Psalms

Good morning. My name is Wes. I'm one of the elders here, and I'm going to start us off with a reading from Psalms 131. And yes, I've joined the club now, too. My heart is not proud. Lord, my eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters of things too wonderful for me, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. Israel, put your hope in the Lord, both now and forevermore. Thank you, Wes. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. We are in the fifth part of our series called Ascent. It's inspired by the book by Eugene Peterson called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. It's a hugely impactful book for me and for some of the folks on staff, and I've encouraged you guys to pick it up and read it. And hopefully you've started to do that and it's impacting you in similar ways. The book Long Obedience in the Same Direction is based off of, and you should know this by now because we're in week five and we've been saying this every week. It's based off of the Psalms of Ascent that are found in Psalms chapters 120 through 134 that were meant to be read and sung and worshiped through on a family's pilgrimage to Jerusalem on their way to go worship. So it's worship to get their hearts and their minds right on the way to go worship. And so the whole idea of the series has been to go on a journey of spiritual pursuit of God as I challenged you guys in September to let's all take our spiritual lives, our spiritual health more seriously and begin to take intentional steps in that direction. The series has been designed to help us with that. And so this morning we arrive at Psalm 131, which is a Psalm that places its focus squarely on this idea of humility. And humility is an idea that I think that we probably think incorrectly about. I think we probably default to an unhelpful definition and application of humility. I remember a few years ago, and I think I've mentioned this story in church before. I can't remember if I have or not. So if you've heard it before, if it sounds familiar, I'm not going to belabor it, but I think it helps me make my point today. A few years ago, I was with some family and family friends, and we were at this get-together, and the guy whose house it was at said, hey, come help me get some food for everybody. I said, great. So we go outside. We get in this car. It was a brand-new Mercedes S-Class, super nice car, over $100,000 vehicle. And I get in there, and I go, oh, is this new? And he goes, yeah, yeah, I just got it last month. I said, do you like it? He goes, I love it. It's great. I said, it looks great, man. These seats are nice. They got the cooling things. You got the screen across here. This seems like a really great car. And he goes, yeah, it's just a car. Just gets me from A to B. And I just went, okay. And we started talking about something else. But in my head, I thought, oh, crud. Just a car. A 2015 Prius with 150,000 miles is just a car, okay? $115,000 S-Class is not just a car. That's a choice. And if that's a choice you want to make, that's fine. I'm not here to critique it, okay? I have no criticism for what he chooses to do with his resources. And any of you that have nice vehicles, I'm not trying to criticize those. But here's what I will criticize is when someone, when you spend $115,000 on a car and someone goes, this is nice, don't try to act like you're driving a Civic, okay? I just found it to be disingenuous, and I think it was his attempt to be humble and modest, but I found it annoying. Kind of like those people that you have in your lives that you can't give a compliment to. Compliments won't stick to them, right? You go tell Aaron he did a great job leading worship last week, and he just goes, oh, glory to God. Like, he won't accept it. I I've seen women do this to each other you show up at a wedding or at an event or the the I joke that the Addis Jamari uh night of new beginnings every year is like uh Grace Raleigh prom everybody gets dressed up for it when you go and a group of women standing around you're like oh you look so good I love your dress and they're just like oh this I just got it at Dillard's it's deal. You know, like they won't just say thank you. I feel pretty too. They won't say that ever. You go over to someone's house and it's wonderful. This meal is fantastic. Oh, thanks. My husband did all the hard work. And we know good and well your husband didn't do anything. But there's this idea in our culture, and I think particularly in Christian culture, maybe Southern culture, which how do you unparse those things, where humility is really false modesty. And I think that's just an insufficient way to think about humility because I think if we can actually understand what biblical godly humility is, that there's an efficacy to that that we really probably haven't considered when it comes to humility. So this morning I want to posit to you that maybe this can be a working definition of humility that we understand together. Maybe humility is the result of how we estimate our sin and ourselves. Maybe humility, true biblical humility, is how we estimate our sin. And when I say our sin, what I mean is the current situation of our sin, the current sins with which we wrestle, the things that entangle us and cause us to not run our race that we need to cast aside, the current sins that we deal with, and the capacity that we have for sin in the future. If we want to be truly humble, we need to adequately and accurately estimate our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here this morning because I think what we'll find is that we're all on the same page and it would be a little bit of a redundant sermon. I think how to accurately estimate ourselves is where we can make some more interesting headway. But I can't talk about biblical humility without addressing the fact that it's immediately intertwined with how we understand our sin condition because of verses like this. I'm going to read from James 4, 6 through 10. It's on your bulletins, but it's not in the notes. James 4 says this, will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn, and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. James, when he says humble yourself, when he says that really ought to be scary term for us, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. I'm not exactly sure what God's opposition looks and feels like, but I don't want to know. But he gives grace or favor to the humble. James immediately ties humility into an awareness of and disgust with our sin. You see that? He immediately says, be humble. And to be humble, he says we have to weep and wretch before the Lord, that our joy has to turn into mourning, that our laughter has to turn into sorrow, that we need to be brought to a place where we are rock bottom with our sin, where we despise our sin and what it does to us and those around us. Now, I'm not going to belabor this because any point that I would make here would be very similar to the points that I preached in part two of this series on repentance. The first Psalm, Psalm 120, is a Psalm on repentance. It's how the Psalms of Ascent start off. And I said, no journey towards God can begin without the first step being repentance. And for repentance, we have to come to a place of disgust with our sin and who we are and what it's doing to the people around us. And that's what James is echoing. And that's what leads to true humility, which is why we're talking about it today. Now, as it relates to being realistic about our current sin condition and our capacity to sin in the future, I think that Christians, in my experience, kind of fall into three categories. And I've been in church world, I have no memories outside of church. I've been in church world my whole life. These are the blocks of Christians that I've experienced. So the main block of Christians that I've experienced are the ones who, when you say, how are you doing with sin? How's sin in your life? And what do you think of your capacity to sin? You think terrible, wretched, I'm miserable. I'm so glad everyone in the room does not know what the sins that I'm dealing with, the things I'm thinking of right now. When I say, what sin do you deal with in your life? For many of us in the room, instantly, we know which one it is for us or five, right? And for you, you walk around constantly aware of your sin. On Tuesday, I was sitting in a recliner, not moving, watching TV, and I got a crick in my neck. I don't know. I'm getting old. I guess this is what it feels like. And it's gotten a little bit better every day since. All right, I can do this now. But on Monday, on Wednesday morning, if Lily, my daughter, needed something, I had to go, yeah. And every, on Wednesday, everything I did, every reflex that turned my head, every way that I sat, every way that I laid, every time I tried to take pressure off of it, it didn't matter. Sometimes it felt a little bit bad. Sometimes it felt a lot a bit bad. But I was all day acutely aware of it. And if you've ever had a crick in your neck for days afterwards, it is part of your consciousness. That pain is there all the time. And for a lot of us, we carry sin in the same way. There's a sin that we're aware of that we need to fix, that we need to eradicate, that we need to start doing or stop doing. And we don't do it. And so anytime we're in church, anytime we're in small group, anytime we're exposed to spiritual things, any movement, any slight movement of our head, we feel it, we're reminded of it, we feel bad about it, we want to get rid of it. That's fine. That's actually a good, humble place to be. It's not a good place to stay, which is why we should go through repentance and not exist there. But we should all have a sense of our capacity for wretchedness. The second category of Christians that I've seen and how we think about our sin is kind of the group of people that goes, you know what? I'm doing okay, right? I'm not an alcoholic. I don't have things in the shadows that I'd be ashamed for other people to see. When they talked about me being embarrassed if everybody knew my sins, I mean, maybe a little bit, but not really. We think we're kind of doing okay. That's great. But what I would ask you is, is your doing okay really just you playing the comparison game between you and people who are not? And going, I'm doing fine? Is your okay complacency? Is it laziness? Is it fear or cowardice? Is it a lack of engagement? I would argue almost always that it's just simply a lack of awareness of ourselves. If you think you're doing okay, ask your spouse, your kids, your coworkers, your close friends. In the last three to five years of my life, do you see me increasingly growing in the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, do you see in my wake a greater production of those things? Do you see me growing closer to God and increasing in zeal and increasing in discipline and increasing in patience and wisdom and joy? Do you see these things manifesting in my life? Because if for the last three to five years those things are not increasing in greater measure year over year, then what I would tell you is, buddy, you're not doing okay. You're stagnant. And if you're stagnant, you're going back. But I do think there's a third group that genuinely is doing okay. And you say, no, I am increasing in those ways. I don't want to make space for that. Because I'm not trying to make everybody feel bad. But if you are doing okay, if this is a season in your life where you feel closer to God than you've ever felt, you have more earnest desire for him than you've ever had, I think the humble thing to do there, the thing to help us accurately see our sin is to understand I'm in a good spot now, but nothing that has happened has changed my capacity for sin in the future. There but for the grace of God go I. I don't care how good you're doing. You're two bad weeks away from some of the worst decisions you've ever made in your life. And so if you are in a good place, look at that as grace from God. That every day and week and month that's gotten you there is a gift of grace that he gave you where he gave you the clarity to allow him in your life to shape your character, to sanctify you, and to make you more like Christ. But it's God's working in you that puts you there. So the first thing we do to seek humility is we have an adequate perception of our sin. We hold that well. We understand our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. But I didn't want to belabor that or spend a lot of time there this morning because I think having an accurate estimate of ourselves is something that, because I think as Christians we've probably all thought about the things I just said in some capacity. But I'd be willing to bet that not all of us have thought about humility in this light and accurately estimating ourselves in this way. The first verse of Psalm 131 speaks to this. I want to bring our attention back to it. My heart is not proud, Lord. My eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. In long obedience in the same direction at the beginning of every chapter, you're given the psalm. But it's the psalm from the message that was translated by Eugene Peterson to be very easily approachable. And the way that he phrases it there is, God, I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think that I'm a bigger deal than I really am. And I think that's a great concept. But the problem is that I think we've tended to apply that principle. My eyes are not haughty. My spirit is not proud. I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think I'm too big of a deal. I think we've applied that the way that my family friend applied it to his new car. It shows up as a false modesty. It shows up as disingenuous. It shows up as, oh, you know, I didn't have anything to do with that. Oh, no, that's not me. It shows up as that friend that won't let compliments stick. And you just want to grab him by the shoulders and say, can I just please bless you? Will you accept this? Will you just admit that you've done something good in someone's life for once? And we apply this incorrectly. I think we often mistake humility as the disingenuous reduction of ourselves. I think we often seek to be humble. God opposes the proud, gives grace to the humble, So I'm not going to be, to run from pride, I'm going to be extra reductive of myself and who I am. I have no talents. I have nothing to offer. I've never done anything good. Even like, I used to do this. I've tried to move away from it. But if somebody said, hey, you know, that was a great sermon. I would say either, yeah, hey, glory to God, thank you so much. Like, nothing to do with me. Or I would say, yeah, well, you know, blind squirrel and things. Like, not accepting any of it. And I think when we're the person trying to compliment, when we're the person who sees other people, when we're the person who sees what other people have to offer, and we can't get that person to agree with us, not in a braggadocious way, not in a haughty way, just in an honest way, it becomes frustrating and disingenuous. So I actually think that true humility is realizing our abilities, our gifts, the things at which we excel, are actually gifts from God. He created us with those gifts, and he gave them so that we might use them to build God's kingdom, which is a wonderful invitation from God that fills our life with purpose beyond ourselves. It's incredible how it all works together. So let's say that you're smart. God made you smart. And here's the thing. We have a lot of smart people in this room. I think about, Grace, that we have an unusual concentration of capable and intelligent leadership. Some of us bring the average way down. Others of us are really gifted in this area. So let's say you're smart. So, what'd you do to be smart? You were born smart, right? Let's say you're fast. You can run really fast. So, you were born fast. What'd you do at three to get fast? Nothing. Let's say you're funny. Great. You're going to brag about it? Did you make yourself funny? No. Somebody making fun of you when you were a little kid and giving you trauma made you funny. No, I'm just kidding around. God gave you the capacity for humor. Let's say you're a leader. You're a good leader. People seem to follow you. They seem to rally around you. When you use your voice, people tend to listen and you don't really understand, but people just always kind of get behind you and kind of go where you're going. So, did you make yourself that way? You're hospitable, or you're kind, or you're gracious. Whatever your gifts may be, my attitude about those gifts with you and with me is who cares? Who cares? The Bible says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. He created all of us with gifts and abilities and a path to good works that we should walk in. We're told in Corinthians that we are the body of Christ and that within the body, the nose, the toes, the eyes, the ears, the mouth, the arms, they all have a job. We were all gifted to be a part of that body. What do I care about what your gift is and what my gift is? The flip side of this is being haughty about it, is being proud of it. Let's say you're smart and you're proud of the fact that you're smart. And you kind of think everybody else can be a bunch of dummies sometimes. And if they don't think about it like you think about it, maybe you find yourself gracious by thinking, well, I don't think they're that smart. So it's probably hard going through life that stupid. I'll give them some grace. I've never personally thought that. It's not my struggle. If you're successful, it's to be haughty about that success. I've done it. I've earned it. I put together the amalgamation of ambition and perception and leadership and intelligence that produced in me what has been successful in the business place. I am proud of that, and we walk around with our chest puffed out because I'm a big deal. You know what you're like when you do that? You're like the teenage kid whose parents decide to buy them a $100,000 Range Rover. If that's what you want to do for your kid, I'd like to be adopted. But, not criticizing you. But you're like the kid whose parents buy you the $100,000 Range Rover, and you drive to school, and you park next to the kid in the 2015 Civic, and you make fun of them for it. You look down on them for it. Look at your stupid car. My car's so great, your car's so dumb. Yeah. Jerk. You didn't do a thing to earn that Range Rover except breathe for 16 years. All right? That's your daddy's money or your mommy's money. That is not your money or your granddaddy's money. I don't know where you got it, but you didn't get it. That's what I know. And that kid probably earned his car. Which one of you is better off for that? When we walk around proud of our gifts and abilities, yeah, I'm smart. Yeah, I'm talented. Yeah, I'm kind. I'm nicer than everybody else. And we take pride in that. I take care of other people better than everybody else, and we take pride in that. When we walk around proud, one pastor put it this way, we were born on third base, and we act like we hit a triple. We should not do that. Once you've identified where your gifts and abilities lie, the absolute wrong thing is to start to give yourself credit for putting those things in there because you didn't make yourself that way. God did. And this is what gives Christians a unique path to humility because we're able to go, yeah, God made me smart. So I have a capable and curious mind. God, how can I use that to further your kingdom? God gave me a good voice. So, God, how can I use this voice to bring glory to you and grow your kingdom? God made me a good leader. God made me good at making money. God made me good at building things and companies. God made me good at hosting people and making them feel welcome. I have this unnatural ability where when I sit down with someone I don't know, they just start telling me all of their problems. Okay, great. That's a gift that God has given you. Who cares about bragging about it? The important question is, once we acknowledge it, is to go, great, I've been made this way. You've been made that way. Nobody cares. What's the best way to use and deploy this gift to build God's kingdom? And in that way, we exist in this posture of gratitude. God, I'm so grateful that you made me the way you did. And then it gives me the opportunities that it does. Please help me to always hold them in the proper light and to use them to bring glory and honor to you and to build your kingdom. When we have this posture of humility, where we're willing to be honest with ourselves, it's not bragging to admit and to acknowledge that God has gifted us in certain ways. It's actually in concurrence with all of Scripture because we know that He does. It's simply estimating ourselves accurately and holding them properly to know that those gifts were not given to make our lives better. They were given so that we might participate in the building of God's kingdom. I think Jeremiah the prophet probably said it best when he says this in chapter 9 verses 23 and 24. or the strong boast of their strength, or the rich boast of their riches. But let the one who boasts boast about this, that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord who exercises kindness, justice, and righteousness on earth. For in these I delight, declares the Lord. God says, if you want to boast, don't boast because you're wise. Don't boast because you're smart. Don't boast because you're capable or successful or kind or generous or hospitable. Don't boast about any of that stuff. If you want to boast, boast in me and boast in this. Boast that you know me. Boast that you have the humility to know me, to recognize and have faith in me. Boast in who your heavenly father is. I was walking by before church started to get my last minute water. And as I walked by, my son John is three. As I walked by his room, he saw me and he goes, that's my dad. For everyone to know. If you're going to boast, boast like John, that when we see God, we go, that's my dad. That's my heavenly father. I know him. I'm his child. I'm proud to know him. Everything else is just a gift that your dad gave you so you can point other people towards him. That's all it is. To hold it in any different regard than that is foolish. Now, there's a flip side to this coin because not everybody in the room has the same comfort level with admitting their various gifts and abilities. There are some of you in the room. There are some people, when I say, hey, whatever your gifts and abilities are, they go, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, I got them. There are other people that when I go, whatever your gifts and abilities are, that you think to yourself, I'd love to know, because I don't have any. And I don't really have anything to offer anyone. I'm just kind of there. I'm nice. I do my part. I don't have anything in particular to offer God or his kingdom. The second verse in the psalm is for you. This verse says, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. In the chapter that Peterson writes on this psalm, he points out these opposing sides of the humility coin. One is pride and haughtiness. And the other is infantilism. To infantilize ourselves unnecessarily. And he thinks that's the figurative language with I'm a weaned child because a child that isn't weaned, that still relies on its mama for sustenance day to day, can't yet be a productive member of society. And so the picture that he paints is once we are weaned, once we are separated, once we don't need somebody else for our daily sustenance, we can actually take our step into being a productive member of society and God's kingdom. And so it's actually harmful to refuse to acknowledge our gifts. And when we do that, when we think we have nothing to offer, when we've taken humility so far in the other direction, so far away from pride that we don't allow ourselves to even identify how God has gifted us and how we might be used. This psalm says we're like a child who's still a suckling. We're not yet ready to be productive. And I think that refusing to acknowledge our gifts actually makes us less productive as believers. Refusing to acknowledge that you have a good voice, that you have musical talent, that you're organized, that you lead well, that you build well, that you ask good questions without, by refusing to acknowledge how God made us we actually make ourselves less productive towards God's kingdom now I will admit to you and I don't think this is going to come as a shocker to anyone if you we all lean towards one side of that coin this is not the side to which lean. So I don't want to try to paint a picture like I don't struggle with pride somehow. I do. But there has been one very, to me, profound area in my life where this struggle has shown up. I went into vocational ministry when I was 19 years old. In the year 2000, I began to get paid to be a Christian. I just took my faith professional. That's all I did. Because I think that what I do is just be a professional Christian. I think everybody's got their part to play. Everybody has their gifts to apply, and we should just do it. Anyways. I've been in vocational ministry close to 25 years. And again, started in 2000 as a student staffer for a local Young Life Club. It took me until 2021, the summer of 2021, after I read Eugene Peterson's autobiography called Pastor. It took me 21 years of vocational ministry to say out loud, I believe God has called and purposed and designed me to be a pastor. Not simply a teacher of God's word, which is how I would have phrased it prior to, but a pastor, a shepherd, someone who has been called and purposed to look out for people, to draw people in to one another, to provide leadership for the corner of the kingdom to which he's assigned me, Grace Raleigh. It took me 21 years to acknowledge out loud that I believe God has designed me and purposed me to be a pastor and that he's gifted me in some capacity to be a leader so that I might serve his kingdom in that way. It took me 21 years to admit that because I thought it felt so arrogant for me to admit that before 2021, even though functionally I had served as a pastor for 20 years. It struck me as so arrogant and I had so much imposter syndrome about it that I could never say it out loud. I always considered myself less than that, apart from that, not quite made to be that. It took me so long to be able to admit that and simply say it out loud. And when I said it and when I admitted it, there wasn't an ounce of pride in it, I promise you. It was just coming to the place where I could admit what other people told me and what God has shown me that this is the way that he's gifted me and what he wants me to do and I think that there is a lot of you who are limiting yourself and your estimation of yourself by over-correcting pride towards a useless humility that's actually causing you to be less productive in God's kingdom than you could be. Since that revelation in 2021, I'm not looking for any of you to say like, yeah, I've noticed you've been a markedly better pastor since then. But here's what I know. Since then, I've accepted the mantle of the church far more readily than I did before. Since then, I understand my role with more acuity than I did before. Since then, I understand what I'm supposed to do and how I'm supposed to use my voice so much more accurately and clearly than before and unapologetically. And again, not because it's somehow gone to my head and now I think this is what I can do, but because I feel the weight of responsibility of where God has placed me and it does me no good to not acknowledge that weight. And it does you no good either. You have people around you waiting to be impacted towards God's kingdom. You have people in your lives who need you to walk with God. You have friends and neighbors and family members who will listen to your voice far more than you think they will if you'll simply acknowledge how God has made you to reach them. But refusing to accept it isn't humility. It's fear and overcorrection and dishonesty. And it's not godly humility. When we accurately estimate our sin and ourselves, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. When we have that first piece of the puzzle in place, I have an accurate estimate of my capacity to sin in the future and my current sin situation now. When we see that clearly as God sees it, and when we see ourselves as God sees us, you are for me, not against me. I am who you say I am. We just all sang it together. When we really believe that and we see ourselves as God does, and we see our sin as God does, and our potential to sin as God does, and we don't hold our gifts as something we're proud of. We offer them up to God, and we have the courage to admit how he's gifted us. When we can do that and accurately see those things, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. Don't you see? Because we go, okay, sure, you may be good at this thing. Who cares? It's neither good nor bad. It just is. God, how should I use it? And I just wonder what could happen in your families if you decided to pursue true godly humility and saw your sin in yourself accurately the way that God does. Parents, most of the parents in the room that's still raising kids are over here parents what if what if the kids that grew up in your home had the clairvoyance to think when they were 16 years old, sure, I'm smart. So what? It's my job to figure out in the next decade how God wants me to use that in his kingdom. What if that's who you release into the wild? What if that's what we produce at Grace? What if your kids at 25 and 30 have careers and lives and are involved in things that are a result of true humility that you showed them and modeled for them. How much better would they be at this than you are? If we can do that now. When we pursue godly humility, we perfectly position ourselves to build God's kingdom. And it's a powerful thing. So let's no longer think of humility as simply a disingenuous modesty. Let's think of it as accurately holding a vision of who we are that agrees with God's vision for ourselves and pursues the future that he's designed for us. Let's pray. Father we thank you for. Who you are. We thank you for how you love us. We thank you for the gifts that you've given us. God, for those of us who have a tendency to let pride and haughtiness sneak in, to begin when we go unmonitored to think that we're somebody and we've done something special. Would you help us remember who we are and who you are and how you made us? And God, would we see what you see and hold our abilities as gifts that were given to us so that we might build your kingdom? Father, for those of us that struggle and might think that we don't have anything to offer, I pray that you would help us see through the people in our lives who love us, the way that you've gifted us so that we might be productive in your kingdom, so that the people around us who need us would see us and be pointed to you by us. God, I pray that we would be a church full of humble people, but not humble in the way that the world describes it. Humble in the way that you lay out so that we might be servants to you as we go. We thank you for all these things. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. My name is Wes. I'm one of the elders here, and I'm going to start us off with a reading from Psalms 131. And yes, I've joined the club now, too. My heart is not proud. Lord, my eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters of things too wonderful for me, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. Israel, put your hope in the Lord, both now and forevermore. Thank you, Wes. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. We are in the fifth part of our series called Ascent. It's inspired by the book by Eugene Peterson called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. It's a hugely impactful book for me and for some of the folks on staff, and I've encouraged you guys to pick it up and read it. And hopefully you've started to do that and it's impacting you in similar ways. The book Long Obedience in the Same Direction is based off of, and you should know this by now because we're in week five and we've been saying this every week. It's based off of the Psalms of Ascent that are found in Psalms chapters 120 through 134 that were meant to be read and sung and worshiped through on a family's pilgrimage to Jerusalem on their way to go worship. So it's worship to get their hearts and their minds right on the way to go worship. And so the whole idea of the series has been to go on a journey of spiritual pursuit of God as I challenged you guys in September to let's all take our spiritual lives, our spiritual health more seriously and begin to take intentional steps in that direction. The series has been designed to help us with that. And so this morning we arrive at Psalm 131, which is a Psalm that places its focus squarely on this idea of humility. And humility is an idea that I think that we probably think incorrectly about. I think we probably default to an unhelpful definition and application of humility. I remember a few years ago, and I think I've mentioned this story in church before. I can't remember if I have or not. So if you've heard it before, if it sounds familiar, I'm not going to belabor it, but I think it helps me make my point today. A few years ago, I was with some family and family friends, and we were at this get-together, and the guy whose house it was at said, hey, come help me get some food for everybody. I said, great. So we go outside. We get in this car. It was a brand-new Mercedes S-Class, super nice car, over $100,000 vehicle. And I get in there, and I go, oh, is this new? And he goes, yeah, yeah, I just got it last month. I said, do you like it? He goes, I love it. It's great. I said, it looks great, man. These seats are nice. They got the cooling things. You got the screen across here. This seems like a really great car. And he goes, yeah, it's just a car. Just gets me from A to B. And I just went, okay. And we started talking about something else. But in my head, I thought, oh, crud. Just a car. A 2015 Prius with 150,000 miles is just a car, okay? $115,000 S-Class is not just a car. That's a choice. And if that's a choice you want to make, that's fine. I'm not here to critique it, okay? I have no criticism for what he chooses to do with his resources. And any of you that have nice vehicles, I'm not trying to criticize those. But here's what I will criticize is when someone, when you spend $115,000 on a car and someone goes, this is nice, don't try to act like you're driving a Civic, okay? I just found it to be disingenuous, and I think it was his attempt to be humble and modest, but I found it annoying. Kind of like those people that you have in your lives that you can't give a compliment to. Compliments won't stick to them, right? You go tell Aaron he did a great job leading worship last week, and he just goes, oh, glory to God. Like, he won't accept it. I I've seen women do this to each other you show up at a wedding or at an event or the the I joke that the Addis Jamari uh night of new beginnings every year is like uh Grace Raleigh prom everybody gets dressed up for it when you go and a group of women standing around you're like oh you look so good I love your dress and they're just like oh this I just got it at Dillard's it's deal. You know, like they won't just say thank you. I feel pretty too. They won't say that ever. You go over to someone's house and it's wonderful. This meal is fantastic. Oh, thanks. My husband did all the hard work. And we know good and well your husband didn't do anything. But there's this idea in our culture, and I think particularly in Christian culture, maybe Southern culture, which how do you unparse those things, where humility is really false modesty. And I think that's just an insufficient way to think about humility because I think if we can actually understand what biblical godly humility is, that there's an efficacy to that that we really probably haven't considered when it comes to humility. So this morning I want to posit to you that maybe this can be a working definition of humility that we understand together. Maybe humility is the result of how we estimate our sin and ourselves. Maybe humility, true biblical humility, is how we estimate our sin. And when I say our sin, what I mean is the current situation of our sin, the current sins with which we wrestle, the things that entangle us and cause us to not run our race that we need to cast aside, the current sins that we deal with, and the capacity that we have for sin in the future. If we want to be truly humble, we need to adequately and accurately estimate our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here this morning because I think what we'll find is that we're all on the same page and it would be a little bit of a redundant sermon. I think how to accurately estimate ourselves is where we can make some more interesting headway. But I can't talk about biblical humility without addressing the fact that it's immediately intertwined with how we understand our sin condition because of verses like this. I'm going to read from James 4, 6 through 10. It's on your bulletins, but it's not in the notes. James 4 says this, will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn, and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. James, when he says humble yourself, when he says that really ought to be scary term for us, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. I'm not exactly sure what God's opposition looks and feels like, but I don't want to know. But he gives grace or favor to the humble. James immediately ties humility into an awareness of and disgust with our sin. You see that? He immediately says, be humble. And to be humble, he says we have to weep and wretch before the Lord, that our joy has to turn into mourning, that our laughter has to turn into sorrow, that we need to be brought to a place where we are rock bottom with our sin, where we despise our sin and what it does to us and those around us. Now, I'm not going to belabor this because any point that I would make here would be very similar to the points that I preached in part two of this series on repentance. The first Psalm, Psalm 120, is a Psalm on repentance. It's how the Psalms of Ascent start off. And I said, no journey towards God can begin without the first step being repentance. And for repentance, we have to come to a place of disgust with our sin and who we are and what it's doing to the people around us. And that's what James is echoing. And that's what leads to true humility, which is why we're talking about it today. Now, as it relates to being realistic about our current sin condition and our capacity to sin in the future, I think that Christians, in my experience, kind of fall into three categories. And I've been in church world, I have no memories outside of church. I've been in church world my whole life. These are the blocks of Christians that I've experienced. So the main block of Christians that I've experienced are the ones who, when you say, how are you doing with sin? How's sin in your life? And what do you think of your capacity to sin? You think terrible, wretched, I'm miserable. I'm so glad everyone in the room does not know what the sins that I'm dealing with, the things I'm thinking of right now. When I say, what sin do you deal with in your life? For many of us in the room, instantly, we know which one it is for us or five, right? And for you, you walk around constantly aware of your sin. On Tuesday, I was sitting in a recliner, not moving, watching TV, and I got a crick in my neck. I don't know. I'm getting old. I guess this is what it feels like. And it's gotten a little bit better every day since. All right, I can do this now. But on Monday, on Wednesday morning, if Lily, my daughter, needed something, I had to go, yeah. And every, on Wednesday, everything I did, every reflex that turned my head, every way that I sat, every way that I laid, every time I tried to take pressure off of it, it didn't matter. Sometimes it felt a little bit bad. Sometimes it felt a lot a bit bad. But I was all day acutely aware of it. And if you've ever had a crick in your neck for days afterwards, it is part of your consciousness. That pain is there all the time. And for a lot of us, we carry sin in the same way. There's a sin that we're aware of that we need to fix, that we need to eradicate, that we need to start doing or stop doing. And we don't do it. And so anytime we're in church, anytime we're in small group, anytime we're exposed to spiritual things, any movement, any slight movement of our head, we feel it, we're reminded of it, we feel bad about it, we want to get rid of it. That's fine. That's actually a good, humble place to be. It's not a good place to stay, which is why we should go through repentance and not exist there. But we should all have a sense of our capacity for wretchedness. The second category of Christians that I've seen and how we think about our sin is kind of the group of people that goes, you know what? I'm doing okay, right? I'm not an alcoholic. I don't have things in the shadows that I'd be ashamed for other people to see. When they talked about me being embarrassed if everybody knew my sins, I mean, maybe a little bit, but not really. We think we're kind of doing okay. That's great. But what I would ask you is, is your doing okay really just you playing the comparison game between you and people who are not? And going, I'm doing fine? Is your okay complacency? Is it laziness? Is it fear or cowardice? Is it a lack of engagement? I would argue almost always that it's just simply a lack of awareness of ourselves. If you think you're doing okay, ask your spouse, your kids, your coworkers, your close friends. In the last three to five years of my life, do you see me increasingly growing in the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, do you see in my wake a greater production of those things? Do you see me growing closer to God and increasing in zeal and increasing in discipline and increasing in patience and wisdom and joy? Do you see these things manifesting in my life? Because if for the last three to five years those things are not increasing in greater measure year over year, then what I would tell you is, buddy, you're not doing okay. You're stagnant. And if you're stagnant, you're going back. But I do think there's a third group that genuinely is doing okay. And you say, no, I am increasing in those ways. I don't want to make space for that. Because I'm not trying to make everybody feel bad. But if you are doing okay, if this is a season in your life where you feel closer to God than you've ever felt, you have more earnest desire for him than you've ever had, I think the humble thing to do there, the thing to help us accurately see our sin is to understand I'm in a good spot now, but nothing that has happened has changed my capacity for sin in the future. There but for the grace of God go I. I don't care how good you're doing. You're two bad weeks away from some of the worst decisions you've ever made in your life. And so if you are in a good place, look at that as grace from God. That every day and week and month that's gotten you there is a gift of grace that he gave you where he gave you the clarity to allow him in your life to shape your character, to sanctify you, and to make you more like Christ. But it's God's working in you that puts you there. So the first thing we do to seek humility is we have an adequate perception of our sin. We hold that well. We understand our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. But I didn't want to belabor that or spend a lot of time there this morning because I think having an accurate estimate of ourselves is something that, because I think as Christians we've probably all thought about the things I just said in some capacity. But I'd be willing to bet that not all of us have thought about humility in this light and accurately estimating ourselves in this way. The first verse of Psalm 131 speaks to this. I want to bring our attention back to it. My heart is not proud, Lord. My eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. In long obedience in the same direction at the beginning of every chapter, you're given the psalm. But it's the psalm from the message that was translated by Eugene Peterson to be very easily approachable. And the way that he phrases it there is, God, I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think that I'm a bigger deal than I really am. And I think that's a great concept. But the problem is that I think we've tended to apply that principle. My eyes are not haughty. My spirit is not proud. I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think I'm too big of a deal. I think we've applied that the way that my family friend applied it to his new car. It shows up as a false modesty. It shows up as disingenuous. It shows up as, oh, you know, I didn't have anything to do with that. Oh, no, that's not me. It shows up as that friend that won't let compliments stick. And you just want to grab him by the shoulders and say, can I just please bless you? Will you accept this? Will you just admit that you've done something good in someone's life for once? And we apply this incorrectly. I think we often mistake humility as the disingenuous reduction of ourselves. I think we often seek to be humble. God opposes the proud, gives grace to the humble, So I'm not going to be, to run from pride, I'm going to be extra reductive of myself and who I am. I have no talents. I have nothing to offer. I've never done anything good. Even like, I used to do this. I've tried to move away from it. But if somebody said, hey, you know, that was a great sermon. I would say either, yeah, hey, glory to God, thank you so much. Like, nothing to do with me. Or I would say, yeah, well, you know, blind squirrel and things. Like, not accepting any of it. And I think when we're the person trying to compliment, when we're the person who sees other people, when we're the person who sees what other people have to offer, and we can't get that person to agree with us, not in a braggadocious way, not in a haughty way, just in an honest way, it becomes frustrating and disingenuous. So I actually think that true humility is realizing our abilities, our gifts, the things at which we excel, are actually gifts from God. He created us with those gifts, and he gave them so that we might use them to build God's kingdom, which is a wonderful invitation from God that fills our life with purpose beyond ourselves. It's incredible how it all works together. So let's say that you're smart. God made you smart. And here's the thing. We have a lot of smart people in this room. I think about, Grace, that we have an unusual concentration of capable and intelligent leadership. Some of us bring the average way down. Others of us are really gifted in this area. So let's say you're smart. So, what'd you do to be smart? You were born smart, right? Let's say you're fast. You can run really fast. So, you were born fast. What'd you do at three to get fast? Nothing. Let's say you're funny. Great. You're going to brag about it? Did you make yourself funny? No. Somebody making fun of you when you were a little kid and giving you trauma made you funny. No, I'm just kidding around. God gave you the capacity for humor. Let's say you're a leader. You're a good leader. People seem to follow you. They seem to rally around you. When you use your voice, people tend to listen and you don't really understand, but people just always kind of get behind you and kind of go where you're going. So, did you make yourself that way? You're hospitable, or you're kind, or you're gracious. Whatever your gifts may be, my attitude about those gifts with you and with me is who cares? Who cares? The Bible says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. He created all of us with gifts and abilities and a path to good works that we should walk in. We're told in Corinthians that we are the body of Christ and that within the body, the nose, the toes, the eyes, the ears, the mouth, the arms, they all have a job. We were all gifted to be a part of that body. What do I care about what your gift is and what my gift is? The flip side of this is being haughty about it, is being proud of it. Let's say you're smart and you're proud of the fact that you're smart. And you kind of think everybody else can be a bunch of dummies sometimes. And if they don't think about it like you think about it, maybe you find yourself gracious by thinking, well, I don't think they're that smart. So it's probably hard going through life that stupid. I'll give them some grace. I've never personally thought that. It's not my struggle. If you're successful, it's to be haughty about that success. I've done it. I've earned it. I put together the amalgamation of ambition and perception and leadership and intelligence that produced in me what has been successful in the business place. I am proud of that, and we walk around with our chest puffed out because I'm a big deal. You know what you're like when you do that? You're like the teenage kid whose parents decide to buy them a $100,000 Range Rover. If that's what you want to do for your kid, I'd like to be adopted. But, not criticizing you. But you're like the kid whose parents buy you the $100,000 Range Rover, and you drive to school, and you park next to the kid in the 2015 Civic, and you make fun of them for it. You look down on them for it. Look at your stupid car. My car's so great, your car's so dumb. Yeah. Jerk. You didn't do a thing to earn that Range Rover except breathe for 16 years. All right? That's your daddy's money or your mommy's money. That is not your money or your granddaddy's money. I don't know where you got it, but you didn't get it. That's what I know. And that kid probably earned his car. Which one of you is better off for that? When we walk around proud of our gifts and abilities, yeah, I'm smart. Yeah, I'm talented. Yeah, I'm kind. I'm nicer than everybody else. And we take pride in that. I take care of other people better than everybody else, and we take pride in that. When we walk around proud, one pastor put it this way, we were born on third base, and we act like we hit a triple. We should not do that. Once you've identified where your gifts and abilities lie, the absolute wrong thing is to start to give yourself credit for putting those things in there because you didn't make yourself that way. God did. And this is what gives Christians a unique path to humility because we're able to go, yeah, God made me smart. So I have a capable and curious mind. God, how can I use that to further your kingdom? God gave me a good voice. So, God, how can I use this voice to bring glory to you and grow your kingdom? God made me a good leader. God made me good at making money. God made me good at building things and companies. God made me good at hosting people and making them feel welcome. I have this unnatural ability where when I sit down with someone I don't know, they just start telling me all of their problems. Okay, great. That's a gift that God has given you. Who cares about bragging about it? The important question is, once we acknowledge it, is to go, great, I've been made this way. You've been made that way. Nobody cares. What's the best way to use and deploy this gift to build God's kingdom? And in that way, we exist in this posture of gratitude. God, I'm so grateful that you made me the way you did. And then it gives me the opportunities that it does. Please help me to always hold them in the proper light and to use them to bring glory and honor to you and to build your kingdom. When we have this posture of humility, where we're willing to be honest with ourselves, it's not bragging to admit and to acknowledge that God has gifted us in certain ways. It's actually in concurrence with all of Scripture because we know that He does. It's simply estimating ourselves accurately and holding them properly to know that those gifts were not given to make our lives better. They were given so that we might participate in the building of God's kingdom. I think Jeremiah the prophet probably said it best when he says this in chapter 9 verses 23 and 24. or the strong boast of their strength, or the rich boast of their riches. But let the one who boasts boast about this, that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord who exercises kindness, justice, and righteousness on earth. For in these I delight, declares the Lord. God says, if you want to boast, don't boast because you're wise. Don't boast because you're smart. Don't boast because you're capable or successful or kind or generous or hospitable. Don't boast about any of that stuff. If you want to boast, boast in me and boast in this. Boast that you know me. Boast that you have the humility to know me, to recognize and have faith in me. Boast in who your heavenly father is. I was walking by before church started to get my last minute water. And as I walked by, my son John is three. As I walked by his room, he saw me and he goes, that's my dad. For everyone to know. If you're going to boast, boast like John, that when we see God, we go, that's my dad. That's my heavenly father. I know him. I'm his child. I'm proud to know him. Everything else is just a gift that your dad gave you so you can point other people towards him. That's all it is. To hold it in any different regard than that is foolish. Now, there's a flip side to this coin because not everybody in the room has the same comfort level with admitting their various gifts and abilities. There are some of you in the room. There are some people, when I say, hey, whatever your gifts and abilities are, they go, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, I got them. There are other people that when I go, whatever your gifts and abilities are, that you think to yourself, I'd love to know, because I don't have any. And I don't really have anything to offer anyone. I'm just kind of there. I'm nice. I do my part. I don't have anything in particular to offer God or his kingdom. The second verse in the psalm is for you. This verse says, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. In the chapter that Peterson writes on this psalm, he points out these opposing sides of the humility coin. One is pride and haughtiness. And the other is infantilism. To infantilize ourselves unnecessarily. And he thinks that's the figurative language with I'm a weaned child because a child that isn't weaned, that still relies on its mama for sustenance day to day, can't yet be a productive member of society. And so the picture that he paints is once we are weaned, once we are separated, once we don't need somebody else for our daily sustenance, we can actually take our step into being a productive member of society and God's kingdom. And so it's actually harmful to refuse to acknowledge our gifts. And when we do that, when we think we have nothing to offer, when we've taken humility so far in the other direction, so far away from pride that we don't allow ourselves to even identify how God has gifted us and how we might be used. This psalm says we're like a child who's still a suckling. We're not yet ready to be productive. And I think that refusing to acknowledge our gifts actually makes us less productive as believers. Refusing to acknowledge that you have a good voice, that you have musical talent, that you're organized, that you lead well, that you build well, that you ask good questions without, by refusing to acknowledge how God made us we actually make ourselves less productive towards God's kingdom now I will admit to you and I don't think this is going to come as a shocker to anyone if you we all lean towards one side of that coin this is not the side to which lean. So I don't want to try to paint a picture like I don't struggle with pride somehow. I do. But there has been one very, to me, profound area in my life where this struggle has shown up. I went into vocational ministry when I was 19 years old. In the year 2000, I began to get paid to be a Christian. I just took my faith professional. That's all I did. Because I think that what I do is just be a professional Christian. I think everybody's got their part to play. Everybody has their gifts to apply, and we should just do it. Anyways. I've been in vocational ministry close to 25 years. And again, started in 2000 as a student staffer for a local Young Life Club. It took me until 2021, the summer of 2021, after I read Eugene Peterson's autobiography called Pastor. It took me 21 years of vocational ministry to say out loud, I believe God has called and purposed and designed me to be a pastor. Not simply a teacher of God's word, which is how I would have phrased it prior to, but a pastor, a shepherd, someone who has been called and purposed to look out for people, to draw people in to one another, to provide leadership for the corner of the kingdom to which he's assigned me, Grace Raleigh. It took me 21 years to acknowledge out loud that I believe God has designed me and purposed me to be a pastor and that he's gifted me in some capacity to be a leader so that I might serve his kingdom in that way. It took me 21 years to admit that because I thought it felt so arrogant for me to admit that before 2021, even though functionally I had served as a pastor for 20 years. It struck me as so arrogant and I had so much imposter syndrome about it that I could never say it out loud. I always considered myself less than that, apart from that, not quite made to be that. It took me so long to be able to admit that and simply say it out loud. And when I said it and when I admitted it, there wasn't an ounce of pride in it, I promise you. It was just coming to the place where I could admit what other people told me and what God has shown me that this is the way that he's gifted me and what he wants me to do and I think that there is a lot of you who are limiting yourself and your estimation of yourself by over-correcting pride towards a useless humility that's actually causing you to be less productive in God's kingdom than you could be. Since that revelation in 2021, I'm not looking for any of you to say like, yeah, I've noticed you've been a markedly better pastor since then. But here's what I know. Since then, I've accepted the mantle of the church far more readily than I did before. Since then, I understand my role with more acuity than I did before. Since then, I understand what I'm supposed to do and how I'm supposed to use my voice so much more accurately and clearly than before and unapologetically. And again, not because it's somehow gone to my head and now I think this is what I can do, but because I feel the weight of responsibility of where God has placed me and it does me no good to not acknowledge that weight. And it does you no good either. You have people around you waiting to be impacted towards God's kingdom. You have people in your lives who need you to walk with God. You have friends and neighbors and family members who will listen to your voice far more than you think they will if you'll simply acknowledge how God has made you to reach them. But refusing to accept it isn't humility. It's fear and overcorrection and dishonesty. And it's not godly humility. When we accurately estimate our sin and ourselves, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. When we have that first piece of the puzzle in place, I have an accurate estimate of my capacity to sin in the future and my current sin situation now. When we see that clearly as God sees it, and when we see ourselves as God sees us, you are for me, not against me. I am who you say I am. We just all sang it together. When we really believe that and we see ourselves as God does, and we see our sin as God does, and our potential to sin as God does, and we don't hold our gifts as something we're proud of. We offer them up to God, and we have the courage to admit how he's gifted us. When we can do that and accurately see those things, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. Don't you see? Because we go, okay, sure, you may be good at this thing. Who cares? It's neither good nor bad. It just is. God, how should I use it? And I just wonder what could happen in your families if you decided to pursue true godly humility and saw your sin in yourself accurately the way that God does. Parents, most of the parents in the room that's still raising kids are over here parents what if what if the kids that grew up in your home had the clairvoyance to think when they were 16 years old, sure, I'm smart. So what? It's my job to figure out in the next decade how God wants me to use that in his kingdom. What if that's who you release into the wild? What if that's what we produce at Grace? What if your kids at 25 and 30 have careers and lives and are involved in things that are a result of true humility that you showed them and modeled for them. How much better would they be at this than you are? If we can do that now. When we pursue godly humility, we perfectly position ourselves to build God's kingdom. And it's a powerful thing. So let's no longer think of humility as simply a disingenuous modesty. Let's think of it as accurately holding a vision of who we are that agrees with God's vision for ourselves and pursues the future that he's designed for us. Let's pray. Father we thank you for. Who you are. We thank you for how you love us. We thank you for the gifts that you've given us. God, for those of us who have a tendency to let pride and haughtiness sneak in, to begin when we go unmonitored to think that we're somebody and we've done something special. Would you help us remember who we are and who you are and how you made us? And God, would we see what you see and hold our abilities as gifts that were given to us so that we might build your kingdom? Father, for those of us that struggle and might think that we don't have anything to offer, I pray that you would help us see through the people in our lives who love us, the way that you've gifted us so that we might be productive in your kingdom, so that the people around us who need us would see us and be pointed to you by us. God, I pray that we would be a church full of humble people, but not humble in the way that the world describes it. Humble in the way that you lay out so that we might be servants to you as we go. We thank you for all these things. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. My name is Wes. I'm one of the elders here, and I'm going to start us off with a reading from Psalms 131. And yes, I've joined the club now, too. My heart is not proud. Lord, my eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters of things too wonderful for me, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. Israel, put your hope in the Lord, both now and forevermore. Thank you, Wes. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. We are in the fifth part of our series called Ascent. It's inspired by the book by Eugene Peterson called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. It's a hugely impactful book for me and for some of the folks on staff, and I've encouraged you guys to pick it up and read it. And hopefully you've started to do that and it's impacting you in similar ways. The book Long Obedience in the Same Direction is based off of, and you should know this by now because we're in week five and we've been saying this every week. It's based off of the Psalms of Ascent that are found in Psalms chapters 120 through 134 that were meant to be read and sung and worshiped through on a family's pilgrimage to Jerusalem on their way to go worship. So it's worship to get their hearts and their minds right on the way to go worship. And so the whole idea of the series has been to go on a journey of spiritual pursuit of God as I challenged you guys in September to let's all take our spiritual lives, our spiritual health more seriously and begin to take intentional steps in that direction. The series has been designed to help us with that. And so this morning we arrive at Psalm 131, which is a Psalm that places its focus squarely on this idea of humility. And humility is an idea that I think that we probably think incorrectly about. I think we probably default to an unhelpful definition and application of humility. I remember a few years ago, and I think I've mentioned this story in church before. I can't remember if I have or not. So if you've heard it before, if it sounds familiar, I'm not going to belabor it, but I think it helps me make my point today. A few years ago, I was with some family and family friends, and we were at this get-together, and the guy whose house it was at said, hey, come help me get some food for everybody. I said, great. So we go outside. We get in this car. It was a brand-new Mercedes S-Class, super nice car, over $100,000 vehicle. And I get in there, and I go, oh, is this new? And he goes, yeah, yeah, I just got it last month. I said, do you like it? He goes, I love it. It's great. I said, it looks great, man. These seats are nice. They got the cooling things. You got the screen across here. This seems like a really great car. And he goes, yeah, it's just a car. Just gets me from A to B. And I just went, okay. And we started talking about something else. But in my head, I thought, oh, crud. Just a car. A 2015 Prius with 150,000 miles is just a car, okay? $115,000 S-Class is not just a car. That's a choice. And if that's a choice you want to make, that's fine. I'm not here to critique it, okay? I have no criticism for what he chooses to do with his resources. And any of you that have nice vehicles, I'm not trying to criticize those. But here's what I will criticize is when someone, when you spend $115,000 on a car and someone goes, this is nice, don't try to act like you're driving a Civic, okay? I just found it to be disingenuous, and I think it was his attempt to be humble and modest, but I found it annoying. Kind of like those people that you have in your lives that you can't give a compliment to. Compliments won't stick to them, right? You go tell Aaron he did a great job leading worship last week, and he just goes, oh, glory to God. Like, he won't accept it. I I've seen women do this to each other you show up at a wedding or at an event or the the I joke that the Addis Jamari uh night of new beginnings every year is like uh Grace Raleigh prom everybody gets dressed up for it when you go and a group of women standing around you're like oh you look so good I love your dress and they're just like oh this I just got it at Dillard's it's deal. You know, like they won't just say thank you. I feel pretty too. They won't say that ever. You go over to someone's house and it's wonderful. This meal is fantastic. Oh, thanks. My husband did all the hard work. And we know good and well your husband didn't do anything. But there's this idea in our culture, and I think particularly in Christian culture, maybe Southern culture, which how do you unparse those things, where humility is really false modesty. And I think that's just an insufficient way to think about humility because I think if we can actually understand what biblical godly humility is, that there's an efficacy to that that we really probably haven't considered when it comes to humility. So this morning I want to posit to you that maybe this can be a working definition of humility that we understand together. Maybe humility is the result of how we estimate our sin and ourselves. Maybe humility, true biblical humility, is how we estimate our sin. And when I say our sin, what I mean is the current situation of our sin, the current sins with which we wrestle, the things that entangle us and cause us to not run our race that we need to cast aside, the current sins that we deal with, and the capacity that we have for sin in the future. If we want to be truly humble, we need to adequately and accurately estimate our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here this morning because I think what we'll find is that we're all on the same page and it would be a little bit of a redundant sermon. I think how to accurately estimate ourselves is where we can make some more interesting headway. But I can't talk about biblical humility without addressing the fact that it's immediately intertwined with how we understand our sin condition because of verses like this. I'm going to read from James 4, 6 through 10. It's on your bulletins, but it's not in the notes. James 4 says this, will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn, and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. James, when he says humble yourself, when he says that really ought to be scary term for us, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. I'm not exactly sure what God's opposition looks and feels like, but I don't want to know. But he gives grace or favor to the humble. James immediately ties humility into an awareness of and disgust with our sin. You see that? He immediately says, be humble. And to be humble, he says we have to weep and wretch before the Lord, that our joy has to turn into mourning, that our laughter has to turn into sorrow, that we need to be brought to a place where we are rock bottom with our sin, where we despise our sin and what it does to us and those around us. Now, I'm not going to belabor this because any point that I would make here would be very similar to the points that I preached in part two of this series on repentance. The first Psalm, Psalm 120, is a Psalm on repentance. It's how the Psalms of Ascent start off. And I said, no journey towards God can begin without the first step being repentance. And for repentance, we have to come to a place of disgust with our sin and who we are and what it's doing to the people around us. And that's what James is echoing. And that's what leads to true humility, which is why we're talking about it today. Now, as it relates to being realistic about our current sin condition and our capacity to sin in the future, I think that Christians, in my experience, kind of fall into three categories. And I've been in church world, I have no memories outside of church. I've been in church world my whole life. These are the blocks of Christians that I've experienced. So the main block of Christians that I've experienced are the ones who, when you say, how are you doing with sin? How's sin in your life? And what do you think of your capacity to sin? You think terrible, wretched, I'm miserable. I'm so glad everyone in the room does not know what the sins that I'm dealing with, the things I'm thinking of right now. When I say, what sin do you deal with in your life? For many of us in the room, instantly, we know which one it is for us or five, right? And for you, you walk around constantly aware of your sin. On Tuesday, I was sitting in a recliner, not moving, watching TV, and I got a crick in my neck. I don't know. I'm getting old. I guess this is what it feels like. And it's gotten a little bit better every day since. All right, I can do this now. But on Monday, on Wednesday morning, if Lily, my daughter, needed something, I had to go, yeah. And every, on Wednesday, everything I did, every reflex that turned my head, every way that I sat, every way that I laid, every time I tried to take pressure off of it, it didn't matter. Sometimes it felt a little bit bad. Sometimes it felt a lot a bit bad. But I was all day acutely aware of it. And if you've ever had a crick in your neck for days afterwards, it is part of your consciousness. That pain is there all the time. And for a lot of us, we carry sin in the same way. There's a sin that we're aware of that we need to fix, that we need to eradicate, that we need to start doing or stop doing. And we don't do it. And so anytime we're in church, anytime we're in small group, anytime we're exposed to spiritual things, any movement, any slight movement of our head, we feel it, we're reminded of it, we feel bad about it, we want to get rid of it. That's fine. That's actually a good, humble place to be. It's not a good place to stay, which is why we should go through repentance and not exist there. But we should all have a sense of our capacity for wretchedness. The second category of Christians that I've seen and how we think about our sin is kind of the group of people that goes, you know what? I'm doing okay, right? I'm not an alcoholic. I don't have things in the shadows that I'd be ashamed for other people to see. When they talked about me being embarrassed if everybody knew my sins, I mean, maybe a little bit, but not really. We think we're kind of doing okay. That's great. But what I would ask you is, is your doing okay really just you playing the comparison game between you and people who are not? And going, I'm doing fine? Is your okay complacency? Is it laziness? Is it fear or cowardice? Is it a lack of engagement? I would argue almost always that it's just simply a lack of awareness of ourselves. If you think you're doing okay, ask your spouse, your kids, your coworkers, your close friends. In the last three to five years of my life, do you see me increasingly growing in the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, do you see in my wake a greater production of those things? Do you see me growing closer to God and increasing in zeal and increasing in discipline and increasing in patience and wisdom and joy? Do you see these things manifesting in my life? Because if for the last three to five years those things are not increasing in greater measure year over year, then what I would tell you is, buddy, you're not doing okay. You're stagnant. And if you're stagnant, you're going back. But I do think there's a third group that genuinely is doing okay. And you say, no, I am increasing in those ways. I don't want to make space for that. Because I'm not trying to make everybody feel bad. But if you are doing okay, if this is a season in your life where you feel closer to God than you've ever felt, you have more earnest desire for him than you've ever had, I think the humble thing to do there, the thing to help us accurately see our sin is to understand I'm in a good spot now, but nothing that has happened has changed my capacity for sin in the future. There but for the grace of God go I. I don't care how good you're doing. You're two bad weeks away from some of the worst decisions you've ever made in your life. And so if you are in a good place, look at that as grace from God. That every day and week and month that's gotten you there is a gift of grace that he gave you where he gave you the clarity to allow him in your life to shape your character, to sanctify you, and to make you more like Christ. But it's God's working in you that puts you there. So the first thing we do to seek humility is we have an adequate perception of our sin. We hold that well. We understand our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. But I didn't want to belabor that or spend a lot of time there this morning because I think having an accurate estimate of ourselves is something that, because I think as Christians we've probably all thought about the things I just said in some capacity. But I'd be willing to bet that not all of us have thought about humility in this light and accurately estimating ourselves in this way. The first verse of Psalm 131 speaks to this. I want to bring our attention back to it. My heart is not proud, Lord. My eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. In long obedience in the same direction at the beginning of every chapter, you're given the psalm. But it's the psalm from the message that was translated by Eugene Peterson to be very easily approachable. And the way that he phrases it there is, God, I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think that I'm a bigger deal than I really am. And I think that's a great concept. But the problem is that I think we've tended to apply that principle. My eyes are not haughty. My spirit is not proud. I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think I'm too big of a deal. I think we've applied that the way that my family friend applied it to his new car. It shows up as a false modesty. It shows up as disingenuous. It shows up as, oh, you know, I didn't have anything to do with that. Oh, no, that's not me. It shows up as that friend that won't let compliments stick. And you just want to grab him by the shoulders and say, can I just please bless you? Will you accept this? Will you just admit that you've done something good in someone's life for once? And we apply this incorrectly. I think we often mistake humility as the disingenuous reduction of ourselves. I think we often seek to be humble. God opposes the proud, gives grace to the humble, So I'm not going to be, to run from pride, I'm going to be extra reductive of myself and who I am. I have no talents. I have nothing to offer. I've never done anything good. Even like, I used to do this. I've tried to move away from it. But if somebody said, hey, you know, that was a great sermon. I would say either, yeah, hey, glory to God, thank you so much. Like, nothing to do with me. Or I would say, yeah, well, you know, blind squirrel and things. Like, not accepting any of it. And I think when we're the person trying to compliment, when we're the person who sees other people, when we're the person who sees what other people have to offer, and we can't get that person to agree with us, not in a braggadocious way, not in a haughty way, just in an honest way, it becomes frustrating and disingenuous. So I actually think that true humility is realizing our abilities, our gifts, the things at which we excel, are actually gifts from God. He created us with those gifts, and he gave them so that we might use them to build God's kingdom, which is a wonderful invitation from God that fills our life with purpose beyond ourselves. It's incredible how it all works together. So let's say that you're smart. God made you smart. And here's the thing. We have a lot of smart people in this room. I think about, Grace, that we have an unusual concentration of capable and intelligent leadership. Some of us bring the average way down. Others of us are really gifted in this area. So let's say you're smart. So, what'd you do to be smart? You were born smart, right? Let's say you're fast. You can run really fast. So, you were born fast. What'd you do at three to get fast? Nothing. Let's say you're funny. Great. You're going to brag about it? Did you make yourself funny? No. Somebody making fun of you when you were a little kid and giving you trauma made you funny. No, I'm just kidding around. God gave you the capacity for humor. Let's say you're a leader. You're a good leader. People seem to follow you. They seem to rally around you. When you use your voice, people tend to listen and you don't really understand, but people just always kind of get behind you and kind of go where you're going. So, did you make yourself that way? You're hospitable, or you're kind, or you're gracious. Whatever your gifts may be, my attitude about those gifts with you and with me is who cares? Who cares? The Bible says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. He created all of us with gifts and abilities and a path to good works that we should walk in. We're told in Corinthians that we are the body of Christ and that within the body, the nose, the toes, the eyes, the ears, the mouth, the arms, they all have a job. We were all gifted to be a part of that body. What do I care about what your gift is and what my gift is? The flip side of this is being haughty about it, is being proud of it. Let's say you're smart and you're proud of the fact that you're smart. And you kind of think everybody else can be a bunch of dummies sometimes. And if they don't think about it like you think about it, maybe you find yourself gracious by thinking, well, I don't think they're that smart. So it's probably hard going through life that stupid. I'll give them some grace. I've never personally thought that. It's not my struggle. If you're successful, it's to be haughty about that success. I've done it. I've earned it. I put together the amalgamation of ambition and perception and leadership and intelligence that produced in me what has been successful in the business place. I am proud of that, and we walk around with our chest puffed out because I'm a big deal. You know what you're like when you do that? You're like the teenage kid whose parents decide to buy them a $100,000 Range Rover. If that's what you want to do for your kid, I'd like to be adopted. But, not criticizing you. But you're like the kid whose parents buy you the $100,000 Range Rover, and you drive to school, and you park next to the kid in the 2015 Civic, and you make fun of them for it. You look down on them for it. Look at your stupid car. My car's so great, your car's so dumb. Yeah. Jerk. You didn't do a thing to earn that Range Rover except breathe for 16 years. All right? That's your daddy's money or your mommy's money. That is not your money or your granddaddy's money. I don't know where you got it, but you didn't get it. That's what I know. And that kid probably earned his car. Which one of you is better off for that? When we walk around proud of our gifts and abilities, yeah, I'm smart. Yeah, I'm talented. Yeah, I'm kind. I'm nicer than everybody else. And we take pride in that. I take care of other people better than everybody else, and we take pride in that. When we walk around proud, one pastor put it this way, we were born on third base, and we act like we hit a triple. We should not do that. Once you've identified where your gifts and abilities lie, the absolute wrong thing is to start to give yourself credit for putting those things in there because you didn't make yourself that way. God did. And this is what gives Christians a unique path to humility because we're able to go, yeah, God made me smart. So I have a capable and curious mind. God, how can I use that to further your kingdom? God gave me a good voice. So, God, how can I use this voice to bring glory to you and grow your kingdom? God made me a good leader. God made me good at making money. God made me good at building things and companies. God made me good at hosting people and making them feel welcome. I have this unnatural ability where when I sit down with someone I don't know, they just start telling me all of their problems. Okay, great. That's a gift that God has given you. Who cares about bragging about it? The important question is, once we acknowledge it, is to go, great, I've been made this way. You've been made that way. Nobody cares. What's the best way to use and deploy this gift to build God's kingdom? And in that way, we exist in this posture of gratitude. God, I'm so grateful that you made me the way you did. And then it gives me the opportunities that it does. Please help me to always hold them in the proper light and to use them to bring glory and honor to you and to build your kingdom. When we have this posture of humility, where we're willing to be honest with ourselves, it's not bragging to admit and to acknowledge that God has gifted us in certain ways. It's actually in concurrence with all of Scripture because we know that He does. It's simply estimating ourselves accurately and holding them properly to know that those gifts were not given to make our lives better. They were given so that we might participate in the building of God's kingdom. I think Jeremiah the prophet probably said it best when he says this in chapter 9 verses 23 and 24. or the strong boast of their strength, or the rich boast of their riches. But let the one who boasts boast about this, that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord who exercises kindness, justice, and righteousness on earth. For in these I delight, declares the Lord. God says, if you want to boast, don't boast because you're wise. Don't boast because you're smart. Don't boast because you're capable or successful or kind or generous or hospitable. Don't boast about any of that stuff. If you want to boast, boast in me and boast in this. Boast that you know me. Boast that you have the humility to know me, to recognize and have faith in me. Boast in who your heavenly father is. I was walking by before church started to get my last minute water. And as I walked by, my son John is three. As I walked by his room, he saw me and he goes, that's my dad. For everyone to know. If you're going to boast, boast like John, that when we see God, we go, that's my dad. That's my heavenly father. I know him. I'm his child. I'm proud to know him. Everything else is just a gift that your dad gave you so you can point other people towards him. That's all it is. To hold it in any different regard than that is foolish. Now, there's a flip side to this coin because not everybody in the room has the same comfort level with admitting their various gifts and abilities. There are some of you in the room. There are some people, when I say, hey, whatever your gifts and abilities are, they go, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, I got them. There are other people that when I go, whatever your gifts and abilities are, that you think to yourself, I'd love to know, because I don't have any. And I don't really have anything to offer anyone. I'm just kind of there. I'm nice. I do my part. I don't have anything in particular to offer God or his kingdom. The second verse in the psalm is for you. This verse says, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. In the chapter that Peterson writes on this psalm, he points out these opposing sides of the humility coin. One is pride and haughtiness. And the other is infantilism. To infantilize ourselves unnecessarily. And he thinks that's the figurative language with I'm a weaned child because a child that isn't weaned, that still relies on its mama for sustenance day to day, can't yet be a productive member of society. And so the picture that he paints is once we are weaned, once we are separated, once we don't need somebody else for our daily sustenance, we can actually take our step into being a productive member of society and God's kingdom. And so it's actually harmful to refuse to acknowledge our gifts. And when we do that, when we think we have nothing to offer, when we've taken humility so far in the other direction, so far away from pride that we don't allow ourselves to even identify how God has gifted us and how we might be used. This psalm says we're like a child who's still a suckling. We're not yet ready to be productive. And I think that refusing to acknowledge our gifts actually makes us less productive as believers. Refusing to acknowledge that you have a good voice, that you have musical talent, that you're organized, that you lead well, that you build well, that you ask good questions without, by refusing to acknowledge how God made us we actually make ourselves less productive towards God's kingdom now I will admit to you and I don't think this is going to come as a shocker to anyone if you we all lean towards one side of that coin this is not the side to which lean. So I don't want to try to paint a picture like I don't struggle with pride somehow. I do. But there has been one very, to me, profound area in my life where this struggle has shown up. I went into vocational ministry when I was 19 years old. In the year 2000, I began to get paid to be a Christian. I just took my faith professional. That's all I did. Because I think that what I do is just be a professional Christian. I think everybody's got their part to play. Everybody has their gifts to apply, and we should just do it. Anyways. I've been in vocational ministry close to 25 years. And again, started in 2000 as a student staffer for a local Young Life Club. It took me until 2021, the summer of 2021, after I read Eugene Peterson's autobiography called Pastor. It took me 21 years of vocational ministry to say out loud, I believe God has called and purposed and designed me to be a pastor. Not simply a teacher of God's word, which is how I would have phrased it prior to, but a pastor, a shepherd, someone who has been called and purposed to look out for people, to draw people in to one another, to provide leadership for the corner of the kingdom to which he's assigned me, Grace Raleigh. It took me 21 years to acknowledge out loud that I believe God has designed me and purposed me to be a pastor and that he's gifted me in some capacity to be a leader so that I might serve his kingdom in that way. It took me 21 years to admit that because I thought it felt so arrogant for me to admit that before 2021, even though functionally I had served as a pastor for 20 years. It struck me as so arrogant and I had so much imposter syndrome about it that I could never say it out loud. I always considered myself less than that, apart from that, not quite made to be that. It took me so long to be able to admit that and simply say it out loud. And when I said it and when I admitted it, there wasn't an ounce of pride in it, I promise you. It was just coming to the place where I could admit what other people told me and what God has shown me that this is the way that he's gifted me and what he wants me to do and I think that there is a lot of you who are limiting yourself and your estimation of yourself by over-correcting pride towards a useless humility that's actually causing you to be less productive in God's kingdom than you could be. Since that revelation in 2021, I'm not looking for any of you to say like, yeah, I've noticed you've been a markedly better pastor since then. But here's what I know. Since then, I've accepted the mantle of the church far more readily than I did before. Since then, I understand my role with more acuity than I did before. Since then, I understand what I'm supposed to do and how I'm supposed to use my voice so much more accurately and clearly than before and unapologetically. And again, not because it's somehow gone to my head and now I think this is what I can do, but because I feel the weight of responsibility of where God has placed me and it does me no good to not acknowledge that weight. And it does you no good either. You have people around you waiting to be impacted towards God's kingdom. You have people in your lives who need you to walk with God. You have friends and neighbors and family members who will listen to your voice far more than you think they will if you'll simply acknowledge how God has made you to reach them. But refusing to accept it isn't humility. It's fear and overcorrection and dishonesty. And it's not godly humility. When we accurately estimate our sin and ourselves, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. When we have that first piece of the puzzle in place, I have an accurate estimate of my capacity to sin in the future and my current sin situation now. When we see that clearly as God sees it, and when we see ourselves as God sees us, you are for me, not against me. I am who you say I am. We just all sang it together. When we really believe that and we see ourselves as God does, and we see our sin as God does, and our potential to sin as God does, and we don't hold our gifts as something we're proud of. We offer them up to God, and we have the courage to admit how he's gifted us. When we can do that and accurately see those things, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. Don't you see? Because we go, okay, sure, you may be good at this thing. Who cares? It's neither good nor bad. It just is. God, how should I use it? And I just wonder what could happen in your families if you decided to pursue true godly humility and saw your sin in yourself accurately the way that God does. Parents, most of the parents in the room that's still raising kids are over here parents what if what if the kids that grew up in your home had the clairvoyance to think when they were 16 years old, sure, I'm smart. So what? It's my job to figure out in the next decade how God wants me to use that in his kingdom. What if that's who you release into the wild? What if that's what we produce at Grace? What if your kids at 25 and 30 have careers and lives and are involved in things that are a result of true humility that you showed them and modeled for them. How much better would they be at this than you are? If we can do that now. When we pursue godly humility, we perfectly position ourselves to build God's kingdom. And it's a powerful thing. So let's no longer think of humility as simply a disingenuous modesty. Let's think of it as accurately holding a vision of who we are that agrees with God's vision for ourselves and pursues the future that he's designed for us. Let's pray. Father we thank you for. Who you are. We thank you for how you love us. We thank you for the gifts that you've given us. God, for those of us who have a tendency to let pride and haughtiness sneak in, to begin when we go unmonitored to think that we're somebody and we've done something special. Would you help us remember who we are and who you are and how you made us? And God, would we see what you see and hold our abilities as gifts that were given to us so that we might build your kingdom? Father, for those of us that struggle and might think that we don't have anything to offer, I pray that you would help us see through the people in our lives who love us, the way that you've gifted us so that we might be productive in your kingdom, so that the people around us who need us would see us and be pointed to you by us. God, I pray that we would be a church full of humble people, but not humble in the way that the world describes it. Humble in the way that you lay out so that we might be servants to you as we go. We thank you for all these things. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. My name is Wes. I'm one of the elders here, and I'm going to start us off with a reading from Psalms 131. And yes, I've joined the club now, too. My heart is not proud. Lord, my eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters of things too wonderful for me, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. Israel, put your hope in the Lord, both now and forevermore. Thank you, Wes. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. We are in the fifth part of our series called Ascent. It's inspired by the book by Eugene Peterson called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. It's a hugely impactful book for me and for some of the folks on staff, and I've encouraged you guys to pick it up and read it. And hopefully you've started to do that and it's impacting you in similar ways. The book Long Obedience in the Same Direction is based off of, and you should know this by now because we're in week five and we've been saying this every week. It's based off of the Psalms of Ascent that are found in Psalms chapters 120 through 134 that were meant to be read and sung and worshiped through on a family's pilgrimage to Jerusalem on their way to go worship. So it's worship to get their hearts and their minds right on the way to go worship. And so the whole idea of the series has been to go on a journey of spiritual pursuit of God as I challenged you guys in September to let's all take our spiritual lives, our spiritual health more seriously and begin to take intentional steps in that direction. The series has been designed to help us with that. And so this morning we arrive at Psalm 131, which is a Psalm that places its focus squarely on this idea of humility. And humility is an idea that I think that we probably think incorrectly about. I think we probably default to an unhelpful definition and application of humility. I remember a few years ago, and I think I've mentioned this story in church before. I can't remember if I have or not. So if you've heard it before, if it sounds familiar, I'm not going to belabor it, but I think it helps me make my point today. A few years ago, I was with some family and family friends, and we were at this get-together, and the guy whose house it was at said, hey, come help me get some food for everybody. I said, great. So we go outside. We get in this car. It was a brand-new Mercedes S-Class, super nice car, over $100,000 vehicle. And I get in there, and I go, oh, is this new? And he goes, yeah, yeah, I just got it last month. I said, do you like it? He goes, I love it. It's great. I said, it looks great, man. These seats are nice. They got the cooling things. You got the screen across here. This seems like a really great car. And he goes, yeah, it's just a car. Just gets me from A to B. And I just went, okay. And we started talking about something else. But in my head, I thought, oh, crud. Just a car. A 2015 Prius with 150,000 miles is just a car, okay? $115,000 S-Class is not just a car. That's a choice. And if that's a choice you want to make, that's fine. I'm not here to critique it, okay? I have no criticism for what he chooses to do with his resources. And any of you that have nice vehicles, I'm not trying to criticize those. But here's what I will criticize is when someone, when you spend $115,000 on a car and someone goes, this is nice, don't try to act like you're driving a Civic, okay? I just found it to be disingenuous, and I think it was his attempt to be humble and modest, but I found it annoying. Kind of like those people that you have in your lives that you can't give a compliment to. Compliments won't stick to them, right? You go tell Aaron he did a great job leading worship last week, and he just goes, oh, glory to God. Like, he won't accept it. I I've seen women do this to each other you show up at a wedding or at an event or the the I joke that the Addis Jamari uh night of new beginnings every year is like uh Grace Raleigh prom everybody gets dressed up for it when you go and a group of women standing around you're like oh you look so good I love your dress and they're just like oh this I just got it at Dillard's it's deal. You know, like they won't just say thank you. I feel pretty too. They won't say that ever. You go over to someone's house and it's wonderful. This meal is fantastic. Oh, thanks. My husband did all the hard work. And we know good and well your husband didn't do anything. But there's this idea in our culture, and I think particularly in Christian culture, maybe Southern culture, which how do you unparse those things, where humility is really false modesty. And I think that's just an insufficient way to think about humility because I think if we can actually understand what biblical godly humility is, that there's an efficacy to that that we really probably haven't considered when it comes to humility. So this morning I want to posit to you that maybe this can be a working definition of humility that we understand together. Maybe humility is the result of how we estimate our sin and ourselves. Maybe humility, true biblical humility, is how we estimate our sin. And when I say our sin, what I mean is the current situation of our sin, the current sins with which we wrestle, the things that entangle us and cause us to not run our race that we need to cast aside, the current sins that we deal with, and the capacity that we have for sin in the future. If we want to be truly humble, we need to adequately and accurately estimate our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here this morning because I think what we'll find is that we're all on the same page and it would be a little bit of a redundant sermon. I think how to accurately estimate ourselves is where we can make some more interesting headway. But I can't talk about biblical humility without addressing the fact that it's immediately intertwined with how we understand our sin condition because of verses like this. I'm going to read from James 4, 6 through 10. It's on your bulletins, but it's not in the notes. James 4 says this, will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn, and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. James, when he says humble yourself, when he says that really ought to be scary term for us, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. I'm not exactly sure what God's opposition looks and feels like, but I don't want to know. But he gives grace or favor to the humble. James immediately ties humility into an awareness of and disgust with our sin. You see that? He immediately says, be humble. And to be humble, he says we have to weep and wretch before the Lord, that our joy has to turn into mourning, that our laughter has to turn into sorrow, that we need to be brought to a place where we are rock bottom with our sin, where we despise our sin and what it does to us and those around us. Now, I'm not going to belabor this because any point that I would make here would be very similar to the points that I preached in part two of this series on repentance. The first Psalm, Psalm 120, is a Psalm on repentance. It's how the Psalms of Ascent start off. And I said, no journey towards God can begin without the first step being repentance. And for repentance, we have to come to a place of disgust with our sin and who we are and what it's doing to the people around us. And that's what James is echoing. And that's what leads to true humility, which is why we're talking about it today. Now, as it relates to being realistic about our current sin condition and our capacity to sin in the future, I think that Christians, in my experience, kind of fall into three categories. And I've been in church world, I have no memories outside of church. I've been in church world my whole life. These are the blocks of Christians that I've experienced. So the main block of Christians that I've experienced are the ones who, when you say, how are you doing with sin? How's sin in your life? And what do you think of your capacity to sin? You think terrible, wretched, I'm miserable. I'm so glad everyone in the room does not know what the sins that I'm dealing with, the things I'm thinking of right now. When I say, what sin do you deal with in your life? For many of us in the room, instantly, we know which one it is for us or five, right? And for you, you walk around constantly aware of your sin. On Tuesday, I was sitting in a recliner, not moving, watching TV, and I got a crick in my neck. I don't know. I'm getting old. I guess this is what it feels like. And it's gotten a little bit better every day since. All right, I can do this now. But on Monday, on Wednesday morning, if Lily, my daughter, needed something, I had to go, yeah. And every, on Wednesday, everything I did, every reflex that turned my head, every way that I sat, every way that I laid, every time I tried to take pressure off of it, it didn't matter. Sometimes it felt a little bit bad. Sometimes it felt a lot a bit bad. But I was all day acutely aware of it. And if you've ever had a crick in your neck for days afterwards, it is part of your consciousness. That pain is there all the time. And for a lot of us, we carry sin in the same way. There's a sin that we're aware of that we need to fix, that we need to eradicate, that we need to start doing or stop doing. And we don't do it. And so anytime we're in church, anytime we're in small group, anytime we're exposed to spiritual things, any movement, any slight movement of our head, we feel it, we're reminded of it, we feel bad about it, we want to get rid of it. That's fine. That's actually a good, humble place to be. It's not a good place to stay, which is why we should go through repentance and not exist there. But we should all have a sense of our capacity for wretchedness. The second category of Christians that I've seen and how we think about our sin is kind of the group of people that goes, you know what? I'm doing okay, right? I'm not an alcoholic. I don't have things in the shadows that I'd be ashamed for other people to see. When they talked about me being embarrassed if everybody knew my sins, I mean, maybe a little bit, but not really. We think we're kind of doing okay. That's great. But what I would ask you is, is your doing okay really just you playing the comparison game between you and people who are not? And going, I'm doing fine? Is your okay complacency? Is it laziness? Is it fear or cowardice? Is it a lack of engagement? I would argue almost always that it's just simply a lack of awareness of ourselves. If you think you're doing okay, ask your spouse, your kids, your coworkers, your close friends. In the last three to five years of my life, do you see me increasingly growing in the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, do you see in my wake a greater production of those things? Do you see me growing closer to God and increasing in zeal and increasing in discipline and increasing in patience and wisdom and joy? Do you see these things manifesting in my life? Because if for the last three to five years those things are not increasing in greater measure year over year, then what I would tell you is, buddy, you're not doing okay. You're stagnant. And if you're stagnant, you're going back. But I do think there's a third group that genuinely is doing okay. And you say, no, I am increasing in those ways. I don't want to make space for that. Because I'm not trying to make everybody feel bad. But if you are doing okay, if this is a season in your life where you feel closer to God than you've ever felt, you have more earnest desire for him than you've ever had, I think the humble thing to do there, the thing to help us accurately see our sin is to understand I'm in a good spot now, but nothing that has happened has changed my capacity for sin in the future. There but for the grace of God go I. I don't care how good you're doing. You're two bad weeks away from some of the worst decisions you've ever made in your life. And so if you are in a good place, look at that as grace from God. That every day and week and month that's gotten you there is a gift of grace that he gave you where he gave you the clarity to allow him in your life to shape your character, to sanctify you, and to make you more like Christ. But it's God's working in you that puts you there. So the first thing we do to seek humility is we have an adequate perception of our sin. We hold that well. We understand our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. But I didn't want to belabor that or spend a lot of time there this morning because I think having an accurate estimate of ourselves is something that, because I think as Christians we've probably all thought about the things I just said in some capacity. But I'd be willing to bet that not all of us have thought about humility in this light and accurately estimating ourselves in this way. The first verse of Psalm 131 speaks to this. I want to bring our attention back to it. My heart is not proud, Lord. My eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. In long obedience in the same direction at the beginning of every chapter, you're given the psalm. But it's the psalm from the message that was translated by Eugene Peterson to be very easily approachable. And the way that he phrases it there is, God, I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think that I'm a bigger deal than I really am. And I think that's a great concept. But the problem is that I think we've tended to apply that principle. My eyes are not haughty. My spirit is not proud. I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think I'm too big of a deal. I think we've applied that the way that my family friend applied it to his new car. It shows up as a false modesty. It shows up as disingenuous. It shows up as, oh, you know, I didn't have anything to do with that. Oh, no, that's not me. It shows up as that friend that won't let compliments stick. And you just want to grab him by the shoulders and say, can I just please bless you? Will you accept this? Will you just admit that you've done something good in someone's life for once? And we apply this incorrectly. I think we often mistake humility as the disingenuous reduction of ourselves. I think we often seek to be humble. God opposes the proud, gives grace to the humble, So I'm not going to be, to run from pride, I'm going to be extra reductive of myself and who I am. I have no talents. I have nothing to offer. I've never done anything good. Even like, I used to do this. I've tried to move away from it. But if somebody said, hey, you know, that was a great sermon. I would say either, yeah, hey, glory to God, thank you so much. Like, nothing to do with me. Or I would say, yeah, well, you know, blind squirrel and things. Like, not accepting any of it. And I think when we're the person trying to compliment, when we're the person who sees other people, when we're the person who sees what other people have to offer, and we can't get that person to agree with us, not in a braggadocious way, not in a haughty way, just in an honest way, it becomes frustrating and disingenuous. So I actually think that true humility is realizing our abilities, our gifts, the things at which we excel, are actually gifts from God. He created us with those gifts, and he gave them so that we might use them to build God's kingdom, which is a wonderful invitation from God that fills our life with purpose beyond ourselves. It's incredible how it all works together. So let's say that you're smart. God made you smart. And here's the thing. We have a lot of smart people in this room. I think about, Grace, that we have an unusual concentration of capable and intelligent leadership. Some of us bring the average way down. Others of us are really gifted in this area. So let's say you're smart. So, what'd you do to be smart? You were born smart, right? Let's say you're fast. You can run really fast. So, you were born fast. What'd you do at three to get fast? Nothing. Let's say you're funny. Great. You're going to brag about it? Did you make yourself funny? No. Somebody making fun of you when you were a little kid and giving you trauma made you funny. No, I'm just kidding around. God gave you the capacity for humor. Let's say you're a leader. You're a good leader. People seem to follow you. They seem to rally around you. When you use your voice, people tend to listen and you don't really understand, but people just always kind of get behind you and kind of go where you're going. So, did you make yourself that way? You're hospitable, or you're kind, or you're gracious. Whatever your gifts may be, my attitude about those gifts with you and with me is who cares? Who cares? The Bible says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. He created all of us with gifts and abilities and a path to good works that we should walk in. We're told in Corinthians that we are the body of Christ and that within the body, the nose, the toes, the eyes, the ears, the mouth, the arms, they all have a job. We were all gifted to be a part of that body. What do I care about what your gift is and what my gift is? The flip side of this is being haughty about it, is being proud of it. Let's say you're smart and you're proud of the fact that you're smart. And you kind of think everybody else can be a bunch of dummies sometimes. And if they don't think about it like you think about it, maybe you find yourself gracious by thinking, well, I don't think they're that smart. So it's probably hard going through life that stupid. I'll give them some grace. I've never personally thought that. It's not my struggle. If you're successful, it's to be haughty about that success. I've done it. I've earned it. I put together the amalgamation of ambition and perception and leadership and intelligence that produced in me what has been successful in the business place. I am proud of that, and we walk around with our chest puffed out because I'm a big deal. You know what you're like when you do that? You're like the teenage kid whose parents decide to buy them a $100,000 Range Rover. If that's what you want to do for your kid, I'd like to be adopted. But, not criticizing you. But you're like the kid whose parents buy you the $100,000 Range Rover, and you drive to school, and you park next to the kid in the 2015 Civic, and you make fun of them for it. You look down on them for it. Look at your stupid car. My car's so great, your car's so dumb. Yeah. Jerk. You didn't do a thing to earn that Range Rover except breathe for 16 years. All right? That's your daddy's money or your mommy's money. That is not your money or your granddaddy's money. I don't know where you got it, but you didn't get it. That's what I know. And that kid probably earned his car. Which one of you is better off for that? When we walk around proud of our gifts and abilities, yeah, I'm smart. Yeah, I'm talented. Yeah, I'm kind. I'm nicer than everybody else. And we take pride in that. I take care of other people better than everybody else, and we take pride in that. When we walk around proud, one pastor put it this way, we were born on third base, and we act like we hit a triple. We should not do that. Once you've identified where your gifts and abilities lie, the absolute wrong thing is to start to give yourself credit for putting those things in there because you didn't make yourself that way. God did. And this is what gives Christians a unique path to humility because we're able to go, yeah, God made me smart. So I have a capable and curious mind. God, how can I use that to further your kingdom? God gave me a good voice. So, God, how can I use this voice to bring glory to you and grow your kingdom? God made me a good leader. God made me good at making money. God made me good at building things and companies. God made me good at hosting people and making them feel welcome. I have this unnatural ability where when I sit down with someone I don't know, they just start telling me all of their problems. Okay, great. That's a gift that God has given you. Who cares about bragging about it? The important question is, once we acknowledge it, is to go, great, I've been made this way. You've been made that way. Nobody cares. What's the best way to use and deploy this gift to build God's kingdom? And in that way, we exist in this posture of gratitude. God, I'm so grateful that you made me the way you did. And then it gives me the opportunities that it does. Please help me to always hold them in the proper light and to use them to bring glory and honor to you and to build your kingdom. When we have this posture of humility, where we're willing to be honest with ourselves, it's not bragging to admit and to acknowledge that God has gifted us in certain ways. It's actually in concurrence with all of Scripture because we know that He does. It's simply estimating ourselves accurately and holding them properly to know that those gifts were not given to make our lives better. They were given so that we might participate in the building of God's kingdom. I think Jeremiah the prophet probably said it best when he says this in chapter 9 verses 23 and 24. or the strong boast of their strength, or the rich boast of their riches. But let the one who boasts boast about this, that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord who exercises kindness, justice, and righteousness on earth. For in these I delight, declares the Lord. God says, if you want to boast, don't boast because you're wise. Don't boast because you're smart. Don't boast because you're capable or successful or kind or generous or hospitable. Don't boast about any of that stuff. If you want to boast, boast in me and boast in this. Boast that you know me. Boast that you have the humility to know me, to recognize and have faith in me. Boast in who your heavenly father is. I was walking by before church started to get my last minute water. And as I walked by, my son John is three. As I walked by his room, he saw me and he goes, that's my dad. For everyone to know. If you're going to boast, boast like John, that when we see God, we go, that's my dad. That's my heavenly father. I know him. I'm his child. I'm proud to know him. Everything else is just a gift that your dad gave you so you can point other people towards him. That's all it is. To hold it in any different regard than that is foolish. Now, there's a flip side to this coin because not everybody in the room has the same comfort level with admitting their various gifts and abilities. There are some of you in the room. There are some people, when I say, hey, whatever your gifts and abilities are, they go, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, I got them. There are other people that when I go, whatever your gifts and abilities are, that you think to yourself, I'd love to know, because I don't have any. And I don't really have anything to offer anyone. I'm just kind of there. I'm nice. I do my part. I don't have anything in particular to offer God or his kingdom. The second verse in the psalm is for you. This verse says, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. In the chapter that Peterson writes on this psalm, he points out these opposing sides of the humility coin. One is pride and haughtiness. And the other is infantilism. To infantilize ourselves unnecessarily. And he thinks that's the figurative language with I'm a weaned child because a child that isn't weaned, that still relies on its mama for sustenance day to day, can't yet be a productive member of society. And so the picture that he paints is once we are weaned, once we are separated, once we don't need somebody else for our daily sustenance, we can actually take our step into being a productive member of society and God's kingdom. And so it's actually harmful to refuse to acknowledge our gifts. And when we do that, when we think we have nothing to offer, when we've taken humility so far in the other direction, so far away from pride that we don't allow ourselves to even identify how God has gifted us and how we might be used. This psalm says we're like a child who's still a suckling. We're not yet ready to be productive. And I think that refusing to acknowledge our gifts actually makes us less productive as believers. Refusing to acknowledge that you have a good voice, that you have musical talent, that you're organized, that you lead well, that you build well, that you ask good questions without, by refusing to acknowledge how God made us we actually make ourselves less productive towards God's kingdom now I will admit to you and I don't think this is going to come as a shocker to anyone if you we all lean towards one side of that coin this is not the side to which lean. So I don't want to try to paint a picture like I don't struggle with pride somehow. I do. But there has been one very, to me, profound area in my life where this struggle has shown up. I went into vocational ministry when I was 19 years old. In the year 2000, I began to get paid to be a Christian. I just took my faith professional. That's all I did. Because I think that what I do is just be a professional Christian. I think everybody's got their part to play. Everybody has their gifts to apply, and we should just do it. Anyways. I've been in vocational ministry close to 25 years. And again, started in 2000 as a student staffer for a local Young Life Club. It took me until 2021, the summer of 2021, after I read Eugene Peterson's autobiography called Pastor. It took me 21 years of vocational ministry to say out loud, I believe God has called and purposed and designed me to be a pastor. Not simply a teacher of God's word, which is how I would have phrased it prior to, but a pastor, a shepherd, someone who has been called and purposed to look out for people, to draw people in to one another, to provide leadership for the corner of the kingdom to which he's assigned me, Grace Raleigh. It took me 21 years to acknowledge out loud that I believe God has designed me and purposed me to be a pastor and that he's gifted me in some capacity to be a leader so that I might serve his kingdom in that way. It took me 21 years to admit that because I thought it felt so arrogant for me to admit that before 2021, even though functionally I had served as a pastor for 20 years. It struck me as so arrogant and I had so much imposter syndrome about it that I could never say it out loud. I always considered myself less than that, apart from that, not quite made to be that. It took me so long to be able to admit that and simply say it out loud. And when I said it and when I admitted it, there wasn't an ounce of pride in it, I promise you. It was just coming to the place where I could admit what other people told me and what God has shown me that this is the way that he's gifted me and what he wants me to do and I think that there is a lot of you who are limiting yourself and your estimation of yourself by over-correcting pride towards a useless humility that's actually causing you to be less productive in God's kingdom than you could be. Since that revelation in 2021, I'm not looking for any of you to say like, yeah, I've noticed you've been a markedly better pastor since then. But here's what I know. Since then, I've accepted the mantle of the church far more readily than I did before. Since then, I understand my role with more acuity than I did before. Since then, I understand what I'm supposed to do and how I'm supposed to use my voice so much more accurately and clearly than before and unapologetically. And again, not because it's somehow gone to my head and now I think this is what I can do, but because I feel the weight of responsibility of where God has placed me and it does me no good to not acknowledge that weight. And it does you no good either. You have people around you waiting to be impacted towards God's kingdom. You have people in your lives who need you to walk with God. You have friends and neighbors and family members who will listen to your voice far more than you think they will if you'll simply acknowledge how God has made you to reach them. But refusing to accept it isn't humility. It's fear and overcorrection and dishonesty. And it's not godly humility. When we accurately estimate our sin and ourselves, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. When we have that first piece of the puzzle in place, I have an accurate estimate of my capacity to sin in the future and my current sin situation now. When we see that clearly as God sees it, and when we see ourselves as God sees us, you are for me, not against me. I am who you say I am. We just all sang it together. When we really believe that and we see ourselves as God does, and we see our sin as God does, and our potential to sin as God does, and we don't hold our gifts as something we're proud of. We offer them up to God, and we have the courage to admit how he's gifted us. When we can do that and accurately see those things, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. Don't you see? Because we go, okay, sure, you may be good at this thing. Who cares? It's neither good nor bad. It just is. God, how should I use it? And I just wonder what could happen in your families if you decided to pursue true godly humility and saw your sin in yourself accurately the way that God does. Parents, most of the parents in the room that's still raising kids are over here parents what if what if the kids that grew up in your home had the clairvoyance to think when they were 16 years old, sure, I'm smart. So what? It's my job to figure out in the next decade how God wants me to use that in his kingdom. What if that's who you release into the wild? What if that's what we produce at Grace? What if your kids at 25 and 30 have careers and lives and are involved in things that are a result of true humility that you showed them and modeled for them. How much better would they be at this than you are? If we can do that now. When we pursue godly humility, we perfectly position ourselves to build God's kingdom. And it's a powerful thing. So let's no longer think of humility as simply a disingenuous modesty. Let's think of it as accurately holding a vision of who we are that agrees with God's vision for ourselves and pursues the future that he's designed for us. Let's pray. Father we thank you for. Who you are. We thank you for how you love us. We thank you for the gifts that you've given us. God, for those of us who have a tendency to let pride and haughtiness sneak in, to begin when we go unmonitored to think that we're somebody and we've done something special. Would you help us remember who we are and who you are and how you made us? And God, would we see what you see and hold our abilities as gifts that were given to us so that we might build your kingdom? Father, for those of us that struggle and might think that we don't have anything to offer, I pray that you would help us see through the people in our lives who love us, the way that you've gifted us so that we might be productive in your kingdom, so that the people around us who need us would see us and be pointed to you by us. God, I pray that we would be a church full of humble people, but not humble in the way that the world describes it. Humble in the way that you lay out so that we might be servants to you as we go. We thank you for all these things. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning. My name is Wes. I'm one of the elders here, and I'm going to start us off with a reading from Psalms 131. And yes, I've joined the club now, too. My heart is not proud. Lord, my eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters of things too wonderful for me, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. Israel, put your hope in the Lord, both now and forevermore. Thank you, Wes. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see you. We are in the fifth part of our series called Ascent. It's inspired by the book by Eugene Peterson called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. It's a hugely impactful book for me and for some of the folks on staff, and I've encouraged you guys to pick it up and read it. And hopefully you've started to do that and it's impacting you in similar ways. The book Long Obedience in the Same Direction is based off of, and you should know this by now because we're in week five and we've been saying this every week. It's based off of the Psalms of Ascent that are found in Psalms chapters 120 through 134 that were meant to be read and sung and worshiped through on a family's pilgrimage to Jerusalem on their way to go worship. So it's worship to get their hearts and their minds right on the way to go worship. And so the whole idea of the series has been to go on a journey of spiritual pursuit of God as I challenged you guys in September to let's all take our spiritual lives, our spiritual health more seriously and begin to take intentional steps in that direction. The series has been designed to help us with that. And so this morning we arrive at Psalm 131, which is a Psalm that places its focus squarely on this idea of humility. And humility is an idea that I think that we probably think incorrectly about. I think we probably default to an unhelpful definition and application of humility. I remember a few years ago, and I think I've mentioned this story in church before. I can't remember if I have or not. So if you've heard it before, if it sounds familiar, I'm not going to belabor it, but I think it helps me make my point today. A few years ago, I was with some family and family friends, and we were at this get-together, and the guy whose house it was at said, hey, come help me get some food for everybody. I said, great. So we go outside. We get in this car. It was a brand-new Mercedes S-Class, super nice car, over $100,000 vehicle. And I get in there, and I go, oh, is this new? And he goes, yeah, yeah, I just got it last month. I said, do you like it? He goes, I love it. It's great. I said, it looks great, man. These seats are nice. They got the cooling things. You got the screen across here. This seems like a really great car. And he goes, yeah, it's just a car. Just gets me from A to B. And I just went, okay. And we started talking about something else. But in my head, I thought, oh, crud. Just a car. A 2015 Prius with 150,000 miles is just a car, okay? $115,000 S-Class is not just a car. That's a choice. And if that's a choice you want to make, that's fine. I'm not here to critique it, okay? I have no criticism for what he chooses to do with his resources. And any of you that have nice vehicles, I'm not trying to criticize those. But here's what I will criticize is when someone, when you spend $115,000 on a car and someone goes, this is nice, don't try to act like you're driving a Civic, okay? I just found it to be disingenuous, and I think it was his attempt to be humble and modest, but I found it annoying. Kind of like those people that you have in your lives that you can't give a compliment to. Compliments won't stick to them, right? You go tell Aaron he did a great job leading worship last week, and he just goes, oh, glory to God. Like, he won't accept it. I I've seen women do this to each other you show up at a wedding or at an event or the the I joke that the Addis Jamari uh night of new beginnings every year is like uh Grace Raleigh prom everybody gets dressed up for it when you go and a group of women standing around you're like oh you look so good I love your dress and they're just like oh this I just got it at Dillard's it's deal. You know, like they won't just say thank you. I feel pretty too. They won't say that ever. You go over to someone's house and it's wonderful. This meal is fantastic. Oh, thanks. My husband did all the hard work. And we know good and well your husband didn't do anything. But there's this idea in our culture, and I think particularly in Christian culture, maybe Southern culture, which how do you unparse those things, where humility is really false modesty. And I think that's just an insufficient way to think about humility because I think if we can actually understand what biblical godly humility is, that there's an efficacy to that that we really probably haven't considered when it comes to humility. So this morning I want to posit to you that maybe this can be a working definition of humility that we understand together. Maybe humility is the result of how we estimate our sin and ourselves. Maybe humility, true biblical humility, is how we estimate our sin. And when I say our sin, what I mean is the current situation of our sin, the current sins with which we wrestle, the things that entangle us and cause us to not run our race that we need to cast aside, the current sins that we deal with, and the capacity that we have for sin in the future. If we want to be truly humble, we need to adequately and accurately estimate our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here this morning because I think what we'll find is that we're all on the same page and it would be a little bit of a redundant sermon. I think how to accurately estimate ourselves is where we can make some more interesting headway. But I can't talk about biblical humility without addressing the fact that it's immediately intertwined with how we understand our sin condition because of verses like this. I'm going to read from James 4, 6 through 10. It's on your bulletins, but it's not in the notes. James 4 says this, will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn, and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. James, when he says humble yourself, when he says that really ought to be scary term for us, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. I'm not exactly sure what God's opposition looks and feels like, but I don't want to know. But he gives grace or favor to the humble. James immediately ties humility into an awareness of and disgust with our sin. You see that? He immediately says, be humble. And to be humble, he says we have to weep and wretch before the Lord, that our joy has to turn into mourning, that our laughter has to turn into sorrow, that we need to be brought to a place where we are rock bottom with our sin, where we despise our sin and what it does to us and those around us. Now, I'm not going to belabor this because any point that I would make here would be very similar to the points that I preached in part two of this series on repentance. The first Psalm, Psalm 120, is a Psalm on repentance. It's how the Psalms of Ascent start off. And I said, no journey towards God can begin without the first step being repentance. And for repentance, we have to come to a place of disgust with our sin and who we are and what it's doing to the people around us. And that's what James is echoing. And that's what leads to true humility, which is why we're talking about it today. Now, as it relates to being realistic about our current sin condition and our capacity to sin in the future, I think that Christians, in my experience, kind of fall into three categories. And I've been in church world, I have no memories outside of church. I've been in church world my whole life. These are the blocks of Christians that I've experienced. So the main block of Christians that I've experienced are the ones who, when you say, how are you doing with sin? How's sin in your life? And what do you think of your capacity to sin? You think terrible, wretched, I'm miserable. I'm so glad everyone in the room does not know what the sins that I'm dealing with, the things I'm thinking of right now. When I say, what sin do you deal with in your life? For many of us in the room, instantly, we know which one it is for us or five, right? And for you, you walk around constantly aware of your sin. On Tuesday, I was sitting in a recliner, not moving, watching TV, and I got a crick in my neck. I don't know. I'm getting old. I guess this is what it feels like. And it's gotten a little bit better every day since. All right, I can do this now. But on Monday, on Wednesday morning, if Lily, my daughter, needed something, I had to go, yeah. And every, on Wednesday, everything I did, every reflex that turned my head, every way that I sat, every way that I laid, every time I tried to take pressure off of it, it didn't matter. Sometimes it felt a little bit bad. Sometimes it felt a lot a bit bad. But I was all day acutely aware of it. And if you've ever had a crick in your neck for days afterwards, it is part of your consciousness. That pain is there all the time. And for a lot of us, we carry sin in the same way. There's a sin that we're aware of that we need to fix, that we need to eradicate, that we need to start doing or stop doing. And we don't do it. And so anytime we're in church, anytime we're in small group, anytime we're exposed to spiritual things, any movement, any slight movement of our head, we feel it, we're reminded of it, we feel bad about it, we want to get rid of it. That's fine. That's actually a good, humble place to be. It's not a good place to stay, which is why we should go through repentance and not exist there. But we should all have a sense of our capacity for wretchedness. The second category of Christians that I've seen and how we think about our sin is kind of the group of people that goes, you know what? I'm doing okay, right? I'm not an alcoholic. I don't have things in the shadows that I'd be ashamed for other people to see. When they talked about me being embarrassed if everybody knew my sins, I mean, maybe a little bit, but not really. We think we're kind of doing okay. That's great. But what I would ask you is, is your doing okay really just you playing the comparison game between you and people who are not? And going, I'm doing fine? Is your okay complacency? Is it laziness? Is it fear or cowardice? Is it a lack of engagement? I would argue almost always that it's just simply a lack of awareness of ourselves. If you think you're doing okay, ask your spouse, your kids, your coworkers, your close friends. In the last three to five years of my life, do you see me increasingly growing in the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, do you see in my wake a greater production of those things? Do you see me growing closer to God and increasing in zeal and increasing in discipline and increasing in patience and wisdom and joy? Do you see these things manifesting in my life? Because if for the last three to five years those things are not increasing in greater measure year over year, then what I would tell you is, buddy, you're not doing okay. You're stagnant. And if you're stagnant, you're going back. But I do think there's a third group that genuinely is doing okay. And you say, no, I am increasing in those ways. I don't want to make space for that. Because I'm not trying to make everybody feel bad. But if you are doing okay, if this is a season in your life where you feel closer to God than you've ever felt, you have more earnest desire for him than you've ever had, I think the humble thing to do there, the thing to help us accurately see our sin is to understand I'm in a good spot now, but nothing that has happened has changed my capacity for sin in the future. There but for the grace of God go I. I don't care how good you're doing. You're two bad weeks away from some of the worst decisions you've ever made in your life. And so if you are in a good place, look at that as grace from God. That every day and week and month that's gotten you there is a gift of grace that he gave you where he gave you the clarity to allow him in your life to shape your character, to sanctify you, and to make you more like Christ. But it's God's working in you that puts you there. So the first thing we do to seek humility is we have an adequate perception of our sin. We hold that well. We understand our current sin situation and our capacity to sin in the future. But I didn't want to belabor that or spend a lot of time there this morning because I think having an accurate estimate of ourselves is something that, because I think as Christians we've probably all thought about the things I just said in some capacity. But I'd be willing to bet that not all of us have thought about humility in this light and accurately estimating ourselves in this way. The first verse of Psalm 131 speaks to this. I want to bring our attention back to it. My heart is not proud, Lord. My eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. In long obedience in the same direction at the beginning of every chapter, you're given the psalm. But it's the psalm from the message that was translated by Eugene Peterson to be very easily approachable. And the way that he phrases it there is, God, I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think that I'm a bigger deal than I really am. And I think that's a great concept. But the problem is that I think we've tended to apply that principle. My eyes are not haughty. My spirit is not proud. I'm not too big for my britches. I don't think I'm too big of a deal. I think we've applied that the way that my family friend applied it to his new car. It shows up as a false modesty. It shows up as disingenuous. It shows up as, oh, you know, I didn't have anything to do with that. Oh, no, that's not me. It shows up as that friend that won't let compliments stick. And you just want to grab him by the shoulders and say, can I just please bless you? Will you accept this? Will you just admit that you've done something good in someone's life for once? And we apply this incorrectly. I think we often mistake humility as the disingenuous reduction of ourselves. I think we often seek to be humble. God opposes the proud, gives grace to the humble, So I'm not going to be, to run from pride, I'm going to be extra reductive of myself and who I am. I have no talents. I have nothing to offer. I've never done anything good. Even like, I used to do this. I've tried to move away from it. But if somebody said, hey, you know, that was a great sermon. I would say either, yeah, hey, glory to God, thank you so much. Like, nothing to do with me. Or I would say, yeah, well, you know, blind squirrel and things. Like, not accepting any of it. And I think when we're the person trying to compliment, when we're the person who sees other people, when we're the person who sees what other people have to offer, and we can't get that person to agree with us, not in a braggadocious way, not in a haughty way, just in an honest way, it becomes frustrating and disingenuous. So I actually think that true humility is realizing our abilities, our gifts, the things at which we excel, are actually gifts from God. He created us with those gifts, and he gave them so that we might use them to build God's kingdom, which is a wonderful invitation from God that fills our life with purpose beyond ourselves. It's incredible how it all works together. So let's say that you're smart. God made you smart. And here's the thing. We have a lot of smart people in this room. I think about, Grace, that we have an unusual concentration of capable and intelligent leadership. Some of us bring the average way down. Others of us are really gifted in this area. So let's say you're smart. So, what'd you do to be smart? You were born smart, right? Let's say you're fast. You can run really fast. So, you were born fast. What'd you do at three to get fast? Nothing. Let's say you're funny. Great. You're going to brag about it? Did you make yourself funny? No. Somebody making fun of you when you were a little kid and giving you trauma made you funny. No, I'm just kidding around. God gave you the capacity for humor. Let's say you're a leader. You're a good leader. People seem to follow you. They seem to rally around you. When you use your voice, people tend to listen and you don't really understand, but people just always kind of get behind you and kind of go where you're going. So, did you make yourself that way? You're hospitable, or you're kind, or you're gracious. Whatever your gifts may be, my attitude about those gifts with you and with me is who cares? Who cares? The Bible says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. He created all of us with gifts and abilities and a path to good works that we should walk in. We're told in Corinthians that we are the body of Christ and that within the body, the nose, the toes, the eyes, the ears, the mouth, the arms, they all have a job. We were all gifted to be a part of that body. What do I care about what your gift is and what my gift is? The flip side of this is being haughty about it, is being proud of it. Let's say you're smart and you're proud of the fact that you're smart. And you kind of think everybody else can be a bunch of dummies sometimes. And if they don't think about it like you think about it, maybe you find yourself gracious by thinking, well, I don't think they're that smart. So it's probably hard going through life that stupid. I'll give them some grace. I've never personally thought that. It's not my struggle. If you're successful, it's to be haughty about that success. I've done it. I've earned it. I put together the amalgamation of ambition and perception and leadership and intelligence that produced in me what has been successful in the business place. I am proud of that, and we walk around with our chest puffed out because I'm a big deal. You know what you're like when you do that? You're like the teenage kid whose parents decide to buy them a $100,000 Range Rover. If that's what you want to do for your kid, I'd like to be adopted. But, not criticizing you. But you're like the kid whose parents buy you the $100,000 Range Rover, and you drive to school, and you park next to the kid in the 2015 Civic, and you make fun of them for it. You look down on them for it. Look at your stupid car. My car's so great, your car's so dumb. Yeah. Jerk. You didn't do a thing to earn that Range Rover except breathe for 16 years. All right? That's your daddy's money or your mommy's money. That is not your money or your granddaddy's money. I don't know where you got it, but you didn't get it. That's what I know. And that kid probably earned his car. Which one of you is better off for that? When we walk around proud of our gifts and abilities, yeah, I'm smart. Yeah, I'm talented. Yeah, I'm kind. I'm nicer than everybody else. And we take pride in that. I take care of other people better than everybody else, and we take pride in that. When we walk around proud, one pastor put it this way, we were born on third base, and we act like we hit a triple. We should not do that. Once you've identified where your gifts and abilities lie, the absolute wrong thing is to start to give yourself credit for putting those things in there because you didn't make yourself that way. God did. And this is what gives Christians a unique path to humility because we're able to go, yeah, God made me smart. So I have a capable and curious mind. God, how can I use that to further your kingdom? God gave me a good voice. So, God, how can I use this voice to bring glory to you and grow your kingdom? God made me a good leader. God made me good at making money. God made me good at building things and companies. God made me good at hosting people and making them feel welcome. I have this unnatural ability where when I sit down with someone I don't know, they just start telling me all of their problems. Okay, great. That's a gift that God has given you. Who cares about bragging about it? The important question is, once we acknowledge it, is to go, great, I've been made this way. You've been made that way. Nobody cares. What's the best way to use and deploy this gift to build God's kingdom? And in that way, we exist in this posture of gratitude. God, I'm so grateful that you made me the way you did. And then it gives me the opportunities that it does. Please help me to always hold them in the proper light and to use them to bring glory and honor to you and to build your kingdom. When we have this posture of humility, where we're willing to be honest with ourselves, it's not bragging to admit and to acknowledge that God has gifted us in certain ways. It's actually in concurrence with all of Scripture because we know that He does. It's simply estimating ourselves accurately and holding them properly to know that those gifts were not given to make our lives better. They were given so that we might participate in the building of God's kingdom. I think Jeremiah the prophet probably said it best when he says this in chapter 9 verses 23 and 24. or the strong boast of their strength, or the rich boast of their riches. But let the one who boasts boast about this, that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord who exercises kindness, justice, and righteousness on earth. For in these I delight, declares the Lord. God says, if you want to boast, don't boast because you're wise. Don't boast because you're smart. Don't boast because you're capable or successful or kind or generous or hospitable. Don't boast about any of that stuff. If you want to boast, boast in me and boast in this. Boast that you know me. Boast that you have the humility to know me, to recognize and have faith in me. Boast in who your heavenly father is. I was walking by before church started to get my last minute water. And as I walked by, my son John is three. As I walked by his room, he saw me and he goes, that's my dad. For everyone to know. If you're going to boast, boast like John, that when we see God, we go, that's my dad. That's my heavenly father. I know him. I'm his child. I'm proud to know him. Everything else is just a gift that your dad gave you so you can point other people towards him. That's all it is. To hold it in any different regard than that is foolish. Now, there's a flip side to this coin because not everybody in the room has the same comfort level with admitting their various gifts and abilities. There are some of you in the room. There are some people, when I say, hey, whatever your gifts and abilities are, they go, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, I got them. There are other people that when I go, whatever your gifts and abilities are, that you think to yourself, I'd love to know, because I don't have any. And I don't really have anything to offer anyone. I'm just kind of there. I'm nice. I do my part. I don't have anything in particular to offer God or his kingdom. The second verse in the psalm is for you. This verse says, but I have calmed and quieted myself. I am like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child, I am content. In the chapter that Peterson writes on this psalm, he points out these opposing sides of the humility coin. One is pride and haughtiness. And the other is infantilism. To infantilize ourselves unnecessarily. And he thinks that's the figurative language with I'm a weaned child because a child that isn't weaned, that still relies on its mama for sustenance day to day, can't yet be a productive member of society. And so the picture that he paints is once we are weaned, once we are separated, once we don't need somebody else for our daily sustenance, we can actually take our step into being a productive member of society and God's kingdom. And so it's actually harmful to refuse to acknowledge our gifts. And when we do that, when we think we have nothing to offer, when we've taken humility so far in the other direction, so far away from pride that we don't allow ourselves to even identify how God has gifted us and how we might be used. This psalm says we're like a child who's still a suckling. We're not yet ready to be productive. And I think that refusing to acknowledge our gifts actually makes us less productive as believers. Refusing to acknowledge that you have a good voice, that you have musical talent, that you're organized, that you lead well, that you build well, that you ask good questions without, by refusing to acknowledge how God made us we actually make ourselves less productive towards God's kingdom now I will admit to you and I don't think this is going to come as a shocker to anyone if you we all lean towards one side of that coin this is not the side to which lean. So I don't want to try to paint a picture like I don't struggle with pride somehow. I do. But there has been one very, to me, profound area in my life where this struggle has shown up. I went into vocational ministry when I was 19 years old. In the year 2000, I began to get paid to be a Christian. I just took my faith professional. That's all I did. Because I think that what I do is just be a professional Christian. I think everybody's got their part to play. Everybody has their gifts to apply, and we should just do it. Anyways. I've been in vocational ministry close to 25 years. And again, started in 2000 as a student staffer for a local Young Life Club. It took me until 2021, the summer of 2021, after I read Eugene Peterson's autobiography called Pastor. It took me 21 years of vocational ministry to say out loud, I believe God has called and purposed and designed me to be a pastor. Not simply a teacher of God's word, which is how I would have phrased it prior to, but a pastor, a shepherd, someone who has been called and purposed to look out for people, to draw people in to one another, to provide leadership for the corner of the kingdom to which he's assigned me, Grace Raleigh. It took me 21 years to acknowledge out loud that I believe God has designed me and purposed me to be a pastor and that he's gifted me in some capacity to be a leader so that I might serve his kingdom in that way. It took me 21 years to admit that because I thought it felt so arrogant for me to admit that before 2021, even though functionally I had served as a pastor for 20 years. It struck me as so arrogant and I had so much imposter syndrome about it that I could never say it out loud. I always considered myself less than that, apart from that, not quite made to be that. It took me so long to be able to admit that and simply say it out loud. And when I said it and when I admitted it, there wasn't an ounce of pride in it, I promise you. It was just coming to the place where I could admit what other people told me and what God has shown me that this is the way that he's gifted me and what he wants me to do and I think that there is a lot of you who are limiting yourself and your estimation of yourself by over-correcting pride towards a useless humility that's actually causing you to be less productive in God's kingdom than you could be. Since that revelation in 2021, I'm not looking for any of you to say like, yeah, I've noticed you've been a markedly better pastor since then. But here's what I know. Since then, I've accepted the mantle of the church far more readily than I did before. Since then, I understand my role with more acuity than I did before. Since then, I understand what I'm supposed to do and how I'm supposed to use my voice so much more accurately and clearly than before and unapologetically. And again, not because it's somehow gone to my head and now I think this is what I can do, but because I feel the weight of responsibility of where God has placed me and it does me no good to not acknowledge that weight. And it does you no good either. You have people around you waiting to be impacted towards God's kingdom. You have people in your lives who need you to walk with God. You have friends and neighbors and family members who will listen to your voice far more than you think they will if you'll simply acknowledge how God has made you to reach them. But refusing to accept it isn't humility. It's fear and overcorrection and dishonesty. And it's not godly humility. When we accurately estimate our sin and ourselves, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. When we have that first piece of the puzzle in place, I have an accurate estimate of my capacity to sin in the future and my current sin situation now. When we see that clearly as God sees it, and when we see ourselves as God sees us, you are for me, not against me. I am who you say I am. We just all sang it together. When we really believe that and we see ourselves as God does, and we see our sin as God does, and our potential to sin as God does, and we don't hold our gifts as something we're proud of. We offer them up to God, and we have the courage to admit how he's gifted us. When we can do that and accurately see those things, we are perfectly positioned to build God's kingdom. Don't you see? Because we go, okay, sure, you may be good at this thing. Who cares? It's neither good nor bad. It just is. God, how should I use it? And I just wonder what could happen in your families if you decided to pursue true godly humility and saw your sin in yourself accurately the way that God does. Parents, most of the parents in the room that's still raising kids are over here parents what if what if the kids that grew up in your home had the clairvoyance to think when they were 16 years old, sure, I'm smart. So what? It's my job to figure out in the next decade how God wants me to use that in his kingdom. What if that's who you release into the wild? What if that's what we produce at Grace? What if your kids at 25 and 30 have careers and lives and are involved in things that are a result of true humility that you showed them and modeled for them. How much better would they be at this than you are? If we can do that now. When we pursue godly humility, we perfectly position ourselves to build God's kingdom. And it's a powerful thing. So let's no longer think of humility as simply a disingenuous modesty. Let's think of it as accurately holding a vision of who we are that agrees with God's vision for ourselves and pursues the future that he's designed for us. Let's pray. Father we thank you for. Who you are. We thank you for how you love us. We thank you for the gifts that you've given us. God, for those of us who have a tendency to let pride and haughtiness sneak in, to begin when we go unmonitored to think that we're somebody and we've done something special. Would you help us remember who we are and who you are and how you made us? And God, would we see what you see and hold our abilities as gifts that were given to us so that we might build your kingdom? Father, for those of us that struggle and might think that we don't have anything to offer, I pray that you would help us see through the people in our lives who love us, the way that you've gifted us so that we might be productive in your kingdom, so that the people around us who need us would see us and be pointed to you by us. God, I pray that we would be a church full of humble people, but not humble in the way that the world describes it. Humble in the way that you lay out so that we might be servants to you as we go. We thank you for all these things. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning, Grace. I'm David. I'm one of the elders here,. The Lord will keep you from all harm. He will watch over your life. The Lord will watch over your coming and going, both now and forevermore. Well, good morning, Grace. I am Erin. I get the honor of being one of the pastors here. And I am going to channel a little. I didn't do it. It wasn't me. I'm going to channel a little Nate, maybe that's what it was, that's what the, you know. I'm going to channel a little Nate right now and tell you that I am so excited to be here with you today that I get the opportunity to introduce our new sermon series and it's my favorite. But in all actuality, it is. As a staff, we gather periodically to kind of plan out sermon series as we look at semesters that are coming. And for like the last four years, I have come with my little sheet of ideas, and I pitched this one. I promise it's not me. I pitched this one every single year and it goes up on the whiteboard and it gets looked at and everybody says like, yeah, we could do that. We think it and then we get down to the cuts at the end and it always gets wiped off the board and so until this last time all of a sudden it was it stayed on the board and we get to do it and then Nate comes to me and says hey would you like to be the one that actually gets to introduce the sermon series and and then also speak on your favorite one and I was like, yes, that's fantastic. So it is a banner day for me and I will try to contain my excitement. There's just no guarantee. So hang on if it gets a little over the top. But for the next seven weeks, we as a church get to journey together through what are known as the Songs of Ascent. The Bible itself contains 150 different psalms. And towards the back of the psalms, number 120 to 135 to be exact, are little psalms, and I say little because they're shorter, but they actually bear a second heading of Song of Ascent. These psalms were written as reminders to the Israelites of their past, of their history, of the faithfulness of God to them in the midst of their seasons of despair and hopelessness. They were used during all of the pilgrimages that were taken as they went from their places outlying to Jerusalem for the feasts. So it was a road trip of sorts. And I know everyone in here at some point in time has taken a road trip, I'm going to assume. If you've taken a road trip with children, it was a testing period. Just saying, testing of sanity and testing of quite possibly every single one of the fruits of the spirit. And if you came out the end of the road trip with at least one of those still intact, count it as a win. Just count it as a win. It's a good thing. But I remember as a kid taking road trips with my family. We lived in an area that we were a couple of hours away from relatives. And so we would pile into the station wagon. Yes, I will date myself. We would pile into the station wagon. Mom and dad had the front, my brother had the middle, and I had the back. Because it was kind of like little fiefdoms. And there was this need to keep peace in the kingdom. You must separate the two children because if not, it was the constant, you know, she looked at me the wrong way. And then the fighting ensued. So I took over the back. I had my pillow. I had my book. I had my flashlight. And away we went. And the flashlight was to read at night, of course. It was also to irritate my brother with, but I never admitted to that one. But it was a good thing. Nowadays, though, when these kids pile into the vans that they're taking on road trips with their parents, they have switches. For those of you of a different generation, it's not a piece of wood that your parents used to threaten you with. A switch is actually a video game. There's iPads, and then there's headphones. That is a gift from God to the parents as well because the parents have them also. So it's a good thing. It's peace in the kingdom, remember. That's what we all want. But the one thing that I know that's happening inside of those headphones now and was happening inside of my station wagon years ago and even further back was there was always music. There was always song. The genre changed depending upon who was in the car. But there was song. And to me, song and music is just food for the soul. And so for the Israelites, these Psalms of ascent were their music. These Psalms were a way for them to prepare their hearts as they took that journey to be in the presence of God in Jerusalem. They also used these psalms in a continued way to get closer to God. Once they got to Jerusalem, there were 15 steps that went from the outer court to the inner court of the temple. And so they would stop on the first step and they would sing. They would pause. They would move to the next step. They would sing another song. Remember, there's 15 steps. There's 15 songs. God's good that way. He just is. It's nice and orderly. And I know to a lot of you all, though, you went, I'm going to stop and I'm going to sing. And then I'm going to take another step and then I'm going to sing wrong. I'm going to take them two by two and I'm going to be the first one to the top. I know there's a competitive spirit in here. I have been with you all on many occasions. But yes, this is one of those really cool times for us where scripture makes an invitation. It invites us to slow down, to think very deeply about the story of God. And it's an opportunity for us to reframe our mindset, to orient our hearts, and to direct our steps toward God and who we are in him. And so this morning when I got to pick my psalm, Psalm 121 is the direction I felt I wanted to go and to look at the question, where does my help come from? And then especially in light of the society that we live in today that has entire marketing plans and TV shows out there all about the help that we need, even though we personally think we have it all together. Right? So if I gave you the little jingle, like a good neighbor, State Farm is there, right? He's there to help the minute you need it. Or not too terribly long ago, Zoe, my daughter, introduced me to a random show on Netflix. It's called Alone. They take 10 survivalists and drop them in I don't even know where back I don't know what it's called it's like way up in the upper back part of Canada where they get to deal with weather and bears and moose and all of this stuff and they are dropped by themselves on an island with a thing of bear spray and a satellite phone. And their whole objective is to stay there the longest. They want to be the last one to actually pick up that phone and call for help. And if they do, they win. They don't know what their other friends are doing. So it's a competition in their brain at this point in time to see how long they can last. But that's the, let's just push a button. Once we push, once we've exhausted all of our resources and we think that we're going to have to call for help, we finally push that button and get their help. And isn't that just like us? Because we believe the lies of the world that tell us that we're strong enough, that we can do it all by ourselves. We are so capable. Just keep trying. Just keep striving. Just keep doing all the things. And I am wired as a helper. For those of y'all that know personality traits, that's mine. I'm a helper. And helpers don't ask for help. We don't like to. It goes against every part of our being. Let's just put it that way. It's kind of like the toddler that says, I do it myself. Like that's, that is very much me. And if anybody has walked with me or been around me over the last couple of years, you saw a lot of this, I do it myself and stubbornness as I walked a journey with aging parents. I specifically remember a time when I knew my dad needed some help. I said he needed the help, right? He's trying to take care of mom. He needs to get out. It's time for you to do some help. I arranged for him to have some help so he could get out and play golf. The people come and he's talking to them and this is great. Thank you so much. We'll be in touch. They leave. He turns around and looks at me, and he says, thanks so much for doing that, but I don't need any help. Like father, like daughter, I come by it naturally. But you know what? Then there was a medical issue, so then we had to call the help in because he couldn't do what he needed to do, and so guess what? I won. I did. I won. It was me. And over the course of the next few years, the same, those little things would happen. I'd exert my help and eventually it would get used and all was good. Um, little victories here and there until it wasn't until my feet got taken out completely from underneath me. And this was May of this past year in 2024. My mom had died in December of 2022. My dad was here. All was good. He was having a great time, living his best life. We were enjoying our time with him. And then last spring we had some issues. We had a couple health falls. We had a couple falls. The last fall ended us up in the ER. Scan reveals four broken ribs and a compression fracture, which mind you, they also say, oh, that wasn't caused by this ball. It had to have, tough old bird. That's all I got to say, tough old bird. But then they also proceed to say, oh, well, wait, his white blood cell count is exceptionally high, so we think there's an infection. And then, oh, his cardiac enzymes have gone up too, and we're not sure why, because they continue to climb. Excuse me, stop, wait. Two weeks ago, we had a physical. This was the healthiest 90-year-old you've ever met. What has just happened? My feet are gone. And all I wanted in that moment was for the weight that had just been dropped on my shoulders to be lifted off. It needed to go away. I wanted to push that button and have it just disappear. I wanted to hit rewind and go back two weeks when the doctor said it's the healthiest 90-year-old he'd ever seen. What is this? And so as I continued to read through Psalm 121 in preparation, the first verse, this, I lift my eyes to the mountains from where does my help come? It spoke directly to even the residual, exhausted, scared, unsure, weary daughter. And so when we look at that verse that says, I lift my eyes to the mountains, we're starting with the Israelites on the beginning of their journey towards Jerusalem. They're standing and they're looking towards Jerusalem in these moments. And they're surrounded by these huge mountains. This is one of those places where scripture asks us to stop, though. You're preconceived a notion about mountain. What does it say? They're strong. They're stable. They're majestic. And to the Israelites, it also could have meant that they were this promise of Mount Zion and the meeting of the presence of God. But what happens if I also said to you, these mountains were anything but friendly? They look up. So first of all, that tells you they're going to start climbing. Everything they did was by foot. It's rocks, it's pebbles, it's obstacles that they're having to climb. It's hot and it's full of twists and turns and blind corners and around every blind corner is a robber waiting for these pilgrims as they make their way into Jerusalem. Not the picture that we have in our brain. And then to add to all of that physical part, there's also a whole line of temptation. Because on the tops of some of these hills sit altars, altars set up to false gods. So you are in this place of hopelessness and despair. You are headed towards the presence of your God. And yet, somewhere in the middle, there's this offer of, you having trouble with your crops? Come see the God of rain. He'll fix it. You having trouble with infertility? Oh, oh, well, wait a second. The God of fertility is right here. Just make a stop right here. Drop your offerings here. It's simpler. You don't have to keep climbing. We're going to stop right here. It'll be all better. And the thing is, is that, yeah, it might be for a minute. It might be just in the middle of that for a second. You've kind of offloaded it so it feels a little bit better. But that instant gratification only leads to further despair. Counterfeit gods are not going to get us what we need. And isn't this just like our journey as Christians, as disciples of Christ? We aren't promised easy. We aren't promised this easy little path. No, no, no. We're promised an uphill climb. We're promised obstacles and rocks and stones in our way. We're promised weird things around corners that might take our feet out from underneath us. It's what we're promised. We also have the temptations that we face too, right? We face whatever it is at this moment for you. The temptation to give it away to an instant gratification. And the thing is, though, our goal is eternal. And so we cannot sacrifice tomorrow's joy on today's pleasure. We just can't. What we need to do is we need to focus on the eternal. And that's what the next verse actually says to us. Because if we pass over those counterfeit gods, if we don't allow the temptations to get to us, the thing that we have waiting is that my help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth. And the really cool part here, y'all, is Lord is capitalized in the Hebrew that the name of God here is Yahweh, which is the I am is the all-powerful and the one with all authority so the one that created the mountains and the earth and who created you and who created me is our button he's our satellite phone he is our help at all times. But why is it so difficult for us to get our gaze above what is sitting here and tempting us? Why is it so hard for us to look past the things around us in this world? Well, we live in a broken world. That's probably the easiest answer to this. And the world wants us to do absolutely nothing but focus on our circumstances and how awful it is. Because that keeps our head down here and not on him. You know, you see the news today and it is all about the devastation from two hurricanes. It's all of the crazy that is involved in an election cycle. It could also be there's something happening inside of your marriage. It could be a medical diagnosis that you've recently received. Or maybe it's one that you've had for a while that just won't change. Maybe it's your marriage. Maybe it's a prodigal kid. Maybe it is somehow you're involved in school and you're just done and you want to give up. The world convinces us to stay in those moments. Because guess what? Remember, I do it myself. You can fix it. If you stay focused on it, you can fix it. But how tired are we in trying to do it ourselves and constantly striving in all these moments to fix it? I don't know about y'all, but we're exhausted. I'm exhausted. And so when I sat in that hospital room, done, exhausted, spinning, all of the what ifs, not knowing what was going on with my dad, there was a moment when I just kind of said, I'm done. And it was as if God reached down and took my chin and he lifted it all the way up and said, your gaze is wrong. Your gaze needs to be on me, not on what's going on around you. Now my circumstance at that moment, nothing changed with my dad, but what did change was that now my source of strength was not me. I was not looking into my own for my source of strength. I knew very much that every bit of patience and strength and the ability to put one foot in front of the other was coming directly from him. And David was very sweet to us to read the entire psalm. And there's one of the verses in the psalm where God refers to himself as our keeper. And I just love this moment and what it implies. Because to me, it implies a level of care and a level of attention that only comes from love. It can only come from a place of love. We are his beloved. And when we suffer, when we're in pain, he's in pain also. And Psalm 91 verse 4 is a beautiful picture to me of this idea of keeper. And it says that he will cover you with his feathers and under his wings you will find refuge and his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart. Thank you. So y'all, he's watching us. So in those moments like me sitting in the hospital, he saw me in my moment of need. He's going to protect us from the harshness of the circumstances around us. He's going to try his best to protect us from the fears and those anxieties that creep in in those quiet moments. He's our place of retreat when the world around us just feels like it's way too much. And so I look back over the course of those last couple of weeks and all of the stuff that was going on with my dad, and I can now, you know, hindsight's 20-20, right? You can go back and I can see God's hand offering so much of his provision and so much of his protection with every step that I took. And so often that provision and that protection came in the people that he put in my path. There was a time when dad was at, I call it Little Wake Med, so the one that's over there on Durant. Because of all this weird cardiac stuff, they moved him to Big Wake Med. We had a little brief moment of, he had had some mental decline due to all the medications. Adjusted medications, his sweet little personality came back out. We got him settled at Big Wake Med. And it was a good night. I left because he kicked me out. But I left. I came home. And not, I don't know, a little bit later, I received this random text. Kind of out of the blue. And all it said was, I just visited your dad. And he's smiling and he's cracking jokes. Sleep well. The text was from Connor Brannon, who is a friend of a lot of people here at Grace and someone whom I call a friend as well. And it was an amazing gift to me to know that Connor's at the hospital while my dad's there. And then the next night, and dad had had a horribly rough day, and Connor checked on him that night and just let me know that he was finally resting. He was like, you can rest too. Thank you. It was just a good thing. And then a few hours later is when I received the call that my dad was on the decline. Things had changed very rapidly. And as we headed to the hospital, it was Connor who met us in the room just after my dad had passed. It was Connor who hugged us. It was Connor who prayed with us. And it was Connor who offered the most beautiful words of encouragement to a girl who had just lost her daddy. That, my friends, is God's providence and God's provision wrapped up in human form. And there's nothing more beautiful than that. And so as I look, this will forever be for me a moment marked in time of God's faithfulness to me and to my family to have provided Connor in those moments. We don't do this by ourselves. The Israelites didn't walk their paths alone either. They started out together. They moved along these mountain paths. They met up with other pilgrims. They supported each other. They loved on each other. And they knew the verses out of Ecclesiastes that talk very specifically about two being better than one. And if one falls down, the other one's there to help them up. And it also goes on to say, pity who falls but has no one to help them up. We were never meant to walk this spiritual journey alone. This journey of faith is not supposed to be done alone. Who are your people? Who do you walk with? Who do you trust to reach down and pick you up when you fall? Who do you trust to be the most vulnerable with and say, this situation stinks and have them look at you and go, yeah, it does. But guess what? I got you and so does God. Those are the people we need in our lives. This past weekend, I got to go to the beach with my girlfriends. These were my college girlfriends and I will not tell you how long it's been since I was in college. So let's just say it had been a few years had passed. But these were girls that I had done life with for at least four years and then quite a few years after. We had been in each other's weddings. We had rocked babies together, all of the things. And then I moved. I'm the only one. I left Kentucky, but I will say I came to the promised land. So it's been good. But I left. They all stayed in and around the Lexington area and they've kept in touch really well. They do monthly brunches. They do all the things. They include me periodically on a group text, which is great fun. And so we've kept up with each other. And then just, I don't know, a couple months ago, random group text comes out. Next thing you know is within less than a week's period of time, we have planned a weekend at the beach, and they're coming here. Six of them are going to journey from Kentucky to Topsail just to make sure that they could pick me up along the way. And so the minute we all got together, the room is just full of love and laughter and some tears. And the years that had gone in between had washed away. And while they had walked together, not everyone's stories were known. And so we took time and we shared and we held each other's stories and we talked about hard marriages and we talked about even harder divorces and custody issues. We talked about cancer battles. We talked about seasons with kids that were hard. Even one of them now is raising her seven-year-old grandchild. We talked about harder seasons of aging parents, Alzheimer's, hospice, and then grief that comes from losing a parent. And even for a few of us, this feeling of being an orphan when you've lost two parents suddenly. But then we also got to talk about weddings and we got to talk about grandbabies and we got to talk about new marriages and love that they didn't know still existed. And happiness that they didn't know was still possible. And so often in these moments, these conversations circled back to God and his faithfulness to provide and to protect during all of these journeys. And the acknowledgement that these journeys were hard, but out of that acknowledgement came this place of gratitude. This place of saying, like, I am so grateful that I got to walk it with him. And now that I'm on the other side, I can honestly say I'm better for having done it. Wouldn't want to do it without him, but I'm definitely better for having done it. So as we sat in these moments and we cried and we laughed until our faces hurt, something settled in my bones. Something that I didn't realize until I sat in that room. And that was how much my soul needed those girls in that moment. But you know what? My God knew that that's what I needed. And out of his kindness to me, that's what he gave my sweet, weary heart was that time of rest and love and reflection with six of the most amazing women that I am privileged and honored to call my friends. Y'all, our God is also a steadfast friend to us. We can trust him with our problems. We can trust him with our failures, with our lives. And we know and we can know with all certainty. And I say that again, we can know with all certainty that he'll be there with his hands outstretched, ready to help us. He's going to cover us with those feathers. He's going to be on constant watch so that we can rest. He's going to be our shade. And the one that I love the most is when the world just gets to be too much and we're ready to say, I'm done. He's going to carry you. We just have to be willing to look up. And I said this in the note, in the grace fund, but I think it bears repeating. That our prayer is that through our sacred journey in which God has encountered through places and people and situations that we are changed. We invite you to join us in this season. Invite you to slow down, to open your Bible, to take a look at these Psalms. Read them slowly and prayerfully and obediently. And don't look just to gather information or check a box. Pray, read, and allow the Holy Spirit to do his thing, which is change. And I would also say, don't forget to look up. Will y'all pray with me? Lord, thank you for your goodness. Thank you for your kindness. Thank you for loving us. It is a privilege and it is an honor to be yours. So in these times and this craziness that is the season that we live in, we ask that you slow us down. We ask that you give us the opportunity to pray, to read, and to most importantly look up. Look up past the distractions. Look up past all the things that the world wants for us to grab our attention and to focus our gaze on you. And Lord, we love you. It's in your name we pray. Amen.

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thank you for being here with us in person. Thank you for joining us online, if that's what you're doing. I am excited for this Sunday morning. I was probably more excited about this particular sermon in this series than any of the others, because this morning, this big rock is on a topic that I've invested a lot of time and energy thinking about, actually. We're going to be talking about time, and we should spend our time and how we should prioritize our time. And I will confess to you that I have nerded out on this subject. I've listened to podcasts and read books about productivity. If something comes across my news feed about this new study about how to be productive and how to maximize our time in the workplace and all that stuff, I will listen to it. I eat all of that stuff up. Now, it hasn't translated to actual productivity in my workplace, but I'm hoping that if I can just keep learning more things, like for instance, when you're in, when you're just, when you're locked in and you're focused, you're in the groove and you're doing the thing you need to do, you're maximum productive, you're being creative, you're knocking out emails, whatever it is. When you get interrupted, somebody texts you, somebody sticks their head in your office. Kyle starts to talk to someone in the office next to you if you happen to work next to Kyle. When you get interrupted, do you know how long it takes you to regain maximum focus? 26 minutes. Like it takes 26 minutes to regain maximum focus. I could do a whole sermon just telling you stuff like that. That wouldn't be much of a sermon. That would more be like a productivity seminar. So we're going to avoid that. But I've spent a lot of time thinking about time. Because of that, there are myriad directions we could go this morning as we think about the topic of time under the umbrella of God's authority. How would God have us spend our time? What would His priorities for our schedules and our calendars look like? We all know that if you really want to know what a person cares about, look at their calendar and look at their checkbook. And that will tell you what's really, really important to that individual. So we could talk about how to properly prioritize it. We could talk about how much time to make for God. We could talk about how would Jesus have us spend our time. We could do all of those things. And there's a bunch of different directions to go. And when I started out, the way that I write a sermon is I just write down everything I think about that topic, everything I know, all the Bible verses I'm aware of, every time the scriptures address it. And for this particular sermon, I had a big long list. And so the difficulty was on what do we focus on as we think about time? And I really landed on one sentence in the Bible. The first part of one verse that we find in Psalms. And we're going to spend the rest of the morning thinking about the idea of time through the lens of this one sentence that we find in Psalms chapter 46, verse 10. Many of you know this verse. It simply says, be still and know that I am God. Be still, God says, and know that I am God. It's this idea of at some point during your day, during your week, during your month, in your life, at some point, slow down. Be still. Quit doing all the things. Quit going to all the places. Quit stressing out about all the stuff. Quit being distracted by all the different things that can distract you. Be still. Stop moving. Stop going. Right now, I have a five-and-a-half-year-old who cannot be still. She cannot be still. When she's in trouble, I'll tell her, you sit on the stairs, and you sit there, and you do not move, and you do not make a noise. She cannot do it. It's impossible. And for many of us, with our schedules and with our temperaments, it's impossible for us to be still, to just slow down and be still and know that he is God, to focus on God, to focus on what Jesus has done for us, to remind ourselves of the gospel, to remind ourselves of God's goodness in our life. I think many of us struggle mightily to obey this simple psalm, to simply have regular times in our life where we are still and we know that he is God. This is why, incidentally, I think church attendance and involvement is so important. Because even if we're not prioritizing it at any other time in our week, even if our weeks just get away from us and it's just busy, busy, busy, and we're running 90 to nothing and we come into church on two wheels with our hair on fire, at least, hopefully, for an hour, we will slow down. We will be still. We will do our best to put aside all the other things that we've been thinking about that have been stressing us out all week long. And we will, in this service, collectively as a body, know that He is God. It's why I think the rhythm of church is an important one in the life of an individual and a marriage and a family. And so I want to talk about this idea of being still. And I want to talk specifically about why it feels like such a challenge for us sometimes. I think that there are really two camps of people. There's really two divisions of people as we think about how we spend our time and what kind of stops us from being still in the way that we need to be still. I think there's really two camps of people. And I'm not saying that you're all one or you're all the other. This is a sliding scale, but I would bet that everybody in this room has a lean. There are those who fill their days with nothing and those who fill their days with everything. There are those who with their margins, they fill it with nothing, just a bunch of nothingness. And then there's those who fill it with everything. And we're going to talk about what that means. But as we think about how we fill our time with nothing or everything, I want to be clear that I'm talking about the margins of our time. We all have roles in life to play that require time from us, right? Most of us in this room, we have to get up, we have to work every day. That's something that's required of your time. If you don't have to work every day, hopefully you're getting up and being productive. If you're a stay-at-home parent, you've got to get up and gosh, you definitely have to work every day. And so there's some things that we don't have an option. We've got to go to work. We've got to take care of the kids. We've got to run the house. We've got to do the things. There's some things where we just don't have a choice. But around those ways that we spend our time is our discretionary time. And it's that time that I'm talking about that we fill with nothing or with everything. The time when we wake up in the morning. Whether you realize it or not, I don't want to step on too many toes here, everyone has two or three hours of discretionary time in the morning. If you choose to fill that time with sleep, that's your business. But everybody can get up two or three hours just about before we really have anything that life requires of us. So most of us have discretionary time in the morning before our time is demanded of us. Most of us have a lunch break. We've got to drive to work, drive home from work. We have time in the car where we can choose what we're going to listen to and choose what we're going to do and choose what we're going to consume. We have time when we come home. I don't know what the rhythm of your house is. Maybe you have some dead space before dinner. Maybe it's just a mad rush to get the kids to bed and sit down and take a breath. And then you've got from then until whenever you go to bed as your own discretionary time when your parents have young kids to regain your sanity. You've got the weekends, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, where there's probably not much of a demand on your time. So now we've got this discretionary time, these times in the margins. We're trying to decide what to do with it. And my contention is that we tend towards either filling that time with nothing or filling it with everything. I would love to say I'm an everything guy. I'm really more of a nothing guy. So what I'm about to say, I'm saying to me too. But when we fill our time with nothing, we just jump from one thing that doesn't matter to the next thing that doesn't matter. We wake up in the morning, first thing we do is we grab our phone and we start to scroll. We check Instagram, we check Twitter, and we check Facebook, and we check our email, and we check our news outlets, and whatever it is. And we just lay in bed, and and instead of getting up and being productive doing something that we would probably be wiser to do, we just scroll on our phones, right? We come home, we turn on the TV. Kids go to bed, we zone out. We binge watch The Office again. We're in the car, we have some time that we could use to fill ourselves with some Jesus, and instead we just put on something mindless. We listen to music that just kind of puts us in a good mood or whatever it is that it does, or we listen to like sports talk or political talk or whatever it is that women listen to in the car that's talk. I don't know what you guys listen to. But we just, every gap that we have, we just fill it with more nothing. How many of you, don't raise your hand, can't sit at a traffic light without looking at your phone? I think that maybe, this is just a side note, maybe the most damaging thing about cell phones is how incapable we are of not being entertained for just five stinking seconds. If the line's too long at Jersey Mike's, well, let's see what's going on in the news. And we just jump from nothing to nothing. Our time's required of us. We're focused on this. Now I can do whatever I want. What nothing can I fill this with? How can I entertain myself? What's the next drama that's going to happen? What's on Yahoo News front page? What's the next thing going on? And then political stuff happens. So I mean, I was doom scrolling Twitter a lot in December and January. We were all locked into that stuff. And we just wake up in the morning and we waste a little time. We go to work. We have lunch and we engage in a little bit more nothing and we come home and we get the kids. We take care of the kids and we do whatever it is we're going to do. We eat dinner and then we engage in a little bit more nothing. Watch a little bit more trash TV and then we go to bed. And we sleep in and we do the same thing the next day. And it's just a day filled with nothing. As I was doing research for this, I came across a sermon by a guy named Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan Edwards is one of the great American pastors and theologians. He was a key figure in the Great Awakening in the late 1700s. One of the smartest, best theologians that's ever lived. And he did a sermon on time. And he noted within that sermon the unique scarcity of time. It is a uniquely limited resource that we cannot get back in ways that we can recover other resources. And about time, Jonathan Edwards says, there is nothing more precious and yet nothing of which men are more wasteful. There is nothing more precious than time because we can never get it back, and yet there is nothing of which men are more wasteful. I think, if we're honest, that we tend to waste our time like NBA players waste their money. I heard a story this last week as I was in the car listening to the sports talk radio show that I like to listen to, which incidentally was not a waste of time this week because I'm using it in a sermon. So how about that? And there was this author who wrote a book. She wrote a book on Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is the, he is the MVP of the Milwaukee Bucks. They just won the NBA finals. He is a phenomenal athlete and he is like, he's a gem of a person. If you could, if you could create an athlete in a mold, it would be this guy. He's a really neat guy. And he grew up really poor in Greece. And they would sell, he and his family would sell trinkets on the beach to rich tourists. And it was not a very easy upbringing. And so when he came over to the United States, he was drafted in the first round of the draft. He's playing for the Bucs. He has money for the first time in his life. He doesn't know what to do with it. And so he still brings over these sensibilities and he's very conservative. And this author said that he relayed some stories to her about how he was blown away about how some of these guys spent their money. And she said, well, give me some examples. And she said, well, one guy, one guy gave me $500 for a Mountain Dew and a Snickers. He just, the dude was a veteran. He said, Giannis, go give me a Mountain Dew and a Snickers. He did. And the veteran gave him 500 bucks. That's wasteful. Other guys, he had two guys on his team who liked playing PlayStation 4, but they didn't like to be encumbered with like packing it. So they would literally on a road trip, they would go into a new city, buy a PlayStation 4 and the games they wanted to play, and then leave it in the hotel room and buy another one in the next city. Just appalling waste of money. I just saw a financial planner shake his head like just, oh my gosh. Just an appalling waste of money. But I waste my time like that sometimes. I look at my weeks and know that I've just doled out my time as if it's $500 for a Mountain Dew in the way that I invest it and spend it. And if you think that's ridiculous, if you think I'm overstating that, what's your screen time report at the end of your week? I don't know what Android phones do, but Apple phones, every weekend you get a screen time report. You average this many hours per day, it is up or down this percentage from last week. You ever see that and feel good about yourself? It always brings deep, deep conviction. It should send us straight into prayer and confession when that screen time report comes up. I think we waste time like some people like to waste money by just jumping from one numbing entertainment to the next thing without ever considering what's important. And then I think on the opposite end of the spectrum are those of us who fill our days with everything. It's just one thing after the next, just a deluge of activities, one after the other. A workaholic could fit here because there's hours that your job requires of you, and I'm all about going above and beyond. I don't want to decry working hard to get ahead and to provide and to be successful and all that stuff, but I do want us to realize that when we get to work before we're supposed to, that's a choice, and when we stay longer than we have to, that's a choice. It's a way that we're choosing to fill our schedule. When we volunteer for something, that's a choice. We all know people, and some of us are people, who volunteer for everything and say no to nothing and then just do and do and do and do all day long. We just run around with our hair on fire. I am convinced that the busiest time of anyone's life is families, particularly if families have two working spouses with children from ages 8 to 18. I don't think you can ever be busier than that season. It's crazy. And kids have stuff and we have stuff and we fill every single iota of our calendar with something that we're supposed to do. We'll come up with projects on the weekend and disappear and do those. And we allocate our time to this and our time to that. We have no way to pause. We run around frantically and we just do and we do and we do and we jump from one activity to the next activity without ever stopping to be still and know that he is God because our schedules are so full that we feel like we don't have space for anything else. And to those people, I would just say gently, is it possible that the rhythms of our homes are so frantic that we've effectively scheduled God out of our lives? Is it possible that we've allowed some of us, that we've allowed ourselves to become so busy that we have effectively scheduled God and scheduled Jesus right out of our life? Somebody told me one time, and this is, it's deeply convicting. It's probably not all the way fair, but it's mostly fair. If we aren't spending time with God on a daily basis, then we're simply telling him that he didn't make our 24-hour priority list that day. Good luck tomorrow, God. I think sometimes the rhythms of our homes get so frantic that we effectively just schedule them right out of our lives. And what I really want us to see this morning is that wherever we are on the spectrum, whether we fill our days with just nothing, just jumping from entertainment to entertainment, from nothing to nothing, or from activity to activity. That nothing and everything are simply distractions from the right thing. All that entertainment, all that pulling out the phone, all that screen time, all that binge watching, all that late night stuff, all that sleeping in, and then all the busyness, all the activities can sometimes simply be distractions from the right thing. I've made this point before, but I think it bears repeating. I think one of the greatest tricks of the enemy, one of the greatest guises of Satan is to trick us into wasting our time, is to distract us with nothing, is to distract us with our phones and with TV and with information and with nothingness and stuff that is frivolous and doesn't matter. And listen, that stuff has its place. You need to veg out and watch something that makes you laugh, that gives you an escape. We need to do that. But when it becomes too much, when it takes over everything, when it's just nothing to nothing to nothing, the enemy has us distracted. When it's activity to activity to activity that fills us with our own sense of self-importance, yet the activities that we're doing have no eternal consequences. The enemy simply has us distracted. See, I think for many of us in the room, it's one of my favorite verses these days in my life is Ephesians 2.10. It says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. And it carries with it this idea that God made you, he gifted you, he designed you, and he purposed you. Each one of us. I think some of us walk through life feeling like we couldn't possibly have a purpose. I'm too small for that. And I would say, bupkis, God created you. He designed you in Christ for good works that you might walk in them. And in those good works, we know from other passages, we find the fullness of Christ. We walk with Jesus. Our hearts beat with him. We develop a passion for our Savior. I believe that we find Jesus in his work. So as we do the good works that we were designed to do, we grow more vibrant in our relationship with Jesus. We grow more passionate in our desire to serve God. And we live a fuller life that's filled with more joy because we are walking so closely with Jesus. And the enemy does not want you to experience that. He wants to rip you away from our Father's hands. And the deal is, for many of us sitting in this room, he's probably not going to rip us away with some addiction. There are some of us that he might be able to rip away with some sort of shadow life or sin going on, but for the vast majority of us in this room, it's not going to be some crippling addiction that tears us away from the work of the Father. It's not going to be some secret shadow life that tears us away from the work of the Father. It's simply going to be tricking you into spending your days on nothing or everything, day after day after day, until you look back on the month of the year and you go, what did I do? How much more of the work of Jesus for which we were designed could we do if we didn't allow the enemy to distract us with nothing or everything. I believe it's one of his greatest ploys. And I want to do everything I can to call it out whenever I can so that we can be, so that we can walk in the good works for which we were created. And it's why I landed on this one sentence in regards to time this morning, that we should be still and know that he is God. Because I firmly believe that being still is the first true step in the path to knowing God. I absolutely believe that this habit of being still is the first true step that we can take in the path to knowing God, in the path to our hearts beating like Jesus' heart. And I've said this in a bunch of different ways. I've said this phrase over and over and over again, and I will continue to beat this drum until God says this isn't my stage anymore. But as long as it is, I will continue to repeat, there is no greater habit anyone can develop in their life than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in God's presence through prayer. No greater habit. And that's what being still is. And I say that it's the first true step to really knowing God because we can come to church and we can hear about God and we can serve and we can do his work and we can go to small group and we can have conversations, but until it becomes personal, until it becomes intimate, until it becomes a habit to wake up and let scripture speak to us, not me speaking to you about what I think scripture says from my quiet times. Let that supplement what God has been saying to you all week in your quiet times. Until we wake up every day and we spend time in God's word and then we pursue him in prayer. For some reason, for some people, that looks like going on a hike and just allowing God to be with us in nature. For some people, that means contemplative practices or meditative practices. For some people, that means listening prayer. For some people, that means getting on our knees and speaking prayer. For some people, it's reading a spiritual book and supplement to the Word of God. But until our pursuit of the Father becomes an intentional, personal one, it can never become an intimate one. So this instruction in Psalm to be still and know that he is God is, to me, the first fundamental step in actually knowing him. And I believe this to be true because I have seen this in my own life. I have seen in the ebbs and flows of my own spiritual health. That when I am consistent in this practice, I'm a better husband. I'm more patient with my children. I'm even more patient with Ruby when I'm having quiet times. That's my dog that I don't like. I even like pet her and invite her over sometimes when I'm praying and reading the Bible and inviting God into every moment of my life. I'm a better pastor. In those seasons where Jesus is enriching my soul and my spirit every day, I can't wait for Sunday to share with you what I have to share with you. In the seasons where I'm not doing that, in the seasons where I feel like I'm running on empty because I've been filling my days with nothing or everything, just to be honest with you, there are Sundays I don't want to preach to you. I want to get done with the sermon so I can go do whatever it is I really want to do that day. And it's because I haven't been filling my days with Jesus. It's because I've been filling them with nothing or everything. And I'm forgetting to be still. And we could talk about how you should spend the rest of your time and what you should volunteer for and what we shouldn't volunteer for and what really is important and what really isn't. And we can talk about God's priorities for your schedule, but I would just simply say, man, if you'll make it a habit every day to be still before the Father and let Him breathe life into your soul, you're a grown-up. You'll figure the rest of it out yourself. You don't need a sermon about that. If we'll do this, if we'll simply be still, God will breathe into our life in such a way that our heart will begin to beat like Jesus' heart and suddenly all the things, all the nothing and all the everything that we use to fill as a simple distraction from what's actually important, those things will become less important to us and we will pursue more Jesus. I've seen it happen over and over and over again in the lives of others and in my own life. So my encouragement to you this morning is to be still and know that he is God. My encouragement to you this morning is don't let this, what I say, be the only source of God and Jesus in your life. Because I am broken and I am fallible and I am often wrong. Pursue him on your own. Let him breathe life into you every day. This will be the first true step that we can take in our path to knowing God. And so I would say to you this morning, how still should I be? Just a little bit more than you are. Take that step. If you have no habit or pattern of waking up and spending time in God's word and letting Jesus refresh your soul there and in prayer, then just give it a week. Do it for seven days and get to the end of seven days and tell me that that was a waste of your time. Just do it for a week. If you're already in that habit, God bless you for being in that habit. You know that I'm speaking truth. Pick another time too. Do it in the evening. End your day with prayer. Let's all just step up our stillness just a little bit and stop and let God wash over us and fill us up and so breathe life into us that we can be his workmanship and do the good works in which we were created to walk in. However still or not you've been in your life, be just a little bit more still this week and see how God breathes life into you in that stillness. As we close, I have a quote. It's a long quote, but I think it's worth it. Growing up, my pastor, a guy named Buddy Hoffman, was one of my heroes, and he still is. He passed away right as I came up here to take this job, and it is one of my great sadnesses that I can't talk about being a pastor with Buddy. And every now and again, I'll go back and I'll listen to some of his sermons. They have them all archived all the way back to the 80s. And when I listen to them, it's like going home. I feel like a 12-year-old kid, 10-year-old kid sitting in church, just taking it all in. I really like listening to Buddy's sermons. Five or six years ago, I was listening to one. Actually, it was a little over four years ago because it was in my parents' basement when I was waiting for you guys to hire me so we could move up here. I was listening to one of his sermons and he was preaching on time. And Buddy spoke pretty extemporaneously, but this I could tell was prepared. He was reading off of a sheet of paper. He wrote it very intentionally and it was so good to me and so profound that I stopped and I typed it out. I would listen to a sentence and pause it and type it and listen and pause and type. And I've just kind of been sitting on it wondering when the best time was to share it with anybody at all. And it just feels very appropriate this morning to end with these words that have impacted me over the years so much. So I want to share them with you. And when I finish, we're going to have a chance to reflect and worship together. This is what Buddy says. Are we possessed with an inescapable passion to live in an intimate knowledge of God? The problem is not that we are engaged in actively evil. The problem is that we are just too active. It's not that we are criminally engaged. We are just inattentive to the voice of God. It's not that we're heretics. Most people I know are just hectic in their activities of mind-numbing nothingness. It should make sense to anyone that minds empty of God will be empty of meaning. Our hunger for God is numbered by our addictions to substitutes and stimulants that hide our starving souls. We are spiritual anorexics. We've morphed to a point where we don't even recognize what is the spiritual norm. Today's lifestyle is lived at a pace that makes contemplations all but impossible, and most people cannot imagine a life like Jesus lived. We can't imagine a life without constant informational connectivity. We live in a noisy world where there are a lot of things competing for our attention, TV, phones, Facebook, emails. But the unintended consequence of constant informational connectivity is divine disconnection. We are so distracted with inconsequential information, our brains and our hearts are overloaded with timely data, leaving no space for timeless deity. We're called to live with a preoccupation with God who is worthy to be pursued at all costs and is pursuing us. We find ourselves in an age that has pushed the knowledge of God into the margins. We arrogantly assume that God should be grateful for the crumbs of our overcrowded schedule. We call it efficient. But God has not called us first to be efficient. He has called us to be passionate. We are spiritually diseased. Never have we had more to eat and found ourselves more famished. Never have we had more stuff and been less satisfied. It is time we made time for the timeless.

If you're like a lot of us, then this jar kind of looks like your life as we entered the pandemic. Lots of things in our life that are really important to us, big deals, things that we definitely want to prioritize, but maybe sometimes we have a hard time finding time for, and then other things in our life that are probably important, but maybe not essential, and we'd love to give our time to them, but we probably don't need to make big priorities out of them. But what happens in the end when we get so busy is that we don't have time for everything, right? But then with the pandemic, life, well it kind of hit the reset button. And we spent most of last year with nothing but time on our hands. And now, as we face moving back into what feels like normal, I think that we have this unique opportunity to reassemble our lives. And as we have this opportunity, I thought it would be appropriate for Grace to stop and really think critically about well, what are our big rocks? What are the things in our life that are the most important to us? What are the things that we want to prioritize above and beyond everything else and what would our life look like if we actually identified our big rocks and prioritized our time around those things? What if we put these rocks in first and made sure that there was space in our life for the things that were most important and then around those things we allowed all the other little things to kind of fill in the rest of our time and priorities? What would it look like if we were to hit the reset button on our life and reassemble it in such a way that we had time and space for what was important to us and we didn't have to worry at all about the other things that just at the end of the day, they're not nearly as big of a deal. What are our big rocks? And how do we make space for them as we enter into a new normal? Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. Thank you for being here with us in person. Thank you for joining us online, if that's what you're doing. I am excited for this Sunday morning. I was probably more excited about this particular sermon in this series than any of the others, because this morning, this big rock is on a topic that I've invested a lot of time and energy thinking about, actually. We're going to be talking about time, and we should spend our time and how we should prioritize our time. And I will confess to you that I have nerded out on this subject. I've listened to podcasts and read books about productivity. If something comes across my news feed about this new study about how to be productive and how to maximize our time in the workplace and all that stuff, I will listen to it. I eat all of that stuff up. Now, it hasn't translated to actual productivity in my workplace, but I'm hoping that if I can just keep learning more things, like for instance, when you're in, when you're just, when you're locked in and you're focused, you're in the groove and you're doing the thing you need to do, you're maximum productive, you're being creative, you're knocking out emails, whatever it is. When you get interrupted, somebody texts you, somebody sticks their head in your office. Kyle starts to talk to someone in the office next to you if you happen to work next to Kyle. When you get interrupted, do you know how long it takes you to regain maximum focus? 26 minutes. Like it takes 26 minutes to regain maximum focus. I could do a whole sermon just telling you stuff like that. That wouldn't be much of a sermon. That would more be like a productivity seminar. So we're going to avoid that. But I've spent a lot of time thinking about time. Because of that, there are myriad directions we could go this morning as we think about the topic of time under the umbrella of God's authority. How would God have us spend our time? What would His priorities for our schedules and our calendars look like? We all know that if you really want to know what a person cares about, look at their calendar and look at their checkbook. And that will tell you what's really, really important to that individual. So we could talk about how to properly prioritize it. We could talk about how much time to make for God. We could talk about how would Jesus have us spend our time. We could do all of those things. And there's a bunch of different directions to go. And when I started out, the way that I write a sermon is I just write down everything I think about that topic, everything I know, all the Bible verses I'm aware of, every time the scriptures address it. And for this particular sermon, I had a big long list. And so the difficulty was on what do we focus on as we think about time? And I really landed on one sentence in the Bible. The first part of one verse that we find in Psalms. And we're going to spend the rest of the morning thinking about the idea of time through the lens of this one sentence that we find in Psalms chapter 46, verse 10. Many of you know this verse. It simply says, be still and know that I am God. Be still, God says, and know that I am God. It's this idea of at some point during your day, during your week, during your month, in your life, at some point, slow down. Be still. Quit doing all the things. Quit going to all the places. Quit stressing out about all the stuff. Quit being distracted by all the different things that can distract you. Be still. Stop moving. Stop going. Right now, I have a five-and-a-half-year-old who cannot be still. She cannot be still. When she's in trouble, I'll tell her, you sit on the stairs, and you sit there, and you do not move, and you do not make a noise. She cannot do it. It's impossible. And for many of us, with our schedules and with our temperaments, it's impossible for us to be still, to just slow down and be still and know that he is God, to focus on God, to focus on what Jesus has done for us, to remind ourselves of the gospel, to remind ourselves of God's goodness in our life. I think many of us struggle mightily to obey this simple psalm, to simply have regular times in our life where we are still and we know that he is God. This is why, incidentally, I think church attendance and involvement is so important. Because even if we're not prioritizing it at any other time in our week, even if our weeks just get away from us and it's just busy, busy, busy, and we're running 90 to nothing and we come into church on two wheels with our hair on fire, at least, hopefully, for an hour, we will slow down. We will be still. We will do our best to put aside all the other things that we've been thinking about that have been stressing us out all week long. And we will, in this service, collectively as a body, know that He is God. It's why I think the rhythm of church is an important one in the life of an individual and a marriage and a family. And so I want to talk about this idea of being still. And I want to talk specifically about why it feels like such a challenge for us sometimes. I think that there are really two camps of people. There's really two divisions of people as we think about how we spend our time and what kind of stops us from being still in the way that we need to be still. I think there's really two camps of people. And I'm not saying that you're all one or you're all the other. This is a sliding scale, but I would bet that everybody in this room has a lean. There are those who fill their days with nothing and those who fill their days with everything. There are those who with their margins, they fill it with nothing, just a bunch of nothingness. And then there's those who fill it with everything. And we're going to talk about what that means. But as we think about how we fill our time with nothing or everything, I want to be clear that I'm talking about the margins of our time. We all have roles in life to play that require time from us, right? Most of us in this room, we have to get up, we have to work every day. That's something that's required of your time. If you don't have to work every day, hopefully you're getting up and being productive. If you're a stay-at-home parent, you've got to get up and gosh, you definitely have to work every day. And so there's some things that we don't have an option. We've got to go to work. We've got to take care of the kids. We've got to run the house. We've got to do the things. There's some things where we just don't have a choice. But around those ways that we spend our time is our discretionary time. And it's that time that I'm talking about that we fill with nothing or with everything. The time when we wake up in the morning. Whether you realize it or not, I don't want to step on too many toes here, everyone has two or three hours of discretionary time in the morning. If you choose to fill that time with sleep, that's your business. But everybody can get up two or three hours just about before we really have anything that life requires of us. So most of us have discretionary time in the morning before our time is demanded of us. Most of us have a lunch break. We've got to drive to work, drive home from work. We have time in the car where we can choose what we're going to listen to and choose what we're going to do and choose what we're going to consume. We have time when we come home. I don't know what the rhythm of your house is. Maybe you have some dead space before dinner. Maybe it's just a mad rush to get the kids to bed and sit down and take a breath. And then you've got from then until whenever you go to bed as your own discretionary time when your parents have young kids to regain your sanity. You've got the weekends, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, where there's probably not much of a demand on your time. So now we've got this discretionary time, these times in the margins. We're trying to decide what to do with it. And my contention is that we tend towards either filling that time with nothing or filling it with everything. I would love to say I'm an everything guy. I'm really more of a nothing guy. So what I'm about to say, I'm saying to me too. But when we fill our time with nothing, we just jump from one thing that doesn't matter to the next thing that doesn't matter. We wake up in the morning, first thing we do is we grab our phone and we start to scroll. We check Instagram, we check Twitter, and we check Facebook, and we check our email, and we check our news outlets, and whatever it is. And we just lay in bed, and and instead of getting up and being productive doing something that we would probably be wiser to do, we just scroll on our phones, right? We come home, we turn on the TV. Kids go to bed, we zone out. We binge watch The Office again. We're in the car, we have some time that we could use to fill ourselves with some Jesus, and instead we just put on something mindless. We listen to music that just kind of puts us in a good mood or whatever it is that it does, or we listen to like sports talk or political talk or whatever it is that women listen to in the car that's talk. I don't know what you guys listen to. But we just, every gap that we have, we just fill it with more nothing. How many of you, don't raise your hand, can't sit at a traffic light without looking at your phone? I think that maybe, this is just a side note, maybe the most damaging thing about cell phones is how incapable we are of not being entertained for just five stinking seconds. If the line's too long at Jersey Mike's, well, let's see what's going on in the news. And we just jump from nothing to nothing. Our time's required of us. We're focused on this. Now I can do whatever I want. What nothing can I fill this with? How can I entertain myself? What's the next drama that's going to happen? What's on Yahoo News front page? What's the next thing going on? And then political stuff happens. So I mean, I was doom scrolling Twitter a lot in December and January. We were all locked into that stuff. And we just wake up in the morning and we waste a little time. We go to work. We have lunch and we engage in a little bit more nothing and we come home and we get the kids. We take care of the kids and we do whatever it is we're going to do. We eat dinner and then we engage in a little bit more nothing. Watch a little bit more trash TV and then we go to bed. And we sleep in and we do the same thing the next day. And it's just a day filled with nothing. As I was doing research for this, I came across a sermon by a guy named Jonathan Edwards. Jonathan Edwards is one of the great American pastors and theologians. He was a key figure in the Great Awakening in the late 1700s. One of the smartest, best theologians that's ever lived. And he did a sermon on time. And he noted within that sermon the unique scarcity of time. It is a uniquely limited resource that we cannot get back in ways that we can recover other resources. And about time, Jonathan Edwards says, there is nothing more precious and yet nothing of which men are more wasteful. There is nothing more precious than time because we can never get it back, and yet there is nothing of which men are more wasteful. I think, if we're honest, that we tend to waste our time like NBA players waste their money. I heard a story this last week as I was in the car listening to the sports talk radio show that I like to listen to, which incidentally was not a waste of time this week because I'm using it in a sermon. So how about that? And there was this author who wrote a book. She wrote a book on Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is the, he is the MVP of the Milwaukee Bucks. They just won the NBA finals. He is a phenomenal athlete and he is like, he's a gem of a person. If you could, if you could create an athlete in a mold, it would be this guy. He's a really neat guy. And he grew up really poor in Greece. And they would sell, he and his family would sell trinkets on the beach to rich tourists. And it was not a very easy upbringing. And so when he came over to the United States, he was drafted in the first round of the draft. He's playing for the Bucs. He has money for the first time in his life. He doesn't know what to do with it. And so he still brings over these sensibilities and he's very conservative. And this author said that he relayed some stories to her about how he was blown away about how some of these guys spent their money. And she said, well, give me some examples. And she said, well, one guy, one guy gave me $500 for a Mountain Dew and a Snickers. He just, the dude was a veteran. He said, Giannis, go give me a Mountain Dew and a Snickers. He did. And the veteran gave him 500 bucks. That's wasteful. Other guys, he had two guys on his team who liked playing PlayStation 4, but they didn't like to be encumbered with like packing it. So they would literally on a road trip, they would go into a new city, buy a PlayStation 4 and the games they wanted to play, and then leave it in the hotel room and buy another one in the next city. Just appalling waste of money. I just saw a financial planner shake his head like just, oh my gosh. Just an appalling waste of money. But I waste my time like that sometimes. I look at my weeks and know that I've just doled out my time as if it's $500 for a Mountain Dew in the way that I invest it and spend it. And if you think that's ridiculous, if you think I'm overstating that, what's your screen time report at the end of your week? I don't know what Android phones do, but Apple phones, every weekend you get a screen time report. You average this many hours per day, it is up or down this percentage from last week. You ever see that and feel good about yourself? It always brings deep, deep conviction. It should send us straight into prayer and confession when that screen time report comes up. I think we waste time like some people like to waste money by just jumping from one numbing entertainment to the next thing without ever considering what's important. And then I think on the opposite end of the spectrum are those of us who fill our days with everything. It's just one thing after the next, just a deluge of activities, one after the other. A workaholic could fit here because there's hours that your job requires of you, and I'm all about going above and beyond. I don't want to decry working hard to get ahead and to provide and to be successful and all that stuff, but I do want us to realize that when we get to work before we're supposed to, that's a choice, and when we stay longer than we have to, that's a choice. It's a way that we're choosing to fill our schedule. When we volunteer for something, that's a choice. We all know people, and some of us are people, who volunteer for everything and say no to nothing and then just do and do and do and do all day long. We just run around with our hair on fire. I am convinced that the busiest time of anyone's life is families, particularly if families have two working spouses with children from ages 8 to 18. I don't think you can ever be busier than that season. It's crazy. And kids have stuff and we have stuff and we fill every single iota of our calendar with something that we're supposed to do. We'll come up with projects on the weekend and disappear and do those. And we allocate our time to this and our time to that. We have no way to pause. We run around frantically and we just do and we do and we do and we jump from one activity to the next activity without ever stopping to be still and know that he is God because our schedules are so full that we feel like we don't have space for anything else. And to those people, I would just say gently, is it possible that the rhythms of our homes are so frantic that we've effectively scheduled God out of our lives? Is it possible that we've allowed some of us, that we've allowed ourselves to become so busy that we have effectively scheduled God and scheduled Jesus right out of our life? Somebody told me one time, and this is, it's deeply convicting. It's probably not all the way fair, but it's mostly fair. If we aren't spending time with God on a daily basis, then we're simply telling him that he didn't make our 24-hour priority list that day. Good luck tomorrow, God. I think sometimes the rhythms of our homes get so frantic that we effectively just schedule them right out of our lives. And what I really want us to see this morning is that wherever we are on the spectrum, whether we fill our days with just nothing, just jumping from entertainment to entertainment, from nothing to nothing, or from activity to activity. That nothing and everything are simply distractions from the right thing. All that entertainment, all that pulling out the phone, all that screen time, all that binge watching, all that late night stuff, all that sleeping in, and then all the busyness, all the activities can sometimes simply be distractions from the right thing. I've made this point before, but I think it bears repeating. I think one of the greatest tricks of the enemy, one of the greatest guises of Satan is to trick us into wasting our time, is to distract us with nothing, is to distract us with our phones and with TV and with information and with nothingness and stuff that is frivolous and doesn't matter. And listen, that stuff has its place. You need to veg out and watch something that makes you laugh, that gives you an escape. We need to do that. But when it becomes too much, when it takes over everything, when it's just nothing to nothing to nothing, the enemy has us distracted. When it's activity to activity to activity that fills us with our own sense of self-importance, yet the activities that we're doing have no eternal consequences. The enemy simply has us distracted. See, I think for many of us in the room, it's one of my favorite verses these days in my life is Ephesians 2.10. It says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. And it carries with it this idea that God made you, he gifted you, he designed you, and he purposed you. Each one of us. I think some of us walk through life feeling like we couldn't possibly have a purpose. I'm too small for that. And I would say, bupkis, God created you. He designed you in Christ for good works that you might walk in them. And in those good works, we know from other passages, we find the fullness of Christ. We walk with Jesus. Our hearts beat with him. We develop a passion for our Savior. I believe that we find Jesus in his work. So as we do the good works that we were designed to do, we grow more vibrant in our relationship with Jesus. We grow more passionate in our desire to serve God. And we live a fuller life that's filled with more joy because we are walking so closely with Jesus. And the enemy does not want you to experience that. He wants to rip you away from our Father's hands. And the deal is, for many of us sitting in this room, he's probably not going to rip us away with some addiction. There are some of us that he might be able to rip away with some sort of shadow life or sin going on, but for the vast majority of us in this room, it's not going to be some crippling addiction that tears us away from the work of the Father. It's not going to be some secret shadow life that tears us away from the work of the Father. It's simply going to be tricking you into spending your days on nothing or everything, day after day after day, until you look back on the month of the year and you go, what did I do? How much more of the work of Jesus for which we were designed could we do if we didn't allow the enemy to distract us with nothing or everything. I believe it's one of his greatest ploys. And I want to do everything I can to call it out whenever I can so that we can be, so that we can walk in the good works for which we were created. And it's why I landed on this one sentence in regards to time this morning, that we should be still and know that he is God. Because I firmly believe that being still is the first true step in the path to knowing God. I absolutely believe that this habit of being still is the first true step that we can take in the path to knowing God, in the path to our hearts beating like Jesus' heart. And I've said this in a bunch of different ways. I've said this phrase over and over and over again, and I will continue to beat this drum until God says this isn't my stage anymore. But as long as it is, I will continue to repeat, there is no greater habit anyone can develop in their life than to wake up every day and spend time in God's word and spend time in God's presence through prayer. No greater habit. And that's what being still is. And I say that it's the first true step to really knowing God because we can come to church and we can hear about God and we can serve and we can do his work and we can go to small group and we can have conversations, but until it becomes personal, until it becomes intimate, until it becomes a habit to wake up and let scripture speak to us, not me speaking to you about what I think scripture says from my quiet times. Let that supplement what God has been saying to you all week in your quiet times. Until we wake up every day and we spend time in God's word and then we pursue him in prayer. For some reason, for some people, that looks like going on a hike and just allowing God to be with us in nature. For some people, that means contemplative practices or meditative practices. For some people, that means listening prayer. For some people, that means getting on our knees and speaking prayer. For some people, it's reading a spiritual book and supplement to the Word of God. But until our pursuit of the Father becomes an intentional, personal one, it can never become an intimate one. So this instruction in Psalm to be still and know that he is God is, to me, the first fundamental step in actually knowing him. And I believe this to be true because I have seen this in my own life. I have seen in the ebbs and flows of my own spiritual health. That when I am consistent in this practice, I'm a better husband. I'm more patient with my children. I'm even more patient with Ruby when I'm having quiet times. That's my dog that I don't like. I even like pet her and invite her over sometimes when I'm praying and reading the Bible and inviting God into every moment of my life. I'm a better pastor. In those seasons where Jesus is enriching my soul and my spirit every day, I can't wait for Sunday to share with you what I have to share with you. In the seasons where I'm not doing that, in the seasons where I feel like I'm running on empty because I've been filling my days with nothing or everything, just to be honest with you, there are Sundays I don't want to preach to you. I want to get done with the sermon so I can go do whatever it is I really want to do that day. And it's because I haven't been filling my days with Jesus. It's because I've been filling them with nothing or everything. And I'm forgetting to be still. And we could talk about how you should spend the rest of your time and what you should volunteer for and what we shouldn't volunteer for and what really is important and what really isn't. And we can talk about God's priorities for your schedule, but I would just simply say, man, if you'll make it a habit every day to be still before the Father and let Him breathe life into your soul, you're a grown-up. You'll figure the rest of it out yourself. You don't need a sermon about that. If we'll do this, if we'll simply be still, God will breathe into our life in such a way that our heart will begin to beat like Jesus' heart and suddenly all the things, all the nothing and all the everything that we use to fill as a simple distraction from what's actually important, those things will become less important to us and we will pursue more Jesus. I've seen it happen over and over and over again in the lives of others and in my own life. So my encouragement to you this morning is to be still and know that he is God. My encouragement to you this morning is don't let this, what I say, be the only source of God and Jesus in your life. Because I am broken and I am fallible and I am often wrong. Pursue him on your own. Let him breathe life into you every day. This will be the first true step that we can take in our path to knowing God. And so I would say to you this morning, how still should I be? Just a little bit more than you are. Take that step. If you have no habit or pattern of waking up and spending time in God's word and letting Jesus refresh your soul there and in prayer, then just give it a week. Do it for seven days and get to the end of seven days and tell me that that was a waste of your time. Just do it for a week. If you're already in that habit, God bless you for being in that habit. You know that I'm speaking truth. Pick another time too. Do it in the evening. End your day with prayer. Let's all just step up our stillness just a little bit and stop and let God wash over us and fill us up and so breathe life into us that we can be his workmanship and do the good works in which we were created to walk in. However still or not you've been in your life, be just a little bit more still this week and see how God breathes life into you in that stillness. As we close, I have a quote. It's a long quote, but I think it's worth it. Growing up, my pastor, a guy named Buddy Hoffman, was one of my heroes, and he still is. He passed away right as I came up here to take this job, and it is one of my great sadnesses that I can't talk about being a pastor with Buddy. And every now and again, I'll go back and I'll listen to some of his sermons. They have them all archived all the way back to the 80s. And when I listen to them, it's like going home. I feel like a 12-year-old kid, 10-year-old kid sitting in church, just taking it all in. I really like listening to Buddy's sermons. Five or six years ago, I was listening to one. Actually, it was a little over four years ago because it was in my parents' basement when I was waiting for you guys to hire me so we could move up here. I was listening to one of his sermons and he was preaching on time. And Buddy spoke pretty extemporaneously, but this I could tell was prepared. He was reading off of a sheet of paper. He wrote it very intentionally and it was so good to me and so profound that I stopped and I typed it out. I would listen to a sentence and pause it and type it and listen and pause and type. And I've just kind of been sitting on it wondering when the best time was to share it with anybody at all. And it just feels very appropriate this morning to end with these words that have impacted me over the years so much. So I want to share them with you. And when I finish, we're going to have a chance to reflect and worship together. This is what Buddy says. Are we possessed with an inescapable passion to live in an intimate knowledge of God? The problem is not that we are engaged in actively evil. The problem is that we are just too active. It's not that we are criminally engaged. We are just inattentive to the voice of God. It's not that we're heretics. Most people I know are just hectic in their activities of mind-numbing nothingness. It should make sense to anyone that minds empty of God will be empty of meaning. Our hunger for God is numbered by our addictions to substitutes and stimulants that hide our starving souls. We are spiritual anorexics. We've morphed to a point where we don't even recognize what is the spiritual norm. Today's lifestyle is lived at a pace that makes contemplations all but impossible, and most people cannot imagine a life like Jesus lived. We can't imagine a life without constant informational connectivity. We live in a noisy world where there are a lot of things competing for our attention, TV, phones, Facebook, emails. But the unintended consequence of constant informational connectivity is divine disconnection. We are so distracted with inconsequential information, our brains and our hearts are overloaded with timely data, leaving no space for timeless deity. We're called to live with a preoccupation with God who is worthy to be pursued at all costs and is pursuing us. We find ourselves in an age that has pushed the knowledge of God into the margins. We arrogantly assume that God should be grateful for the crumbs of our overcrowded schedule. We call it efficient. But God has not called us first to be efficient. He has called us to be passionate. We are spiritually diseased. Never have we had more to eat and found ourselves more famished. Never have we had more stuff and been less satisfied. It is time we made time for the timeless.

It's good to see you guys. My name is Nate. I'm the pastor here, believe it or not. And I'm so excited about 2019. I feel like 2018 was such a wonderful year for grace, was such a wonderful year for the church. And we've enumerated all the things that God did for us last year. But I feel like, gosh, we are just poised to do really good things this year. We have a solid staff team, a good, great folks around us, and we are really ready to push this year. So I'm excited to see what the Lord does in the church this year. And I've already been praying for you a little bit, been praying for you as you enter into 2019. And my prayer for all of us, me included, is that when we leave this year, we will leave it closer to God than we are right now. My prayer for you is that 2019 will be a year of marked spiritual change and health in your life, and Jesus will draw you closer to him. That's my prayer and my hope. So we're launching with this series, Thoughts from the Gym, because we kind of felt like it fit into the beginning of the year, New Year's resolutions, and things like that. And a lot of us, like I did this week, are having day one in the gym again, right? The genesis of this series is we moved here in April of 2007. And so entering into the summer, we didn't know anybody. And so Jen said, well, Jen is my wife and we have a little girl named Lily. And so we wanted to join a pool so they could have something to do during the day because they make me work office hours here. It's ridiculous. So they wanted something to do during the day when I wasn't around. And so we ended up joining a pool and we joined a pool at a gym. And I thought, well, as long as I'm paying for this thing, I should try to go, right? And so I went, and it was pretty fun, and as I would go and watch other people work out, I was thinking about things, and there's some thoughts that occurred to me like, man, there's so many parallels here that apply to church and spiritual health, and I just kind of filed them away, and then one day, and I didn't know what I was going to do with them. And then one day I shared them with staff and they said, well, that should be a series. You should do that in January. So here we are. And the first one that we're going to do is called day one. And it's the first thing that occurred to me. That day, whenever it was, when I got ready to go to the gym, I put on whatever ratty clothes I had, and I go there, and I'm going to work out. I'm going to do the thing, right? Like you guys have had day ones, right? And I'm going to do the thing. And I don't like admitting this, okay, because I like to think of myself as mentally tough. I don't get easily intimidated, or at least maybe my unearned confidence has told me that. But I don't think I get intimidated a lot, but I was intimidated going to the gym. I don't like to admit that, but I was. Because, you know, if you've been there and you look like me, like there was a season, I got real consistent in the gym. There was a season where I would even be bold enough as to call myself in shape. But due to my affinity for baked goods and sitting, I'm back in like normal shape. All right. So I've got a long road to glory ahead of me this year. But I go and as I'm going, like I walk in and everybody's got on the matching clothes. All the dudes are wearing tight shirts by choice. I'm wearing tight shirts like not by choice. You know, they look good in theirs. I want to look better in mine. I get up on the treadmill and there's all these buttons and, and three of them say start. I'm like, what are you doing to me, Lifetime? I don't know what to do or which buttons to push. I'm pretty sure everyone around me is staring at me going, look at this clown. I'm starting to sweat. I haven't even done anything yet because I'm just nervous that everybody's judging me. Then I go over. I don't even know what. I literally, I'm just there. I have just like, I'm just, I don't, I have no workout plan. I'm just going to pick up some heavy things. Then I'm going to go home and I'm sweaty. And so I like curls, I know how to do curls. So I go over there and I grab a, you know, a barbell and a dumbbell and I, and I'm like looking at the other dudes to make sure that my form is good. And I'm hoping that they don't catch me looking at them and think I'm creepy or weird or something. And it's just the whole thing, I was just nerve wracked the whole time. And that's really not in my character to do that. I just was intimidated. And I realized I was intimidated because I felt like I was an outsider. I don't belong here. All the other people who are like gym people that nobody likes, they are, and I'm just playing around, but the people who are in good shape that we're jealous of, like they are going to look at me and they're going to know, oh man, this guy doesn't belong here. He won't last till February, you know? And so, like, I felt like I was an imposter. And at some point or another, everybody around me was going to know he doesn't belong. And what I realized is, man, this must be the way that people feel when they come back to church for the first time or go to church for the first time. This must be the way they feel. And I was actually glad to have that experience where I kind of felt insecure, even though I feel like I'm a pretty reasonably secure guy. I didn't like the way that felt. And so I was glad I had the experience as, oh my gosh, this must be what it feels like to come to church for the first time after a while. Because if I'm honest with you, I don't have that experience. I have no memory in my life of ever not being in church. I grew up in church. I could go to any church and feel pretty comfortable. And people who are in really good shape, they can go to any gym and they'll feel pretty good. They won't feel like I did on that first day. But if you haven't been to church in a while or you haven't ever been to church that you can remember, when you go that first day, it has to feel a lot like I felt at the gym that day. And I just remember thinking, man, if someone, as I thought about that and ruminated on it more, I thought, man, if one of the trainers or somebody who looks like they know what they're doing could come up to me and put their arm around me and just kind of give me some pointers like, hey, bro, let me show you how to set this treadmill up, you know? Let me show you how to do some of these exercises. Like these are the machines you want to do so you don't wander around looking like a dummy. Like just go to these things and you'll fit in. And I wish they could put their arm around me and just been like, dude, we've all had a day one. Like it's all right. It's good for you that you're here. And so what I wanted to do this morning, the first Sunday in January, is acknowledge that there's a lot of people here who your New Year's resolution is spiritual in nature. And maybe you're here on the very first Sunday in January because you decided, you know what, I'm going to church this year. I'm going to take my walk with God seriously. I've been meaning to prioritize my faith. This is the year I'm going to do that. I'm all in. I'm going to church this year. That's what I'm going to do. Somebody between services says you guys are resolutioners. If you're the resolutioners that are here and you said, I want to be back in church, then this is what you're doing. And what I want to do is take the first Sunday and address you and say, hey, listen, if this is your first Sunday back in church in a long time, there's five things that I want you to know. Now, this sermon is going to look a little bit different than all my other sermons. I'm really kind of anti-listy sermons. I don't like it when pastors make lists because this is just kind of like a behind the scenes thing a little bit. Lists tend to be lazy. It's super easy to be like, what are five things that are true about that verse? These five things. Okay, I'm just going to talk about them for a while. That's easy. To me, it's harder to make one point. And so that's what I try to do because I think it's best to ruminate on one scripture and move through it. But I thought this topic was so important and there's so many messages that I want to share with those of you who are coming back to church for the first time that I wanted to make a list of those things this morning. Now, here's the thing. A lot of the people in the room, y'all are grace people. You're church people. You're comfortable here. This isn't your first day. This is your first day this year. And you're kind of thinking like, well, this isn't for me. Wrong, pal. It is. Because if I'm saying that this is the message that we want to deliver to people who come to grace for the first time. Who is it that delivers this message? It's you. So these are the things that we want to say to folks who are coming into the fold for the first time or for the first time in a while. So if you're new, these are directly for you. If you are not new, then consider these your marching orders. These are the messages I want you to communicate with your actions and with your words, okay? So the first thing that I would love to say to you on your first visit back to church and in the midst of your intimidation is simply this. We know those feels, man. We know those feels. Now listen, some of y'all don't know what that means. You hired a young, attractive, hip senior pastor from Atlanta, okay? And I know the lingo. This is probably like eight years old. I'm so outdated in my lingo. There's people here who actually know the lingo going, no, you don't. But feels, I know those feels is the way that millennials tell you that they have empathy for you, okay? That's the word that you recognize. It's, I understand that feeling. I've been there before. I have empathy for that. I empathize with you. We've all had day ones and they're hard. It takes a lot of courage to come to church for the first time. As a matter of fact, on your bulletin, if you got one, when you came in on the front of it, there's a note from me. And the first thing I do is welcome people who are new and acknowledge that it was a difficult thing for you to do to get here. Okay. A lot of you have never seen that before because you've been here forever, and no one who goes to church consistently reads the note from the pastor on the bulletin. So that's not even for you. That's for them. We acknowledge that it is difficult. As a matter of fact, I had an interesting conversation with somebody just this last year, a guy who is a longtime partner here, been going to the church for forever. I love and respect this guy mostly because of the free golf he offers me, but I really do like him as a person. And one day we were golfing and he shared with me that he's one of the leaders of our men's Monday night Bible study. And he was telling me about the first time he went. And he said the first time he went, he was intimidated and scared. He kind of had been around church. He was a successful guy, sharp guy, smart guy. But he was going to Bible study for the first time and he was intimidated because he felt like they were going to ask him a question that he couldn't answer or that they were going to start talking about like insider stuff that he didn't know what it was. He felt like the knowledge gap was so wide that he was going to be exposed like he didn't belong there. But he knew in his heart that this was something that he needed to do. It was a step that he needed to take for his own health, and so he did it. And gradually, he was assimilated into the group. He didn't need to be near as intimidated as he was, and now he's a leader of the group. And so I want you to know that we've been there before. We understand how you feel. And to those of us who have been here for a while, understanding what it is to come to a new place for the first time, I would like for you guys to begin to run new people through a grid. Okay, so when you bring friends to church for the first time, when you have friends that bring friends to church for the first time, or when you see somebody here that maybe you don't recognize, I want you to have a grid or a question that you ask them, okay? And this question comes from the biblical imperative to be hospitable. This isn't just a thing that we do to be nice. Did you know that hospitality is actually one of the spiritual gifts? See, Christians believe, the Bible teaches that once you become a Christian, that the Holy Spirit, part of God, gives you a gift or a propensity in a certain area that you may not have had before or heightens it in you. And one of those gifts is the gift of hospitality. And you can tell who has the gift of hospitality because when you go to their house for something that's not even a big deal, they have like all the trays and all the platters set out. They're the ones that own the cupcake towers. They usually have the folded piece of paper in front of everything. Like you haven't seen cupcakes before. Like these are the chocolate ones. And you think to yourself, I'm never inviting them to my house because they're going to know what a degenerate I am, that I only have plates, right? Like those people are wonderful and I love them and they have the gift of hospitality. It's a gift. It's a thing. And if we as a church, as God instructs us to do in scripture, are going to express that gift of hospitality to folks who are with us for the first time, then I think the question that hospitality asks is, what can I do to make this person as comfortable as possible? Right? Isn't that the question? And listen, when you bring your friends or your loved ones to church and you say, I like it so far. It's pretty good. Worship's great. Sermons are all right. You should come and check it out. And you bring them, and you're hoping that there's a good experience for them, right? Don't you want everybody around you to be thinking, what can I do to make this experience as comfortable as possible? Which, by the way, I don't know if you realize this, that's our only growth strategy, all right? We don't do mailers. We don't send things out. We don't fleece the community with invite cards. We thought about over Christmas getting a bunch of, a big stack of invite cards and going to the apartment complexes right down the road and handing them out, going door to door and just giving them to people and putting a banner out in front of the church and inviting everybody in. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, that's not us. The point is not to get rear ends and seats. The point is not to fill up rooms. It's to bring people closer to Jesus. And the best chance we have at bringing people closer to Jesus is to bring in people who have relationships with you. So our entire growth strategy is to do things on Sunday morning that add value to your life and excite you so that you bring your friends to come see it too. That's it. And then we want to take good care of them once they get here. So when you bring those people, I want the filter that we view them through to be, what can I do to make this person as comfortable as possible here? And that looks like different things for different people, right? We've got to be savvy about this. Sometimes an extrovert visits and they want to meet everybody, right? Like last service, a new guy came. His name was Stuart. And I got introduced to Stuart. And Stuart chatted me up and he clearly wanted to meet everybody else. And so what Stuart wanted is for everybody to get to meet him. And that's great. But sometimes people aren't like him. Sometimes they're like me. I haven't had to visit a new church in a while, but if I did visit a new church, here's the experience I would want. I would want to go there and have one person acknowledge my existence and then leave me alone, right? Let me sit in the back. Let me take it in. I have to decide if y'all are crazy. Don't talk to me, right? And so when people come here for the first time, true story, they're coming in and they're going, are these people weird? Are these people normal? Do they make me laugh? I don't know about that video. That guy's a weirdo. Right? They're kicking the tires and sometimes they just want to sit in the back and take it in. And the thing we can do to be most hospitable is to give them their space to be introverted and assess. And that's what we need to have the wisdom to do. Sometimes it means showing them where the coffee is. Sometimes it means showing them where the restrooms are since we tuck them away in the kids' hallway by choice. And then sometimes we show them how to check in their children, right? Or we tell the kids to get out of the way so we have a room for everybody to sit down. That's the kinds of things we have to do. So I want us this year to begin to think as we see people that we don't recognize at church, what can I do to make them as comfortable as possible? That's what hospitality asks. Okay, that's the first thing. The second thing is this. This is important. If you're here, if you're here and you have resolved, I'm going to go to church, I'm going to do the thing, I'm going to take my walk more seriously, whatever your New Year's resolution is, I hope that you've made a spiritual New Year's resolution. If you haven't, I would highly encourage you to do that. You can just call it like a January 15th resolution or something like that. It would be great. But listen, if you made a resolution, particularly spiritually, I just want you to hear me say this, okay? You're going to mess up, and that's okay. You're going to spit the bit, man. You're going to blow it, and that's all right. If you made a New Year's resolution to come to church more often, three Sundays, four Sundays a month, whatever it is, you're going to do something on a Saturday that makes you feel like maybe I shouldn't go to church on Sunday. It's going to happen. You're going to wake up late. You're going to have a reason to not prioritize it. You're going to miss a couple of weeks in a row, and then you're going to feel like, man, I fell off the wagon. That's going to happen. If you made a New Year's resolution to watch your mouth, like, you're going to cuss in traffic. Like, eventually, that's going to happen. Try not to flip anybody off when it does. Make sure your windows are up. Like, it'll happen. We are going to mess up our New Year's resolutions. Like, we're going to fail. And that's okay because I can make a long list for you of people in the Bible who were heroes of the faith but failed miserably. Moses is a hero of the faith. He led the people out of Egypt. He's the dude that carried the Ten Commandments down the hill. He's a big deal. He messed up so badly late in life that God didn't even allow him to enter into the promised land that he led God's people to. Abraham, the man to whom we trace all of our spiritual lineage, he committed a sin so bad when he slept with another woman that was not his wife and had a child that we still feel the ramifications of that sin today. David, the greatest king Israel ever had, the one from whom Jesus came, the throne that Jesus will sit on, messed up so bad that he became a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer and God took his child as a result of his sin. Samson messed up so bad that many theologians don't even know if he ever even really knew the Lord. Peter in the New Testament, the leader of the disciples, messed up so badly that he denied even knowing Jesus three times in one night. If they messed up, you will too. And so will I. But here's the thing I want you to know. Spiritual progress is brought about by perseverance, not perfection. You hear me? Spiritual progress, spiritual success is not brought about by perfection. It's brought about by perseverance. The difference between spiritually healthy people and spiritually distant people is not some sort of moral fiber where one exceeds the other. It's simply perseverance. It's the willingness to, when I mess up, to get myself to stand back up, to dust myself off, and make the next decision of faith that I said I was going to make. It's to get up, refuse to listen to the voices in your head that tell you, here you go again, you've messed it up again. It's a refusal to listen to those and to get back on the horse and to make the next decision of faith in front of you. This is such a biblical idea. Perseverance is so important in the Christian life that many of the New Testament authors wrote about it. Paul wrote two-thirds in the New Testament. He was one of the most influential Christians to ever live. And over and over and over again in his letters that he wrote to the churches that we now read that make up our Bible, he encourages perseverance. He says to run the race, run to win the race. He says at the end of his life, he says, I have fought the good fight. I have kept the faith. I have finished the race. And he says that as an example for us, he says that we should be poured out like a drink offering, okay? He encourages us to persevere in our faith. James, the brother of Jesus, holds perseverance so high in his economy that he says that we should consider suffering pure joy because it rots within us perseverance. It brings about within us perseverance and the ability to stick to things and to be steadfast. Peter, the leader of the disciples, values it so highly that in one of my favorite passages in the first chapter of 2 Peter, he makes a list of the attributes that Christians should seek out in their life. And in the middle of that list, he puts perseverance there. And it's a building list. And what Peter says is, perseverance is so important that you cannot experience brotherly kindness or godliness or love until you learn perseverance. It's a building block to the rest of the faith. Perseverance is the key to progress in spiritual health, not perfection. If you allow yourself to be discouraged and quit the first time you mess up, it's going to be really hard to see any progress. But if you will acknowledge that this happens to everybody, even heroes in the Bible, and you give yourself the grace to get back up and take the next step of faith in your life, regardless of what you did yesterday, that's perseverance. And that will bring about a spiritual progress. So you're going to mess up, and that's all right, as long as you get back up. Number three, the third thing I want you to know on your visit back to church, we love your questions. We love your questions. They're great. And I say that because we get intimidated about asking questions, right? We get in our own head. We don't want to ask questions. Questions show vulnerability and they admit that I don't know something and that you might be better than me at it and I don't want to feel dumb. So we don't ask questions and we just continue being dumb, right? That's what we do. I was at the gym and I'm working out. I'm doing, I think I was doing some tricep thing. And there's a dude like there, he's just a couple of feet away from me and he is just a bear of a man. He's just, he's been working out for 12 hours a day for the past 10 years of his life. Like he's just, he's just huge and intimidating. And he's got his, he's got his hat on backwards and he's got his, he's got his earphones on and the whole, the whole deal. And he's just going and he's like, he's lifting like three of me as he does the thing that he's doing. And I, but he was doing an exercise that I did not recognize. Like I've never seen this before. I don't know what that is. And my curiosity got the best of my good sense, as it often does. And so I decided I'm going to ask him what he's doing. And so I go to him, and I'm like, excuse me, sir. You know, scrawny white guy, excuse me, sir. And he pulls his headphones on, and he looks at me and goes, what? And I'm like, oh, I wanted to be like, my bad, nothing. I'll talk to you later. And I said, you want me to spot you? No, I said, I said, dude, I don't mean to be weird, but I've never seen anybody do that exercise before. And I'm just curious, like, what muscle is that working? And he kind of laughed and he pulled his headphones off and he goes, here, man, let me show you. And it was, he said, it's this, like, you got to do this. It's working. I don't know what that's called. The lat, we'll call it. I don't know what it is. And he says, do this, you know? And he kind of like, he showed me, he's like, can you feel it back there? I'm like, yeah. And like, we like joked around, we exchanged names. We grabbed coffee later and I was just messing around about that. But like, we were kind of buddies. And like, now I see him. I'm like, hey man, how you doing? And we'll do the little fist pound every now and again. I'll ask him a question or whatever. But like, that question broke down that wall. And I didn't know. And I would have never known. But I asked the question. And if you're new to the faith, you should ask your questions. If you're old to the faith, you should ask your questions. Do you know that before I was a senior pastor, if you can't already tell, I worked with youth for a long time. And I got to sit in a bunch of rooms with students, and I still love hanging out with students. And one of the big reasons I love hanging out with students is they haven't developed the fear that you have about asking questions. So they'll ask whatever they want. But now when I do adult Bible studies, sometimes people lean forward and they ask me questions about scripture and what it says and yada, yada, yada. Can I tell you that adults ask the same questions that students do? They don't get any better or smarter. The only difference is you sat on yours for 30 years and they just had the guts to go ahead and ask it. I was in a men's Bible study. I do a men's Bible study on Wednesday mornings at 6 o'clock. That keeps out the riffraff. People don't come kick the tires at 6 a.m. You've got to want it. Everybody's welcome. You've just got to be there on time. I'll lock the door and wave at you. So they come in. They come in, they sit down, and we're going to the book of John. And in the book of John, there's two Johns. There's John the Baptist and the Apostle John. And one of them says, hey, there's some Johns in the Bible. Are they the same or is that two different dudes? And that's a hard question to ask because if you've been around church for any time at all, you feel like you should know that question, right? Except like three or four other dudes in the circle, their eyebrows go up and they're like, yo, like what's the answer to this? Because they didn't know either. But because that one guy had the guts to ask a perfectly reasonable question, why in the world would you be expected to know that there's two Johns in the book of John if you haven't spent your life looking at it? Why in the world would you be expected to know that? Because he had the guts to ask the question, everybody got to learn, right? And listen, I don't want you to feel remotely intimidated about not knowing anything about the Bible. If you don't, that's great. If I tell you one Sunday, hey guys, listen, we're going to be in the book of Mark. You can go ahead and turn there if you want to. If you don't know where that is, please lean over to your neighbor and go, where's Mark? That's fine. Why in the world would you be expected to know that Mark is the second book in the New Testament if you haven't been around church in a long time? I try my best to not leave anybody behind, to not assume any knowledge on your behalf, to bring everybody up to speed. But sometimes I mess up. And when I do, man, you should have the courage to ask questions. In Bible studies, ask questions. Long-time church people, ask your questions. Don't be scared of them. They are good, and they are positive, and they follow this biblical model that I love of the Ethiopian eunuch. There's a guy in Acts. He's an Ethiopian governmental official, essentially, and he's on a chariot, and this guy, Philip, sees him reading from the book of Isaiah, and he walks up to him, and he says, hey, that's Isaiah. Do you understand what you're reading? And the eunuch responds in such an incredibly bold way. He says, how can I unless someone explains it to me? Isn't that refreshing honesty? Someone comes up to us, hey, you're reading Isaiah. You understand what that means? Yeah, you want some tips? And in our head, we're like, I don't know anything. Please don't ask me any questions. This doesn't make any sense. Have the boldness to be like that guy from Ethiopia and say, how can I know this unless someone explains it to me? Ask your questions. The fourth thing that I want you to know is that we are rooting for you. We're rooting for you. We believe in you. There is this thing in our culture, and I'm sure it's in all cultures. Whenever you start a new initiative, everybody around you doubts you, right? Like when I go into the gym on day one, I've had a lot of day ones, I feel the same way every time, that everybody's looking at me in their matching clothes and in their good shape, and they're looking at me going, yeah, it'll be nice seeing you in January because because you ain't making it to February, pal. And then I can have my treadmill back, and you'll be out of the way, right? Then we can keep the weights like where they need to go instead of on your level, you know? People tend to look at you with skepticism, and they don't believe in you. Spouses are the best at this, right? Like, if I tell Jen, like, I'm going to start some new initiative in my life, like, hey, I think I'm going to journal. He's like, all right. Let me know how that goes for you, buddy. You know? Don't they, like our people who know us the best are sometimes the worst at this. I think I'm going to pray 30 minutes every day. Good luck. Why do we do that to one another? So I want you to know that that attitude doesn't make it into here. If you're here and you've been wandering from God for a long time, but you've decided, you know what, I want to get serious about my faith. I believe that Jesus worked in your heart to bring you here. I believe that Jesus has been slowly working on your heart and drawing you near to him for months and years leading you into this day. And I don't believe it's on accident. And I don't for a second doubt the sincerity of the decision that brought you in here. So I want you to know that we believe in you. If you made a spiritual resolution this year, you've been coming to church for a long time, but you've resolved to do this. I want you to know that I believe in you. I don't look at you with a bit of skepticism. We don't look at you with a bit of skepticism. We only look at you with hope. Man, it would thrill my soul to know and to hear the story years from now of somebody who wandered in here in January of 2019 and had known God or had been around church, but for some reason, when I came here this month, something clicked and I just felt God's presence like I never had before. And my life has been different ever since. I would love to know that story. I would love for someone right here, in here right now, who is far from God to become one of our elders or one of our leaders in the children's ministry or one of our volunteers or small group leaders one day. I believe that story is possible and I believe that you are here on purpose. And so there is no doubt here. We believe in you. This is such an important idea that in the middle of the most theological, theologically technical book in the New Testament, Paul, the author of Romans, stops in chapter 14 and he makes it about encouraging more mature believers, encouraging those who are less experienced. He says this over and over in his writings. He says that we should constantly in Thessalonians, that we should build one another up. The author of Hebrews says that we should outdo one another in kindness and that we should spur one another on to good works. And Paul in chapter 14 of Romans devotes an entire chapter where he's talking to the more experienced believer, and he says over and over and over again, don't pass judgment. Don't judge them. Encourage them. Don't do anything that would cause them to stumble. Don't do anything that would cause them not to grow. Do everything you can to encourage other people as they seek to grow closer to God. And so that's what we do here. We believe in you. And I'm going to ask the grace people, if you're a partner, you've been coming here for a while, I'm going to give you a homework assignment and just ask you to be willing to do this. Will you, every day this week when you pray, will you pray for those people who have made a decision to get back into church in 2019? Will you please just remember to do that? And let's together pray for those folks every day this week. And you guys know that if you're here for the first time in a while, like we're praying for you. And the other thing is, if you've made a spiritual resolution, I want to pray for that too. I would love for you to write that on your communication card and hand that to somebody after the service and make sure it gets to me. I want to make a list, and once a week I'm going to sit down, and I'm going to pray for all the resolutions in the church that have to do with becoming more healthy spiritually. I'm going to do that every week until you tell me to stop, because we want to encourage one another. We believe in each other here. And if you say you're serious about this, then we believe you. The last thing I want you to know this morning, the fifth thing that I would love to be able to say to everybody is this. God is the only reason that any of us are here. God is the only reason that any of us are here. And here's what I mean. Again, at the gym, when I see other people who are really healthy and really fit, honestly, I admire that. I admire that because I know what goes into that. Having failed so many times, I understand the discipline it takes to be in shape and to be healthy because it's not just the time you spend at the gym. It's what you eat and how you sleep. And it's a whole lifestyle thing. And so I look at people who are in shape and honestly, I admire them and I admire them for their character. I admire them for their discipline, for their stick-to-itiveness. When people are disciplined in their profession, when they're successful in their profession, I admire that. I look at the way that they work hard. They wake up before everybody else. They work harder than everybody else. And they put in time when nobody else is putting in time. And I admire that. And in our culture, we have a culture of success that admires success. And we all tend to believe that that success was brought about by personal disciplines that accelerated you beyond your peers, right? And so what do we do when we come into church? We apply the same metric. We come into church and we see somebody who looks spiritually healthy to us, who sets a good example, who may be a leader somewhere or seems godly, or we like the way they interact with people, we like the way that they interact with their family or whatever it is, and we admire them spiritually. And what we tend to do is attribute to them some sort of discipline that won that for them, and then we try to duplicate that discipline in our own lives. And when we attribute discipline to other people in different arenas outside of church, I think that that is a good and fair thing to do. But when you attribute discipline to people inside of church, I don't think that that's right at all, and here's why. If you were to go to the person that you admire spiritually, and you to learn more about them and you were to somehow tell them, man, I wish I could have your discipline. I wish I could grow like you. I wish I was as self-disciplined as you are. They would tell you, listen, if there is anything in me that you admire, it has nothing to do with my discipline. I promise you that. It has everything to do with a God that loves me enough to continue to stick with me even when I don't stick with him. It has everything to do with a God working in my heart even when I don't know he's working. Being spiritually healthy has nothing to do with our white-knuckle discipline. And if that's what you are relying on this year to bring you spiritual health and closer to Jesus, let me tell you something, you're going to fail and that's not all right. Because this is the one arena where it's not about you and it's not about your discipline. It's about getting out of the way and accepting the free love that the Father offers so graciously. The author of Hebrews sums this up well in Hebrews chapter 12, some of my favorite verses in the Bible. Hebrews 12, 1 says, That's what they tell us to do. And that's a great verse. It's an inspirational verse. But the problem with that verse is it makes it seem like the impetus is on us to run it well, right? Because the direction is throw off the sin and get everything out of your life that does not help you run the race, that doesn't help you live the life that God has for you to live. Get rid of everything in your life that doesn't make you spiritually healthy so that you can run the race that you need to run. That's the implication of that verse until you get to the second verse, which says, How do we run the race that we're supposed to run? How do we live the life that we're supposed to live? How do we achieve spiritual health in 2019? Not by focusing on the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. Not by focusing on the behaviors that we want to be done with, but by focusing on Christ and falling more in love with Him and allowing Him to work more in our hearts as He draws us near to Him. Can I just tell you that if you're seeking spiritual health this year and you're doing it by identifying some behaviors in your life that aren't good, that shouldn't be there, that we would probably call sin, and you look at this group of things and you go, I'm not going to do these things anymore, and your focus is on the behaviors and not on Jesus, can I tell you that you're going to fail? Because spiritual health is not wrought by white-knuckle discipline. No one has ever in the history of mankind besides Jesus himself gotten themselves closer to God by focusing on their behaviors and trying to be perfect. The only spiritual health anybody in this church or any other church has is as a result of figuring out that we need to focus on God. We focus on God. There's this great verse in Psalms that says, delight yourselves in the laws of the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. And how it works is the more I focus on Jesus, the more I follow the advice of the author of Hebrews and fix my eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of my faith, the more my heart begins to beat in sync with his, the more I want the things that he wants, the, I want you to know that that was not won by their discipline and it being better than yours. It was won by them realizing the only thing that matters is how I relate to God. John 15, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. All that matters is following Jesus, is allowing him to draw me closer to him. Don't focus on the behaviors this year. Focus on what you can do to draw yourself closer to the Father and allow that drawing to happen to you. Pray more, read the Bible more, come to church more, be around other believers more, but let Jesus draw yourself into him. Fix your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. There's actually one more thing that I would love to tell people on their first visit at church, but it's such a big deal that I'm going to devote a whole Sunday to it next week, and that's you can't do this alone. There is no such thing as a John Wayne Christian. You cannot do this alone. It was designed to be done around other people. So next week, that's what we're going to come back and we're going to talk about. The weeks following, we're going to talk about spiritual health as a lifestyle, as a lifestyle, and then we're going to talk about how long it takes to get spiritually healthy and the stick-to-itiveness that it requires. So I hope that you'll join us for the rest of those in this series as I continue to share with you my thoughts from the gym. I'm really looking forward to this January. I hope you are too. All right, I'm going to pray, and then Steve and the band are going to come up, and they're going to close us out. Father, thank you so much for today. Thank you for this year. Thank you for this Sunday. God, I thank you for the way that I believe you are drawing everybody in here closer to you in just the subtle and gentle way that you do it. Lord, let us know that we are loved by you, that we are cherished by you, that we are pursued by you. I lift up all those here who have resolved this year to do something that they believe will draw them closer to you. Give them the courage to get up when they fail. Give them the faith to lean on you when they don't find strength. And God, let 2019 be a year of marked spiritual health and change for us. Lord, we love you. We pray these things in your son's name. Amen.

It's good to see you guys. My name is Nate. I'm the pastor here, believe it or not. And I'm so excited about 2019. I feel like 2018 was such a wonderful year for grace, was such a wonderful year for the church. And we've enumerated all the things that God did for us last year. But I feel like, gosh, we are just poised to do really good things this year. We have a solid staff team, a good, great folks around us, and we are really ready to push this year. So I'm excited to see what the Lord does in the church this year. And I've already been praying for you a little bit, been praying for you as you enter into 2019. And my prayer for all of us, me included, is that when we leave this year, we will leave it closer to God than we are right now. My prayer for you is that 2019 will be a year of marked spiritual change and health in your life, and Jesus will draw you closer to him. That's my prayer and my hope. So we're launching with this series, Thoughts from the Gym, because we kind of felt like it fit into the beginning of the year, New Year's resolutions, and things like that. And a lot of us, like I did this week, are having day one in the gym again, right? The genesis of this series is we moved here in April of 2007. And so entering into the summer, we didn't know anybody. And so Jen said, well, Jen is my wife and we have a little girl named Lily. And so we wanted to join a pool so they could have something to do during the day because they make me work office hours here. It's ridiculous. So they wanted something to do during the day when I wasn't around. And so we ended up joining a pool and we joined a pool at a gym. And I thought, well, as long as I'm paying for this thing, I should try to go, right? And so I went, and it was pretty fun, and as I would go and watch other people work out, I was thinking about things, and there's some thoughts that occurred to me like, man, there's so many parallels here that apply to church and spiritual health, and I just kind of filed them away, and then one day, and I didn't know what I was going to do with them. And then one day I shared them with staff and they said, well, that should be a series. You should do that in January. So here we are. And the first one that we're going to do is called day one. And it's the first thing that occurred to me. That day, whenever it was, when I got ready to go to the gym, I put on whatever ratty clothes I had, and I go there, and I'm going to work out. I'm going to do the thing, right? Like you guys have had day ones, right? And I'm going to do the thing. And I don't like admitting this, okay, because I like to think of myself as mentally tough. I don't get easily intimidated, or at least maybe my unearned confidence has told me that. But I don't think I get intimidated a lot, but I was intimidated going to the gym. I don't like to admit that, but I was. Because, you know, if you've been there and you look like me, like there was a season, I got real consistent in the gym. There was a season where I would even be bold enough as to call myself in shape. But due to my affinity for baked goods and sitting, I'm back in like normal shape. All right. So I've got a long road to glory ahead of me this year. But I go and as I'm going, like I walk in and everybody's got on the matching clothes. All the dudes are wearing tight shirts by choice. I'm wearing tight shirts like not by choice. You know, they look good in theirs. I want to look better in mine. I get up on the treadmill and there's all these buttons and, and three of them say start. I'm like, what are you doing to me, Lifetime? I don't know what to do or which buttons to push. I'm pretty sure everyone around me is staring at me going, look at this clown. I'm starting to sweat. I haven't even done anything yet because I'm just nervous that everybody's judging me. Then I go over. I don't even know what. I literally, I'm just there. I have just like, I'm just, I don't, I have no workout plan. I'm just going to pick up some heavy things. Then I'm going to go home and I'm sweaty. And so I like curls, I know how to do curls. So I go over there and I grab a, you know, a barbell and a dumbbell and I, and I'm like looking at the other dudes to make sure that my form is good. And I'm hoping that they don't catch me looking at them and think I'm creepy or weird or something. And it's just the whole thing, I was just nerve wracked the whole time. And that's really not in my character to do that. I just was intimidated. And I realized I was intimidated because I felt like I was an outsider. I don't belong here. All the other people who are like gym people that nobody likes, they are, and I'm just playing around, but the people who are in good shape that we're jealous of, like they are going to look at me and they're going to know, oh man, this guy doesn't belong here. He won't last till February, you know? And so, like, I felt like I was an imposter. And at some point or another, everybody around me was going to know he doesn't belong. And what I realized is, man, this must be the way that people feel when they come back to church for the first time or go to church for the first time. This must be the way they feel. And I was actually glad to have that experience where I kind of felt insecure, even though I feel like I'm a pretty reasonably secure guy. I didn't like the way that felt. And so I was glad I had the experience as, oh my gosh, this must be what it feels like to come to church for the first time after a while. Because if I'm honest with you, I don't have that experience. I have no memory in my life of ever not being in church. I grew up in church. I could go to any church and feel pretty comfortable. And people who are in really good shape, they can go to any gym and they'll feel pretty good. They won't feel like I did on that first day. But if you haven't been to church in a while or you haven't ever been to church that you can remember, when you go that first day, it has to feel a lot like I felt at the gym that day. And I just remember thinking, man, if someone, as I thought about that and ruminated on it more, I thought, man, if one of the trainers or somebody who looks like they know what they're doing could come up to me and put their arm around me and just kind of give me some pointers like, hey, bro, let me show you how to set this treadmill up, you know? Let me show you how to do some of these exercises. Like these are the machines you want to do so you don't wander around looking like a dummy. Like just go to these things and you'll fit in. And I wish they could put their arm around me and just been like, dude, we've all had a day one. Like it's all right. It's good for you that you're here. And so what I wanted to do this morning, the first Sunday in January, is acknowledge that there's a lot of people here who your New Year's resolution is spiritual in nature. And maybe you're here on the very first Sunday in January because you decided, you know what, I'm going to church this year. I'm going to take my walk with God seriously. I've been meaning to prioritize my faith. This is the year I'm going to do that. I'm all in. I'm going to church this year. That's what I'm going to do. Somebody between services says you guys are resolutioners. If you're the resolutioners that are here and you said, I want to be back in church, then this is what you're doing. And what I want to do is take the first Sunday and address you and say, hey, listen, if this is your first Sunday back in church in a long time, there's five things that I want you to know. Now, this sermon is going to look a little bit different than all my other sermons. I'm really kind of anti-listy sermons. I don't like it when pastors make lists because this is just kind of like a behind the scenes thing a little bit. Lists tend to be lazy. It's super easy to be like, what are five things that are true about that verse? These five things. Okay, I'm just going to talk about them for a while. That's easy. To me, it's harder to make one point. And so that's what I try to do because I think it's best to ruminate on one scripture and move through it. But I thought this topic was so important and there's so many messages that I want to share with those of you who are coming back to church for the first time that I wanted to make a list of those things this morning. Now, here's the thing. A lot of the people in the room, y'all are grace people. You're church people. You're comfortable here. This isn't your first day. This is your first day this year. And you're kind of thinking like, well, this isn't for me. Wrong, pal. It is. Because if I'm saying that this is the message that we want to deliver to people who come to grace for the first time. Who is it that delivers this message? It's you. So these are the things that we want to say to folks who are coming into the fold for the first time or for the first time in a while. So if you're new, these are directly for you. If you are not new, then consider these your marching orders. These are the messages I want you to communicate with your actions and with your words, okay? So the first thing that I would love to say to you on your first visit back to church and in the midst of your intimidation is simply this. We know those feels, man. We know those feels. Now listen, some of y'all don't know what that means. You hired a young, attractive, hip senior pastor from Atlanta, okay? And I know the lingo. This is probably like eight years old. I'm so outdated in my lingo. There's people here who actually know the lingo going, no, you don't. But feels, I know those feels is the way that millennials tell you that they have empathy for you, okay? That's the word that you recognize. It's, I understand that feeling. I've been there before. I have empathy for that. I empathize with you. We've all had day ones and they're hard. It takes a lot of courage to come to church for the first time. As a matter of fact, on your bulletin, if you got one, when you came in on the front of it, there's a note from me. And the first thing I do is welcome people who are new and acknowledge that it was a difficult thing for you to do to get here. Okay. A lot of you have never seen that before because you've been here forever, and no one who goes to church consistently reads the note from the pastor on the bulletin. So that's not even for you. That's for them. We acknowledge that it is difficult. As a matter of fact, I had an interesting conversation with somebody just this last year, a guy who is a longtime partner here, been going to the church for forever. I love and respect this guy mostly because of the free golf he offers me, but I really do like him as a person. And one day we were golfing and he shared with me that he's one of the leaders of our men's Monday night Bible study. And he was telling me about the first time he went. And he said the first time he went, he was intimidated and scared. He kind of had been around church. He was a successful guy, sharp guy, smart guy. But he was going to Bible study for the first time and he was intimidated because he felt like they were going to ask him a question that he couldn't answer or that they were going to start talking about like insider stuff that he didn't know what it was. He felt like the knowledge gap was so wide that he was going to be exposed like he didn't belong there. But he knew in his heart that this was something that he needed to do. It was a step that he needed to take for his own health, and so he did it. And gradually, he was assimilated into the group. He didn't need to be near as intimidated as he was, and now he's a leader of the group. And so I want you to know that we've been there before. We understand how you feel. And to those of us who have been here for a while, understanding what it is to come to a new place for the first time, I would like for you guys to begin to run new people through a grid. Okay, so when you bring friends to church for the first time, when you have friends that bring friends to church for the first time, or when you see somebody here that maybe you don't recognize, I want you to have a grid or a question that you ask them, okay? And this question comes from the biblical imperative to be hospitable. This isn't just a thing that we do to be nice. Did you know that hospitality is actually one of the spiritual gifts? See, Christians believe, the Bible teaches that once you become a Christian, that the Holy Spirit, part of God, gives you a gift or a propensity in a certain area that you may not have had before or heightens it in you. And one of those gifts is the gift of hospitality. And you can tell who has the gift of hospitality because when you go to their house for something that's not even a big deal, they have like all the trays and all the platters set out. They're the ones that own the cupcake towers. They usually have the folded piece of paper in front of everything. Like you haven't seen cupcakes before. Like these are the chocolate ones. And you think to yourself, I'm never inviting them to my house because they're going to know what a degenerate I am, that I only have plates, right? Like those people are wonderful and I love them and they have the gift of hospitality. It's a gift. It's a thing. And if we as a church, as God instructs us to do in scripture, are going to express that gift of hospitality to folks who are with us for the first time, then I think the question that hospitality asks is, what can I do to make this person as comfortable as possible? Right? Isn't that the question? And listen, when you bring your friends or your loved ones to church and you say, I like it so far. It's pretty good. Worship's great. Sermons are all right. You should come and check it out. And you bring them, and you're hoping that there's a good experience for them, right? Don't you want everybody around you to be thinking, what can I do to make this experience as comfortable as possible? Which, by the way, I don't know if you realize this, that's our only growth strategy, all right? We don't do mailers. We don't send things out. We don't fleece the community with invite cards. We thought about over Christmas getting a bunch of, a big stack of invite cards and going to the apartment complexes right down the road and handing them out, going door to door and just giving them to people and putting a banner out in front of the church and inviting everybody in. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, that's not us. The point is not to get rear ends and seats. The point is not to fill up rooms. It's to bring people closer to Jesus. And the best chance we have at bringing people closer to Jesus is to bring in people who have relationships with you. So our entire growth strategy is to do things on Sunday morning that add value to your life and excite you so that you bring your friends to come see it too. That's it. And then we want to take good care of them once they get here. So when you bring those people, I want the filter that we view them through to be, what can I do to make this person as comfortable as possible here? And that looks like different things for different people, right? We've got to be savvy about this. Sometimes an extrovert visits and they want to meet everybody, right? Like last service, a new guy came. His name was Stuart. And I got introduced to Stuart. And Stuart chatted me up and he clearly wanted to meet everybody else. And so what Stuart wanted is for everybody to get to meet him. And that's great. But sometimes people aren't like him. Sometimes they're like me. I haven't had to visit a new church in a while, but if I did visit a new church, here's the experience I would want. I would want to go there and have one person acknowledge my existence and then leave me alone, right? Let me sit in the back. Let me take it in. I have to decide if y'all are crazy. Don't talk to me, right? And so when people come here for the first time, true story, they're coming in and they're going, are these people weird? Are these people normal? Do they make me laugh? I don't know about that video. That guy's a weirdo. Right? They're kicking the tires and sometimes they just want to sit in the back and take it in. And the thing we can do to be most hospitable is to give them their space to be introverted and assess. And that's what we need to have the wisdom to do. Sometimes it means showing them where the coffee is. Sometimes it means showing them where the restrooms are since we tuck them away in the kids' hallway by choice. And then sometimes we show them how to check in their children, right? Or we tell the kids to get out of the way so we have a room for everybody to sit down. That's the kinds of things we have to do. So I want us this year to begin to think as we see people that we don't recognize at church, what can I do to make them as comfortable as possible? That's what hospitality asks. Okay, that's the first thing. The second thing is this. This is important. If you're here, if you're here and you have resolved, I'm going to go to church, I'm going to do the thing, I'm going to take my walk more seriously, whatever your New Year's resolution is, I hope that you've made a spiritual New Year's resolution. If you haven't, I would highly encourage you to do that. You can just call it like a January 15th resolution or something like that. It would be great. But listen, if you made a resolution, particularly spiritually, I just want you to hear me say this, okay? You're going to mess up, and that's okay. You're going to spit the bit, man. You're going to blow it, and that's all right. If you made a New Year's resolution to come to church more often, three Sundays, four Sundays a month, whatever it is, you're going to do something on a Saturday that makes you feel like maybe I shouldn't go to church on Sunday. It's going to happen. You're going to wake up late. You're going to have a reason to not prioritize it. You're going to miss a couple of weeks in a row, and then you're going to feel like, man, I fell off the wagon. That's going to happen. If you made a New Year's resolution to watch your mouth, like, you're going to cuss in traffic. Like, eventually, that's going to happen. Try not to flip anybody off when it does. Make sure your windows are up. Like, it'll happen. We are going to mess up our New Year's resolutions. Like, we're going to fail. And that's okay because I can make a long list for you of people in the Bible who were heroes of the faith but failed miserably. Moses is a hero of the faith. He led the people out of Egypt. He's the dude that carried the Ten Commandments down the hill. He's a big deal. He messed up so badly late in life that God didn't even allow him to enter into the promised land that he led God's people to. Abraham, the man to whom we trace all of our spiritual lineage, he committed a sin so bad when he slept with another woman that was not his wife and had a child that we still feel the ramifications of that sin today. David, the greatest king Israel ever had, the one from whom Jesus came, the throne that Jesus will sit on, messed up so bad that he became a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer and God took his child as a result of his sin. Samson messed up so bad that many theologians don't even know if he ever even really knew the Lord. Peter in the New Testament, the leader of the disciples, messed up so badly that he denied even knowing Jesus three times in one night. If they messed up, you will too. And so will I. But here's the thing I want you to know. Spiritual progress is brought about by perseverance, not perfection. You hear me? Spiritual progress, spiritual success is not brought about by perfection. It's brought about by perseverance. The difference between spiritually healthy people and spiritually distant people is not some sort of moral fiber where one exceeds the other. It's simply perseverance. It's the willingness to, when I mess up, to get myself to stand back up, to dust myself off, and make the next decision of faith that I said I was going to make. It's to get up, refuse to listen to the voices in your head that tell you, here you go again, you've messed it up again. It's a refusal to listen to those and to get back on the horse and to make the next decision of faith in front of you. This is such a biblical idea. Perseverance is so important in the Christian life that many of the New Testament authors wrote about it. Paul wrote two-thirds in the New Testament. He was one of the most influential Christians to ever live. And over and over and over again in his letters that he wrote to the churches that we now read that make up our Bible, he encourages perseverance. He says to run the race, run to win the race. He says at the end of his life, he says, I have fought the good fight. I have kept the faith. I have finished the race. And he says that as an example for us, he says that we should be poured out like a drink offering, okay? He encourages us to persevere in our faith. James, the brother of Jesus, holds perseverance so high in his economy that he says that we should consider suffering pure joy because it rots within us perseverance. It brings about within us perseverance and the ability to stick to things and to be steadfast. Peter, the leader of the disciples, values it so highly that in one of my favorite passages in the first chapter of 2 Peter, he makes a list of the attributes that Christians should seek out in their life. And in the middle of that list, he puts perseverance there. And it's a building list. And what Peter says is, perseverance is so important that you cannot experience brotherly kindness or godliness or love until you learn perseverance. It's a building block to the rest of the faith. Perseverance is the key to progress in spiritual health, not perfection. If you allow yourself to be discouraged and quit the first time you mess up, it's going to be really hard to see any progress. But if you will acknowledge that this happens to everybody, even heroes in the Bible, and you give yourself the grace to get back up and take the next step of faith in your life, regardless of what you did yesterday, that's perseverance. And that will bring about a spiritual progress. So you're going to mess up, and that's all right, as long as you get back up. Number three, the third thing I want you to know on your visit back to church, we love your questions. We love your questions. They're great. And I say that because we get intimidated about asking questions, right? We get in our own head. We don't want to ask questions. Questions show vulnerability and they admit that I don't know something and that you might be better than me at it and I don't want to feel dumb. So we don't ask questions and we just continue being dumb, right? That's what we do. I was at the gym and I'm working out. I'm doing, I think I was doing some tricep thing. And there's a dude like there, he's just a couple of feet away from me and he is just a bear of a man. He's just, he's been working out for 12 hours a day for the past 10 years of his life. Like he's just, he's just huge and intimidating. And he's got his, he's got his hat on backwards and he's got his, he's got his earphones on and the whole, the whole deal. And he's just going and he's like, he's lifting like three of me as he does the thing that he's doing. And I, but he was doing an exercise that I did not recognize. Like I've never seen this before. I don't know what that is. And my curiosity got the best of my good sense, as it often does. And so I decided I'm going to ask him what he's doing. And so I go to him, and I'm like, excuse me, sir. You know, scrawny white guy, excuse me, sir. And he pulls his headphones on, and he looks at me and goes, what? And I'm like, oh, I wanted to be like, my bad, nothing. I'll talk to you later. And I said, you want me to spot you? No, I said, I said, dude, I don't mean to be weird, but I've never seen anybody do that exercise before. And I'm just curious, like, what muscle is that working? And he kind of laughed and he pulled his headphones off and he goes, here, man, let me show you. And it was, he said, it's this, like, you got to do this. It's working. I don't know what that's called. The lat, we'll call it. I don't know what it is. And he says, do this, you know? And he kind of like, he showed me, he's like, can you feel it back there? I'm like, yeah. And like, we like joked around, we exchanged names. We grabbed coffee later and I was just messing around about that. But like, we were kind of buddies. And like, now I see him. I'm like, hey man, how you doing? And we'll do the little fist pound every now and again. I'll ask him a question or whatever. But like, that question broke down that wall. And I didn't know. And I would have never known. But I asked the question. And if you're new to the faith, you should ask your questions. If you're old to the faith, you should ask your questions. Do you know that before I was a senior pastor, if you can't already tell, I worked with youth for a long time. And I got to sit in a bunch of rooms with students, and I still love hanging out with students. And one of the big reasons I love hanging out with students is they haven't developed the fear that you have about asking questions. So they'll ask whatever they want. But now when I do adult Bible studies, sometimes people lean forward and they ask me questions about scripture and what it says and yada, yada, yada. Can I tell you that adults ask the same questions that students do? They don't get any better or smarter. The only difference is you sat on yours for 30 years and they just had the guts to go ahead and ask it. I was in a men's Bible study. I do a men's Bible study on Wednesday mornings at 6 o'clock. That keeps out the riffraff. People don't come kick the tires at 6 a.m. You've got to want it. Everybody's welcome. You've just got to be there on time. I'll lock the door and wave at you. So they come in. They come in, they sit down, and we're going to the book of John. And in the book of John, there's two Johns. There's John the Baptist and the Apostle John. And one of them says, hey, there's some Johns in the Bible. Are they the same or is that two different dudes? And that's a hard question to ask because if you've been around church for any time at all, you feel like you should know that question, right? Except like three or four other dudes in the circle, their eyebrows go up and they're like, yo, like what's the answer to this? Because they didn't know either. But because that one guy had the guts to ask a perfectly reasonable question, why in the world would you be expected to know that there's two Johns in the book of John if you haven't spent your life looking at it? Why in the world would you be expected to know that? Because he had the guts to ask the question, everybody got to learn, right? And listen, I don't want you to feel remotely intimidated about not knowing anything about the Bible. If you don't, that's great. If I tell you one Sunday, hey guys, listen, we're going to be in the book of Mark. You can go ahead and turn there if you want to. If you don't know where that is, please lean over to your neighbor and go, where's Mark? That's fine. Why in the world would you be expected to know that Mark is the second book in the New Testament if you haven't been around church in a long time? I try my best to not leave anybody behind, to not assume any knowledge on your behalf, to bring everybody up to speed. But sometimes I mess up. And when I do, man, you should have the courage to ask questions. In Bible studies, ask questions. Long-time church people, ask your questions. Don't be scared of them. They are good, and they are positive, and they follow this biblical model that I love of the Ethiopian eunuch. There's a guy in Acts. He's an Ethiopian governmental official, essentially, and he's on a chariot, and this guy, Philip, sees him reading from the book of Isaiah, and he walks up to him, and he says, hey, that's Isaiah. Do you understand what you're reading? And the eunuch responds in such an incredibly bold way. He says, how can I unless someone explains it to me? Isn't that refreshing honesty? Someone comes up to us, hey, you're reading Isaiah. You understand what that means? Yeah, you want some tips? And in our head, we're like, I don't know anything. Please don't ask me any questions. This doesn't make any sense. Have the boldness to be like that guy from Ethiopia and say, how can I know this unless someone explains it to me? Ask your questions. The fourth thing that I want you to know is that we are rooting for you. We're rooting for you. We believe in you. There is this thing in our culture, and I'm sure it's in all cultures. Whenever you start a new initiative, everybody around you doubts you, right? Like when I go into the gym on day one, I've had a lot of day ones, I feel the same way every time, that everybody's looking at me in their matching clothes and in their good shape, and they're looking at me going, yeah, it'll be nice seeing you in January because because you ain't making it to February, pal. And then I can have my treadmill back, and you'll be out of the way, right? Then we can keep the weights like where they need to go instead of on your level, you know? People tend to look at you with skepticism, and they don't believe in you. Spouses are the best at this, right? Like, if I tell Jen, like, I'm going to start some new initiative in my life, like, hey, I think I'm going to journal. He's like, all right. Let me know how that goes for you, buddy. You know? Don't they, like our people who know us the best are sometimes the worst at this. I think I'm going to pray 30 minutes every day. Good luck. Why do we do that to one another? So I want you to know that that attitude doesn't make it into here. If you're here and you've been wandering from God for a long time, but you've decided, you know what, I want to get serious about my faith. I believe that Jesus worked in your heart to bring you here. I believe that Jesus has been slowly working on your heart and drawing you near to him for months and years leading you into this day. And I don't believe it's on accident. And I don't for a second doubt the sincerity of the decision that brought you in here. So I want you to know that we believe in you. If you made a spiritual resolution this year, you've been coming to church for a long time, but you've resolved to do this. I want you to know that I believe in you. I don't look at you with a bit of skepticism. We don't look at you with a bit of skepticism. We only look at you with hope. Man, it would thrill my soul to know and to hear the story years from now of somebody who wandered in here in January of 2019 and had known God or had been around church, but for some reason, when I came here this month, something clicked and I just felt God's presence like I never had before. And my life has been different ever since. I would love to know that story. I would love for someone right here, in here right now, who is far from God to become one of our elders or one of our leaders in the children's ministry or one of our volunteers or small group leaders one day. I believe that story is possible and I believe that you are here on purpose. And so there is no doubt here. We believe in you. This is such an important idea that in the middle of the most theological, theologically technical book in the New Testament, Paul, the author of Romans, stops in chapter 14 and he makes it about encouraging more mature believers, encouraging those who are less experienced. He says this over and over in his writings. He says that we should constantly in Thessalonians, that we should build one another up. The author of Hebrews says that we should outdo one another in kindness and that we should spur one another on to good works. And Paul in chapter 14 of Romans devotes an entire chapter where he's talking to the more experienced believer, and he says over and over and over again, don't pass judgment. Don't judge them. Encourage them. Don't do anything that would cause them to stumble. Don't do anything that would cause them not to grow. Do everything you can to encourage other people as they seek to grow closer to God. And so that's what we do here. We believe in you. And I'm going to ask the grace people, if you're a partner, you've been coming here for a while, I'm going to give you a homework assignment and just ask you to be willing to do this. Will you, every day this week when you pray, will you pray for those people who have made a decision to get back into church in 2019? Will you please just remember to do that? And let's together pray for those folks every day this week. And you guys know that if you're here for the first time in a while, like we're praying for you. And the other thing is, if you've made a spiritual resolution, I want to pray for that too. I would love for you to write that on your communication card and hand that to somebody after the service and make sure it gets to me. I want to make a list, and once a week I'm going to sit down, and I'm going to pray for all the resolutions in the church that have to do with becoming more healthy spiritually. I'm going to do that every week until you tell me to stop, because we want to encourage one another. We believe in each other here. And if you say you're serious about this, then we believe you. The last thing I want you to know this morning, the fifth thing that I would love to be able to say to everybody is this. God is the only reason that any of us are here. God is the only reason that any of us are here. And here's what I mean. Again, at the gym, when I see other people who are really healthy and really fit, honestly, I admire that. I admire that because I know what goes into that. Having failed so many times, I understand the discipline it takes to be in shape and to be healthy because it's not just the time you spend at the gym. It's what you eat and how you sleep. And it's a whole lifestyle thing. And so I look at people who are in shape and honestly, I admire them and I admire them for their character. I admire them for their discipline, for their stick-to-itiveness. When people are disciplined in their profession, when they're successful in their profession, I admire that. I look at the way that they work hard. They wake up before everybody else. They work harder than everybody else. And they put in time when nobody else is putting in time. And I admire that. And in our culture, we have a culture of success that admires success. And we all tend to believe that that success was brought about by personal disciplines that accelerated you beyond your peers, right? And so what do we do when we come into church? We apply the same metric. We come into church and we see somebody who looks spiritually healthy to us, who sets a good example, who may be a leader somewhere or seems godly, or we like the way they interact with people, we like the way that they interact with their family or whatever it is, and we admire them spiritually. And what we tend to do is attribute to them some sort of discipline that won that for them, and then we try to duplicate that discipline in our own lives. And when we attribute discipline to other people in different arenas outside of church, I think that that is a good and fair thing to do. But when you attribute discipline to people inside of church, I don't think that that's right at all, and here's why. If you were to go to the person that you admire spiritually, and you to learn more about them and you were to somehow tell them, man, I wish I could have your discipline. I wish I could grow like you. I wish I was as self-disciplined as you are. They would tell you, listen, if there is anything in me that you admire, it has nothing to do with my discipline. I promise you that. It has everything to do with a God that loves me enough to continue to stick with me even when I don't stick with him. It has everything to do with a God working in my heart even when I don't know he's working. Being spiritually healthy has nothing to do with our white-knuckle discipline. And if that's what you are relying on this year to bring you spiritual health and closer to Jesus, let me tell you something, you're going to fail and that's not all right. Because this is the one arena where it's not about you and it's not about your discipline. It's about getting out of the way and accepting the free love that the Father offers so graciously. The author of Hebrews sums this up well in Hebrews chapter 12, some of my favorite verses in the Bible. Hebrews 12, 1 says, That's what they tell us to do. And that's a great verse. It's an inspirational verse. But the problem with that verse is it makes it seem like the impetus is on us to run it well, right? Because the direction is throw off the sin and get everything out of your life that does not help you run the race, that doesn't help you live the life that God has for you to live. Get rid of everything in your life that doesn't make you spiritually healthy so that you can run the race that you need to run. That's the implication of that verse until you get to the second verse, which says, How do we run the race that we're supposed to run? How do we live the life that we're supposed to live? How do we achieve spiritual health in 2019? Not by focusing on the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. Not by focusing on the behaviors that we want to be done with, but by focusing on Christ and falling more in love with Him and allowing Him to work more in our hearts as He draws us near to Him. Can I just tell you that if you're seeking spiritual health this year and you're doing it by identifying some behaviors in your life that aren't good, that shouldn't be there, that we would probably call sin, and you look at this group of things and you go, I'm not going to do these things anymore, and your focus is on the behaviors and not on Jesus, can I tell you that you're going to fail? Because spiritual health is not wrought by white-knuckle discipline. No one has ever in the history of mankind besides Jesus himself gotten themselves closer to God by focusing on their behaviors and trying to be perfect. The only spiritual health anybody in this church or any other church has is as a result of figuring out that we need to focus on God. We focus on God. There's this great verse in Psalms that says, delight yourselves in the laws of the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. And how it works is the more I focus on Jesus, the more I follow the advice of the author of Hebrews and fix my eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of my faith, the more my heart begins to beat in sync with his, the more I want the things that he wants, the, I want you to know that that was not won by their discipline and it being better than yours. It was won by them realizing the only thing that matters is how I relate to God. John 15, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. All that matters is following Jesus, is allowing him to draw me closer to him. Don't focus on the behaviors this year. Focus on what you can do to draw yourself closer to the Father and allow that drawing to happen to you. Pray more, read the Bible more, come to church more, be around other believers more, but let Jesus draw yourself into him. Fix your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. There's actually one more thing that I would love to tell people on their first visit at church, but it's such a big deal that I'm going to devote a whole Sunday to it next week, and that's you can't do this alone. There is no such thing as a John Wayne Christian. You cannot do this alone. It was designed to be done around other people. So next week, that's what we're going to come back and we're going to talk about. The weeks following, we're going to talk about spiritual health as a lifestyle, as a lifestyle, and then we're going to talk about how long it takes to get spiritually healthy and the stick-to-itiveness that it requires. So I hope that you'll join us for the rest of those in this series as I continue to share with you my thoughts from the gym. I'm really looking forward to this January. I hope you are too. All right, I'm going to pray, and then Steve and the band are going to come up, and they're going to close us out. Father, thank you so much for today. Thank you for this year. Thank you for this Sunday. God, I thank you for the way that I believe you are drawing everybody in here closer to you in just the subtle and gentle way that you do it. Lord, let us know that we are loved by you, that we are cherished by you, that we are pursued by you. I lift up all those here who have resolved this year to do something that they believe will draw them closer to you. Give them the courage to get up when they fail. Give them the faith to lean on you when they don't find strength. And God, let 2019 be a year of marked spiritual health and change for us. Lord, we love you. We pray these things in your son's name. Amen.