the courage to tear those down and invite people into our lives who point us towards you so that we might become the version of ourselves that you intended us to be. In Jesus' name, amen.