Psalms

This is the third week of our series called Best Practices. The idea is that I believe that there are some habits in life that we can form that if we do, they're the most important possible habits we can have. I believe that these habits, these practices, will make us better at every aspect of our lives. They'll make us better wives and mothers and husbands and fathers. They'll make us better friends, better children, better family members, better employees and employers. And more importantly, they will bring us alive in our walk with God and our knowledge of God and be a part of the answered prayer that Paul prays over us, that we would know God with the depth of all the saints, that there are some practices, some keystone habits that we can develop in our life that if we do, we will become closer to who God created us to be. And so we're taking four weeks and looking at those habits that make us better in every aspect of life. The first week we looked at reading the Bible. I hope that you guys took the challenge from that. I kind of challenge you all to make a goal and make a plan and then let somebody in on that plan for some accountability. So I hope that you've been reading the Bible maybe a little bit more than you're used to and that that's been a blessing for you. Last week, Steve did a phenomenal job talking about worship. If you missed that, which is the summertime and I get it. So if you missed that last week, they're online. You can watch them on video. You can listen on our podcast and catch up with that one. This week, I want us to look at the practice of prayer. And prayer is a huge topic. It's incredibly broad. At the last church I was at, we did a six-part series all on prayer, and it still wasn't adequate to cover everything that the Bible had to say. So this morning, I know that I get to touch on prayer, but I don't get to talk about everything around prayer. Because if you go through the Bible, what you find is that the Bible is replete with verses on prayer. We're told in the Old Testament if we're brokenhearted that we can run to him. That's what David tells us in Psalms. We're told that we should be marked, be characterized by prayer. James says the prayer of the righteous person is powerful and availeth much, does much doing. Jesus tells us that if we're tempted, he tells us in Matthew, if you're tempted, if anyone is tempted, pray. So there's this aspect of prayer that helps us stave off temptation. We're told in Philippians that we should be anxious for nothing, but pray over everything. And that if we do this, that somehow God's peace comes into our life and guards us if we will be people who pray. In Colossians, Paul tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. In Romans, he tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. But there's this peculiar verse. It's not peculiar. It's just kind of famous. It's probably a better word. In 1 Thessalonians 5, verse 17, where Paul is finishing up his letter to the church in Thessalonica, and he's telling them, hey, here's the last things I want you to do. And in the middle of this list of advice, he tells them this really difficult command, pray without ceasing. He says, I want you to do a couple of things. I want you to bless one another. I want you to help one another. I want you to honor God. And I want you to pray without ceasing. And I don't know about you, but I read that verse and I'm like, I don't even know how to do that. I don't know how many in this room would raise their hand and say, you know what? I have been obedient to that command in my life for X amount of weeks, X amount of years, X amount of months. That's a super challenging verse. And so as I thought about the best place to invest our Sunday morning on prayer, I thought it might be best to tackle this verse. Because we can talk about all the things around prayer, postures in praying, different types of prayer. We can go through Psalms and see the different types of prayer that David offers. We could look at the correct format of prayer that Jesus does when he teaches the disciples how to pray. We'll talk about it more later, but he gives a pattern of prayer in the Lord's prayer that we're supposed to follow. We could talk about that. We could talk about this idea of listening prayer. Spurgeon, one of the most influential pastors to ever live, this guy from England in the 1800s when he was 19 years old, he had a multi-thousand person congregation, just an amazing guy. He wrote to his students that if you only pray, and if when you pray, all you do is talk and you don't listen to God, then you are like somebody who dips their toes in the Atlantic and claims to have experienced the whole of the ocean. So there's this whole idea of listening prayer where we clue into God, which I'm being honest, sounds a lot lot like meditation, the Christian version of that. And we could talk about that, and I think there'd be some ground to gain. But where I've landed is, until we get this command down, the command in Colossians to be devoted to prayer, the command in Romans to pray continually, the command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing, until we become people who are characterized by prayer, then all the different types of prayer and all the different information around prayer really is not as impactful to us. I think the first thing we need to do is become people who are characterized by prayer. And if you think about the biblical heroes that you know, they're characterized by prayer. Moses prayed all the time. David prayed constantly. Hannah, the mother of Samuel, is famous because of her prayer, because she was praying so fervently that Eli, the high priest, thought that she was drunk. She was just praying to God. There's a great prayer from Moses' mother. There's all these great prayers through Scripture. All the biblical heroes that we know are people who are characterized by prayer. And I would bet that the people that you look up to spiritually are people, whether you know it or not, who are characterized by prayer and devoted to prayer. As I think about this idea to pray without ceasing and make that kind of the first goal of our prayer life is to be a people who are devoted to prayer, Spurgeon again said that we cannot be constantly in the act of prayer, but we can be constantly in the spirit of prayer. And I believe that that goal is best illustrated through a super cheesy made-up story that I heard years ago. I heard this story back in high school. It is not true. Somebody made it up, but it makes a good point. There was a guy who was super spiritual, really close to God. Whenever he prayed in public, it was excellent, excellent prayers. People were really impressed with him. For the sake of the story, we're going to call him Nate. So there's Nate, the super spiritual guy. I'm talking about Nate Murray there in the back, not me. Super spiritual guy, and his prayers were incredible. And one day his friend said, I want to hear his nighttime prayers. Like, I want to hear what he prays for at night, at the end of the day. Because that's like the good prayer. Like, you pray in the morning, you pray for the day, then at night you pray again. I want to hear what Nate prays at the end of the day. And so again, this is made up, it's silly, they snuck into his room and they're hiding out somewhere. I don't know if it's in the closet or under the bed, wherever you want. They're hiding out, they're listening to Nate. Nate comes in at the end of the day and they're like, oh, here we go, dude's going to pray, this is going to be some good stuff. They're super excited to hear what Nate says to God at the end of his day. They expect him to get down on his knees next to the bed and double over like you're supposed to. I mean, that's what good believers do. You get on your knees next to the bed. That's part of the deal. And they're waiting for him to do that, and he doesn't do that, and he just gets into bed. And they're like, oh, maybe Nate's having an off night. And as he climbs into bed, he pulls the covers up, and he lays back, and he simply says, good night, God. I'll talk to you tomorrow. That's what it is to pray without ceasing. He didn't have a big, long prayer at the end of the day because he had been in the spirit of prayer communicating with God throughout the day. And so when he got to the end of the day, he had run out of words. He had said everything he needed to say. And so like you say to a good friend or to your spouse when you're roommates or whatever, is you say, hey, good night. Talk to you in the morning. And that's it. That, to me, is a good picture of what it is to be in the spirit of prayer and be praying without ceasing. But just like the Bible, when we talked about in the first week of best practices, we hear this, but we don't do it all the time. Christians, a lot of us are not good at praying. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hands, but man, how hard is it to pray sometimes? You sit down, you're like, I'm going to do the thing, I'm going to pray, and you go for like two minutes. You're like, God, I don't know what else to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out, and your kid starts making noise, and you run upstairs, and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out. Your kid starts making noise and you run upstairs and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to prayer. But I think that maybe there's a motivation to go into prayer that we haven't considered that if we do, it would make it a lot easier to approach prayer. Because again, don't raise your hand, but how many here have decided at some point in your life, I want to be better at prayer, I want to pray more regularly, so I'm going to white knuckle this thing and set my alarm and I'm going to get up early and I'm going to pray? How'd that go? So as we think about how can we be obedient to the seemingly impossible command to pray without ceasing, how can we be more like Nate? I now regret using that name. I think it's important to answer this question, and I want you to answer it personally. When do you pray? Like right now in your life, as you go throughout your week, when do you pray? What is it that drives you to prayer? Maybe you're in a habit of praying every morning. Maybe it's specific things that take you to prayer. I mean, a lot of us pray for the meal, right? We know that drill. We're Christians, and so you go out to eat, and you kind of look around the table, and who's the most spiritual one here that's going to say, like, hey, I'll pray. Like, who's going to be the big Christian? And then if you got to eat with me, you have to go like, Nate, you have to pray. You're clearly, you're the pastor. That seems to be the gig. And so like you pray, right? And here's what I would say about meal prayers. If you mean it, pray. If you don't, eat. Okay. It doesn't matter. If you mean it, pray. If you don't mean the prayer, don't pray the prayer, ever. We need to be sincere with prayer. One of the things I try to do about prayer is not pray when we don't mean it on stage. We don't pray as just a way to get people up here awkwardly. It would have been really great to have Jordan pray at the end of worship so that I could hobble up here without all of you guys staring at me, but it wouldn't have been an honest and an earnest prayer. So pray when you mean it. And when you don't mean it, don't pray. But we pray when we have meals. We know that. And some of us are good about having time set aside to pray. But what is it that makes you pray the most? What is it that drives you to prayer most earnestly? Isn't it something that happens in your life that's too big for you? Doesn't anxiety drive you to prayer? When you're so worried about something, when you don't know what's going to happen, isn't that when you run and you go, this is too big for me, and you appeal to the almighty creator God? Isn't that when you appeal to the supernatural is when you realize in life this is too big for me. When the decision is too big and you don't know what to do. Do I take the promotion or do I not? Do we move to the city or do we not? Do we change our kid's school or do we not? When the decision is so big that we don't know what to do, we pray. Because in that prayer is an admission that God is bigger than us, that he's supernatural and we are natural, that he is God and that we are not, that he's a creator and that we're the created and that we need his wisdom for this. When we're walking through the difficult times and our spirits are low, we pray. When the diagnosis comes in, what do we do? We run to God and we pray. When we don't know where our kid is, or we don't know about the decisions that they're making, or we're so worried that they're going to run off the rails, what do we do? We pray. I was just at a wedding last weekend in Dothan, Alabama. And it was a really beautiful experience because it was Jen's cousin. Jen's my wife, not just some lady I talk about. It was Jen's cousin getting married. And she's older. She's like 30? She's 35? Oh, man, she's up there like me. So she's 35 and for years she was dating a guy that wasn't good for her. Just wasn't good for her. I've met the guy. He's a good guy. He's got a sweet heart. He just had stuff going on that made him not husband material just yet. And there was nothing, her dad's name is Edwin. There's nothing that Edwin could do. Edwin and Mary, there was nothing they could do. You guys who have kids who are adults, you know you can't tell them who to date. You can't tell them who to see. That's not going to work out. You just have to hope that they end up with the right people. And so they didn't know what to do. They had no other option, and so they made a space in their home, and every day, Edwin went to the space in his home, getting choked up thinking about it, and got on his knees and prayed for his daughter, that she wouldn't marry this guy, and lo and behold, after years of doing that, she broke the cycle with him, and she met the right guy, a good dude who loves the Lord, who's got a good head on his shoulders. And they got married on Saturday. And as they got married, I looked over at Uncle Edwin down the row, and he has tears streaming down his face because that's an answer to prayer, because the prayers of the righteous are powerful and effective. And what happened to Edwin is he had no other options. He was simply reduced to prayer. And what I want you to see this morning is when we are reduced to prayer, we pray. We pray when we are reduced to prayer. If you think about when I asked you that question, when in your life do you pray? The answer, whether you know it or not, is I pray when I'm reduced to prayer. When I have no other options, when I've exercised everything else to try to exert my control over it, when I've exercised every other avenues to fix it myself, and I realize that I am helpless, then I am reduced where the only thing I have is prayer, and so we cling to prayer, and we appeal to the supernatural God that we know. After we had a miscarriage and we got pregnant again, I wanted desperately to be able to do something to keep this baby safe. There was nothing I could do. I was reduced to prayer. So I prayed. Guys, we pray when we are reduced to prayer. When there's something happening in our life that is so big and so confusing and so difficult that makes us feel so helpless that we get on our knees and we appeal to our God. God, you've got to help me here. And if that's true, if that's true that we pray when we're reduced to prayer, then the opposite is true too. And when I say this, this is going to step on some toes. And I'm sorry about that. But let me just tell you this. Okay, this is not an us or me and you situation. This is not an us and them situation. This isn't staff and elders and then lowly congregation situation. This is a we situation. If this steps on your toes, I promise you it stepped on mine too. My toes hurt literally and figuratively worse than yours. I'm in this with you, okay? So when I say this, I'm not accusing you of anything that I am not guilty of. We are just all a bundle of insecurities and mechanisms trying to go through life, figuring out how to follow God together, okay? All of us. But if it's true that when we pray, we pray because we're reduced to prayer, then it's also true that when we don't pray, we assert our independence, right? When we don't pray, we are asserting our independence. When there's something coming up in life and we don't pray about it, we don't go to God about it, what we're saying implicitly is, I'm good, I don't need you for this one, I got it, right? And I know that's harsh, and I know that's not what you intend when you don't pray, but tell me that's not what we're saying when we don't pray. When I don't pray about a sermon, God, what would you have me do this week? What I'm saying implicitly is, I'm good. This is community. I've done a community sermon twice a year for the past 10 years of my life. I got it, God, I'm fine. When we make a decision at work, when we approach the sales meeting and we haven't prayed over it, what are we telling God? I got this sale, God, don't worry about it. We go into a meeting and we have a blanket of that prayer, blanket of that meeting and prayer. What are we telling God? I got this meeting, God, I'm good. We make decisions with our kids when we interact with our spouses, when we try to build them up, when we make decisions about church or about which small group to join. When we make these day-to-day decisions and we don't pray to God about these decisions, we make them on our own. What are we saying? We're saying, God, I'm good. I got this. And I'm in there too. There's a pastor in Washington, D.C. named Mark Batterson, and he said, you should never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. I don't know about you, but in my life, I've initiated a lot of things that were not saturated in prayer. And when we do that, we claim our independence, don't we? We flex our little independent muscles. We say, God, I'm good. I don't need you for this. And we figure it out on our own. And every day we do that is one more day we convince ourselves that we are adequate for the things that God has called us to in life. It's one more day when we make the argument implicitly by not praying to God that I am enough for today and that I don't need you. Thank you. Every day we go, we get a little bit more independent. We build our sense of self a little bit more. We reduce our dependency and our reliance on God and we build up our independence on and our dependence on ourselves. And then we go through life like this, praying maybe just for meals, praying maybe just for things here and there, praying when we go to Bible study and somebody goes, hey, will you pray? And you're like, okay, I guess I will. But we know in our own life we haven't prayed like that in a while. And every day we do that, we build our independence a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more until something happens and outside forces in life exert themselves on us and act on us to reduce us to a state of prayer. And then we pray again. And then we pray and we pray and we pray. And God in his goodness and his glory, he fixes it. And then what do we start to do? We exercise our independence muscles again and we say, God, thank you for your help over there. I'm good now. If it's true that we pray when we feel reduced to prayer, then it has to be true that we don't pray when we feel adequate for the day's task. Now, there is another reason why some of us don't pray sometimes. And I don't have time to talk about it at length this morning, but it is true and it should be mentioned. Sometimes we don't pray and it's not because we think we are adequate for the task. It's because our faith is a little broken and a little shattered and we don't think God is adequate for the task. And so we don't pray because we're just afraid that it's going to further hurt our faith. And I don't have a lot to say about that this morning, except if that's you, please don't carry that by yourself. If the reason you have not prayed as much as you normally do lately is because you kind of doubt God's ability to answer that prayer, you think he might be inadequate to it, talk to somebody about that. Come talk to me. Talk to one of our elders. Talk to someone that you respect spiritually. Don't carry that by yourself. So I think that that's true. But I think that for most of us, as we walk through our Christian life, if we find ourselves in a season where we are not praying without ceasing, we're not even praying regularly, much less without ceasing, that the reason that is, is because we feel adequate for the task. And if we want to break this cycle of meaning to pray more, but not praying as much as we should, then I think we have to initiate a practice. And we need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. We need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. Every prayer we pray, no matter how flippant, even if it's just a, dear God, thank you for this food, we're so excited for this lunch, amen, that admits some sort of dependence on some level that God, it's because of you and your gifts and your goodness that I get to eat this delicious, this week I had a pot roast and Cajun macaroni and cheese sandwich. I'm in prime condition to recover from my injuries. And when we pray for that, we say, God, it's your goodness that I get to enjoy this. Even in part, every prayer, every prayer admits dependence. Every time we throw anything to God, whether we do it for 45 minutes or for 10 seconds, is a way to go, God, I'm not big enough for this. I need you. That's why I pray every Sunday before I preach. It's honestly not as much to ask God for help as it is to remind me that I need it. I'm not big enough for this. I need you. Every prayer that we pray, no matter how small or how big, admits dependence. And so if we want to make prayer a daily habit, if we want to finally figure out how to persist in prayer and be devoted to prayer and be obedient to all those verses we talked about at the onset, if we want our prayers to be powerful and effective, then I think what we need to do is practice a daily reduction to prayer. I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. I don't think that we need to practice praying every day. I do, but I think it'll come after this. I think we sometimes put the cart before the horse and we skip it. And we go to God with all of our independence and all of our capabilities and we go, well, I know that I should pray to be a good Christian, so let me try to pray. And what we need to do instead is the very first thing we need to do is daily reduce ourself to the need to pray. Do you know that this is actually how Jesus prays? When the disciples went to him and they said, hey, can you teach us how to pray? You pray differently than us. Can you teach us to pray? The very first thing he does, he gives us a pattern, doesn't he? Gives us lines to recite. He gives us a pattern to follow. The very first words out of his mouth, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. God, you are big. We call this adoration. God, you are awesome. God, you are wonderful. God, you are the creator. God, you are holy. You are different. May your will persist here as it does in heaven. May your will be done. We start every prayer. God, you are big and I am small. God, I need you and I am insufficient. God, will your will be done, not my will be done. And it puts us in this place where we are reduced to prayer. So I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. Daily admitting I am insufficient for my tasks today. Now, if you're a thinking person, that exercise of daily reducing yourself to prayer will force you to ask the question, what am I inadequate for? If you're a thinking person at all, you'll want to know, for what am I inadequate? What do I need to get done that I can't handle? What do I need to appeal to God for? And in this exercise of thinking through, for what am I inadequate, we will arrive at these great callings that we have on our life that we sometimes forget. If you're a husband or a wife, do you know that your role is far more than to simply love your spouse? According to Scripture, my understanding is that my goal, my job with Jen, is to serve her like Christ loved the church, to lay my life down for her, and to do everything I can to be a tool in the hands of God to make her as beautiful and as spiritually vibrant as is possible, to help her become the best version of herself. I'm not adequate to that task. Her job is to be a tool in the hands of God that makes me into the most respectable, lovely, godly, spiritually healthy version of myself possible. Nobody is adequate for that task. How can she do that without prayer? Our job is to raise Lily, and not just to raise her so that she goes to a good school and has a nice life, but to raise her, to release her into the wild with as little baggage to undo with a therapist as possible, who loves God, who knows him, and knows him more intimately than Jen and I ever did. That's our job. We're not adequate to that task. You're called to be pastors in your workplace. We are all a member. If you're a Christian, you're a member of the royal priesthood. You are called to be pastors in your workplace. Jesus tells you in the Sermon on the Mount that other people, if you're a Christian, other people should see your good works and so glorify your Father who is in heaven without you ever talking to them about who you believe in. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians that we are led in procession by Jesus and that through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You are inadequate to that task. You have no choice but to rely on God to help you accomplish those things in that day. When someone asks you a difficult question and you realize they've opened the door for a spiritual conversation, you're inadequate for that conversation. You need the Spirit. You need to say, God, help me here. Give me ears to hear and give me wisdom to speak. When we practice a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer and admit our inadequacies before God, what he will do is bring to light all the wonderful, beautiful, grand things that his word calls us to, to live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. And in the face of those, we'll have no choice but to say, I can't do that myself. And that will drive us to prayer, to God. And in doing that, in a constant reduction of ourselves, we have reminders of the tasks to which we are called. In the face of those, we feel inadequate. We run to God in prayer. And because of our mindset and our posture before the Lord every day, by to Scripture? Be devoted to prayer? Be a person who is characterized by prayer? You want to be obedient to that seemingly impossible command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. I think it begins with a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer. Daily admitting our inadequacies and admitting our need for God so that we might accomplish just in that day what he wants us to accomplish in that day and that that knowledge will drive us to a prayer with him all the time. I know it's a lofty goal. Pastors say stuff like this a lot. But I really do want grace to be a place that's devoted to prayer, that's characterized by prayer. I know we have some people here who all you have to do in this sermon is nod your head because you're already doing this stuff. You're some of our warriors and you pray all the time. We need more of those. We need people praying for our families. We need people praying for the children's ministry. We need people who come and sit in this space and touch seats and pray for the people who sit there. We need to be a church that prays. And I think the key to getting into that habit is daily confessing our need to do that, is daily reducing ourselves to prayer. And I hope that we will. If that's not part of your life right now, then I would encourage you, make it a part of your life this week. This week, daily reduce yourself to prayer. This week, every day, just get up and say, God, I need you today, and tell them the things you need them for. And let me also tell you this, if praying isn't part of your normal habit, just pray until you're done praying. If you pray for a minute, nobody cares. Pray for a minute. Pray for 60 minutes, great, good for you. Pray for 60 minutes. Pray until you're done praying and then go and do what God's called you to do that day. But I would challenge you this week, for one week, if it's not a part of your regular habit, to daily this week reduce yourself to prayer. Now, I'd like to invite you all to pray with me, and the band will come up, and we'll have a song, and then we've got a special thing that we're going to do at the end. Father, you're good. You love us. You're merciful to us. You call us back to you. Your goodness, like a fetter, binds our wandering hearts to you. Father, if there's anybody wandering, I pray that you would draw them in. God, I pray that if we are not characterized by prayer, that we would be. Lord, help us reduce ourselves to prayer. Help us not wait for life to do that for us. Show us the things that you've called us to for which we are inadequate. Let us be the husbands and the fathers and the wives and the mothers and the friends and the employees and employers that you've created us to be. May we be a people and a church and individuals who are characterized by a devotion to prayer, Father. God, may you work in my own life that I might set the pace for that too. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

This is the third week of our series called Best Practices. The idea is that I believe that there are some habits in life that we can form that if we do, they're the most important possible habits we can have. I believe that these habits, these practices, will make us better at every aspect of our lives. They'll make us better wives and mothers and husbands and fathers. They'll make us better friends, better children, better family members, better employees and employers. And more importantly, they will bring us alive in our walk with God and our knowledge of God and be a part of the answered prayer that Paul prays over us, that we would know God with the depth of all the saints, that there are some practices, some keystone habits that we can develop in our life that if we do, we will become closer to who God created us to be. And so we're taking four weeks and looking at those habits that make us better in every aspect of life. The first week we looked at reading the Bible. I hope that you guys took the challenge from that. I kind of challenge you all to make a goal and make a plan and then let somebody in on that plan for some accountability. So I hope that you've been reading the Bible maybe a little bit more than you're used to and that that's been a blessing for you. Last week, Steve did a phenomenal job talking about worship. If you missed that, which is the summertime and I get it. So if you missed that last week, they're online. You can watch them on video. You can listen on our podcast and catch up with that one. This week, I want us to look at the practice of prayer. And prayer is a huge topic. It's incredibly broad. At the last church I was at, we did a six-part series all on prayer, and it still wasn't adequate to cover everything that the Bible had to say. So this morning, I know that I get to touch on prayer, but I don't get to talk about everything around prayer. Because if you go through the Bible, what you find is that the Bible is replete with verses on prayer. We're told in the Old Testament if we're brokenhearted that we can run to him. That's what David tells us in Psalms. We're told that we should be marked, be characterized by prayer. James says the prayer of the righteous person is powerful and availeth much, does much doing. Jesus tells us that if we're tempted, he tells us in Matthew, if you're tempted, if anyone is tempted, pray. So there's this aspect of prayer that helps us stave off temptation. We're told in Philippians that we should be anxious for nothing, but pray over everything. And that if we do this, that somehow God's peace comes into our life and guards us if we will be people who pray. In Colossians, Paul tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. In Romans, he tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. But there's this peculiar verse. It's not peculiar. It's just kind of famous. It's probably a better word. In 1 Thessalonians 5, verse 17, where Paul is finishing up his letter to the church in Thessalonica, and he's telling them, hey, here's the last things I want you to do. And in the middle of this list of advice, he tells them this really difficult command, pray without ceasing. He says, I want you to do a couple of things. I want you to bless one another. I want you to help one another. I want you to honor God. And I want you to pray without ceasing. And I don't know about you, but I read that verse and I'm like, I don't even know how to do that. I don't know how many in this room would raise their hand and say, you know what? I have been obedient to that command in my life for X amount of weeks, X amount of years, X amount of months. That's a super challenging verse. And so as I thought about the best place to invest our Sunday morning on prayer, I thought it might be best to tackle this verse. Because we can talk about all the things around prayer, postures in praying, different types of prayer. We can go through Psalms and see the different types of prayer that David offers. We could look at the correct format of prayer that Jesus does when he teaches the disciples how to pray. We'll talk about it more later, but he gives a pattern of prayer in the Lord's prayer that we're supposed to follow. We could talk about that. We could talk about this idea of listening prayer. Spurgeon, one of the most influential pastors to ever live, this guy from England in the 1800s when he was 19 years old, he had a multi-thousand person congregation, just an amazing guy. He wrote to his students that if you only pray, and if when you pray, all you do is talk and you don't listen to God, then you are like somebody who dips their toes in the Atlantic and claims to have experienced the whole of the ocean. So there's this whole idea of listening prayer where we clue into God, which I'm being honest, sounds a lot lot like meditation, the Christian version of that. And we could talk about that, and I think there'd be some ground to gain. But where I've landed is, until we get this command down, the command in Colossians to be devoted to prayer, the command in Romans to pray continually, the command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing, until we become people who are characterized by prayer, then all the different types of prayer and all the different information around prayer really is not as impactful to us. I think the first thing we need to do is become people who are characterized by prayer. And if you think about the biblical heroes that you know, they're characterized by prayer. Moses prayed all the time. David prayed constantly. Hannah, the mother of Samuel, is famous because of her prayer, because she was praying so fervently that Eli, the high priest, thought that she was drunk. She was just praying to God. There's a great prayer from Moses' mother. There's all these great prayers through Scripture. All the biblical heroes that we know are people who are characterized by prayer. And I would bet that the people that you look up to spiritually are people, whether you know it or not, who are characterized by prayer and devoted to prayer. As I think about this idea to pray without ceasing and make that kind of the first goal of our prayer life is to be a people who are devoted to prayer, Spurgeon again said that we cannot be constantly in the act of prayer, but we can be constantly in the spirit of prayer. And I believe that that goal is best illustrated through a super cheesy made-up story that I heard years ago. I heard this story back in high school. It is not true. Somebody made it up, but it makes a good point. There was a guy who was super spiritual, really close to God. Whenever he prayed in public, it was excellent, excellent prayers. People were really impressed with him. For the sake of the story, we're going to call him Nate. So there's Nate, the super spiritual guy. I'm talking about Nate Murray there in the back, not me. Super spiritual guy, and his prayers were incredible. And one day his friend said, I want to hear his nighttime prayers. Like, I want to hear what he prays for at night, at the end of the day. Because that's like the good prayer. Like, you pray in the morning, you pray for the day, then at night you pray again. I want to hear what Nate prays at the end of the day. And so again, this is made up, it's silly, they snuck into his room and they're hiding out somewhere. I don't know if it's in the closet or under the bed, wherever you want. They're hiding out, they're listening to Nate. Nate comes in at the end of the day and they're like, oh, here we go, dude's going to pray, this is going to be some good stuff. They're super excited to hear what Nate says to God at the end of his day. They expect him to get down on his knees next to the bed and double over like you're supposed to. I mean, that's what good believers do. You get on your knees next to the bed. That's part of the deal. And they're waiting for him to do that, and he doesn't do that, and he just gets into bed. And they're like, oh, maybe Nate's having an off night. And as he climbs into bed, he pulls the covers up, and he lays back, and he simply says, good night, God. I'll talk to you tomorrow. That's what it is to pray without ceasing. He didn't have a big, long prayer at the end of the day because he had been in the spirit of prayer communicating with God throughout the day. And so when he got to the end of the day, he had run out of words. He had said everything he needed to say. And so like you say to a good friend or to your spouse when you're roommates or whatever, is you say, hey, good night. Talk to you in the morning. And that's it. That, to me, is a good picture of what it is to be in the spirit of prayer and be praying without ceasing. But just like the Bible, when we talked about in the first week of best practices, we hear this, but we don't do it all the time. Christians, a lot of us are not good at praying. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hands, but man, how hard is it to pray sometimes? You sit down, you're like, I'm going to do the thing, I'm going to pray, and you go for like two minutes. You're like, God, I don't know what else to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out, and your kid starts making noise, and you run upstairs, and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out. Your kid starts making noise and you run upstairs and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to prayer. But I think that maybe there's a motivation to go into prayer that we haven't considered that if we do, it would make it a lot easier to approach prayer. Because again, don't raise your hand, but how many here have decided at some point in your life, I want to be better at prayer, I want to pray more regularly, so I'm going to white knuckle this thing and set my alarm and I'm going to get up early and I'm going to pray? How'd that go? So as we think about how can we be obedient to the seemingly impossible command to pray without ceasing, how can we be more like Nate? I now regret using that name. I think it's important to answer this question, and I want you to answer it personally. When do you pray? Like right now in your life, as you go throughout your week, when do you pray? What is it that drives you to prayer? Maybe you're in a habit of praying every morning. Maybe it's specific things that take you to prayer. I mean, a lot of us pray for the meal, right? We know that drill. We're Christians, and so you go out to eat, and you kind of look around the table, and who's the most spiritual one here that's going to say, like, hey, I'll pray. Like, who's going to be the big Christian? And then if you got to eat with me, you have to go like, Nate, you have to pray. You're clearly, you're the pastor. That seems to be the gig. And so like you pray, right? And here's what I would say about meal prayers. If you mean it, pray. If you don't, eat. Okay. It doesn't matter. If you mean it, pray. If you don't mean the prayer, don't pray the prayer, ever. We need to be sincere with prayer. One of the things I try to do about prayer is not pray when we don't mean it on stage. We don't pray as just a way to get people up here awkwardly. It would have been really great to have Jordan pray at the end of worship so that I could hobble up here without all of you guys staring at me, but it wouldn't have been an honest and an earnest prayer. So pray when you mean it. And when you don't mean it, don't pray. But we pray when we have meals. We know that. And some of us are good about having time set aside to pray. But what is it that makes you pray the most? What is it that drives you to prayer most earnestly? Isn't it something that happens in your life that's too big for you? Doesn't anxiety drive you to prayer? When you're so worried about something, when you don't know what's going to happen, isn't that when you run and you go, this is too big for me, and you appeal to the almighty creator God? Isn't that when you appeal to the supernatural is when you realize in life this is too big for me. When the decision is too big and you don't know what to do. Do I take the promotion or do I not? Do we move to the city or do we not? Do we change our kid's school or do we not? When the decision is so big that we don't know what to do, we pray. Because in that prayer is an admission that God is bigger than us, that he's supernatural and we are natural, that he is God and that we are not, that he's a creator and that we're the created and that we need his wisdom for this. When we're walking through the difficult times and our spirits are low, we pray. When the diagnosis comes in, what do we do? We run to God and we pray. When we don't know where our kid is, or we don't know about the decisions that they're making, or we're so worried that they're going to run off the rails, what do we do? We pray. I was just at a wedding last weekend in Dothan, Alabama. And it was a really beautiful experience because it was Jen's cousin. Jen's my wife, not just some lady I talk about. It was Jen's cousin getting married. And she's older. She's like 30? She's 35? Oh, man, she's up there like me. So she's 35 and for years she was dating a guy that wasn't good for her. Just wasn't good for her. I've met the guy. He's a good guy. He's got a sweet heart. He just had stuff going on that made him not husband material just yet. And there was nothing, her dad's name is Edwin. There's nothing that Edwin could do. Edwin and Mary, there was nothing they could do. You guys who have kids who are adults, you know you can't tell them who to date. You can't tell them who to see. That's not going to work out. You just have to hope that they end up with the right people. And so they didn't know what to do. They had no other option, and so they made a space in their home, and every day, Edwin went to the space in his home, getting choked up thinking about it, and got on his knees and prayed for his daughter, that she wouldn't marry this guy, and lo and behold, after years of doing that, she broke the cycle with him, and she met the right guy, a good dude who loves the Lord, who's got a good head on his shoulders. And they got married on Saturday. And as they got married, I looked over at Uncle Edwin down the row, and he has tears streaming down his face because that's an answer to prayer, because the prayers of the righteous are powerful and effective. And what happened to Edwin is he had no other options. He was simply reduced to prayer. And what I want you to see this morning is when we are reduced to prayer, we pray. We pray when we are reduced to prayer. If you think about when I asked you that question, when in your life do you pray? The answer, whether you know it or not, is I pray when I'm reduced to prayer. When I have no other options, when I've exercised everything else to try to exert my control over it, when I've exercised every other avenues to fix it myself, and I realize that I am helpless, then I am reduced where the only thing I have is prayer, and so we cling to prayer, and we appeal to the supernatural God that we know. After we had a miscarriage and we got pregnant again, I wanted desperately to be able to do something to keep this baby safe. There was nothing I could do. I was reduced to prayer. So I prayed. Guys, we pray when we are reduced to prayer. When there's something happening in our life that is so big and so confusing and so difficult that makes us feel so helpless that we get on our knees and we appeal to our God. God, you've got to help me here. And if that's true, if that's true that we pray when we're reduced to prayer, then the opposite is true too. And when I say this, this is going to step on some toes. And I'm sorry about that. But let me just tell you this. Okay, this is not an us or me and you situation. This is not an us and them situation. This isn't staff and elders and then lowly congregation situation. This is a we situation. If this steps on your toes, I promise you it stepped on mine too. My toes hurt literally and figuratively worse than yours. I'm in this with you, okay? So when I say this, I'm not accusing you of anything that I am not guilty of. We are just all a bundle of insecurities and mechanisms trying to go through life, figuring out how to follow God together, okay? All of us. But if it's true that when we pray, we pray because we're reduced to prayer, then it's also true that when we don't pray, we assert our independence, right? When we don't pray, we are asserting our independence. When there's something coming up in life and we don't pray about it, we don't go to God about it, what we're saying implicitly is, I'm good, I don't need you for this one, I got it, right? And I know that's harsh, and I know that's not what you intend when you don't pray, but tell me that's not what we're saying when we don't pray. When I don't pray about a sermon, God, what would you have me do this week? What I'm saying implicitly is, I'm good. This is community. I've done a community sermon twice a year for the past 10 years of my life. I got it, God, I'm fine. When we make a decision at work, when we approach the sales meeting and we haven't prayed over it, what are we telling God? I got this sale, God, don't worry about it. We go into a meeting and we have a blanket of that prayer, blanket of that meeting and prayer. What are we telling God? I got this meeting, God, I'm good. We make decisions with our kids when we interact with our spouses, when we try to build them up, when we make decisions about church or about which small group to join. When we make these day-to-day decisions and we don't pray to God about these decisions, we make them on our own. What are we saying? We're saying, God, I'm good. I got this. And I'm in there too. There's a pastor in Washington, D.C. named Mark Batterson, and he said, you should never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. I don't know about you, but in my life, I've initiated a lot of things that were not saturated in prayer. And when we do that, we claim our independence, don't we? We flex our little independent muscles. We say, God, I'm good. I don't need you for this. And we figure it out on our own. And every day we do that is one more day we convince ourselves that we are adequate for the things that God has called us to in life. It's one more day when we make the argument implicitly by not praying to God that I am enough for today and that I don't need you. Thank you. Every day we go, we get a little bit more independent. We build our sense of self a little bit more. We reduce our dependency and our reliance on God and we build up our independence on and our dependence on ourselves. And then we go through life like this, praying maybe just for meals, praying maybe just for things here and there, praying when we go to Bible study and somebody goes, hey, will you pray? And you're like, okay, I guess I will. But we know in our own life we haven't prayed like that in a while. And every day we do that, we build our independence a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more until something happens and outside forces in life exert themselves on us and act on us to reduce us to a state of prayer. And then we pray again. And then we pray and we pray and we pray. And God in his goodness and his glory, he fixes it. And then what do we start to do? We exercise our independence muscles again and we say, God, thank you for your help over there. I'm good now. If it's true that we pray when we feel reduced to prayer, then it has to be true that we don't pray when we feel adequate for the day's task. Now, there is another reason why some of us don't pray sometimes. And I don't have time to talk about it at length this morning, but it is true and it should be mentioned. Sometimes we don't pray and it's not because we think we are adequate for the task. It's because our faith is a little broken and a little shattered and we don't think God is adequate for the task. And so we don't pray because we're just afraid that it's going to further hurt our faith. And I don't have a lot to say about that this morning, except if that's you, please don't carry that by yourself. If the reason you have not prayed as much as you normally do lately is because you kind of doubt God's ability to answer that prayer, you think he might be inadequate to it, talk to somebody about that. Come talk to me. Talk to one of our elders. Talk to someone that you respect spiritually. Don't carry that by yourself. So I think that that's true. But I think that for most of us, as we walk through our Christian life, if we find ourselves in a season where we are not praying without ceasing, we're not even praying regularly, much less without ceasing, that the reason that is, is because we feel adequate for the task. And if we want to break this cycle of meaning to pray more, but not praying as much as we should, then I think we have to initiate a practice. And we need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. We need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. Every prayer we pray, no matter how flippant, even if it's just a, dear God, thank you for this food, we're so excited for this lunch, amen, that admits some sort of dependence on some level that God, it's because of you and your gifts and your goodness that I get to eat this delicious, this week I had a pot roast and Cajun macaroni and cheese sandwich. I'm in prime condition to recover from my injuries. And when we pray for that, we say, God, it's your goodness that I get to enjoy this. Even in part, every prayer, every prayer admits dependence. Every time we throw anything to God, whether we do it for 45 minutes or for 10 seconds, is a way to go, God, I'm not big enough for this. I need you. That's why I pray every Sunday before I preach. It's honestly not as much to ask God for help as it is to remind me that I need it. I'm not big enough for this. I need you. Every prayer that we pray, no matter how small or how big, admits dependence. And so if we want to make prayer a daily habit, if we want to finally figure out how to persist in prayer and be devoted to prayer and be obedient to all those verses we talked about at the onset, if we want our prayers to be powerful and effective, then I think what we need to do is practice a daily reduction to prayer. I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. I don't think that we need to practice praying every day. I do, but I think it'll come after this. I think we sometimes put the cart before the horse and we skip it. And we go to God with all of our independence and all of our capabilities and we go, well, I know that I should pray to be a good Christian, so let me try to pray. And what we need to do instead is the very first thing we need to do is daily reduce ourself to the need to pray. Do you know that this is actually how Jesus prays? When the disciples went to him and they said, hey, can you teach us how to pray? You pray differently than us. Can you teach us to pray? The very first thing he does, he gives us a pattern, doesn't he? Gives us lines to recite. He gives us a pattern to follow. The very first words out of his mouth, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. God, you are big. We call this adoration. God, you are awesome. God, you are wonderful. God, you are the creator. God, you are holy. You are different. May your will persist here as it does in heaven. May your will be done. We start every prayer. God, you are big and I am small. God, I need you and I am insufficient. God, will your will be done, not my will be done. And it puts us in this place where we are reduced to prayer. So I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. Daily admitting I am insufficient for my tasks today. Now, if you're a thinking person, that exercise of daily reducing yourself to prayer will force you to ask the question, what am I inadequate for? If you're a thinking person at all, you'll want to know, for what am I inadequate? What do I need to get done that I can't handle? What do I need to appeal to God for? And in this exercise of thinking through, for what am I inadequate, we will arrive at these great callings that we have on our life that we sometimes forget. If you're a husband or a wife, do you know that your role is far more than to simply love your spouse? According to Scripture, my understanding is that my goal, my job with Jen, is to serve her like Christ loved the church, to lay my life down for her, and to do everything I can to be a tool in the hands of God to make her as beautiful and as spiritually vibrant as is possible, to help her become the best version of herself. I'm not adequate to that task. Her job is to be a tool in the hands of God that makes me into the most respectable, lovely, godly, spiritually healthy version of myself possible. Nobody is adequate for that task. How can she do that without prayer? Our job is to raise Lily, and not just to raise her so that she goes to a good school and has a nice life, but to raise her, to release her into the wild with as little baggage to undo with a therapist as possible, who loves God, who knows him, and knows him more intimately than Jen and I ever did. That's our job. We're not adequate to that task. You're called to be pastors in your workplace. We are all a member. If you're a Christian, you're a member of the royal priesthood. You are called to be pastors in your workplace. Jesus tells you in the Sermon on the Mount that other people, if you're a Christian, other people should see your good works and so glorify your Father who is in heaven without you ever talking to them about who you believe in. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians that we are led in procession by Jesus and that through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You are inadequate to that task. You have no choice but to rely on God to help you accomplish those things in that day. When someone asks you a difficult question and you realize they've opened the door for a spiritual conversation, you're inadequate for that conversation. You need the Spirit. You need to say, God, help me here. Give me ears to hear and give me wisdom to speak. When we practice a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer and admit our inadequacies before God, what he will do is bring to light all the wonderful, beautiful, grand things that his word calls us to, to live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. And in the face of those, we'll have no choice but to say, I can't do that myself. And that will drive us to prayer, to God. And in doing that, in a constant reduction of ourselves, we have reminders of the tasks to which we are called. In the face of those, we feel inadequate. We run to God in prayer. And because of our mindset and our posture before the Lord every day, by to Scripture? Be devoted to prayer? Be a person who is characterized by prayer? You want to be obedient to that seemingly impossible command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. I think it begins with a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer. Daily admitting our inadequacies and admitting our need for God so that we might accomplish just in that day what he wants us to accomplish in that day and that that knowledge will drive us to a prayer with him all the time. I know it's a lofty goal. Pastors say stuff like this a lot. But I really do want grace to be a place that's devoted to prayer, that's characterized by prayer. I know we have some people here who all you have to do in this sermon is nod your head because you're already doing this stuff. You're some of our warriors and you pray all the time. We need more of those. We need people praying for our families. We need people praying for the children's ministry. We need people who come and sit in this space and touch seats and pray for the people who sit there. We need to be a church that prays. And I think the key to getting into that habit is daily confessing our need to do that, is daily reducing ourselves to prayer. And I hope that we will. If that's not part of your life right now, then I would encourage you, make it a part of your life this week. This week, daily reduce yourself to prayer. This week, every day, just get up and say, God, I need you today, and tell them the things you need them for. And let me also tell you this, if praying isn't part of your normal habit, just pray until you're done praying. If you pray for a minute, nobody cares. Pray for a minute. Pray for 60 minutes, great, good for you. Pray for 60 minutes. Pray until you're done praying and then go and do what God's called you to do that day. But I would challenge you this week, for one week, if it's not a part of your regular habit, to daily this week reduce yourself to prayer. Now, I'd like to invite you all to pray with me, and the band will come up, and we'll have a song, and then we've got a special thing that we're going to do at the end. Father, you're good. You love us. You're merciful to us. You call us back to you. Your goodness, like a fetter, binds our wandering hearts to you. Father, if there's anybody wandering, I pray that you would draw them in. God, I pray that if we are not characterized by prayer, that we would be. Lord, help us reduce ourselves to prayer. Help us not wait for life to do that for us. Show us the things that you've called us to for which we are inadequate. Let us be the husbands and the fathers and the wives and the mothers and the friends and the employees and employers that you've created us to be. May we be a people and a church and individuals who are characterized by a devotion to prayer, Father. God, may you work in my own life that I might set the pace for that too. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

This is the third week of our series called Best Practices. The idea is that I believe that there are some habits in life that we can form that if we do, they're the most important possible habits we can have. I believe that these habits, these practices, will make us better at every aspect of our lives. They'll make us better wives and mothers and husbands and fathers. They'll make us better friends, better children, better family members, better employees and employers. And more importantly, they will bring us alive in our walk with God and our knowledge of God and be a part of the answered prayer that Paul prays over us, that we would know God with the depth of all the saints, that there are some practices, some keystone habits that we can develop in our life that if we do, we will become closer to who God created us to be. And so we're taking four weeks and looking at those habits that make us better in every aspect of life. The first week we looked at reading the Bible. I hope that you guys took the challenge from that. I kind of challenge you all to make a goal and make a plan and then let somebody in on that plan for some accountability. So I hope that you've been reading the Bible maybe a little bit more than you're used to and that that's been a blessing for you. Last week, Steve did a phenomenal job talking about worship. If you missed that, which is the summertime and I get it. So if you missed that last week, they're online. You can watch them on video. You can listen on our podcast and catch up with that one. This week, I want us to look at the practice of prayer. And prayer is a huge topic. It's incredibly broad. At the last church I was at, we did a six-part series all on prayer, and it still wasn't adequate to cover everything that the Bible had to say. So this morning, I know that I get to touch on prayer, but I don't get to talk about everything around prayer. Because if you go through the Bible, what you find is that the Bible is replete with verses on prayer. We're told in the Old Testament if we're brokenhearted that we can run to him. That's what David tells us in Psalms. We're told that we should be marked, be characterized by prayer. James says the prayer of the righteous person is powerful and availeth much, does much doing. Jesus tells us that if we're tempted, he tells us in Matthew, if you're tempted, if anyone is tempted, pray. So there's this aspect of prayer that helps us stave off temptation. We're told in Philippians that we should be anxious for nothing, but pray over everything. And that if we do this, that somehow God's peace comes into our life and guards us if we will be people who pray. In Colossians, Paul tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. In Romans, he tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. But there's this peculiar verse. It's not peculiar. It's just kind of famous. It's probably a better word. In 1 Thessalonians 5, verse 17, where Paul is finishing up his letter to the church in Thessalonica, and he's telling them, hey, here's the last things I want you to do. And in the middle of this list of advice, he tells them this really difficult command, pray without ceasing. He says, I want you to do a couple of things. I want you to bless one another. I want you to help one another. I want you to honor God. And I want you to pray without ceasing. And I don't know about you, but I read that verse and I'm like, I don't even know how to do that. I don't know how many in this room would raise their hand and say, you know what? I have been obedient to that command in my life for X amount of weeks, X amount of years, X amount of months. That's a super challenging verse. And so as I thought about the best place to invest our Sunday morning on prayer, I thought it might be best to tackle this verse. Because we can talk about all the things around prayer, postures in praying, different types of prayer. We can go through Psalms and see the different types of prayer that David offers. We could look at the correct format of prayer that Jesus does when he teaches the disciples how to pray. We'll talk about it more later, but he gives a pattern of prayer in the Lord's prayer that we're supposed to follow. We could talk about that. We could talk about this idea of listening prayer. Spurgeon, one of the most influential pastors to ever live, this guy from England in the 1800s when he was 19 years old, he had a multi-thousand person congregation, just an amazing guy. He wrote to his students that if you only pray, and if when you pray, all you do is talk and you don't listen to God, then you are like somebody who dips their toes in the Atlantic and claims to have experienced the whole of the ocean. So there's this whole idea of listening prayer where we clue into God, which I'm being honest, sounds a lot lot like meditation, the Christian version of that. And we could talk about that, and I think there'd be some ground to gain. But where I've landed is, until we get this command down, the command in Colossians to be devoted to prayer, the command in Romans to pray continually, the command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing, until we become people who are characterized by prayer, then all the different types of prayer and all the different information around prayer really is not as impactful to us. I think the first thing we need to do is become people who are characterized by prayer. And if you think about the biblical heroes that you know, they're characterized by prayer. Moses prayed all the time. David prayed constantly. Hannah, the mother of Samuel, is famous because of her prayer, because she was praying so fervently that Eli, the high priest, thought that she was drunk. She was just praying to God. There's a great prayer from Moses' mother. There's all these great prayers through Scripture. All the biblical heroes that we know are people who are characterized by prayer. And I would bet that the people that you look up to spiritually are people, whether you know it or not, who are characterized by prayer and devoted to prayer. As I think about this idea to pray without ceasing and make that kind of the first goal of our prayer life is to be a people who are devoted to prayer, Spurgeon again said that we cannot be constantly in the act of prayer, but we can be constantly in the spirit of prayer. And I believe that that goal is best illustrated through a super cheesy made-up story that I heard years ago. I heard this story back in high school. It is not true. Somebody made it up, but it makes a good point. There was a guy who was super spiritual, really close to God. Whenever he prayed in public, it was excellent, excellent prayers. People were really impressed with him. For the sake of the story, we're going to call him Nate. So there's Nate, the super spiritual guy. I'm talking about Nate Murray there in the back, not me. Super spiritual guy, and his prayers were incredible. And one day his friend said, I want to hear his nighttime prayers. Like, I want to hear what he prays for at night, at the end of the day. Because that's like the good prayer. Like, you pray in the morning, you pray for the day, then at night you pray again. I want to hear what Nate prays at the end of the day. And so again, this is made up, it's silly, they snuck into his room and they're hiding out somewhere. I don't know if it's in the closet or under the bed, wherever you want. They're hiding out, they're listening to Nate. Nate comes in at the end of the day and they're like, oh, here we go, dude's going to pray, this is going to be some good stuff. They're super excited to hear what Nate says to God at the end of his day. They expect him to get down on his knees next to the bed and double over like you're supposed to. I mean, that's what good believers do. You get on your knees next to the bed. That's part of the deal. And they're waiting for him to do that, and he doesn't do that, and he just gets into bed. And they're like, oh, maybe Nate's having an off night. And as he climbs into bed, he pulls the covers up, and he lays back, and he simply says, good night, God. I'll talk to you tomorrow. That's what it is to pray without ceasing. He didn't have a big, long prayer at the end of the day because he had been in the spirit of prayer communicating with God throughout the day. And so when he got to the end of the day, he had run out of words. He had said everything he needed to say. And so like you say to a good friend or to your spouse when you're roommates or whatever, is you say, hey, good night. Talk to you in the morning. And that's it. That, to me, is a good picture of what it is to be in the spirit of prayer and be praying without ceasing. But just like the Bible, when we talked about in the first week of best practices, we hear this, but we don't do it all the time. Christians, a lot of us are not good at praying. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hands, but man, how hard is it to pray sometimes? You sit down, you're like, I'm going to do the thing, I'm going to pray, and you go for like two minutes. You're like, God, I don't know what else to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out, and your kid starts making noise, and you run upstairs, and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out. Your kid starts making noise and you run upstairs and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to prayer. But I think that maybe there's a motivation to go into prayer that we haven't considered that if we do, it would make it a lot easier to approach prayer. Because again, don't raise your hand, but how many here have decided at some point in your life, I want to be better at prayer, I want to pray more regularly, so I'm going to white knuckle this thing and set my alarm and I'm going to get up early and I'm going to pray? How'd that go? So as we think about how can we be obedient to the seemingly impossible command to pray without ceasing, how can we be more like Nate? I now regret using that name. I think it's important to answer this question, and I want you to answer it personally. When do you pray? Like right now in your life, as you go throughout your week, when do you pray? What is it that drives you to prayer? Maybe you're in a habit of praying every morning. Maybe it's specific things that take you to prayer. I mean, a lot of us pray for the meal, right? We know that drill. We're Christians, and so you go out to eat, and you kind of look around the table, and who's the most spiritual one here that's going to say, like, hey, I'll pray. Like, who's going to be the big Christian? And then if you got to eat with me, you have to go like, Nate, you have to pray. You're clearly, you're the pastor. That seems to be the gig. And so like you pray, right? And here's what I would say about meal prayers. If you mean it, pray. If you don't, eat. Okay. It doesn't matter. If you mean it, pray. If you don't mean the prayer, don't pray the prayer, ever. We need to be sincere with prayer. One of the things I try to do about prayer is not pray when we don't mean it on stage. We don't pray as just a way to get people up here awkwardly. It would have been really great to have Jordan pray at the end of worship so that I could hobble up here without all of you guys staring at me, but it wouldn't have been an honest and an earnest prayer. So pray when you mean it. And when you don't mean it, don't pray. But we pray when we have meals. We know that. And some of us are good about having time set aside to pray. But what is it that makes you pray the most? What is it that drives you to prayer most earnestly? Isn't it something that happens in your life that's too big for you? Doesn't anxiety drive you to prayer? When you're so worried about something, when you don't know what's going to happen, isn't that when you run and you go, this is too big for me, and you appeal to the almighty creator God? Isn't that when you appeal to the supernatural is when you realize in life this is too big for me. When the decision is too big and you don't know what to do. Do I take the promotion or do I not? Do we move to the city or do we not? Do we change our kid's school or do we not? When the decision is so big that we don't know what to do, we pray. Because in that prayer is an admission that God is bigger than us, that he's supernatural and we are natural, that he is God and that we are not, that he's a creator and that we're the created and that we need his wisdom for this. When we're walking through the difficult times and our spirits are low, we pray. When the diagnosis comes in, what do we do? We run to God and we pray. When we don't know where our kid is, or we don't know about the decisions that they're making, or we're so worried that they're going to run off the rails, what do we do? We pray. I was just at a wedding last weekend in Dothan, Alabama. And it was a really beautiful experience because it was Jen's cousin. Jen's my wife, not just some lady I talk about. It was Jen's cousin getting married. And she's older. She's like 30? She's 35? Oh, man, she's up there like me. So she's 35 and for years she was dating a guy that wasn't good for her. Just wasn't good for her. I've met the guy. He's a good guy. He's got a sweet heart. He just had stuff going on that made him not husband material just yet. And there was nothing, her dad's name is Edwin. There's nothing that Edwin could do. Edwin and Mary, there was nothing they could do. You guys who have kids who are adults, you know you can't tell them who to date. You can't tell them who to see. That's not going to work out. You just have to hope that they end up with the right people. And so they didn't know what to do. They had no other option, and so they made a space in their home, and every day, Edwin went to the space in his home, getting choked up thinking about it, and got on his knees and prayed for his daughter, that she wouldn't marry this guy, and lo and behold, after years of doing that, she broke the cycle with him, and she met the right guy, a good dude who loves the Lord, who's got a good head on his shoulders. And they got married on Saturday. And as they got married, I looked over at Uncle Edwin down the row, and he has tears streaming down his face because that's an answer to prayer, because the prayers of the righteous are powerful and effective. And what happened to Edwin is he had no other options. He was simply reduced to prayer. And what I want you to see this morning is when we are reduced to prayer, we pray. We pray when we are reduced to prayer. If you think about when I asked you that question, when in your life do you pray? The answer, whether you know it or not, is I pray when I'm reduced to prayer. When I have no other options, when I've exercised everything else to try to exert my control over it, when I've exercised every other avenues to fix it myself, and I realize that I am helpless, then I am reduced where the only thing I have is prayer, and so we cling to prayer, and we appeal to the supernatural God that we know. After we had a miscarriage and we got pregnant again, I wanted desperately to be able to do something to keep this baby safe. There was nothing I could do. I was reduced to prayer. So I prayed. Guys, we pray when we are reduced to prayer. When there's something happening in our life that is so big and so confusing and so difficult that makes us feel so helpless that we get on our knees and we appeal to our God. God, you've got to help me here. And if that's true, if that's true that we pray when we're reduced to prayer, then the opposite is true too. And when I say this, this is going to step on some toes. And I'm sorry about that. But let me just tell you this. Okay, this is not an us or me and you situation. This is not an us and them situation. This isn't staff and elders and then lowly congregation situation. This is a we situation. If this steps on your toes, I promise you it stepped on mine too. My toes hurt literally and figuratively worse than yours. I'm in this with you, okay? So when I say this, I'm not accusing you of anything that I am not guilty of. We are just all a bundle of insecurities and mechanisms trying to go through life, figuring out how to follow God together, okay? All of us. But if it's true that when we pray, we pray because we're reduced to prayer, then it's also true that when we don't pray, we assert our independence, right? When we don't pray, we are asserting our independence. When there's something coming up in life and we don't pray about it, we don't go to God about it, what we're saying implicitly is, I'm good, I don't need you for this one, I got it, right? And I know that's harsh, and I know that's not what you intend when you don't pray, but tell me that's not what we're saying when we don't pray. When I don't pray about a sermon, God, what would you have me do this week? What I'm saying implicitly is, I'm good. This is community. I've done a community sermon twice a year for the past 10 years of my life. I got it, God, I'm fine. When we make a decision at work, when we approach the sales meeting and we haven't prayed over it, what are we telling God? I got this sale, God, don't worry about it. We go into a meeting and we have a blanket of that prayer, blanket of that meeting and prayer. What are we telling God? I got this meeting, God, I'm good. We make decisions with our kids when we interact with our spouses, when we try to build them up, when we make decisions about church or about which small group to join. When we make these day-to-day decisions and we don't pray to God about these decisions, we make them on our own. What are we saying? We're saying, God, I'm good. I got this. And I'm in there too. There's a pastor in Washington, D.C. named Mark Batterson, and he said, you should never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. I don't know about you, but in my life, I've initiated a lot of things that were not saturated in prayer. And when we do that, we claim our independence, don't we? We flex our little independent muscles. We say, God, I'm good. I don't need you for this. And we figure it out on our own. And every day we do that is one more day we convince ourselves that we are adequate for the things that God has called us to in life. It's one more day when we make the argument implicitly by not praying to God that I am enough for today and that I don't need you. Thank you. Every day we go, we get a little bit more independent. We build our sense of self a little bit more. We reduce our dependency and our reliance on God and we build up our independence on and our dependence on ourselves. And then we go through life like this, praying maybe just for meals, praying maybe just for things here and there, praying when we go to Bible study and somebody goes, hey, will you pray? And you're like, okay, I guess I will. But we know in our own life we haven't prayed like that in a while. And every day we do that, we build our independence a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more until something happens and outside forces in life exert themselves on us and act on us to reduce us to a state of prayer. And then we pray again. And then we pray and we pray and we pray. And God in his goodness and his glory, he fixes it. And then what do we start to do? We exercise our independence muscles again and we say, God, thank you for your help over there. I'm good now. If it's true that we pray when we feel reduced to prayer, then it has to be true that we don't pray when we feel adequate for the day's task. Now, there is another reason why some of us don't pray sometimes. And I don't have time to talk about it at length this morning, but it is true and it should be mentioned. Sometimes we don't pray and it's not because we think we are adequate for the task. It's because our faith is a little broken and a little shattered and we don't think God is adequate for the task. And so we don't pray because we're just afraid that it's going to further hurt our faith. And I don't have a lot to say about that this morning, except if that's you, please don't carry that by yourself. If the reason you have not prayed as much as you normally do lately is because you kind of doubt God's ability to answer that prayer, you think he might be inadequate to it, talk to somebody about that. Come talk to me. Talk to one of our elders. Talk to someone that you respect spiritually. Don't carry that by yourself. So I think that that's true. But I think that for most of us, as we walk through our Christian life, if we find ourselves in a season where we are not praying without ceasing, we're not even praying regularly, much less without ceasing, that the reason that is, is because we feel adequate for the task. And if we want to break this cycle of meaning to pray more, but not praying as much as we should, then I think we have to initiate a practice. And we need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. We need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. Every prayer we pray, no matter how flippant, even if it's just a, dear God, thank you for this food, we're so excited for this lunch, amen, that admits some sort of dependence on some level that God, it's because of you and your gifts and your goodness that I get to eat this delicious, this week I had a pot roast and Cajun macaroni and cheese sandwich. I'm in prime condition to recover from my injuries. And when we pray for that, we say, God, it's your goodness that I get to enjoy this. Even in part, every prayer, every prayer admits dependence. Every time we throw anything to God, whether we do it for 45 minutes or for 10 seconds, is a way to go, God, I'm not big enough for this. I need you. That's why I pray every Sunday before I preach. It's honestly not as much to ask God for help as it is to remind me that I need it. I'm not big enough for this. I need you. Every prayer that we pray, no matter how small or how big, admits dependence. And so if we want to make prayer a daily habit, if we want to finally figure out how to persist in prayer and be devoted to prayer and be obedient to all those verses we talked about at the onset, if we want our prayers to be powerful and effective, then I think what we need to do is practice a daily reduction to prayer. I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. I don't think that we need to practice praying every day. I do, but I think it'll come after this. I think we sometimes put the cart before the horse and we skip it. And we go to God with all of our independence and all of our capabilities and we go, well, I know that I should pray to be a good Christian, so let me try to pray. And what we need to do instead is the very first thing we need to do is daily reduce ourself to the need to pray. Do you know that this is actually how Jesus prays? When the disciples went to him and they said, hey, can you teach us how to pray? You pray differently than us. Can you teach us to pray? The very first thing he does, he gives us a pattern, doesn't he? Gives us lines to recite. He gives us a pattern to follow. The very first words out of his mouth, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. God, you are big. We call this adoration. God, you are awesome. God, you are wonderful. God, you are the creator. God, you are holy. You are different. May your will persist here as it does in heaven. May your will be done. We start every prayer. God, you are big and I am small. God, I need you and I am insufficient. God, will your will be done, not my will be done. And it puts us in this place where we are reduced to prayer. So I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. Daily admitting I am insufficient for my tasks today. Now, if you're a thinking person, that exercise of daily reducing yourself to prayer will force you to ask the question, what am I inadequate for? If you're a thinking person at all, you'll want to know, for what am I inadequate? What do I need to get done that I can't handle? What do I need to appeal to God for? And in this exercise of thinking through, for what am I inadequate, we will arrive at these great callings that we have on our life that we sometimes forget. If you're a husband or a wife, do you know that your role is far more than to simply love your spouse? According to Scripture, my understanding is that my goal, my job with Jen, is to serve her like Christ loved the church, to lay my life down for her, and to do everything I can to be a tool in the hands of God to make her as beautiful and as spiritually vibrant as is possible, to help her become the best version of herself. I'm not adequate to that task. Her job is to be a tool in the hands of God that makes me into the most respectable, lovely, godly, spiritually healthy version of myself possible. Nobody is adequate for that task. How can she do that without prayer? Our job is to raise Lily, and not just to raise her so that she goes to a good school and has a nice life, but to raise her, to release her into the wild with as little baggage to undo with a therapist as possible, who loves God, who knows him, and knows him more intimately than Jen and I ever did. That's our job. We're not adequate to that task. You're called to be pastors in your workplace. We are all a member. If you're a Christian, you're a member of the royal priesthood. You are called to be pastors in your workplace. Jesus tells you in the Sermon on the Mount that other people, if you're a Christian, other people should see your good works and so glorify your Father who is in heaven without you ever talking to them about who you believe in. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians that we are led in procession by Jesus and that through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You are inadequate to that task. You have no choice but to rely on God to help you accomplish those things in that day. When someone asks you a difficult question and you realize they've opened the door for a spiritual conversation, you're inadequate for that conversation. You need the Spirit. You need to say, God, help me here. Give me ears to hear and give me wisdom to speak. When we practice a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer and admit our inadequacies before God, what he will do is bring to light all the wonderful, beautiful, grand things that his word calls us to, to live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. And in the face of those, we'll have no choice but to say, I can't do that myself. And that will drive us to prayer, to God. And in doing that, in a constant reduction of ourselves, we have reminders of the tasks to which we are called. In the face of those, we feel inadequate. We run to God in prayer. And because of our mindset and our posture before the Lord every day, by to Scripture? Be devoted to prayer? Be a person who is characterized by prayer? You want to be obedient to that seemingly impossible command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. I think it begins with a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer. Daily admitting our inadequacies and admitting our need for God so that we might accomplish just in that day what he wants us to accomplish in that day and that that knowledge will drive us to a prayer with him all the time. I know it's a lofty goal. Pastors say stuff like this a lot. But I really do want grace to be a place that's devoted to prayer, that's characterized by prayer. I know we have some people here who all you have to do in this sermon is nod your head because you're already doing this stuff. You're some of our warriors and you pray all the time. We need more of those. We need people praying for our families. We need people praying for the children's ministry. We need people who come and sit in this space and touch seats and pray for the people who sit there. We need to be a church that prays. And I think the key to getting into that habit is daily confessing our need to do that, is daily reducing ourselves to prayer. And I hope that we will. If that's not part of your life right now, then I would encourage you, make it a part of your life this week. This week, daily reduce yourself to prayer. This week, every day, just get up and say, God, I need you today, and tell them the things you need them for. And let me also tell you this, if praying isn't part of your normal habit, just pray until you're done praying. If you pray for a minute, nobody cares. Pray for a minute. Pray for 60 minutes, great, good for you. Pray for 60 minutes. Pray until you're done praying and then go and do what God's called you to do that day. But I would challenge you this week, for one week, if it's not a part of your regular habit, to daily this week reduce yourself to prayer. Now, I'd like to invite you all to pray with me, and the band will come up, and we'll have a song, and then we've got a special thing that we're going to do at the end. Father, you're good. You love us. You're merciful to us. You call us back to you. Your goodness, like a fetter, binds our wandering hearts to you. Father, if there's anybody wandering, I pray that you would draw them in. God, I pray that if we are not characterized by prayer, that we would be. Lord, help us reduce ourselves to prayer. Help us not wait for life to do that for us. Show us the things that you've called us to for which we are inadequate. Let us be the husbands and the fathers and the wives and the mothers and the friends and the employees and employers that you've created us to be. May we be a people and a church and individuals who are characterized by a devotion to prayer, Father. God, may you work in my own life that I might set the pace for that too. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

This is the third week of our series called Best Practices. The idea is that I believe that there are some habits in life that we can form that if we do, they're the most important possible habits we can have. I believe that these habits, these practices, will make us better at every aspect of our lives. They'll make us better wives and mothers and husbands and fathers. They'll make us better friends, better children, better family members, better employees and employers. And more importantly, they will bring us alive in our walk with God and our knowledge of God and be a part of the answered prayer that Paul prays over us, that we would know God with the depth of all the saints, that there are some practices, some keystone habits that we can develop in our life that if we do, we will become closer to who God created us to be. And so we're taking four weeks and looking at those habits that make us better in every aspect of life. The first week we looked at reading the Bible. I hope that you guys took the challenge from that. I kind of challenge you all to make a goal and make a plan and then let somebody in on that plan for some accountability. So I hope that you've been reading the Bible maybe a little bit more than you're used to and that that's been a blessing for you. Last week, Steve did a phenomenal job talking about worship. If you missed that, which is the summertime and I get it. So if you missed that last week, they're online. You can watch them on video. You can listen on our podcast and catch up with that one. This week, I want us to look at the practice of prayer. And prayer is a huge topic. It's incredibly broad. At the last church I was at, we did a six-part series all on prayer, and it still wasn't adequate to cover everything that the Bible had to say. So this morning, I know that I get to touch on prayer, but I don't get to talk about everything around prayer. Because if you go through the Bible, what you find is that the Bible is replete with verses on prayer. We're told in the Old Testament if we're brokenhearted that we can run to him. That's what David tells us in Psalms. We're told that we should be marked, be characterized by prayer. James says the prayer of the righteous person is powerful and availeth much, does much doing. Jesus tells us that if we're tempted, he tells us in Matthew, if you're tempted, if anyone is tempted, pray. So there's this aspect of prayer that helps us stave off temptation. We're told in Philippians that we should be anxious for nothing, but pray over everything. And that if we do this, that somehow God's peace comes into our life and guards us if we will be people who pray. In Colossians, Paul tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. In Romans, he tells us that we should be devoted to prayer. But there's this peculiar verse. It's not peculiar. It's just kind of famous. It's probably a better word. In 1 Thessalonians 5, verse 17, where Paul is finishing up his letter to the church in Thessalonica, and he's telling them, hey, here's the last things I want you to do. And in the middle of this list of advice, he tells them this really difficult command, pray without ceasing. He says, I want you to do a couple of things. I want you to bless one another. I want you to help one another. I want you to honor God. And I want you to pray without ceasing. And I don't know about you, but I read that verse and I'm like, I don't even know how to do that. I don't know how many in this room would raise their hand and say, you know what? I have been obedient to that command in my life for X amount of weeks, X amount of years, X amount of months. That's a super challenging verse. And so as I thought about the best place to invest our Sunday morning on prayer, I thought it might be best to tackle this verse. Because we can talk about all the things around prayer, postures in praying, different types of prayer. We can go through Psalms and see the different types of prayer that David offers. We could look at the correct format of prayer that Jesus does when he teaches the disciples how to pray. We'll talk about it more later, but he gives a pattern of prayer in the Lord's prayer that we're supposed to follow. We could talk about that. We could talk about this idea of listening prayer. Spurgeon, one of the most influential pastors to ever live, this guy from England in the 1800s when he was 19 years old, he had a multi-thousand person congregation, just an amazing guy. He wrote to his students that if you only pray, and if when you pray, all you do is talk and you don't listen to God, then you are like somebody who dips their toes in the Atlantic and claims to have experienced the whole of the ocean. So there's this whole idea of listening prayer where we clue into God, which I'm being honest, sounds a lot lot like meditation, the Christian version of that. And we could talk about that, and I think there'd be some ground to gain. But where I've landed is, until we get this command down, the command in Colossians to be devoted to prayer, the command in Romans to pray continually, the command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing, until we become people who are characterized by prayer, then all the different types of prayer and all the different information around prayer really is not as impactful to us. I think the first thing we need to do is become people who are characterized by prayer. And if you think about the biblical heroes that you know, they're characterized by prayer. Moses prayed all the time. David prayed constantly. Hannah, the mother of Samuel, is famous because of her prayer, because she was praying so fervently that Eli, the high priest, thought that she was drunk. She was just praying to God. There's a great prayer from Moses' mother. There's all these great prayers through Scripture. All the biblical heroes that we know are people who are characterized by prayer. And I would bet that the people that you look up to spiritually are people, whether you know it or not, who are characterized by prayer and devoted to prayer. As I think about this idea to pray without ceasing and make that kind of the first goal of our prayer life is to be a people who are devoted to prayer, Spurgeon again said that we cannot be constantly in the act of prayer, but we can be constantly in the spirit of prayer. And I believe that that goal is best illustrated through a super cheesy made-up story that I heard years ago. I heard this story back in high school. It is not true. Somebody made it up, but it makes a good point. There was a guy who was super spiritual, really close to God. Whenever he prayed in public, it was excellent, excellent prayers. People were really impressed with him. For the sake of the story, we're going to call him Nate. So there's Nate, the super spiritual guy. I'm talking about Nate Murray there in the back, not me. Super spiritual guy, and his prayers were incredible. And one day his friend said, I want to hear his nighttime prayers. Like, I want to hear what he prays for at night, at the end of the day. Because that's like the good prayer. Like, you pray in the morning, you pray for the day, then at night you pray again. I want to hear what Nate prays at the end of the day. And so again, this is made up, it's silly, they snuck into his room and they're hiding out somewhere. I don't know if it's in the closet or under the bed, wherever you want. They're hiding out, they're listening to Nate. Nate comes in at the end of the day and they're like, oh, here we go, dude's going to pray, this is going to be some good stuff. They're super excited to hear what Nate says to God at the end of his day. They expect him to get down on his knees next to the bed and double over like you're supposed to. I mean, that's what good believers do. You get on your knees next to the bed. That's part of the deal. And they're waiting for him to do that, and he doesn't do that, and he just gets into bed. And they're like, oh, maybe Nate's having an off night. And as he climbs into bed, he pulls the covers up, and he lays back, and he simply says, good night, God. I'll talk to you tomorrow. That's what it is to pray without ceasing. He didn't have a big, long prayer at the end of the day because he had been in the spirit of prayer communicating with God throughout the day. And so when he got to the end of the day, he had run out of words. He had said everything he needed to say. And so like you say to a good friend or to your spouse when you're roommates or whatever, is you say, hey, good night. Talk to you in the morning. And that's it. That, to me, is a good picture of what it is to be in the spirit of prayer and be praying without ceasing. But just like the Bible, when we talked about in the first week of best practices, we hear this, but we don't do it all the time. Christians, a lot of us are not good at praying. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hands, but man, how hard is it to pray sometimes? You sit down, you're like, I'm going to do the thing, I'm going to pray, and you go for like two minutes. You're like, God, I don't know what else to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out, and your kid starts making noise, and you run upstairs, and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to do. You start thinking about the emails that you're going to have to send out. Your kid starts making noise and you run upstairs and that prayer time's done. It's hard to pray. It's hard to be devoted to prayer. But I think that maybe there's a motivation to go into prayer that we haven't considered that if we do, it would make it a lot easier to approach prayer. Because again, don't raise your hand, but how many here have decided at some point in your life, I want to be better at prayer, I want to pray more regularly, so I'm going to white knuckle this thing and set my alarm and I'm going to get up early and I'm going to pray? How'd that go? So as we think about how can we be obedient to the seemingly impossible command to pray without ceasing, how can we be more like Nate? I now regret using that name. I think it's important to answer this question, and I want you to answer it personally. When do you pray? Like right now in your life, as you go throughout your week, when do you pray? What is it that drives you to prayer? Maybe you're in a habit of praying every morning. Maybe it's specific things that take you to prayer. I mean, a lot of us pray for the meal, right? We know that drill. We're Christians, and so you go out to eat, and you kind of look around the table, and who's the most spiritual one here that's going to say, like, hey, I'll pray. Like, who's going to be the big Christian? And then if you got to eat with me, you have to go like, Nate, you have to pray. You're clearly, you're the pastor. That seems to be the gig. And so like you pray, right? And here's what I would say about meal prayers. If you mean it, pray. If you don't, eat. Okay. It doesn't matter. If you mean it, pray. If you don't mean the prayer, don't pray the prayer, ever. We need to be sincere with prayer. One of the things I try to do about prayer is not pray when we don't mean it on stage. We don't pray as just a way to get people up here awkwardly. It would have been really great to have Jordan pray at the end of worship so that I could hobble up here without all of you guys staring at me, but it wouldn't have been an honest and an earnest prayer. So pray when you mean it. And when you don't mean it, don't pray. But we pray when we have meals. We know that. And some of us are good about having time set aside to pray. But what is it that makes you pray the most? What is it that drives you to prayer most earnestly? Isn't it something that happens in your life that's too big for you? Doesn't anxiety drive you to prayer? When you're so worried about something, when you don't know what's going to happen, isn't that when you run and you go, this is too big for me, and you appeal to the almighty creator God? Isn't that when you appeal to the supernatural is when you realize in life this is too big for me. When the decision is too big and you don't know what to do. Do I take the promotion or do I not? Do we move to the city or do we not? Do we change our kid's school or do we not? When the decision is so big that we don't know what to do, we pray. Because in that prayer is an admission that God is bigger than us, that he's supernatural and we are natural, that he is God and that we are not, that he's a creator and that we're the created and that we need his wisdom for this. When we're walking through the difficult times and our spirits are low, we pray. When the diagnosis comes in, what do we do? We run to God and we pray. When we don't know where our kid is, or we don't know about the decisions that they're making, or we're so worried that they're going to run off the rails, what do we do? We pray. I was just at a wedding last weekend in Dothan, Alabama. And it was a really beautiful experience because it was Jen's cousin. Jen's my wife, not just some lady I talk about. It was Jen's cousin getting married. And she's older. She's like 30? She's 35? Oh, man, she's up there like me. So she's 35 and for years she was dating a guy that wasn't good for her. Just wasn't good for her. I've met the guy. He's a good guy. He's got a sweet heart. He just had stuff going on that made him not husband material just yet. And there was nothing, her dad's name is Edwin. There's nothing that Edwin could do. Edwin and Mary, there was nothing they could do. You guys who have kids who are adults, you know you can't tell them who to date. You can't tell them who to see. That's not going to work out. You just have to hope that they end up with the right people. And so they didn't know what to do. They had no other option, and so they made a space in their home, and every day, Edwin went to the space in his home, getting choked up thinking about it, and got on his knees and prayed for his daughter, that she wouldn't marry this guy, and lo and behold, after years of doing that, she broke the cycle with him, and she met the right guy, a good dude who loves the Lord, who's got a good head on his shoulders. And they got married on Saturday. And as they got married, I looked over at Uncle Edwin down the row, and he has tears streaming down his face because that's an answer to prayer, because the prayers of the righteous are powerful and effective. And what happened to Edwin is he had no other options. He was simply reduced to prayer. And what I want you to see this morning is when we are reduced to prayer, we pray. We pray when we are reduced to prayer. If you think about when I asked you that question, when in your life do you pray? The answer, whether you know it or not, is I pray when I'm reduced to prayer. When I have no other options, when I've exercised everything else to try to exert my control over it, when I've exercised every other avenues to fix it myself, and I realize that I am helpless, then I am reduced where the only thing I have is prayer, and so we cling to prayer, and we appeal to the supernatural God that we know. After we had a miscarriage and we got pregnant again, I wanted desperately to be able to do something to keep this baby safe. There was nothing I could do. I was reduced to prayer. So I prayed. Guys, we pray when we are reduced to prayer. When there's something happening in our life that is so big and so confusing and so difficult that makes us feel so helpless that we get on our knees and we appeal to our God. God, you've got to help me here. And if that's true, if that's true that we pray when we're reduced to prayer, then the opposite is true too. And when I say this, this is going to step on some toes. And I'm sorry about that. But let me just tell you this. Okay, this is not an us or me and you situation. This is not an us and them situation. This isn't staff and elders and then lowly congregation situation. This is a we situation. If this steps on your toes, I promise you it stepped on mine too. My toes hurt literally and figuratively worse than yours. I'm in this with you, okay? So when I say this, I'm not accusing you of anything that I am not guilty of. We are just all a bundle of insecurities and mechanisms trying to go through life, figuring out how to follow God together, okay? All of us. But if it's true that when we pray, we pray because we're reduced to prayer, then it's also true that when we don't pray, we assert our independence, right? When we don't pray, we are asserting our independence. When there's something coming up in life and we don't pray about it, we don't go to God about it, what we're saying implicitly is, I'm good, I don't need you for this one, I got it, right? And I know that's harsh, and I know that's not what you intend when you don't pray, but tell me that's not what we're saying when we don't pray. When I don't pray about a sermon, God, what would you have me do this week? What I'm saying implicitly is, I'm good. This is community. I've done a community sermon twice a year for the past 10 years of my life. I got it, God, I'm fine. When we make a decision at work, when we approach the sales meeting and we haven't prayed over it, what are we telling God? I got this sale, God, don't worry about it. We go into a meeting and we have a blanket of that prayer, blanket of that meeting and prayer. What are we telling God? I got this meeting, God, I'm good. We make decisions with our kids when we interact with our spouses, when we try to build them up, when we make decisions about church or about which small group to join. When we make these day-to-day decisions and we don't pray to God about these decisions, we make them on our own. What are we saying? We're saying, God, I'm good. I got this. And I'm in there too. There's a pastor in Washington, D.C. named Mark Batterson, and he said, you should never initiate what you cannot saturate in prayer. I don't know about you, but in my life, I've initiated a lot of things that were not saturated in prayer. And when we do that, we claim our independence, don't we? We flex our little independent muscles. We say, God, I'm good. I don't need you for this. And we figure it out on our own. And every day we do that is one more day we convince ourselves that we are adequate for the things that God has called us to in life. It's one more day when we make the argument implicitly by not praying to God that I am enough for today and that I don't need you. Thank you. Every day we go, we get a little bit more independent. We build our sense of self a little bit more. We reduce our dependency and our reliance on God and we build up our independence on and our dependence on ourselves. And then we go through life like this, praying maybe just for meals, praying maybe just for things here and there, praying when we go to Bible study and somebody goes, hey, will you pray? And you're like, okay, I guess I will. But we know in our own life we haven't prayed like that in a while. And every day we do that, we build our independence a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more until something happens and outside forces in life exert themselves on us and act on us to reduce us to a state of prayer. And then we pray again. And then we pray and we pray and we pray. And God in his goodness and his glory, he fixes it. And then what do we start to do? We exercise our independence muscles again and we say, God, thank you for your help over there. I'm good now. If it's true that we pray when we feel reduced to prayer, then it has to be true that we don't pray when we feel adequate for the day's task. Now, there is another reason why some of us don't pray sometimes. And I don't have time to talk about it at length this morning, but it is true and it should be mentioned. Sometimes we don't pray and it's not because we think we are adequate for the task. It's because our faith is a little broken and a little shattered and we don't think God is adequate for the task. And so we don't pray because we're just afraid that it's going to further hurt our faith. And I don't have a lot to say about that this morning, except if that's you, please don't carry that by yourself. If the reason you have not prayed as much as you normally do lately is because you kind of doubt God's ability to answer that prayer, you think he might be inadequate to it, talk to somebody about that. Come talk to me. Talk to one of our elders. Talk to someone that you respect spiritually. Don't carry that by yourself. So I think that that's true. But I think that for most of us, as we walk through our Christian life, if we find ourselves in a season where we are not praying without ceasing, we're not even praying regularly, much less without ceasing, that the reason that is, is because we feel adequate for the task. And if we want to break this cycle of meaning to pray more, but not praying as much as we should, then I think we have to initiate a practice. And we need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. We need to understand that every prayer we pray admits dependence. Every prayer we pray, no matter how flippant, even if it's just a, dear God, thank you for this food, we're so excited for this lunch, amen, that admits some sort of dependence on some level that God, it's because of you and your gifts and your goodness that I get to eat this delicious, this week I had a pot roast and Cajun macaroni and cheese sandwich. I'm in prime condition to recover from my injuries. And when we pray for that, we say, God, it's your goodness that I get to enjoy this. Even in part, every prayer, every prayer admits dependence. Every time we throw anything to God, whether we do it for 45 minutes or for 10 seconds, is a way to go, God, I'm not big enough for this. I need you. That's why I pray every Sunday before I preach. It's honestly not as much to ask God for help as it is to remind me that I need it. I'm not big enough for this. I need you. Every prayer that we pray, no matter how small or how big, admits dependence. And so if we want to make prayer a daily habit, if we want to finally figure out how to persist in prayer and be devoted to prayer and be obedient to all those verses we talked about at the onset, if we want our prayers to be powerful and effective, then I think what we need to do is practice a daily reduction to prayer. I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. I don't think that we need to practice praying every day. I do, but I think it'll come after this. I think we sometimes put the cart before the horse and we skip it. And we go to God with all of our independence and all of our capabilities and we go, well, I know that I should pray to be a good Christian, so let me try to pray. And what we need to do instead is the very first thing we need to do is daily reduce ourself to the need to pray. Do you know that this is actually how Jesus prays? When the disciples went to him and they said, hey, can you teach us how to pray? You pray differently than us. Can you teach us to pray? The very first thing he does, he gives us a pattern, doesn't he? Gives us lines to recite. He gives us a pattern to follow. The very first words out of his mouth, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. God, you are big. We call this adoration. God, you are awesome. God, you are wonderful. God, you are the creator. God, you are holy. You are different. May your will persist here as it does in heaven. May your will be done. We start every prayer. God, you are big and I am small. God, I need you and I am insufficient. God, will your will be done, not my will be done. And it puts us in this place where we are reduced to prayer. So I think we need to practice a daily reduction to prayer. Daily admitting I am insufficient for my tasks today. Now, if you're a thinking person, that exercise of daily reducing yourself to prayer will force you to ask the question, what am I inadequate for? If you're a thinking person at all, you'll want to know, for what am I inadequate? What do I need to get done that I can't handle? What do I need to appeal to God for? And in this exercise of thinking through, for what am I inadequate, we will arrive at these great callings that we have on our life that we sometimes forget. If you're a husband or a wife, do you know that your role is far more than to simply love your spouse? According to Scripture, my understanding is that my goal, my job with Jen, is to serve her like Christ loved the church, to lay my life down for her, and to do everything I can to be a tool in the hands of God to make her as beautiful and as spiritually vibrant as is possible, to help her become the best version of herself. I'm not adequate to that task. Her job is to be a tool in the hands of God that makes me into the most respectable, lovely, godly, spiritually healthy version of myself possible. Nobody is adequate for that task. How can she do that without prayer? Our job is to raise Lily, and not just to raise her so that she goes to a good school and has a nice life, but to raise her, to release her into the wild with as little baggage to undo with a therapist as possible, who loves God, who knows him, and knows him more intimately than Jen and I ever did. That's our job. We're not adequate to that task. You're called to be pastors in your workplace. We are all a member. If you're a Christian, you're a member of the royal priesthood. You are called to be pastors in your workplace. Jesus tells you in the Sermon on the Mount that other people, if you're a Christian, other people should see your good works and so glorify your Father who is in heaven without you ever talking to them about who you believe in. Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians that we are led in procession by Jesus and that through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. You are inadequate to that task. You have no choice but to rely on God to help you accomplish those things in that day. When someone asks you a difficult question and you realize they've opened the door for a spiritual conversation, you're inadequate for that conversation. You need the Spirit. You need to say, God, help me here. Give me ears to hear and give me wisdom to speak. When we practice a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer and admit our inadequacies before God, what he will do is bring to light all the wonderful, beautiful, grand things that his word calls us to, to live a life worthy of the calling that we have received. And in the face of those, we'll have no choice but to say, I can't do that myself. And that will drive us to prayer, to God. And in doing that, in a constant reduction of ourselves, we have reminders of the tasks to which we are called. In the face of those, we feel inadequate. We run to God in prayer. And because of our mindset and our posture before the Lord every day, by to Scripture? Be devoted to prayer? Be a person who is characterized by prayer? You want to be obedient to that seemingly impossible command in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. I think it begins with a daily reduction of ourselves to prayer. Daily admitting our inadequacies and admitting our need for God so that we might accomplish just in that day what he wants us to accomplish in that day and that that knowledge will drive us to a prayer with him all the time. I know it's a lofty goal. Pastors say stuff like this a lot. But I really do want grace to be a place that's devoted to prayer, that's characterized by prayer. I know we have some people here who all you have to do in this sermon is nod your head because you're already doing this stuff. You're some of our warriors and you pray all the time. We need more of those. We need people praying for our families. We need people praying for the children's ministry. We need people who come and sit in this space and touch seats and pray for the people who sit there. We need to be a church that prays. And I think the key to getting into that habit is daily confessing our need to do that, is daily reducing ourselves to prayer. And I hope that we will. If that's not part of your life right now, then I would encourage you, make it a part of your life this week. This week, daily reduce yourself to prayer. This week, every day, just get up and say, God, I need you today, and tell them the things you need them for. And let me also tell you this, if praying isn't part of your normal habit, just pray until you're done praying. If you pray for a minute, nobody cares. Pray for a minute. Pray for 60 minutes, great, good for you. Pray for 60 minutes. Pray until you're done praying and then go and do what God's called you to do that day. But I would challenge you this week, for one week, if it's not a part of your regular habit, to daily this week reduce yourself to prayer. Now, I'd like to invite you all to pray with me, and the band will come up, and we'll have a song, and then we've got a special thing that we're going to do at the end. Father, you're good. You love us. You're merciful to us. You call us back to you. Your goodness, like a fetter, binds our wandering hearts to you. Father, if there's anybody wandering, I pray that you would draw them in. God, I pray that if we are not characterized by prayer, that we would be. Lord, help us reduce ourselves to prayer. Help us not wait for life to do that for us. Show us the things that you've called us to for which we are inadequate. Let us be the husbands and the fathers and the wives and the mothers and the friends and the employees and employers that you've created us to be. May we be a people and a church and individuals who are characterized by a devotion to prayer, Father. God, may you work in my own life that I might set the pace for that too. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

Good morning. My name is Jim Adams. I'm one of your elders, well actually an elder in training. Hopefully by the end of the year I'll be one of your elders. I want to read for you today Psalms 127. It's another one of the songs of ascent and it's generally a credit to Solomon, wise King Solomon. I think you'll understand why when I read. Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain. In vain you rise early and you stay up late, toiling for food to eat, for he grants sleep to those he loves. Sons are a heritage from the Lord, children a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate. Thank you, Jim. I believe you got what it takes. You'll be a full elder in no time. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday. I'll just tell you right up front, off the top, this is a different Sunday than we normally have. This is really a family talk masquerading as a sermon that I'm about to do. So I would tell you this, if this is your first Sunday with us, they're not normally like this. I'm also not talking to you today. Okay, so whatever I say, I'm not asking you for anything. I'm not implying that you should do anything. I hope that you'll come see us again on a normal Sunday. But every now and again, it falls on us as a church to have a Sunday like this, because I want to take our collective focus and place it on what we believe. And when I say we, I mean the elders, what we believe God wants us to do next as a church. So this morning is going to feel a little different. I want us to focus this morning on our campaign. You've probably noticed when you come in the wall opposite the sound booth in the lobby, there's a blueprint of a church, a nice looking blueprint with floor plans and everything. And then there's a facade that you've seen, and it's our goal to build that on four acres of land around the corner on Litchford. And this morning, I want us to talk about it because, A, I haven't talked about it in over a year from here. I've written a letter about it once or twice. I may have emailed about it, but I haven't spoken about it corporately in over a year. And it's time that we do that. More than that, we started this in February of 2020. And so many of you in the room have not been here and were not here when we were talking about this as a church and why we were deciding to do it and move ahead with the pursuit of a permanent home in North Raleigh. And so a lot of us simply need to be caught up and informed on what we're doing and why we are doing it. To do that, I wanted us to see a video really quick. This video is on our webpage. The first part of the video is the video that we used to launch the campaign back in 2020. And then the second part of the video is an update that we gave after we acquired the land that came out of that campaign. So I think it'll help if we watch this together and then I'm going to kind of fill in the blank with some more of the story. So let's watch this video. to strengthen families, build faiths, and knit together a wonderful community of His people. But because there has always been a more urgent struggle or need, the dream of having our own home has not yet been realized. Now, however, we see that we are entering into a time of health. We believe that it is time for us as a church to look outward once again and dream big dreams about how God might use us to build His kingdom here. We continue to believe that having our own permanent home is a part of God's plan for us and is critical to our ministry and our community. We believe that after 20 years of hoping, right before COVID changed the world forever. And even in the midst of the uncertainty, even though we had months at a time where we weren't meeting as a body in a building, the money continued to come in and God continued to provide. And from that campaign, we were able to purchase the land that I'm standing on right now at 7600 Litchford Road. I am standing in the future home of Grace Raleigh. In a few years time, there will be a building right here where I am. And I am so excited for this opportunity. Thank you. And from the very beginning, it's not been about building a building. To us, it's about taking the next step of obedience that we believe God wants us to take. We believe that it's God's will that there would be a building right here where I'm standing, that there would be children filling the hallways, and there would be people coming each week into this space to learn more about Jesus, to get loved closer to Him. We believe that God wants to put grace here in this community to share His love and spread His love and build His kingdom right here in this community. We hope this becomes a place where people hang out and gather, that it's used every day, and that people are connected to Jesus and connected to one another more and more here. It's our ardent prayer that generations of people who call grace home would be connected to Jesus here, would be connected to one another, and that from this place, we can love on this community for decades in the future. You know, what's fun is watching yourself age in real time in front of 200 of your closest friends. It's a year later and a year grayer and a year thinner, but that's how it goes. So that's roughly the background. To give you a little bit more details, because I want you to see how God's been with us every step of the way, this actually started. The dream of having a permanent home has been here since the beginning. It's always been the desire of the people of Grace that we would do this. Back in 2000 when we were founded as Grace Community Church. But we didn't have a time or a place where we could realize that dream. And then in the fall of 2018, we went on an elder retreat. And when we went on the elder retreat, two of our elders, Burt Banks and Bill Reith, who were here this morning, and were over there next door praying before the service like they do every week. They came to the elders and they said, hey, we've come up with a 10-year plan that we'd like to discuss. And the rest of the elders were like, okay, seems presumptuous, but what you got? And they laid out their hopes and dreams for grace. And part of that was, hey, it's high time we start to pursue a permanent home. And so out of that, we formed a campaign committee in 2019, chaired by Tom Proctor, and populated by some other people in the church to figure out how to go about this campaign. We determined that we needed to raise $1.5 million. This was pre-COVID, and so at the time, we genuinely believed that would get done everything that we thought we needed to get done to have a space. And we opened up our search. We were willing to buy another building or another church, move into a church that had moved out, anything like that. Everything was on the table, but we were tasked, the committee was, how do we raise the money? How should we go about the campaign? And we read a book by an expert who's done hundreds of campaigns all over the country and did the research that we felt like we needed to do. We talked to some other committees who had also done it. And the recommendation to the elders from our committee was that we needed to do a silent campaign first. And in a silent campaign, somebody, usually the senior pastor, sits down with the 10 to 15 most impactful givers in the church, the people with the highest capacity to give the most. And I would sit down with them and I would say, hey, listen, here's what we're going to do. I'd love for you to pray about being a part of that. And then make an ask. The book says that you're supposed to ask for three times what they give annually, which seems absurd to me. But that was the guidance. And so we go to the elders and we say, this is what we think we need to do. And the elders served us really well in that moment because they said essentially, absolutely not. That's not who we are as a church. That's not what we want to do. Let's just make an ask, one ask, and let everybody respond how they want to respond and trust the Holy Spirit to get this done. And I responded to that person by saying, that sounds great. Tomorrow, are you going to go walk through the forest and sing with the animals? Because that doesn't seem too practical. We have something we have to do here. And they kept pushing back on me and pushed back on the committee and they said this is how we think we need to do it one of the reasons I've come around to understanding that that was the exact right way to handle things is I've been very careful during this campaign to not value gifts based on amount but but we value gifts based on sacrifice. I would hate to have had a meeting with a high capacity giver and not have met with some of our young families who don't have the capacity to give like that just yet, but are sacrificing in order to do it. Who am I to say which party is making the greater sacrifice? So we don't want to differentiate the gifts based on amount. We just want everybody to participate. And so I'm so glad that we didn't go about it that way. So then in February of 2020, we had four weeks. It was a Grace is Going Home campaign. Four weeks capped off with a Pledge Sunday. And I talked about evangelism and discipleship. I didn't talk about the future. I talked about who we are as a church and what we want to be. Not in a building, but as a people. And then on March the 1st, we had Pledge Sunday. And we had sent everybody out cards and asked you to bring in your pledge card. And at the end of the service, we're going to submit them together. And we collected them in the offering baskets. The goal is to raise 1.5. I, in my prayers, was very hesitant that this was going to get done, a little bit doubtful. And I was just praying that God would make it clear. And my thought was, if we get 800,000 pledged, that'll be a pretty good indication from God that we're moving in the right direction and this is what we need to do. If we have 300,000 pledged, we'll know, well, mud in our eye, we're going to look stupid for this, but I guess we're not going to do it right now. But I wanted it to be clear. We had brought in Tom Ledoux, our wonderful finance director. He lives out of state, but we brought him in so that he could be there on Pledge Sunday and tally up the pledges. So Tom did that. So Sunday afternoon, March the 1st, he called me, and he told me that we had $1.3 million pledged, which absolutely blew me away. By the middle of the week, the pledges were up to $1.5 million. Exactly what we wanted. I couldn't believe it. March the 8th, I stood here, and I announced to all of us, this is what's been pledged. This is amazing. And we celebrate it as a church of what God was doing for us. March the 15th, we didn't meet again for two years because of COVID. And there was a lot of financial uncertainty at the beginning of COVID. It's the last thing in the world we're going to do while the stock market is spiraling and everyone's going to Walmart at five in the morning to try to get bread is email you and be like, by the way, you pledged $10,000. How's that coming along? So we didn't, we just let it lie because we didn't want to be obtuse and ridiculous. And even though we did very little to keep our focus on it during those two years of COVID, $1.6 million came in, not 1.5. What those campaign experts will tell you is you do the silent campaign, you do the silent ask, you do it strategically, then you just need to know your operating budget is going to suffer and you're only going to bring in about 80% of what is pledged, not grace, by not paying attention to it at all God brought in 1.6 million dollars we finished in the black every year once we had the money we assembled our building committee with a commercial banker to commercial real estate agents and some. And me, because I'm highly qualified for that. And we started conducting a search. We looked and we looked and we looked. And finally, Wes Ward, one of our elders, said, hey, I found some land. It's three slots of land put together that's being sold as a chunk. But it's not showing up on any commercial real estate sites. So the land that we have on Litchford is three individual homes. So it's three different plots. But a realtor bought the largest home or the largest plot and then convinced the other two neighbors to sell with him. And then he listed it. But he didn't list it commercial. So all the people that would scoop in and outbid us didn't know it was there. It's like God just gifted us this perfect parcel of land, surrounded by a new neighborhood that's going in, across the street from Northridge, surrounded by another neighborhood on our left, literally surrounded with homes. We are in the middle of a neighborhood. It's perfect. On a road we all know well. And we were able to acquire it in a whirlwind process in the summer of, I think, 22. It was amazing. And then we began the process of meeting with an architect. We formed another committee, because we're churches. We like committees. We formed another committee. It was important to me that we would get voices from every corner of the church, trusted people who wanted to speak into this, and we began the design process. And the building that you saw is the result of that process. And obviously my picture in that building is a really stupid joke because if I ever tried to actually do that, they would fire me that day. Okay, so that's not, we're not, if this is your first time with us, we're not that kind of church. And all along the way, we believed that God was with us. We believed that he was encouraging us to take this step as a body of believers. That this is what he wanted to do. We talk a lot at Grace about being step-takers. It's one of our values. It's one of our traits. It's the way we talk about discipleship. Everybody has a step of obedience that God wants them to take. It's our job to identify it and have the faith and courage to take it. We believe that this is the next step for grace to take as a body, as a church. This is our collective next step. We believed it then in 2018. We believed it in 2020 when we shared it with everybody, when we shared our dream. We believed that God was with us and it was what we were supposed to do as the money came in, even though we didn't ask for it. And we've believed it since we had to come back to you and go, hey, listen, the plan didn't go like we thought it was going to go. We need to raise an additional $2 million to be able to get this done, but we think we can do it. And so last fall, we launched another campaign and said, let's try to give this a two-year horizon and get over the hump. You've got your bulletins. On the back of it is just a little bit of financial information that basically tells you for all intents and purposes, we're about halfway home on that. But I'm talking to you about it this morning because just like we believed then that this is what God wants us to do, we continue to believe that now. We continue to believe that establishing a permanent home is the right thing for grace to do and that this is the right time to do it. If you were to ask me why, I think the most succinct, honest, compelling reason to me is the inadequacies of our current facility. You've never brought a single person to this church that said, you know, I don't know about the service and the people weren't very nice, but you got a beautiful facility. How many weddings do you do here a year? I've done two weddings here. Both of them happened whenever that hurricane came through about four or five years ago. It was, how long ago was it? It was your wedding. 2018. They got hurricaned out of their venue and so they came here that weekend. Those are the two weddings we've done in this space. This space and this location, God forgive me, we're grateful for it, stinks. It does. We all know it. Our location's terrible. We are not positioned geographically to reach the people that we're best equipped to reach. None of our neighbors come to church here. When we go to Litchford, a bunch of our neighbors are going to come to church here. This facade is awful. We're across from a big lot that I think is going out of business. Lord knows what's going to be over there now. We now have new neighbors. We had a fish store for years and we always laughed about walking past the aquarium store to get your children. And, and that was a big joke. Well now jokes on us. Cause you know, who's there now? Trim carpenters. You know what they do every day from 7.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m.? They fabricate. They run a planer and a saw, and Aaron complains about it. Because you can't concentrate. And you can't even hear anything in the one meeting room. The large room that we have, that's our conference room slash children's space. You can't hear anything in there when they're fabricating. And when we are here, we're beholden to our landlord. Raise the rates, charge what they want, kick us out, sell to someone else who doesn't want a church as an occupant. We are not in control of our own future here. And when I think about the inadequacy of the space, I think about it for two groups of people. I think about it for us, for the grownups, and then I think about it for the kids. For us, I don't know if you know this, but every night of the week, Sunday through Thursday, people are meeting here. We are now full of small groups. We've had to ask favors of some small group leaders. We've had to rearrange some things. We've had to ask groups to change nights or to change times so that we can accommodate everybody who wants to use our space. And I was told that there's a large group that meets in here in the evenings and the lights are so dim that a lot of people have a hard time reading their notes and writing things down. And frankly, I don't want to dump several thousand dollars of money into an auditorium that we're leaving. So we're just going to let it be dim now. Use your phone like old people at a restaurant if you have to. I don't know if you know this, but I can't see Jason Ashburn anymore because I just moved behind the pole. How about a church without one of those? Does that sound nice? Every week we hear our kids. If you're on a committee, you know we have no place to meet. White tables, fold-out chairs, that's fine. We're not highfalutin around here. And that's not going to stop us from making disciples. But it does highlight the inadequacy of our space. I just mentioned about eight different committees. None of them had a good place to meet. I get really concerned for our kids. We are bursting at the seams with children now. One of the things that's so striking to me about Grace is going into COVID, February of 2020, about 12 to 13% of our Sunday morning attendance consisted of children 10 and younger. Do you know what it is now? 33. Last year, it was 25%. Now it's 33%. We'll have 130 people in this room, and we'll have 44 kids spread out throughout the rest of the church. We are out of space with our kids' ministry. If you have a toddler that you dropped off this morning, you dropped them off in what was a storage closet a month ago. See all this stuff? See all this junk over here? Look, have you ever noticed it? All this crud under sheets so you don't see it. We have no storage. We have tables tucked in things. We are crammed in every nook and cranny of this place. And we still have to throw things out left and right. Our fourth and fifth graders meet in this back room across from a dirty kitchen with chairs in the hallway and tables jamming things up. There's like this much space that you can just get in and then go to the door. If you have a child in second or third grade, they don't even have a space. They meet in the copy room. It wasn't until Facelift Sunday in September that we were able to move some things out of there to make more space for them and actually put a stinking decoration on the wall so it felt like they were in their own space on a Sunday morning. You know what's next? I'm not kidding around with this because we keep getting more kids. You know where they're going to start meeting after the next time we grow? When we can get some more volunteers. All we're waiting on is volunteers and then we're going to split a class and put them there. My office. My desk is against the wall. I have a whiteboard. I have a lot of space. We're going to start using the senior pastor's office for children's space. That's fine. I do not care. But here's what I know, is we don't want that experience for our kids. We want our children growing up in spaces that feel like they belong to them. We want enough space for our kids to be able to run around. Did you see in the video the playground on the outside? Do you think that they would like that more than this? Because right now, the auditorium doubles as a playground after church is done. They can't wait to come around and run in circles and smile and knock each other over. And it's awesome. It's one of my favorite things about Sunday morning is watching the chaos in here. But man, I'd love for them to have a playground. I would love to be able to do a Grace's Big Night Out at Grace. Did you see that outdoor space where there's going to be, there's a kitchen. And there's going to be a slide-up window for the kitchen so we can prepare things, bring it outside. There's going to be TVs. Small groups can gather there. People can hang out there. We can have parties there. We want people coming from the community to come play on our playground and sit there and talk to one another, even if they don't go to grace. We want those spaces. But the space that we have here is inadequate for who we want to be. It's inadequate for where we want to go as a church. And here's why I chose this psalm. Because I think it's a good thing for us to reflect on as we consider establishing a permanent home together. Here's a big reason why. Verses 3-5 of Psalm 127. Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from Him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their opponents in court. Grace, our quiver is very full. We have a whole generation of kids that we're bringing up, teaching to be kingdom builders, to connect to Jesus and to connect to one another. I believe we have a responsibility to them. I believe it's solemn and sacred. And I know that many of us, we've already raised our kids. But this is an opportunity for those who have adult children now to leave a legacy here too. I want my children's children playing on that playground. I want people who never knew us and never met us to come together and worship God there. I want it to be a footprint, a stamp in North Raleigh where God's kingdom goes out from and comes to. We have an opportunity to do something really special. And I hope that we'll do it. Here's another reason why. When I say our facilities are inadequate for what we want to accomplish, I also mean that they actively turn people away. We have friends, Jen and I do. Not a lot, but we have some. We have friends that we invited here. Come to our church. And they came. And they loved it. They loved our people. They got involved in a small group for a short time. But eventually, they stopped coming. And we didn't know why, and I never press. When people come and then they don't, I have the hardest time reaching out to them. I don't want to make anybody feel bad or awkward or weird. But we were able to talk to them. Jen was able to talk to the mom. And the mom just said, yeah, I love it. I wish we would go, but my husband just says it doesn't feel like a church. He just doesn't want to be at a place that feels like that. And listen, I think that's stupid, okay? I don't accept that as an adequate reason. It's immature. However, we can never mature him in Christ if our building prohibits that. This space is a hurdle for people that have to, they have to overcome it to want to be a part of grace. And I know that you have friends too that you've invited that have said to you because you've told me, yeah, great people, incredible pastor, okay worship, but it doesn't feel like church. Let me know when y'all get a building. Those kids, listen, my friends' kids should be in church every week. They should be making friends with other people who love Jesus, whose parents love Jesus. They should be getting discipled. They should be taught by our wonderful volunteers. That couple should be getting Jesus poured into their life every week. They should be coming and worshiping with us. The Holy Spirit should be working on them, making them more like Christ in character and sanctifying them. That family needs a church. Every family needs a church. I don't think every family needs grace. I'm not trying to make that point, but I think every family needs a church. And that family doesn't have a church right now because the one that they feel closest to and most connected with isn't working for them because our facilities are prohibitive for them. This space is causing us to not do all that we could, to not be all that we can be. It's keeping us from walking the path that we believe God wants for us. So I think it's time for us to get this done. And here's the thing. I've been very passive about this campaign. I was passive about it in COVID. Didn't put it in front of us. We don't have a thermometer in the lobby. I'm not sending out emails. We're not saying, hey, you've pledged this much and given this much, just letting you know. We're not putting it in front of people. I don't talk a lot about the campaign, even in Discover Grace, where we still continue to grow. I know we have a lot of young families, but if you come to Discover Grace, what you'll see is we continue to maintain this generational diversity that is wonderful and characteristic of grace. But you don't hear me talking about the campaign a lot. I have people who care deeply about it that get mad at me and tell me that I need to talk about it more. Why aren't we talking about this? Why aren't you asking people, what are we doing? I have to get it. I have to get the business about three times a year from some folks. The passive approach to the campaign has been intentional. It's not because I'm scared to talk about it. It's not because I forget. It's not because I don't think it's important. There's two big reasons why I've been passive. Well, there are three. The first is when we did the campaign, when we launched it originally, we chose a passive tact. The Holy Spirit did it. It worked. And so I learned from that. And thought, that's what we should continue to do. But two bigger reasons are one, me. I've never wanted it to be about my ego. I've never wanted it to be about what I got done. I don't know if you know this, but a big notch in the belt of a pastor is to take a church from a non-permanent facility to a permanent facility. A big notch in the belt, a big career milestone for guys like me and women is to take a church into a building into its very first one. That's a big accomplishment. And I abhor the idea of making this about me, of asking you to give your money to the kingdom of Nate. And so I have stayed intentionally as far away from it as I can because I don't want my ego involved. I don't want it to be about me. I don't want it to feel like something I am doing. I want it to be something that we are doing. I want it to be something that the Holy Spirit has stirred in us to do. I want it to be something that we come together collectively and don't make it about our egos either. Make it about what we believe God wants us to do. The biggest reason I've been passive is because I didn't want us to take our eye off the ball. I felt like as a church, we had bigger fish to fry than building a building and getting a permanent home. We needed to make disciples. We needed to grow in our youth ministry and our children's ministry. We need a strong small groups ministry where people grow and spiritual health flourishes. And I didn't want for a second for us to start to think that building a building is the most important thing that we can do as a church, not with all this other hard work to do. And so I didn't want us to take our eye off the ball and make it something that it's not. But here's what I think now, and here's why we're talking about this. In light of our health, we have a healthy staff team. Our staff team's great. I love every one of them. I think they love me. They tell me they do, just like my mom. We have a very healthy staff culture. We have the right people in the right places, and to my knowledge, no one's going anywhere for a long while. We have a healthy elder board. We disagree well. I won't say what it was about, but a few months back, we had the most contentious elder meeting I've ever been in. We were voting on an issue that was important to us. There was disagreement there. It was the most fractured vote that there's ever been. And let me tell you something. You should like this. My team lost. The senior pastor did not steamroll the elders. They are unsteamrollable. They're healthy. And they push back. And then we left that contentious meeting where we did not agree. And we agreed. And we were fine. And there was no calls to be made afterwards because someone got upset or their feelings hurt. We're healthy on the elder board. Our student ministry is flourishing. Finally. Kyle, God bless him, he's at home visiting his nana or baba right now. One of the two. I don't know. And so he's not here this morning. But y'all, he worked so hard over COVID. And we have a youth group now that's growing and flourishing and thriving. I've already told you we're bursting at the seams with our kids ministry. Aaron's done a phenomenal job with that and with our volunteers. We have healthy small groups. Our discipleship pathway is in place. We know that we're supposed to be disciples of Christ. We know that we're designed to be kingdom builders. We've installed our five traits. We've reminded you of those. We are ready to go. And so in light of all that health, I think now is the time to take our collective focus and put it on getting this thing done and getting into this building. It's time for that last half of the two million to come in. So here's what I'm going to ask of you. If you have been faithfully giving towards the campaign from the very start, you filled out your pledge card in 2020, or you made your donation in 2020, and you've been doing end of year stuff, and you've been hitting your pledge. Just keep doing that. Just keep it up. We're so grateful. We're so grateful. I'm not asking you for another thing, okay? I would ask us all, as we think about end-of-year giving this year, I know that many of us are in the habit of giving money at the end of the year for different reasons. I would love for you to consider the building campaign as a target for your end-of-year giving, whatever that might be for you. I also want to talk to another group of people in the church and do this as delicately as I can. I've had some of you, and I've heard from other people that have taken this posture. We're going to give to the campaign. We believe in this. We're going to do this. I am going to do this, whatever your case is. But I'm going to wait until we get a little bit closer to the finish line because that money is parked in a place where it's making eight or 10% right now. And it's best for everyone to just leave it there to accrue as long as possible. Fine. Fine. I understand that. I do not have a financial mind. I'm not going to advise for or against that. I have no idea. But if that's you, I want to ask you a favor. The first time we did the campaign, somebody from the church wanted to meet with me. They met with me and they said, hey, listen, we have decided that we're going to give X amount of dollars to the campaign. We're're gonna give it at this increment every year for the next three or five years But if at some point you get close to the finish line and you want to call on it to get us there you can and so once we got within that range of money I Text texted him a GIF of someone from 30 Rock, or from Parks and Rec, saying, money please. And they wired it over. If that's you, if you have an amount that you know you want to give, you guys have talked about it, you've prayed about it, but you're just holding back until we're a little bit closer because of where it's sitting. I understand all of that. But if that's you, would you have that conversation that my friend had with me? Would you have that with Tom Ledoux? Would you email him? He's our finance director, finance at gracerolly.org. If you need to know how to get in touch with him, I can help you out with that. But if that's you, would you just tell him that so that we know once we get close, we have X amount that's going to get us there? The other group of people I want to talk to are the folks that have come since 2020, since we started the campaign. You weren't here for the beginning. You've never pledged, nor should you have. But you've started coming here now and now Grace is home. I would love for you to consider getting involved with this campaign. I would love for you to consider partnering us and letting us walk together to do this because I believe that the whole church needs to galvanize around this. Even if we had somebody who said, you know what, I want to give it all. I would say, I don't know that that's a good idea because I think that we need to come around this as a church and as a body together. So if you're newer to grace and you've never given, I would love for you to consider doing that. And if you've never given to grace, and I know all the different reasons why we might hesitate to do that, and it takes a long time to believe in a place enough to start giving that part of our resources to it, that's fine. But if you've never given and you feel compelled to begin, what I would love for you to do is begin to give to the building campaign. Get in the habit of giving. And then once we get there and we're going and we're building, keep giving that but give it to operational. So that's the ask that I'm making of you. Pray, please, about what you might do at the end of this year if you're inclined to give in that way. If you have an amount you want to give, can you kind of flag that for us and let us know? And then if you've never given to grace, maybe this is a good time to start. But now is the time to get this thing done. And I want to end it this way. I love the beginning of this psalm. 127. Because it says this, What Solomon says here is if the Lord's not in it, what's the point? If we build a church and God's not in it, what's the point? It's why I took the time to walk you through the process that's gotten here because I want you, like me, to be able to see God's hand in all of these things and to have confidence and faith that he continues to remain with us. So what we're going to do is we're going to pray, but we're going to pray differently than we have since I've gotten here. I've never done anything like this, so I'm just going to ask you to trust me and go with me. But I want us to pray together. I want us to make a statement of unanimity as we believe this is our focus. So I'm going to come down here and I'm going to invite up a couple of groups of people. The first group I'd like to join me up here are current elders. So if you're a current elder, if you'd please come stand with me, I would appreciate that greatly. The next group that I'd love to come stand with us is former elders. If you've ever served the church as an elder, if you've ever been asked by your peers to lead us, would you come join us? And now I'd like to see the people who were here in 2000 at the beginning of this dream. If you were here in 2000, would you come up, just stand around the perimeter. We'll expand out. Stay right here. And now the rest of us who call grace home, who believe in this step, I'm going to invite you to stand, find somebody, touch people on the wall. But I want us to hold hands together. Can we do that? Stand up, find someone's hand to hold. And let's have a moment where we pray together. Wonderful. Please pray with me. Father, we thank you for this church. We thank you for what it means to us. We thank you for the people that you've brought here, for the love that fills this room and the lobby and these hallways every weekend. We thank you for a rich community that you've brought us. And we thank you that we get to be the light that shows Jesus to other people in our community. God, we pray for grace. We pray for your blessing on us. We ask God earnestly that you would galvanize us around this goal of getting into this building. Bring in the last million dollars, Father. Bring it in quick. Let us go. We're itching. God, may each one of us consider in our hearts and in our families what you would have us do as we seek to accomplish this together. And we know, God, that if you are not in it, it doesn't matter. So show us your presence in this process. God, help us to do our part as you promised to do yours. We pray all these things together in your son's name. Amen. All right, guys, thank you so much for coming. Have a great week. We will see you next week for a normal service with a sermon and everything.

We always talk about the stories of Moses and Abraham and David and Paul. We know all about the boys, but what about the girls? Why don't we talk more about the people in the Bible who are like me? When I read the Bible, I see story after story of women who are amazing. I see the courage and hope of Miriam and the boldness of Mary Magdalene. I see the consistent and quiet obedience of Mary, the girls of the Bible are pretty awesome. And when we take the time to learn their stories, we will be amazed at what God can do with someone who is consistently, humbly, and lovingly faithful. Nice. All right. Good morning, everyone in the room. Good morning, everyone online. My name is Kyle, and I am the student pastor here. And as you can probably tell, I am not Nate, who is our head pastor. For any of you guys who are new, who are like, I don't know who Kyle or Nate are, I'm just a student pastor. And I'm thrilled to announce that the reason that I am on stage preaching this morning is because Nate and his wife, Jen, have just welcomed their new son, John, into the world. And so, yeah, let's get a little, yeah, let's get some cheers going for that. I mean, absolutely incredible blessing. I'm not exactly sure of the birthday, but I know I got a text with a picture on Friday, so we're going to go with the 30th and just, if I'm wrong, then we will correct it next week. But I mean, just such an incredible blessing. Like it has been such a celebration on our staff group text, just of celebrating Nate. And on Facebook, you'd think Nate's about to go like Facebook famous with how many people have commented and liked the pictures of his son. And it has been awesome. And honestly, too, guys, just to be aware of it for a second, it doesn't, or I guess to put it differently than that, it's not lost on me the fact that the last time that I was asked by Nate to step in and preach for him was when he had to take a little bit of time off because he and Jen were basically spending their last few days with Jen's dad, John, and dealing with that loss of a father and of a grandfather far too early. And how beautiful and how incredible is it that this morning, that the next time that I was asked by Nate to step in and preach so he could take a little bit of time off to be with family, that it is because they are celebrating the new life and the birth of their son, John. And so real quick, I just wanted to take a second and just pray for them real quick and just thank God for his blessings. God, thank you for bringing us here this morning. God, thank you just so much for Nate and for Jen and what they mean to our hearts and what they mean to our church and to all of us here this morning. God, I just pray that you are just showering them with joy right now as they have welcomed in John, this beautiful baby boy. And God, we just pray that in the midst of probably a lot of sleeplessness and a lot of unrest, God, that they find places where they can rest, even if it's not physically, where they can just rest in you and in your blessings and in your joy. Amen. So anyways, so with that being said, here I am this morning getting to go through another incredible woman's story within the Bible. And I love the ability to do that. And this morning, we're going to go into the book of Ruth. And one of the things that I think is incredible about Ruth and is noteworthy about the book of Ruth is that you could make a sermon, or excuse me, you could make a series that is called Faithful about the book of Ruth. When you go through Ruth and you see the way that these people live their lives, see the unbelievable ways that Ruth steps out in faith, looking at fear, looking at terror, looking at loneliness, looking at loss, and at every moment choosing to turn to faith. And this morning and next week, we get to spend two weeks talking about the faithfulness of one of the most faithful women and one of the most faithful people in all of the Bible. Before we get going, I do want to mention that in my just imminent and unbelievably high amounts of wisdom, as I thought about the fact that, you know, at some point I'm going to preach this series, these two weeks in Ruth and, you know, John's due date is May 17th. And so that's a few weeks away. And so in my wisdom, I was like, you know what I'm going to do? Because I know how babies work. And I know that sometimes people have babies early. I'm going to start on May 3rd to just get ready. You know, I'm going to be fully ready. That way, if John comes early, Mother's Day, I'm all in. I got it. I'm ready to go. Well, here we were on Friday when I got a text with a baby's picture. And I'm like, this is Nate messing with me. Turns out it wasn't. It was John in the flesh. And so I say that not to give any excuses or not in any way to say anything, except for the fact that this sermon might be a little bit less dialed in. It might be a little bit less polished than sermons you're used to. I know that anybody who's heard me preach before is probably laughing at the fact that I would use polished in my sermons in the same sentence. But I do say that to say that this story, as we read through Ruth 1 together, and we talk through Ruth 1 together, that regardless of how well or how poorly I speak or how polished this sermon is this morning, the truth that is found in Ruth 1 should speak for itself. And so I ask for grace, and I also ask for the fact that even if I am spitting absolute nonsense, that at least this story you will let resonate in your hearts and hopefully walk away learning something by simply hearing this passage of scripture. And so this morning, I actually, I wanted to start off by telling you guys the backstory of actually how I ended up making my way to grace. It's a story that I don't really think I've told that many people. I mean, not for like any reason. I'm not hiding it or whatever, but, you know, I figured it'd be something that would be worth talking about. And it's a story that I love because when I think back on it, it's just pretty wild that it worked out this way because, as a lot of you know, I was working as a student pastor in Atlanta at a church called Greystone. And I was actually working underneath Nate, who was also at Greystone. He wasn't the head pastor, but it was a, you know, it was a bigger staff. And so, so they were like, I guess, levels to the staff. And so I was actually directly under Nate. Well, we left Greystone at about the same time. He came up here, obviously, to enter into being, becoming a head pastor. Woo, exciting. That's us, yay. But I left to kind of go into school and to do some seminary stuff. Well, after about a year of doing that, I realized that as someone who was so used to being in full-time student ministry that when I'm sitting in classes listening to ministry and talking about student ministry, I realized how bored I was and how little I enjoyed learning about these things and talking about these things when I wasn't able to be a part of them. Ministry was great and talking about ministry is great, but doing ministry and actually having interaction and actually having students that are in my life that I love and that I get to be in their lives, when I was missing out on that, I was just like, dude, I don't even know if this is worth it. And so I decided, you know what? I'm going to try to get back into the church. We'll figure out what exactly it looks like and with school and all this stuff, but I'm going to try to get back into the church. So, you know, I tried to explore some avenues. I found that some churches were doing stuff. Nothing really worked out well. At about the same time, one, I texted Nate. I said, yo, you're a head pastor and head pastors know things. So if you hear of anything, I'm trying to get back into the game, baby, basically is what I said. And at the same time, my dad's first pastor that he was a student pastor under reached out to me. He was the head pastor at this Baptist church that was right outside of Athens, Georgia. Now, Athens, Georgia is where I lived. I went to UGA, Go Dawgs. Yep, we all agree. Tons of people are nodding in the building. I know you're all nodding at home for the good dogs. But I was living in Athens at the time. My brother and sister-in-law lived in Athens. I was hanging out with them most every day. A lot of my friends still lived in Athens. My parents even, even though they were in South Carolina, only lived about an hour and a half, two hours away. Everybody was in Georgia. Everybody was very near Athens or Atlanta or somewhere around there. And so when someone calls and says, hey, we have a job available doing student ministry where you don't have to leave this place you love and you don't have to leave these people you love, well, then you listen. Especially when it's a pastor who you know and who you already know, this is a man that I would love to work for because I know that my dad loved working for him. And so as I'm talking with Nate, because Nate texted back and said, well, you know, it's funny, we actually are looking for someone as well. And so I'm kind of, at the same time, I'm interviewing in Georgia, I'm interviewing here. And obviously it progressed a little bit quicker in Georgia because I could just get out to the church. And so, you know, I was able to go check out the church. It was this beautiful Baptist church. One of those Baptist churches that, you know, it's kind of just in the middle of town where it's just like, oh my gosh, this is just like beautiful and awesome. And there's so many people who come in from everywhere. And it sounds like they have like a big thriving student ministry. And all of these things are awesome. And I got to go to a service. I was like, oh, this is cool. This is really nice. This is great. All of these things. And so I actually got a call the night before I was coming up to Raleigh to do some of those same things. And the call was to say, hey, Kyle, we want to hire you as our student pastor. They gave me an offer, and you know, it was a good offer for, I guess, like monetarily as far as like being a student pastor. So that was cool and that was great. Well, so that was what I was sitting on when I drive up to Raleigh for the weekend. And so as I drive up to Raleigh, the first thing that happens is I like meet with Nate. And I'm thinking that Nate and I are and I are just going to be like, you know, gabbing about, you know, what's been going on, all this type of stuff. And, you know, cause I'm like, well, I mean, I know I got Nate on my side. I've already worked with Nate. And then we have this like conversation where I go, oh my gosh, I don't know if Nate wants me to work here. And, and all he was doing was he was grilling me and he was saying, here are these things that I've seen in you in the past. How, like, you know, how have you been able to make strides or Or are these still things that you would consider strengths? All of those things. But right off the bat, I was pretty overwhelmed. But I spend the weekend talking to different people and interviewing and getting to meet staff and came on a Sunday morning. And as I drive up, I'm like, oh, yes, this church is in the side of a storefront. Interesting. That's cool. I like the white letters though. But so I'm like, okay, interesting. And so I come in and obviously, you know, like we have done an incredible job with this space, but obviously like it doesn't really rival like a beautiful Baptist church's sanctuary, you know? And so we're going through these things and we go through service. And then I come on a Sunday night and I get to meet some of the students. And as much as I love meeting these students, I'm kind of hearing about that while there are certainly just some incredible students in this ministry, that there have been a lot of people who've left it. And because of that, it maybe wasn't at quite the healthiest state. And so as I left, I received a job offer from Grace as well. For less money, obviously. This is a smaller church. It is a smaller youth ministry. In no way was I expecting it to be more because I was kind of like, hey, I don't think you understand that I'm young and single and a student pastor. You shouldn't be paying me this much money. That type of thing in the other place. But as I left, you know, I just, I sat there and I'm like, hey, if I made a pro-con list, it's going to be an interesting look. And I was going to bring out a whiteboard and actually make a pro-con list, but I don't know how many of you guys were here the last time we used a whiteboard on stage, but Zach Winston and I, getting it off the stage, almost knocked the TV down and broke a wine glass that was on the table for communion. So we're not going to do that this morning. So just imagine with me a pro con list being on a whiteboard here. But when you look at it, it's like coming to grace means leaving my family. It means that instead of the max distance that I am from my close personal family as being about two hours to the closest that I am to anybody, which was my parents at the time, it was four and a half hours, and then six hours if I wanted to drive to Athens. And not to mention that, but also my friends and all of these things. And I'm choosing a smaller church that seems like the youth ministry might not be quite where the youth ministry was at this other place. And I'm choosing less money. And I mean, like, honestly, like, just like the definition of conless is having to work for Nate. But, you know, so here's all of these things. And I say that to say, when you look at every single decision that I had to make, when I compared the two, and when I made a pro-con list of what it would look like to go to Grace versus go to this other church in Georgia, from every human perspective, there was literally only one decision, and it was screaming at my face saying, you've got to take this job in Georgia. But here I am. And so, yeah, woo! Thank you for the claps. That's nice and funny. And I think that this first chapter of Ruth helps at least a little bit explain why it is that I'm here. To give a little background behind Ruth, basically what is going on in this time is they are living in Israel, God's chosen people in God's chosen land. You know, Moses had brought his people out of Egypt and, there weren't kings, and so it's instead the time of judges. And so God has given his people his law. These are the laws and the commandments that I ask you to abide by. And the judges were to make sure that those were abiding. I don't know. Whatever. Not important. So because there weren't kings, because there was no earthly ruler, then God kind of reigned supreme in a way that he doesn't. We don't quite see as much now where basically because these were his chosen people and the people who were called to live out his law and called to live out their lives in faith and to trust him and to worship him, when they were doing so, then times were good. Harvests were good. If they weren't, there might be times when armies come in and take over some of the land. There may be times of famine because people aren't living for God. It was just a different time, and it was how the culture was set up during the time of judges. Well, we were in one of those times as we jump into our story. It starts out talking about this woman named Naomi, and Naomi and her husband, Elimelech, were dealing in a time of famine to the point that they realized, hey, like, this is rough. And instead of choosing, instead of making the choice to say, I'm going to trust God to provide what he needs to provide for me and for my family, they instead decide they are going to leave. They're going to grab their two sons and they are going to go into another kingdom. Well, this other kingdom, we'll call it not a friendly. We'll say Moab is like an enemy nation, an enemy country. They're continuously at war. During this time, I read somewhere, it's not actually within the pages of Ruth, but that during this time, there was no love lost between these two kingdoms to the point of like war and battle and all of these things. And so for them to leave Israel and go seek refuge in a kingdom that was not only not God's chosen place and God's chosen people, but an enemy of God, people who were so against God and his people that they wanted to kill him. And so this is where they went. They settled in and Elimelech ends up dying. So Naomi loses her husband and now all she has is her sons. Malan and Chilian, her sons, marry two Moabite women. They marry Ruth and they marry Orpah. They live there for 10 years. And in those 10 years, neither one of them is able to conceive. Neither one of them is able to produce a seed that could lead to them continuing their familial line. In this culture, that was about the most important reason to get married was one, to take care of your family, but two, to raise up a son and raise up a family who is able to take care of your crops, who is able to grow, who's able to take care of your land, who is able to continue your family line. And when your family or when your parents get older to take care of them as well. So in these 10 years, there haven't been any children conceived and her sons die. Both of them die before they're able to conceive. And so now what we're left with, we're left with Naomi, Orpah, and Ruth together. And Naomi, in her overwhelming tragedy, finally realizes that she now has to look her shame in the face. She now has to look her fear and her bad decision in the face and say, I can't provide for myself here. There's nothing that I will be able to do here. I have to return home. She says, I know that the Lord would have me. I mean, she doesn't say this, but like essentially she says, I know the Lord would have me return home because I have to be able to survive. And so I'm going to have to look in the face of people who are probably going to look down on me and see me differently because I chose fear over faith 10 years ago. Coming back in her shame to say, you know what? God is asking me to be here. And so this is where I need to be because I need to survive and I need to be a part of where God has me, even if it means I'm going to be looked down upon. But on their way there, she looks at her daughters-in-law and she says, leave me. Don't be with me anymore. There's no reason for you to follow me back because if you do, if you follow me back, then I can assure you nothing good awaits you. They all weep and they plead with her like, no, we're going to stay with you. You need us. You need us for survival. There's no way you're going to be able to make it alone. But Naomi continues to press on and says, there's literally nothing there for you. I have no, you can't just marry some random man in Israel because you're a Moabite. They won't marry you. Also, I'm too old now to find a husband and much too old to find a husband where I can have another son and you can marry my next son so that you can continue the line and continue in this kinship. So don't go with me. Go back home. Go where your family is. Go where you're comfortable. Go where you know that you at least have some sort of hope at having a family and having a life because coming with me will be no life at all. At this, they all weep again. Clearly, there's so much love between these three women that it's just beautiful. But after it, Orpah says, okay. So she gives her love to these two, and she heads out. But Ruth says, no, I'm staying with you. She says, I don't care what you have to say with me. Stop pleading with me. I'm going to stay with you. And that's where we're actually going to pick up and we're actually going to read. It's in Ruth 1. we're going to stop. How incredible is that? How unbelievable is it that Ruth would say in the face of everything that Naomi is telling me, I'm going to stick with you, Naomi. Let's go, let's head back to the pro-con list. I want you, I want us to understand the implications of what she's saying. Because not only is she saying that by sticking with Naomi, that it probably means that she is going on towards loneliness and singleness, and that will be the end of her family line. Not only is she saying that, which is incredibly devastating, especially in this time, but I know that there's some that like in today's culture, especially some people like, yes, queen, you don't need no man, you know, but also take account that she is taking an elderly woman back and her goal and her mission and the only reason she's doing so is so that she can be a caretaker for this elderly woman who's not even her mom, just a mother-in-law that she has grown to love. So the rest of her life is going to be meant for just finding food wherever she's able to scrounge up food for a single woman without any land. But not only that, but she is a Moabite woman who is entering into Israel where she is hated. So she is walking into a place where she knows she is going to receive bitter racism. And it's alluded to multiple times later in Ruth that she is entering into a place that actually could be quite harmful to her, that she could experience, she could be hurt, injured, killed, or raped by any of these people because she is considered nothing as a single Moabite woman, as less than nothing by some of these people. What's waiting for her if she doesn't stay with Naomi? She gets to go back to her family. She gets to go back to her home. She gets to go back with the hope and encouragement that I can probably find another husband, that I can finally start a family even though I wasn't able to before. There is no good, satisfactory reason why she should stay with Naomi except that, one, she was being nice to help Naomi out, but I think that what Ruth realized and what Ruth knew in her heart, the reason why it didn't matter how long the list of cons were for entering and how long the pros of going back to her kingdom were. I think she knew in her heart what Daniel knew and what Daniel, I mean, excuse me, Daniel, what David wrote in Psalms 84.10 when he says, better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere. I think what she realized and what she knew without a shadow of a doubt is that the Lord had her staying with Naomi. And that is the only thing that mattered. When I was trying to decide, honestly, I'm going to be honest with you, I wasn't ever really trying to decide. Every stop that I made, every interaction that I had, every single part of my weekend in Raleigh was the Lord yelling at me, Kyle, this is where I have you. And I don't at all mean to, and please do not hear me at all, likening my experience coming to Raleigh with Ruth's experience of giving up her entire life to be a single caretaking woman who is ending her seed. Because I came here and I was overwhelmingly blessed. And I came here with immense hope at what was to come. She left without any hope except that if I am in the will of God, then I know there is always hope because I know that there is no place better to be than inside the will of God than anywhere else. I know for me, I was incredibly thankful because this would have been a very difficult decision for me had God not been literally screaming in my face, this is where I have you. And I don't mean to say that I haven't experienced drawbacks and sadness at the times that I have to miss holidays or birthdays or weddings or the like because my friends and my family are all in Georgia. There are certainly negatives to being in Raleigh versus having taken that job in Georgia, but I promise you that every day I get to wake up knowing that because I chose, honestly, because the Lord made it literally impossible for me to choose anything else, but I got to be in the will of God and it has been unbelievable the blessings that have come from getting to see what it looks like to be, to just choose the will of God. And the point of this morning isn't to look at each one of you guys and say, hey, time to leave your family, time to leave your homes, time to go to another state and work for another Nate. You know, like the purpose of this is not, it's time to give up everything that you hold dear so that you can follow God or it's time to, you know, give up your job or your career or your friends or whatever. Now, hear me saying, it's not not that. Because if the Lord is working in your life and asking you to do so, then that's a conversation to have. And that is a prayer that needs to be thrown out. But every single day, we are faced with decisions on whether we want to act in faith, whether we want to choose faith in this interaction that we have, in this way that we think about something, with the way that we spend our time, with the things that we value. We are having an interaction in our heads on whether or not we are going to choose faith or we are going to choose ourselves. Fear, worry, comfort, all of those types of things because it's a lot easier to make the decision that seems earthly like a good decision. But this morning, what I'm asking you, well, honestly, what I'm telling you is I I am a hundred percent sure that there is no better place to be than inside of the will of God. In big ways, but in small little decisions. When you're in your small group and it feels like it's uncomfortable for me to be honest and to be open and to be vulnerable with these people that are also my friends and I don't know how they'll react to me, that you choose faith and you say, I know that this is best for me and I know that these people, if they can walk beside me knowing me and my full self, then I promise you I will have a better life and a better faith and I will experience more joy. And so I am going to look that fear of how people will see me in the face and say no, because I'm going to be vulnerable and I'm going to be open in this small group and with these friends. Maybe you have co-workers or you have friends that you know need to hear who God is, but you're afraid of how they'll react to you or you're afraid that they'll look at you different or see you different or honestly, you're afraid of the discomfort of having to figure it out or you're just afraid because it's just scary in general to do something like that. Maybe you have a sin that's eating your lunch or overwhelming you, and you're so afraid to open up about it. You're so afraid to fight it because you're so rested in it that it's become the norm, and it's become your comfort, and it's become your reliance, and you're terrified of getting rid of it, and you're even more terrified of people finding out, but you know that as soon as you're able to open up and able to share this sin with somebody that you can maybe for once and for all kick this sin because you have somebody being accountable to you for it. Maybe you need to change your priorities from the fact that obviously we live in a culture where success and our jobs and the money and all of these things are what we should be pursuing and what we should be valuing. But maybe we decide, you know what? I'm going to value God over all of that. And I'm going to make my decisions that I make for God and for his glory and out of where his will is for my life and not simply what is best for my career and my life personally. I'll give the opposite of the student ones and I'll just talk to the parents now because this is one we talk about in students a lot, but parents. Maybe it means that you need to look culture in the face and say, you know what? I know that all these parents are going to look down on me, but I'm going to value my kids' spiritual life and their spiritual walk and their ability to come to church and to be a part of a church community. I'm going to value that more than I value their education and their athletic career and future. I'm going to value their future as someone who grows spiritually and is spiritually healthy and full that also seeks after being inside of the will of God. There are very easy arguments to fight against all of these. There are probably good spiritual arguments to fight against any of these hard decisions where the Lord is asking you to step out in faith. That's why it's faith. Last week we sang, I'm no longer a slave to fear, but I'm a child of God. And I've thought before, is fear really that big of a thing now versus Bible times? Yes. If you aren't experiencing any fear or any worry when it comes to living out your faith, then my question for you is, is it because your faith is so strong and who God has called you to be, and so at every waking moment, every decision is for him, or are you unwilling to step out in faith enough to where fear isn't even an impact or isn't even a factor? I often realize about myself that it's the latter. I don't lack fear because of my faith. I avoid fear at the expense of not doing anything that requires me stepping out in faith. May we not do that this morning. May we not do that this week. May we not do that in our lives. And may we instead just understand the joy and the goodness of God and allow that to bring about a freedom in our hearts to say yes to God at any and every turn, even if it makes literally no sense to us, even if it makes no sense to anybody else around us. Let's pray. God, thank you for bringing us here this morning. God, thank you for an unbelievably beautiful depiction of faith in the book of Ruth, God. Just in Ruth 1, we got three more chapters. Lord, I know that we're not always asked to give up our entire lives and everything about ourselves to follow you and to say yes to you. But God, what I also know is every single day we are faced with choices of whether we say yes to you and your will, or we say yes to us and ours. God, may we have the freedom and the love and the joy and the goodness that we have experienced from you. May that shape our decisions and boldness to say yes to you every single time. God, we love you so much. Amen.

We always talk about the stories of Moses and Abraham and David and Paul. We know all about the boys, but what about the girls? Why don't we talk more about the people in the Bible who are like me? When I read the Bible, I see story after story of women who are amazing. I see the courage and hope of Miriam and the boldness of Mary Magdalene. I see the consistent and quiet obedience of Mary, the girls of the Bible are pretty awesome. And when we take the time to learn their stories, we will be amazed at what God can do with someone who is consistently, humbly, and lovingly faithful. Nice. All right. Good morning, everyone in the room. Good morning, everyone online. My name is Kyle, and I am the student pastor here. And as you can probably tell, I am not Nate, who is our head pastor. For any of you guys who are new, who are like, I don't know who Kyle or Nate are, I'm just a student pastor. And I'm thrilled to announce that the reason that I am on stage preaching this morning is because Nate and his wife, Jen, have just welcomed their new son, John, into the world. And so, yeah, let's get a little, yeah, let's get some cheers going for that. I mean, absolutely incredible blessing. I'm not exactly sure of the birthday, but I know I got a text with a picture on Friday, so we're going to go with the 30th and just, if I'm wrong, then we will correct it next week. But I mean, just such an incredible blessing. Like it has been such a celebration on our staff group text, just of celebrating Nate. And on Facebook, you'd think Nate's about to go like Facebook famous with how many people have commented and liked the pictures of his son. And it has been awesome. And honestly, too, guys, just to be aware of it for a second, it doesn't, or I guess to put it differently than that, it's not lost on me the fact that the last time that I was asked by Nate to step in and preach for him was when he had to take a little bit of time off because he and Jen were basically spending their last few days with Jen's dad, John, and dealing with that loss of a father and of a grandfather far too early. And how beautiful and how incredible is it that this morning, that the next time that I was asked by Nate to step in and preach so he could take a little bit of time off to be with family, that it is because they are celebrating the new life and the birth of their son, John. And so real quick, I just wanted to take a second and just pray for them real quick and just thank God for his blessings. God, thank you for bringing us here this morning. God, thank you just so much for Nate and for Jen and what they mean to our hearts and what they mean to our church and to all of us here this morning. God, I just pray that you are just showering them with joy right now as they have welcomed in John, this beautiful baby boy. And God, we just pray that in the midst of probably a lot of sleeplessness and a lot of unrest, God, that they find places where they can rest, even if it's not physically, where they can just rest in you and in your blessings and in your joy. Amen. So anyways, so with that being said, here I am this morning getting to go through another incredible woman's story within the Bible. And I love the ability to do that. And this morning, we're going to go into the book of Ruth. And one of the things that I think is incredible about Ruth and is noteworthy about the book of Ruth is that you could make a sermon, or excuse me, you could make a series that is called Faithful about the book of Ruth. When you go through Ruth and you see the way that these people live their lives, see the unbelievable ways that Ruth steps out in faith, looking at fear, looking at terror, looking at loneliness, looking at loss, and at every moment choosing to turn to faith. And this morning and next week, we get to spend two weeks talking about the faithfulness of one of the most faithful women and one of the most faithful people in all of the Bible. Before we get going, I do want to mention that in my just imminent and unbelievably high amounts of wisdom, as I thought about the fact that, you know, at some point I'm going to preach this series, these two weeks in Ruth and, you know, John's due date is May 17th. And so that's a few weeks away. And so in my wisdom, I was like, you know what I'm going to do? Because I know how babies work. And I know that sometimes people have babies early. I'm going to start on May 3rd to just get ready. You know, I'm going to be fully ready. That way, if John comes early, Mother's Day, I'm all in. I got it. I'm ready to go. Well, here we were on Friday when I got a text with a baby's picture. And I'm like, this is Nate messing with me. Turns out it wasn't. It was John in the flesh. And so I say that not to give any excuses or not in any way to say anything, except for the fact that this sermon might be a little bit less dialed in. It might be a little bit less polished than sermons you're used to. I know that anybody who's heard me preach before is probably laughing at the fact that I would use polished in my sermons in the same sentence. But I do say that to say that this story, as we read through Ruth 1 together, and we talk through Ruth 1 together, that regardless of how well or how poorly I speak or how polished this sermon is this morning, the truth that is found in Ruth 1 should speak for itself. And so I ask for grace, and I also ask for the fact that even if I am spitting absolute nonsense, that at least this story you will let resonate in your hearts and hopefully walk away learning something by simply hearing this passage of scripture. And so this morning, I actually, I wanted to start off by telling you guys the backstory of actually how I ended up making my way to grace. It's a story that I don't really think I've told that many people. I mean, not for like any reason. I'm not hiding it or whatever, but, you know, I figured it'd be something that would be worth talking about. And it's a story that I love because when I think back on it, it's just pretty wild that it worked out this way because, as a lot of you know, I was working as a student pastor in Atlanta at a church called Greystone. And I was actually working underneath Nate, who was also at Greystone. He wasn't the head pastor, but it was a, you know, it was a bigger staff. And so, so they were like, I guess, levels to the staff. And so I was actually directly under Nate. Well, we left Greystone at about the same time. He came up here, obviously, to enter into being, becoming a head pastor. Woo, exciting. That's us, yay. But I left to kind of go into school and to do some seminary stuff. Well, after about a year of doing that, I realized that as someone who was so used to being in full-time student ministry that when I'm sitting in classes listening to ministry and talking about student ministry, I realized how bored I was and how little I enjoyed learning about these things and talking about these things when I wasn't able to be a part of them. Ministry was great and talking about ministry is great, but doing ministry and actually having interaction and actually having students that are in my life that I love and that I get to be in their lives, when I was missing out on that, I was just like, dude, I don't even know if this is worth it. And so I decided, you know what? I'm going to try to get back into the church. We'll figure out what exactly it looks like and with school and all this stuff, but I'm going to try to get back into the church. So, you know, I tried to explore some avenues. I found that some churches were doing stuff. Nothing really worked out well. At about the same time, one, I texted Nate. I said, yo, you're a head pastor and head pastors know things. So if you hear of anything, I'm trying to get back into the game, baby, basically is what I said. And at the same time, my dad's first pastor that he was a student pastor under reached out to me. He was the head pastor at this Baptist church that was right outside of Athens, Georgia. Now, Athens, Georgia is where I lived. I went to UGA, Go Dawgs. Yep, we all agree. Tons of people are nodding in the building. I know you're all nodding at home for the good dogs. But I was living in Athens at the time. My brother and sister-in-law lived in Athens. I was hanging out with them most every day. A lot of my friends still lived in Athens. My parents even, even though they were in South Carolina, only lived about an hour and a half, two hours away. Everybody was in Georgia. Everybody was very near Athens or Atlanta or somewhere around there. And so when someone calls and says, hey, we have a job available doing student ministry where you don't have to leave this place you love and you don't have to leave these people you love, well, then you listen. Especially when it's a pastor who you know and who you already know, this is a man that I would love to work for because I know that my dad loved working for him. And so as I'm talking with Nate, because Nate texted back and said, well, you know, it's funny, we actually are looking for someone as well. And so I'm kind of, at the same time, I'm interviewing in Georgia, I'm interviewing here. And obviously it progressed a little bit quicker in Georgia because I could just get out to the church. And so, you know, I was able to go check out the church. It was this beautiful Baptist church. One of those Baptist churches that, you know, it's kind of just in the middle of town where it's just like, oh my gosh, this is just like beautiful and awesome. And there's so many people who come in from everywhere. And it sounds like they have like a big thriving student ministry. And all of these things are awesome. And I got to go to a service. I was like, oh, this is cool. This is really nice. This is great. All of these things. And so I actually got a call the night before I was coming up to Raleigh to do some of those same things. And the call was to say, hey, Kyle, we want to hire you as our student pastor. They gave me an offer, and you know, it was a good offer for, I guess, like monetarily as far as like being a student pastor. So that was cool and that was great. Well, so that was what I was sitting on when I drive up to Raleigh for the weekend. And so as I drive up to Raleigh, the first thing that happens is I like meet with Nate. And I'm thinking that Nate and I are and I are just going to be like, you know, gabbing about, you know, what's been going on, all this type of stuff. And, you know, cause I'm like, well, I mean, I know I got Nate on my side. I've already worked with Nate. And then we have this like conversation where I go, oh my gosh, I don't know if Nate wants me to work here. And, and all he was doing was he was grilling me and he was saying, here are these things that I've seen in you in the past. How, like, you know, how have you been able to make strides or Or are these still things that you would consider strengths? All of those things. But right off the bat, I was pretty overwhelmed. But I spend the weekend talking to different people and interviewing and getting to meet staff and came on a Sunday morning. And as I drive up, I'm like, oh, yes, this church is in the side of a storefront. Interesting. That's cool. I like the white letters though. But so I'm like, okay, interesting. And so I come in and obviously, you know, like we have done an incredible job with this space, but obviously like it doesn't really rival like a beautiful Baptist church's sanctuary, you know? And so we're going through these things and we go through service. And then I come on a Sunday night and I get to meet some of the students. And as much as I love meeting these students, I'm kind of hearing about that while there are certainly just some incredible students in this ministry, that there have been a lot of people who've left it. And because of that, it maybe wasn't at quite the healthiest state. And so as I left, I received a job offer from Grace as well. For less money, obviously. This is a smaller church. It is a smaller youth ministry. In no way was I expecting it to be more because I was kind of like, hey, I don't think you understand that I'm young and single and a student pastor. You shouldn't be paying me this much money. That type of thing in the other place. But as I left, you know, I just, I sat there and I'm like, hey, if I made a pro-con list, it's going to be an interesting look. And I was going to bring out a whiteboard and actually make a pro-con list, but I don't know how many of you guys were here the last time we used a whiteboard on stage, but Zach Winston and I, getting it off the stage, almost knocked the TV down and broke a wine glass that was on the table for communion. So we're not going to do that this morning. So just imagine with me a pro con list being on a whiteboard here. But when you look at it, it's like coming to grace means leaving my family. It means that instead of the max distance that I am from my close personal family as being about two hours to the closest that I am to anybody, which was my parents at the time, it was four and a half hours, and then six hours if I wanted to drive to Athens. And not to mention that, but also my friends and all of these things. And I'm choosing a smaller church that seems like the youth ministry might not be quite where the youth ministry was at this other place. And I'm choosing less money. And I mean, like, honestly, like, just like the definition of conless is having to work for Nate. But, you know, so here's all of these things. And I say that to say, when you look at every single decision that I had to make, when I compared the two, and when I made a pro-con list of what it would look like to go to Grace versus go to this other church in Georgia, from every human perspective, there was literally only one decision, and it was screaming at my face saying, you've got to take this job in Georgia. But here I am. And so, yeah, woo! Thank you for the claps. That's nice and funny. And I think that this first chapter of Ruth helps at least a little bit explain why it is that I'm here. To give a little background behind Ruth, basically what is going on in this time is they are living in Israel, God's chosen people in God's chosen land. You know, Moses had brought his people out of Egypt and, there weren't kings, and so it's instead the time of judges. And so God has given his people his law. These are the laws and the commandments that I ask you to abide by. And the judges were to make sure that those were abiding. I don't know. Whatever. Not important. So because there weren't kings, because there was no earthly ruler, then God kind of reigned supreme in a way that he doesn't. We don't quite see as much now where basically because these were his chosen people and the people who were called to live out his law and called to live out their lives in faith and to trust him and to worship him, when they were doing so, then times were good. Harvests were good. If they weren't, there might be times when armies come in and take over some of the land. There may be times of famine because people aren't living for God. It was just a different time, and it was how the culture was set up during the time of judges. Well, we were in one of those times as we jump into our story. It starts out talking about this woman named Naomi, and Naomi and her husband, Elimelech, were dealing in a time of famine to the point that they realized, hey, like, this is rough. And instead of choosing, instead of making the choice to say, I'm going to trust God to provide what he needs to provide for me and for my family, they instead decide they are going to leave. They're going to grab their two sons and they are going to go into another kingdom. Well, this other kingdom, we'll call it not a friendly. We'll say Moab is like an enemy nation, an enemy country. They're continuously at war. During this time, I read somewhere, it's not actually within the pages of Ruth, but that during this time, there was no love lost between these two kingdoms to the point of like war and battle and all of these things. And so for them to leave Israel and go seek refuge in a kingdom that was not only not God's chosen place and God's chosen people, but an enemy of God, people who were so against God and his people that they wanted to kill him. And so this is where they went. They settled in and Elimelech ends up dying. So Naomi loses her husband and now all she has is her sons. Malan and Chilian, her sons, marry two Moabite women. They marry Ruth and they marry Orpah. They live there for 10 years. And in those 10 years, neither one of them is able to conceive. Neither one of them is able to produce a seed that could lead to them continuing their familial line. In this culture, that was about the most important reason to get married was one, to take care of your family, but two, to raise up a son and raise up a family who is able to take care of your crops, who is able to grow, who's able to take care of your land, who is able to continue your family line. And when your family or when your parents get older to take care of them as well. So in these 10 years, there haven't been any children conceived and her sons die. Both of them die before they're able to conceive. And so now what we're left with, we're left with Naomi, Orpah, and Ruth together. And Naomi, in her overwhelming tragedy, finally realizes that she now has to look her shame in the face. She now has to look her fear and her bad decision in the face and say, I can't provide for myself here. There's nothing that I will be able to do here. I have to return home. She says, I know that the Lord would have me. I mean, she doesn't say this, but like essentially she says, I know the Lord would have me return home because I have to be able to survive. And so I'm going to have to look in the face of people who are probably going to look down on me and see me differently because I chose fear over faith 10 years ago. Coming back in her shame to say, you know what? God is asking me to be here. And so this is where I need to be because I need to survive and I need to be a part of where God has me, even if it means I'm going to be looked down upon. But on their way there, she looks at her daughters-in-law and she says, leave me. Don't be with me anymore. There's no reason for you to follow me back because if you do, if you follow me back, then I can assure you nothing good awaits you. They all weep and they plead with her like, no, we're going to stay with you. You need us. You need us for survival. There's no way you're going to be able to make it alone. But Naomi continues to press on and says, there's literally nothing there for you. I have no, you can't just marry some random man in Israel because you're a Moabite. They won't marry you. Also, I'm too old now to find a husband and much too old to find a husband where I can have another son and you can marry my next son so that you can continue the line and continue in this kinship. So don't go with me. Go back home. Go where your family is. Go where you're comfortable. Go where you know that you at least have some sort of hope at having a family and having a life because coming with me will be no life at all. At this, they all weep again. Clearly, there's so much love between these three women that it's just beautiful. But after it, Orpah says, okay. So she gives her love to these two, and she heads out. But Ruth says, no, I'm staying with you. She says, I don't care what you have to say with me. Stop pleading with me. I'm going to stay with you. And that's where we're actually going to pick up and we're actually going to read. It's in Ruth 1. we're going to stop. How incredible is that? How unbelievable is it that Ruth would say in the face of everything that Naomi is telling me, I'm going to stick with you, Naomi. Let's go, let's head back to the pro-con list. I want you, I want us to understand the implications of what she's saying. Because not only is she saying that by sticking with Naomi, that it probably means that she is going on towards loneliness and singleness, and that will be the end of her family line. Not only is she saying that, which is incredibly devastating, especially in this time, but I know that there's some that like in today's culture, especially some people like, yes, queen, you don't need no man, you know, but also take account that she is taking an elderly woman back and her goal and her mission and the only reason she's doing so is so that she can be a caretaker for this elderly woman who's not even her mom, just a mother-in-law that she has grown to love. So the rest of her life is going to be meant for just finding food wherever she's able to scrounge up food for a single woman without any land. But not only that, but she is a Moabite woman who is entering into Israel where she is hated. So she is walking into a place where she knows she is going to receive bitter racism. And it's alluded to multiple times later in Ruth that she is entering into a place that actually could be quite harmful to her, that she could experience, she could be hurt, injured, killed, or raped by any of these people because she is considered nothing as a single Moabite woman, as less than nothing by some of these people. What's waiting for her if she doesn't stay with Naomi? She gets to go back to her family. She gets to go back to her home. She gets to go back with the hope and encouragement that I can probably find another husband, that I can finally start a family even though I wasn't able to before. There is no good, satisfactory reason why she should stay with Naomi except that, one, she was being nice to help Naomi out, but I think that what Ruth realized and what Ruth knew in her heart, the reason why it didn't matter how long the list of cons were for entering and how long the pros of going back to her kingdom were. I think she knew in her heart what Daniel knew and what Daniel, I mean, excuse me, Daniel, what David wrote in Psalms 84.10 when he says, better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere. I think what she realized and what she knew without a shadow of a doubt is that the Lord had her staying with Naomi. And that is the only thing that mattered. When I was trying to decide, honestly, I'm going to be honest with you, I wasn't ever really trying to decide. Every stop that I made, every interaction that I had, every single part of my weekend in Raleigh was the Lord yelling at me, Kyle, this is where I have you. And I don't at all mean to, and please do not hear me at all, likening my experience coming to Raleigh with Ruth's experience of giving up her entire life to be a single caretaking woman who is ending her seed. Because I came here and I was overwhelmingly blessed. And I came here with immense hope at what was to come. She left without any hope except that if I am in the will of God, then I know there is always hope because I know that there is no place better to be than inside the will of God than anywhere else. I know for me, I was incredibly thankful because this would have been a very difficult decision for me had God not been literally screaming in my face, this is where I have you. And I don't mean to say that I haven't experienced drawbacks and sadness at the times that I have to miss holidays or birthdays or weddings or the like because my friends and my family are all in Georgia. There are certainly negatives to being in Raleigh versus having taken that job in Georgia, but I promise you that every day I get to wake up knowing that because I chose, honestly, because the Lord made it literally impossible for me to choose anything else, but I got to be in the will of God and it has been unbelievable the blessings that have come from getting to see what it looks like to be, to just choose the will of God. And the point of this morning isn't to look at each one of you guys and say, hey, time to leave your family, time to leave your homes, time to go to another state and work for another Nate. You know, like the purpose of this is not, it's time to give up everything that you hold dear so that you can follow God or it's time to, you know, give up your job or your career or your friends or whatever. Now, hear me saying, it's not not that. Because if the Lord is working in your life and asking you to do so, then that's a conversation to have. And that is a prayer that needs to be thrown out. But every single day, we are faced with decisions on whether we want to act in faith, whether we want to choose faith in this interaction that we have, in this way that we think about something, with the way that we spend our time, with the things that we value. We are having an interaction in our heads on whether or not we are going to choose faith or we are going to choose ourselves. Fear, worry, comfort, all of those types of things because it's a lot easier to make the decision that seems earthly like a good decision. But this morning, what I'm asking you, well, honestly, what I'm telling you is I I am a hundred percent sure that there is no better place to be than inside of the will of God. In big ways, but in small little decisions. When you're in your small group and it feels like it's uncomfortable for me to be honest and to be open and to be vulnerable with these people that are also my friends and I don't know how they'll react to me, that you choose faith and you say, I know that this is best for me and I know that these people, if they can walk beside me knowing me and my full self, then I promise you I will have a better life and a better faith and I will experience more joy. And so I am going to look that fear of how people will see me in the face and say no, because I'm going to be vulnerable and I'm going to be open in this small group and with these friends. Maybe you have co-workers or you have friends that you know need to hear who God is, but you're afraid of how they'll react to you or you're afraid that they'll look at you different or see you different or honestly, you're afraid of the discomfort of having to figure it out or you're just afraid because it's just scary in general to do something like that. Maybe you have a sin that's eating your lunch or overwhelming you, and you're so afraid to open up about it. You're so afraid to fight it because you're so rested in it that it's become the norm, and it's become your comfort, and it's become your reliance, and you're terrified of getting rid of it, and you're even more terrified of people finding out, but you know that as soon as you're able to open up and able to share this sin with somebody that you can maybe for once and for all kick this sin because you have somebody being accountable to you for it. Maybe you need to change your priorities from the fact that obviously we live in a culture where success and our jobs and the money and all of these things are what we should be pursuing and what we should be valuing. But maybe we decide, you know what? I'm going to value God over all of that. And I'm going to make my decisions that I make for God and for his glory and out of where his will is for my life and not simply what is best for my career and my life personally. I'll give the opposite of the student ones and I'll just talk to the parents now because this is one we talk about in students a lot, but parents. Maybe it means that you need to look culture in the face and say, you know what? I know that all these parents are going to look down on me, but I'm going to value my kids' spiritual life and their spiritual walk and their ability to come to church and to be a part of a church community. I'm going to value that more than I value their education and their athletic career and future. I'm going to value their future as someone who grows spiritually and is spiritually healthy and full that also seeks after being inside of the will of God. There are very easy arguments to fight against all of these. There are probably good spiritual arguments to fight against any of these hard decisions where the Lord is asking you to step out in faith. That's why it's faith. Last week we sang, I'm no longer a slave to fear, but I'm a child of God. And I've thought before, is fear really that big of a thing now versus Bible times? Yes. If you aren't experiencing any fear or any worry when it comes to living out your faith, then my question for you is, is it because your faith is so strong and who God has called you to be, and so at every waking moment, every decision is for him, or are you unwilling to step out in faith enough to where fear isn't even an impact or isn't even a factor? I often realize about myself that it's the latter. I don't lack fear because of my faith. I avoid fear at the expense of not doing anything that requires me stepping out in faith. May we not do that this morning. May we not do that this week. May we not do that in our lives. And may we instead just understand the joy and the goodness of God and allow that to bring about a freedom in our hearts to say yes to God at any and every turn, even if it makes literally no sense to us, even if it makes no sense to anybody else around us. Let's pray. God, thank you for bringing us here this morning. God, thank you for an unbelievably beautiful depiction of faith in the book of Ruth, God. Just in Ruth 1, we got three more chapters. Lord, I know that we're not always asked to give up our entire lives and everything about ourselves to follow you and to say yes to you. But God, what I also know is every single day we are faced with choices of whether we say yes to you and your will, or we say yes to us and ours. God, may we have the freedom and the love and the joy and the goodness that we have experienced from you. May that shape our decisions and boldness to say yes to you every single time. God, we love you so much. Amen.

Well, good morning. I'm Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here. You guys, it's a holiday weekend. I mean, for the love of Peter, you're supposed to be out doing fun stuff. You chose to come to church. I am so thrilled about that. So it's good to see all of you, and thank you for coming on this Sunday morning. This is the third part of our series, Lessons from the Gym. As a disclaimer in that video, I've had a lot of people asking me, like, why do you think you're too good for turn lanes? Okay, here's what was happening in that video, is the shot was supposed to be, Nate, let me, this is, Steve was filming this, he says, Nate, let me get a shot of you exiting the gym, like pulling away, like that's the shot that we need to get. So I'm like, okay, good. So I pull out of the gym, and then I let him get a shot of that for as long as he could, driving down the road, and then just cut into the parking lot real quick to go pick him back up and not strand him. And what does he do but put that in the video and make me look like a degenerate? So thanks, Steve. But that's the story. I do actually abide by some, not all, but some traffic laws that make sense. All right. For the first couple of weeks that we've been in this series, we've been looking at what we're calling lessons from the gym and talking about getting spiritually healthy, right? Pursuing spiritual health in our lives. And as I've thought about it, what we've really been doing and what I've really been bringing to you is as you pursue spiritual health in your life, here are some things that I'd like for you to consider or to be aware of. And so the first week we said, here's five things that I want to tell you on your first day as you begin to pursue spiritual health. And then the next week, what I said was, listen, you can't do this alone. So those were things that were really descriptive to you of what does it take to be spiritual, like what do I need to know to be spiritually healthy? And so for the next two weeks, for this week and next week, I want to begin to answer the question, okay, what does it really mean to pursue spiritual health? What does it really require of me? What does it take to get there? And this whole time, I've been doing a parallel between pursuing physical health at the gym or working out or whatever it is we do to care for ourselves physically and paralleling that with our pursuit of spiritual health. And so as I got into the gym and began to pursue this physical health, there's a couple of things that became apparent to me. To go to the gym, to wake up one day and decide to go for a jog, to do push-ups, to buy a Beachbody DVD and try to do that, to do whatever it is you decide to do to get into the physical shape you want to get into, implicit in doing that, implicit in going to the gym, implicit in going for a jog, is this admission that I care about my physical health, right? If you don't care at all about your physical health and you don't go to the gym, you don't do the workout, you don't do the jog. You just eat the cinnamon rolls and sit on the couch. That's what you do. But to do any of those things, implicit in that action is an admission that physical health is important to me. And so when I went to the gym, everybody there is saying being physically healthy matters to me. The other thing is, as you go and you decide you want to be physically healthy, there are myriad goals within physical health, right? Everybody's got the before picture, and then we're all shooting for the after picture. We've got the before with the gut hanging out, we're wearing the t-shirt, we look like an overstuffed sausage. We've got that deal, and then we've got the after picture in our head, whatever it is that we're going for. And to some people, like, get in the gym and some people like they're in it, they're in it for the competitions. Like they are, they like go to competitions, they are lifting weights, they have figured out ways to isolate an exercise to get one strand of their triceps so that when they rub baby oil on it, it's really going to pop at the competition. Like that's their deal and that's their goal, which is also my goal. I'm very close. But that's what they want to do, right? They're in it for the competition. Others just, they just want to, like me, I just wanted to look good in a t-shirt. Like I just wanted to be able to put on a t-shirt, feel confidence without seeing my man gut. I'd love to be able to take Lily swimming and take my shirt off in front of other people and not be embarrassed about myself. Like that's pretty much it for me. Other people, they want to look good, but they want to be built, but not too built, you know. And others, when they start to get healthy, it's really not the way, it's really not about the way they look at all. It's about performance for them. They want to do a marathon or triathlon or whatever it is. And so for them, it's really about getting the body to be disciplined to do what it's supposed to do. And so people can have all kinds of different goals for their physical health, right? But whatever your goal is for your physical health, whatever you want the after picture to look like, there's actually a portion of the scientific community that has defined health for you. Whatever you want to look like, whatever you want your after picture to look like, whatever your reason was for going into the gym, if your goal is to be healthy, the scientific community has actually given you guidelines on what that health looks like, right? They're like, there's guidelines for BMI, for our body mass index, and for fat percentage. There's guidelines for what our cholesterol should be. There's guidelines for what our heart rate should be, our resting heart rate should be, for what our blood pressure should be. And really, whatever's going on outside of those indicators is fine and good, but if we're talking about health, there's actually some guidelines that dictate for us whether or not we are truly healthy. Because we can look fit and not be able to run a mile, and we can be cardiovascularly healthy but have some weakness in some other areas. So it's actually good to have a standard of physical health regardless of what our goals are for it. And in the same way, I think pursuing spiritual health parallels all of that really well. To me, to be in church in January, to be listening to this on a podcast or watching it online, implicit in the decision to do that, implicit in your decision to get up this morning to shower, which I hope you did, and then come here. And if you have kids, the hassle of getting them up and getting them ready for the early service. To do that, implicit in that is, hey, I care about my spiritual health. It could be a lot. It could be a little. But implicit in your attendance here is spiritual health matters to you. Implicit in listening to sermons online is the idea that spiritual health matters to you. And it could have mattered for a very long time. This could be an ongoing thing to you. This January is no different than last January or dozens before that. Or it could be a new initiative. But what I think is true of everyone in the room is that we are saying with our attendance that spiritual health matters to us. Now, there could be a difference in our spiritual goals. If we think about it as a before picture, this is what I looked like last year. This is what I looked like before I began to prioritize my spiritual health. And this is what I'd like to do now. There really is a wide range of goals that we could have. We could say, listen, I just want to be a good mom. I just want to exist in the house with my kids without losing my mind at them. That's what I want to be able to do. I'm just looking for a little bit of peace. Maybe it's my life has just felt so crazy that I just need some peace. I want to feel a connection with God. Maybe it's just things haven't been going my way for a while, and I just want to get some clarity about this. Maybe it's things have been going great and I want to begin to live a life out of this feeling of gratitude. Maybe it's more than that. Maybe we think I want to get plugged into a small group. I want to meet other people. I'd love for God to use me in ways in other people's life. I'd love to be involved in ministry in a volunteer capacity or even in a professional capacity. That's what I want to do. I'd love to be an elder of the church. I see these people that I admire, and I want to do that. Maybe we've got big, huge spiritual goals. Maybe we've got very modest spiritual goals, but we all have them, and I would say they're all good, at least as a starting place. But it got me to thinking, does the Bible, like the scientific community offers to those who are pursuing physical health some guidelines for what it actually looks like to be healthy, does the Bible offer similar guidelines to us for what it means to be spiritually healthy? And if it does, what are they? And I actually think that the Bible does this. Regardless of what your goals are, just to be a good spouse or a good co-worker or a good church partner or beyond that, regardless of what your goals are, does the Bible give to us standards that really define for us what spiritual health looks like, and I think that it does that. In the Bible, Old and New Testament, it talks a lot about this idea of bearing fruit, that if we're healthy, if we're good and we're vibrant, we will bear fruit. The book of Psalms was written by a guy named King David. He was the greatest king that Israel ever had. Jesus is going to sit on his throne one day. The flag flying over Israel now bears his star. He's an important dude. And he wrote the longest book in the Bible, Psalms, which is actually a collection of five different books. And in the Psalms are basically journal entries from David. Worship songs, times when he was sad, times when he was joyful, times when he, blessed are those who do not invest their time with people who don't love Jesus and love them, like what we talked about last week. But if we will delight ourselves in the law of the Lord, if we will pursue him in spiritual health, then we will be like a tree planted by streams of water. We will yield our fruit in season, and all that we do, we will prosper. We will yield fruit if we follow the Lord. So then the question becomes, okay, what does that fruit look like? And I think that answer is twofold, and we find it in the New Testament. If we're going to ask ourselves, what does it look like to bear fruit, to be spiritually healthy to a place where we are bearing fruit, what does that look like? Well, Paul answers this question in the book of Galatians. I talk about Paul a lot. He was a really influential Christian. He planted churches, and then he wrote letters back to the churches. And one of the churches he planted was in Galatia. And he wrote a letter back to them that became the book of Galatians in our New Testament. And in the fifth chapter, there's this really famous, and you will bear the fruit of the Spirit, which are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And so, to that question of what does it look like to bear fruit, what does it look like to be spiritually healthy, well, it means that we're going to bear fruit. Well, what kind of fruit are we going to bear? Well, Paul tells us in Galatians, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I think of that as character. So to answer the question first, if we are going to be spiritually healthy, what is an indicator of that? Well, our character is an indicator of that. As a matter of fact, I think this is such a good diagnostic tool that within churches there's always this question, am I really saved? How do I really know if I know Jesus? How do I really know if I'm going to heaven? And I say, well, Ephesians tells us that we receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment, as a deposit on our salvation, that God's going to make good on this promise. And we can tell if we have the Holy Spirit in our life by whether or not we bear the fruit that Paul lists out in Galatians chapter 5. So I would tell you, if you want to know whether or not you know Jesus, look at the wake of your life over the past three to five years and ask yourself the question, are those things growing in my life? Are those eight, nine characteristics that are in Galatians 5.22, are those things growing in my life? Are those nine characteristics that are in Galatians 5.22, are those increasing in my life, love and joy and peace and patience and all the rest? Are those increasing in my life? Am I growing in those areas? If you're not, it doesn't do you any good to lie to yourself about it. I think it does us a lot of good to get on our knees and pray about it. But if we're going to ask that question, what does it mean to be spiritually healthy? Well, we have to ask ourselves, am I bearing fruit? I think there's twofold ways that we bear that fruit. And the first is to be growing in our character as outlined in Galatians 5.22. The other way we see ourselves bearing fruit based on scripture is found in a lot of places, but I'm going to look at John 15, where Jesus says, and I've talked about this in recent weeks, I am the tree, essentially, I am the tree and you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. And in this instance, he's talking to the disciples. And when he's saying bearing much fruit, what he means is you will produce a lot of ministry. There will be people who are closer to me, closer to Jesus, as a result of you being in their life. And so biblically, to bear fruit means to grow in character and to grow our personal ministries. Does that make sense? And what that means is, can I look at my life, at the wake of my life, and point to individuals who would say, because that person is in my life, because I've been in PTA with them, because I work with them, because I played on the same tennis team as them, because I served in church with them, because I'm in a run group with them, because they are my friend. I am closer to Jesus because of them. If people would look at you and say that, then that is fruit. So when we ask the question, what does it mean to be spiritually healthy? The answer is, well, it means that we will bear fruit. And what does it look like to bear fruit? Well, it looks like we're growing in our character and we're growing in our ministry, okay? That's what that looks like. So as we define spiritual health this morning and say, what does it mean to pursue spiritual health? That's what we're going after. The after picture before is, I'm not doing that stuff. I need to grow in my character. I need to grow in my ministry. The after picture is I am bearing fruit, both in character and impact. So as I'm at the gym and I'm thinking about this idea of physical health, what it means to pursue physical health, one of the things I realized is I think I had committed at first to go three days a week. That's what I'm going to try to do. I'm going to go three days a week. I'm not going to do anything I don't want to do. I'm only going to do the stuff I want to do, and hopefully I get sweaty, and then I'll sit in the steam room, and then I'll go back to the house. That's what I'm going to do. But as I'm looking around at the people there, the people who look really healthy, and I'm thinking, I hope I can look like that. That's good for me. That's what I want to be, right? As I'm looking at those people, one of the things that occurred to me is, and it's really the thought for this week, is my goodness, what I see in them at the gym has a lot more to do with what they do at the gym. It has a lot more to do with what they do outside of the gym than what they do in it. You see? I'm looking at them going, man, their commitment to health is a lot more than 60 to 90 minutes three days a week. Their commitment to health is a lot more than coming into the gym and throwing up some weight and getting on a treadmill. And those of you who have pursued physical health before, you know that this is true. It takes a lot more. There's not just one thing that you can do. You can't just go to the gym three days a week and then do whatever you want to outside of the gym and get physically healthy. It doesn't take very long when you're valuing your physical health to realize that to get physically healthy, it really takes a holistic commitment to this health. If you're going to go to the gym and exercise or run or whatever it is you're going to do, at some point or another, you have to become at least moderately familiar with exercise science. You've got to know what the exercises are doing to your body when you do them. If you just repeat the same ones over and over and over again, you're not going to get physically healthy on a grand scale. You're just not. You're just going to have really big arms from doing curls. That's it. You've got to learn a little bit of exercise science, what it means to mix in some cardio. You have to learn to value that even though you don't want to. You have to learn what it means to eat right, not just healthily, but to eat right so that when you're at the gym, you're actually burning the stuff you want to burn off and not muscle, right? You have to learn that stuff. If you want to get physically healthy, then you have to be committed to eating right. You have to be committed to a diet. I would sometimes go to the gym in the afternoons, and that would impact the way that I ate lunch. I'd have a lunch meeting, and I'd want to eat something big and fun and filling, and realize I can't swim with that in my gut, so I've got to eat a wrap. Darn it. I have to eat fruit right now. But then I would actually feel decent later. So it begins to dictate all the things you do. You begin to think more holistically. You don't just eat to lose weight, but you eat to actually fuel yourself and get healthy. So you have to make a commitment to that. You make a commitment to sleep because you understand that the way that I sleep and the way that I rest really impacts the way that I'm able to perform when I'm trying to get healthy. And then sometimes to get healthy, and this is the hard part, means that you have to let go of something you really love, right? Any of you guys ever been to the doctor and they told you, all right, listen, here's the issue and you need to get better and if you want to get better, you got to chill out on the red meat red meat. That would be a tough one. I know that's coming. Both of my grandfathers on either side of the family had passed away from heart issues. So I'm really cruising for a bruising here if I keep it up with all the meat. I know that. At some point I'm going to have to give that up. I have found I'm a sucker for baked goods. I can be on quite the streak, and then some well-meaning jerk brings some stuff to, I'm just messing around about jerk. It's really sweet, sweet people bring stuff to the office, and I'm like, oh man, I really need to eat that right now. You know, like, and then staff members will mess with me, and they'll come and they'll put it on my desk, because they know that I'm a sucker for it, and I'm going to eat it. Like, I love that stuff, but sometimes getting physically healthy means giving up things that you really love, but it takes a holistic commitment, right? It doesn't just happen in the gym. And I think similarly, when we make a decision in our life and in our hearts that we want to pursue spiritual health, one of the things that we sometimes do is reduce that pursuit to a commitment to things like church and small group. And we don't intentionally reduce it to this, but we just start like anybody else does. Somebody says, I want to get physically healthy, and so they go, okay, I'm going to start going to the gym. I'm going to start running and pursuing prioritized physical health there. I'm going to make this important. And so they take a couple steps to make it important, but as you get into it, what you realize is, oh my gosh, this is not going to cut it. I really need to be entirely, like I need to be bought all the way in on this, or I'm never going to actually get healthy. And it works the same way spiritually. I think a lot of us make decisions to pursue spiritual health, and then as a follow-through on that decision, we go, I'm going to attend church more regularly. I'm going to try to listen to worship music in the car. I'm going to try to go to small group. I'm going to get involved in serving at the church. And as I think about those things, those are good things. But I wonder, is that enough? If we're serious about getting spiritually healthy, is that commitment, I'm going to go to church more, I'm going to sign up for a small group, I'm going to take the plunge, I'm going to do that. Is that commitment really enough to bring about holistic spiritual health in our life? And I think there's a passage that actually answers this question. It's one of my favorite passages in the Bible. It's in 2 Peter chapter 1. It'll be up on the screen in a minute when I start reading it. There's a Bible in front of you if you'd like to look at it yourself there. But it's one of my favorite passages in the Bible. Peter was like the leader of the disciples. And 30 to 40 years after the death of Jesus, as these disciples are popping up all over Asia Minor, Peter writes a letter. And the idea of this letter is for it to be circulated from church to church as he encourages them in their spiritual growth and their pursuit of spiritual health. And in the first chapter of the second letter that he wrote, that we call 2 Peter, he gives us what I think is a roadmap to spiritual health. He says, if you want to be spiritually healthy, then here's what you need to do. So I want us to look at this list together, verses 5, 6, and 7, and understand that this is really a roadmap to spiritual health. Here we go. For this very reason, Peter writes, make every effort. Another translation says, with all diligence. Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue. And virtue with knowledge. And knowledge with self-control. And self-control with steadfastness or perseverance, like we talked about a couple of weeks ago and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. Now, as an aside on this passage, this is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside on this, one of the things I love about the Christian faith is that it is really so simple. Jesus, when he comes on the scene, he boils all the do's and the don'ts and the things that we get worked up about down to two very simple commandments, love God and love others. And so the greatest of these, Paul tells us, of all attributes is love, and that's what we're supposed to pursue. And so part of us goes, okay, this is great. I just have to focus on loving other people and I will fulfill the law. Me and God will be good. And that's true. But what Peter says is you cannot possibly love until you've mastered brotherly affection. You cannot possibly master brotherly affection until you have mastered godliness. And you can't master that until you've mastered what comes before that, perseverance and all the rest, so that there's actually building blocks to even be capable of loving. We don't start at love, we work to it. That's an aside, but I think it's an interesting part about this passage. And so I would ask you, if these, faith, virtue, or integrity, knowledge, learning more about God and the Bible, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly affection and love, if those are the characteristics that we should pursue, he says make every effort to add to this characteristic, this characteristic. If those are the characteristics that we are to dedicate our life to pursuing that result in spiritual health, I would ask you, can you pursue those on a Sunday morning? If you just come to church every week, can you pursue these things? If you go to church and you add to that a small group and you add to that serving and that's your Jesus time, that's your God time, that's your spiritual health time during the week, can you build these characteristics in your life? Or as you read through those and think through the mechanics of pursuing them, does it sound like those need to be on your heart and on your mind every day? Do you think it's possible to come to church once a week, to go to our small group on Tuesday night, to serve once a month or twice a month when we're supposed to serve, and then go through the rest of our weeks like God's not a priority, to go through the rest of our weeks like he's almost an afterthought, to just wake up in the morning whenever our job requires us to wake up, to encounter the stress at our job as it comes to us, to maybe every now and again pray for our food before the meal, and then talk about spiritual things when it comes up. And if we're being honest, most of us get into a habit and into a cycle where that is really our spiritual effort. If that is true of us, is it possible to develop these characteristics in increasing measure in our lives? Does it sound like we are being obedient to what Paul tells us to do in Thessalonians where he says rejoice always and pray without ceasing? See, what I think is if we're going to be spiritually healthy, it requires a holistic commitment with our whole life. We can't just go to the gym three days a week and expect to get healthy. Do you see? That's the first step. But if we're actually serious about our spiritual health, and remember, even being here and listening to me, implicit in that action is that to some degree or another, my spiritual health matters to me. And what I want to tell you this morning is, if it really does, and if you really want to bear fruit, and if you really want to be spiritually healthy, then what it requires of you is a holistic spiritual commitment from your whole life to pursue the health that God outlines for you. It requires waking up in the morning and intentionally pursuing the presence of God, spending time in his word and spending time in prayer. It requires putting people around you who love you and who love Jesus. It requires being able to get to a place where you understand God's word and you grow in knowledge so that you can teach it. You at least have some sort of moderate understanding of how the Bible ties together. It is hard work to get spiritually healthy, but I think a lot of us live in this place where we can pursue spiritual health with a minimal commitment. And what I think Peter is telling us is it does not work that way. We have got to be holistically committed to spiritual health. We can't half-heartedly pursue it. And when people do this at the gym, we see what happens, right? I've been at the gym and I've seen these, it's usually dudes who, they can throw up a ton of weight, man. Like they get over there bench pressing and I'm like, yo, don't mess with that guy. Like they can really throw it up there. They're squatting all kinds of stuff. They got thighs the size of my waist. Like they're some big old dudes. But you can also look at them and you can go, but they don't really seem healthy. They had a bigger gut than me. They're strong. They're good at the gym. They're not healthy, right? I think this happens in church too. They're good at church. They know their Bible. But, man, there's some stuff about them. I don't know if they're healthy. They're kind of jerks. I don't know if I see fruit. I mean, they're good at church. Like, man, they are a killer in Bible study. You ask them a question, they know the answer. But I don't know if that's what I want to look like. Right? And so I wonder this. If you're in a place right now in your life where the after picture doesn't look like what you want it to look like, your spiritual health doesn't look like what you'd like it to look like, you would not look at where you are spiritually and say, this is where I wanted to be. And to me, to be a Christian is to have at least multiple seasons in your life where you look at yourself and you think in your heart and you know it. And this is so true of me. This has been true of me more times in my life and for more of a portion of my life than I even want to admit. But when I think about where I am spiritually, what I tend to think is, man, I should be so much further along. I should be past this now. And if you've ever thought that too, and we would sit where we are right now and say, you know what, I'm not spiritually where I'd like to be. I wonder if it's because we've just been going to the gym three days a week. I wonder if it's because we've just tried to half-heart it. And we haven't ever really made a holistic effort to being spiritually healthy. I wonder if it's because we know that there's something that we really like. And we want to be healthy, but we don't want to give that up. Some of us are still hanging on to that red meat. Right? But here's the thing, and this is why I love Peter. And this is why I love this passage. There's a promise at the end of this passage. Do you know what happens if you'll commit yourself to being spiritually healthy? If you'll radically change your priorities and make the holistic commitment to spiritual health? Look at what happens in verse 8, and I love this verse. It says, Isn't that great? If these qualities are yours and are increasing, if you will lean into these qualities, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive. If you lean into these qualities, if you pursue them with your whole heart, if you will commit to holistic spiritual health and do what it takes to allow God to work in your heart, to bring you closer to him, then Peter promises you that you will bear fruit. Your character will change. You will produce the fruit of the Spirit. And even, I think, more importantly than that, more impactful than that, more rewarding than that, is if you pursue these, then he guarantees you that when you get to the twilight of your life and you begin to look back on all the things that God did in you and through you, that what you will see in your wake is people who would point to you and say, I am closer to Jesus because you existed in my life. Isn't that what we want? All the other crap aside that we pursue with our life and that we put effort into, what could matter more than getting to the end of our life and being able to say what Paul said, that I have been poured out like a drink offering? What could possibly matter more than being able to look at the wake of our life over the decades and know in our heart that there are people who would point to us and say, I am closer to the Father because that person existed in my life. What could be more important to pursue than that? And Peter says, if you will make a commitment to pursuing spiritual health by making every effort to make these characteristics true of you, then I will promise you that one day as you look back on your life, you will see a wake of ministry and impact and character there that will lead to a fulfilling life. I promise you it is not wasted effort. I promise you it will not return null and void. I promise you this is the best possible way to invest your life. So I would just challenge you this morning by asking you, is it possible that your spiritual health isn't where you want it to be? Because in whole or in part, we've reduced that pursuit to going to the gym three days a week. And is your spiritual health worth making a life-altering, holistic commitment to the pursuit of it? I've been saying since the beginning of the year, I hope this is the year that you move closer to Jesus than you ever have. And a big part of that is, what are you willing to do to pursue it? Let's pray, and then I'm going to call the ushers forward for the offering. Father, we are so grateful for you. We are so grateful for the way that you love us. God, we are so grateful that you meet us in our effort, that you meet us in our cry to be closer to you, and that you do the hard work for us. Father, I pray that we would commit, that we wouldn't make a half-hearted effort towards you, but that we would offer our entire selves to you, that we would follow this roadmap that you lay out in 2 Peter. God, I pray that the people of this church would be people who bear fruit in ministry, who grow in their character. Let us not be a church who simply goes to the gym. Whatever stands between us and health, Father, I pray that you would give us the courage to get it out of the way. Let us be people who know you and are fruitful in that knowledge. It's in your Son's name I pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. I'm Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here. You guys, it's a holiday weekend. I mean, for the love of Peter, you're supposed to be out doing fun stuff. You chose to come to church. I am so thrilled about that. So it's good to see all of you, and thank you for coming on this Sunday morning. This is the third part of our series, Lessons from the Gym. As a disclaimer in that video, I've had a lot of people asking me, like, why do you think you're too good for turn lanes? Okay, here's what was happening in that video, is the shot was supposed to be, Nate, let me, this is, Steve was filming this, he says, Nate, let me get a shot of you exiting the gym, like pulling away, like that's the shot that we need to get. So I'm like, okay, good. So I pull out of the gym, and then I let him get a shot of that for as long as he could, driving down the road, and then just cut into the parking lot real quick to go pick him back up and not strand him. And what does he do but put that in the video and make me look like a degenerate? So thanks, Steve. But that's the story. I do actually abide by some, not all, but some traffic laws that make sense. All right. For the first couple of weeks that we've been in this series, we've been looking at what we're calling lessons from the gym and talking about getting spiritually healthy, right? Pursuing spiritual health in our lives. And as I've thought about it, what we've really been doing and what I've really been bringing to you is as you pursue spiritual health in your life, here are some things that I'd like for you to consider or to be aware of. And so the first week we said, here's five things that I want to tell you on your first day as you begin to pursue spiritual health. And then the next week, what I said was, listen, you can't do this alone. So those were things that were really descriptive to you of what does it take to be spiritual, like what do I need to know to be spiritually healthy? And so for the next two weeks, for this week and next week, I want to begin to answer the question, okay, what does it really mean to pursue spiritual health? What does it really require of me? What does it take to get there? And this whole time, I've been doing a parallel between pursuing physical health at the gym or working out or whatever it is we do to care for ourselves physically and paralleling that with our pursuit of spiritual health. And so as I got into the gym and began to pursue this physical health, there's a couple of things that became apparent to me. To go to the gym, to wake up one day and decide to go for a jog, to do push-ups, to buy a Beachbody DVD and try to do that, to do whatever it is you decide to do to get into the physical shape you want to get into, implicit in doing that, implicit in going to the gym, implicit in going for a jog, is this admission that I care about my physical health, right? If you don't care at all about your physical health and you don't go to the gym, you don't do the workout, you don't do the jog. You just eat the cinnamon rolls and sit on the couch. That's what you do. But to do any of those things, implicit in that action is an admission that physical health is important to me. And so when I went to the gym, everybody there is saying being physically healthy matters to me. The other thing is, as you go and you decide you want to be physically healthy, there are myriad goals within physical health, right? Everybody's got the before picture, and then we're all shooting for the after picture. We've got the before with the gut hanging out, we're wearing the t-shirt, we look like an overstuffed sausage. We've got that deal, and then we've got the after picture in our head, whatever it is that we're going for. And to some people, like, get in the gym and some people like they're in it, they're in it for the competitions. Like they are, they like go to competitions, they are lifting weights, they have figured out ways to isolate an exercise to get one strand of their triceps so that when they rub baby oil on it, it's really going to pop at the competition. Like that's their deal and that's their goal, which is also my goal. I'm very close. But that's what they want to do, right? They're in it for the competition. Others just, they just want to, like me, I just wanted to look good in a t-shirt. Like I just wanted to be able to put on a t-shirt, feel confidence without seeing my man gut. I'd love to be able to take Lily swimming and take my shirt off in front of other people and not be embarrassed about myself. Like that's pretty much it for me. Other people, they want to look good, but they want to be built, but not too built, you know. And others, when they start to get healthy, it's really not the way, it's really not about the way they look at all. It's about performance for them. They want to do a marathon or triathlon or whatever it is. And so for them, it's really about getting the body to be disciplined to do what it's supposed to do. And so people can have all kinds of different goals for their physical health, right? But whatever your goal is for your physical health, whatever you want the after picture to look like, there's actually a portion of the scientific community that has defined health for you. Whatever you want to look like, whatever you want your after picture to look like, whatever your reason was for going into the gym, if your goal is to be healthy, the scientific community has actually given you guidelines on what that health looks like, right? They're like, there's guidelines for BMI, for our body mass index, and for fat percentage. There's guidelines for what our cholesterol should be. There's guidelines for what our heart rate should be, our resting heart rate should be, for what our blood pressure should be. And really, whatever's going on outside of those indicators is fine and good, but if we're talking about health, there's actually some guidelines that dictate for us whether or not we are truly healthy. Because we can look fit and not be able to run a mile, and we can be cardiovascularly healthy but have some weakness in some other areas. So it's actually good to have a standard of physical health regardless of what our goals are for it. And in the same way, I think pursuing spiritual health parallels all of that really well. To me, to be in church in January, to be listening to this on a podcast or watching it online, implicit in the decision to do that, implicit in your decision to get up this morning to shower, which I hope you did, and then come here. And if you have kids, the hassle of getting them up and getting them ready for the early service. To do that, implicit in that is, hey, I care about my spiritual health. It could be a lot. It could be a little. But implicit in your attendance here is spiritual health matters to you. Implicit in listening to sermons online is the idea that spiritual health matters to you. And it could have mattered for a very long time. This could be an ongoing thing to you. This January is no different than last January or dozens before that. Or it could be a new initiative. But what I think is true of everyone in the room is that we are saying with our attendance that spiritual health matters to us. Now, there could be a difference in our spiritual goals. If we think about it as a before picture, this is what I looked like last year. This is what I looked like before I began to prioritize my spiritual health. And this is what I'd like to do now. There really is a wide range of goals that we could have. We could say, listen, I just want to be a good mom. I just want to exist in the house with my kids without losing my mind at them. That's what I want to be able to do. I'm just looking for a little bit of peace. Maybe it's my life has just felt so crazy that I just need some peace. I want to feel a connection with God. Maybe it's just things haven't been going my way for a while, and I just want to get some clarity about this. Maybe it's things have been going great and I want to begin to live a life out of this feeling of gratitude. Maybe it's more than that. Maybe we think I want to get plugged into a small group. I want to meet other people. I'd love for God to use me in ways in other people's life. I'd love to be involved in ministry in a volunteer capacity or even in a professional capacity. That's what I want to do. I'd love to be an elder of the church. I see these people that I admire, and I want to do that. Maybe we've got big, huge spiritual goals. Maybe we've got very modest spiritual goals, but we all have them, and I would say they're all good, at least as a starting place. But it got me to thinking, does the Bible, like the scientific community offers to those who are pursuing physical health some guidelines for what it actually looks like to be healthy, does the Bible offer similar guidelines to us for what it means to be spiritually healthy? And if it does, what are they? And I actually think that the Bible does this. Regardless of what your goals are, just to be a good spouse or a good co-worker or a good church partner or beyond that, regardless of what your goals are, does the Bible give to us standards that really define for us what spiritual health looks like, and I think that it does that. In the Bible, Old and New Testament, it talks a lot about this idea of bearing fruit, that if we're healthy, if we're good and we're vibrant, we will bear fruit. The book of Psalms was written by a guy named King David. He was the greatest king that Israel ever had. Jesus is going to sit on his throne one day. The flag flying over Israel now bears his star. He's an important dude. And he wrote the longest book in the Bible, Psalms, which is actually a collection of five different books. And in the Psalms are basically journal entries from David. Worship songs, times when he was sad, times when he was joyful, times when he, blessed are those who do not invest their time with people who don't love Jesus and love them, like what we talked about last week. But if we will delight ourselves in the law of the Lord, if we will pursue him in spiritual health, then we will be like a tree planted by streams of water. We will yield our fruit in season, and all that we do, we will prosper. We will yield fruit if we follow the Lord. So then the question becomes, okay, what does that fruit look like? And I think that answer is twofold, and we find it in the New Testament. If we're going to ask ourselves, what does it look like to bear fruit, to be spiritually healthy to a place where we are bearing fruit, what does that look like? Well, Paul answers this question in the book of Galatians. I talk about Paul a lot. He was a really influential Christian. He planted churches, and then he wrote letters back to the churches. And one of the churches he planted was in Galatia. And he wrote a letter back to them that became the book of Galatians in our New Testament. And in the fifth chapter, there's this really famous, and you will bear the fruit of the Spirit, which are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And so, to that question of what does it look like to bear fruit, what does it look like to be spiritually healthy, well, it means that we're going to bear fruit. Well, what kind of fruit are we going to bear? Well, Paul tells us in Galatians, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I think of that as character. So to answer the question first, if we are going to be spiritually healthy, what is an indicator of that? Well, our character is an indicator of that. As a matter of fact, I think this is such a good diagnostic tool that within churches there's always this question, am I really saved? How do I really know if I know Jesus? How do I really know if I'm going to heaven? And I say, well, Ephesians tells us that we receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment, as a deposit on our salvation, that God's going to make good on this promise. And we can tell if we have the Holy Spirit in our life by whether or not we bear the fruit that Paul lists out in Galatians chapter 5. So I would tell you, if you want to know whether or not you know Jesus, look at the wake of your life over the past three to five years and ask yourself the question, are those things growing in my life? Are those eight, nine characteristics that are in Galatians 5.22, are those things growing in my life? Are those nine characteristics that are in Galatians 5.22, are those increasing in my life, love and joy and peace and patience and all the rest? Are those increasing in my life? Am I growing in those areas? If you're not, it doesn't do you any good to lie to yourself about it. I think it does us a lot of good to get on our knees and pray about it. But if we're going to ask that question, what does it mean to be spiritually healthy? Well, we have to ask ourselves, am I bearing fruit? I think there's twofold ways that we bear that fruit. And the first is to be growing in our character as outlined in Galatians 5.22. The other way we see ourselves bearing fruit based on scripture is found in a lot of places, but I'm going to look at John 15, where Jesus says, and I've talked about this in recent weeks, I am the tree, essentially, I am the tree and you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. And in this instance, he's talking to the disciples. And when he's saying bearing much fruit, what he means is you will produce a lot of ministry. There will be people who are closer to me, closer to Jesus, as a result of you being in their life. And so biblically, to bear fruit means to grow in character and to grow our personal ministries. Does that make sense? And what that means is, can I look at my life, at the wake of my life, and point to individuals who would say, because that person is in my life, because I've been in PTA with them, because I work with them, because I played on the same tennis team as them, because I served in church with them, because I'm in a run group with them, because they are my friend. I am closer to Jesus because of them. If people would look at you and say that, then that is fruit. So when we ask the question, what does it mean to be spiritually healthy? The answer is, well, it means that we will bear fruit. And what does it look like to bear fruit? Well, it looks like we're growing in our character and we're growing in our ministry, okay? That's what that looks like. So as we define spiritual health this morning and say, what does it mean to pursue spiritual health? That's what we're going after. The after picture before is, I'm not doing that stuff. I need to grow in my character. I need to grow in my ministry. The after picture is I am bearing fruit, both in character and impact. So as I'm at the gym and I'm thinking about this idea of physical health, what it means to pursue physical health, one of the things I realized is I think I had committed at first to go three days a week. That's what I'm going to try to do. I'm going to go three days a week. I'm not going to do anything I don't want to do. I'm only going to do the stuff I want to do, and hopefully I get sweaty, and then I'll sit in the steam room, and then I'll go back to the house. That's what I'm going to do. But as I'm looking around at the people there, the people who look really healthy, and I'm thinking, I hope I can look like that. That's good for me. That's what I want to be, right? As I'm looking at those people, one of the things that occurred to me is, and it's really the thought for this week, is my goodness, what I see in them at the gym has a lot more to do with what they do at the gym. It has a lot more to do with what they do outside of the gym than what they do in it. You see? I'm looking at them going, man, their commitment to health is a lot more than 60 to 90 minutes three days a week. Their commitment to health is a lot more than coming into the gym and throwing up some weight and getting on a treadmill. And those of you who have pursued physical health before, you know that this is true. It takes a lot more. There's not just one thing that you can do. You can't just go to the gym three days a week and then do whatever you want to outside of the gym and get physically healthy. It doesn't take very long when you're valuing your physical health to realize that to get physically healthy, it really takes a holistic commitment to this health. If you're going to go to the gym and exercise or run or whatever it is you're going to do, at some point or another, you have to become at least moderately familiar with exercise science. You've got to know what the exercises are doing to your body when you do them. If you just repeat the same ones over and over and over again, you're not going to get physically healthy on a grand scale. You're just not. You're just going to have really big arms from doing curls. That's it. You've got to learn a little bit of exercise science, what it means to mix in some cardio. You have to learn to value that even though you don't want to. You have to learn what it means to eat right, not just healthily, but to eat right so that when you're at the gym, you're actually burning the stuff you want to burn off and not muscle, right? You have to learn that stuff. If you want to get physically healthy, then you have to be committed to eating right. You have to be committed to a diet. I would sometimes go to the gym in the afternoons, and that would impact the way that I ate lunch. I'd have a lunch meeting, and I'd want to eat something big and fun and filling, and realize I can't swim with that in my gut, so I've got to eat a wrap. Darn it. I have to eat fruit right now. But then I would actually feel decent later. So it begins to dictate all the things you do. You begin to think more holistically. You don't just eat to lose weight, but you eat to actually fuel yourself and get healthy. So you have to make a commitment to that. You make a commitment to sleep because you understand that the way that I sleep and the way that I rest really impacts the way that I'm able to perform when I'm trying to get healthy. And then sometimes to get healthy, and this is the hard part, means that you have to let go of something you really love, right? Any of you guys ever been to the doctor and they told you, all right, listen, here's the issue and you need to get better and if you want to get better, you got to chill out on the red meat red meat. That would be a tough one. I know that's coming. Both of my grandfathers on either side of the family had passed away from heart issues. So I'm really cruising for a bruising here if I keep it up with all the meat. I know that. At some point I'm going to have to give that up. I have found I'm a sucker for baked goods. I can be on quite the streak, and then some well-meaning jerk brings some stuff to, I'm just messing around about jerk. It's really sweet, sweet people bring stuff to the office, and I'm like, oh man, I really need to eat that right now. You know, like, and then staff members will mess with me, and they'll come and they'll put it on my desk, because they know that I'm a sucker for it, and I'm going to eat it. Like, I love that stuff, but sometimes getting physically healthy means giving up things that you really love, but it takes a holistic commitment, right? It doesn't just happen in the gym. And I think similarly, when we make a decision in our life and in our hearts that we want to pursue spiritual health, one of the things that we sometimes do is reduce that pursuit to a commitment to things like church and small group. And we don't intentionally reduce it to this, but we just start like anybody else does. Somebody says, I want to get physically healthy, and so they go, okay, I'm going to start going to the gym. I'm going to start running and pursuing prioritized physical health there. I'm going to make this important. And so they take a couple steps to make it important, but as you get into it, what you realize is, oh my gosh, this is not going to cut it. I really need to be entirely, like I need to be bought all the way in on this, or I'm never going to actually get healthy. And it works the same way spiritually. I think a lot of us make decisions to pursue spiritual health, and then as a follow-through on that decision, we go, I'm going to attend church more regularly. I'm going to try to listen to worship music in the car. I'm going to try to go to small group. I'm going to get involved in serving at the church. And as I think about those things, those are good things. But I wonder, is that enough? If we're serious about getting spiritually healthy, is that commitment, I'm going to go to church more, I'm going to sign up for a small group, I'm going to take the plunge, I'm going to do that. Is that commitment really enough to bring about holistic spiritual health in our life? And I think there's a passage that actually answers this question. It's one of my favorite passages in the Bible. It's in 2 Peter chapter 1. It'll be up on the screen in a minute when I start reading it. There's a Bible in front of you if you'd like to look at it yourself there. But it's one of my favorite passages in the Bible. Peter was like the leader of the disciples. And 30 to 40 years after the death of Jesus, as these disciples are popping up all over Asia Minor, Peter writes a letter. And the idea of this letter is for it to be circulated from church to church as he encourages them in their spiritual growth and their pursuit of spiritual health. And in the first chapter of the second letter that he wrote, that we call 2 Peter, he gives us what I think is a roadmap to spiritual health. He says, if you want to be spiritually healthy, then here's what you need to do. So I want us to look at this list together, verses 5, 6, and 7, and understand that this is really a roadmap to spiritual health. Here we go. For this very reason, Peter writes, make every effort. Another translation says, with all diligence. Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue. And virtue with knowledge. And knowledge with self-control. And self-control with steadfastness or perseverance, like we talked about a couple of weeks ago and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. Now, as an aside on this passage, this is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside on this, one of the things I love about the Christian faith is that it is really so simple. Jesus, when he comes on the scene, he boils all the do's and the don'ts and the things that we get worked up about down to two very simple commandments, love God and love others. And so the greatest of these, Paul tells us, of all attributes is love, and that's what we're supposed to pursue. And so part of us goes, okay, this is great. I just have to focus on loving other people and I will fulfill the law. Me and God will be good. And that's true. But what Peter says is you cannot possibly love until you've mastered brotherly affection. You cannot possibly master brotherly affection until you have mastered godliness. And you can't master that until you've mastered what comes before that, perseverance and all the rest, so that there's actually building blocks to even be capable of loving. We don't start at love, we work to it. That's an aside, but I think it's an interesting part about this passage. And so I would ask you, if these, faith, virtue, or integrity, knowledge, learning more about God and the Bible, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly affection and love, if those are the characteristics that we should pursue, he says make every effort to add to this characteristic, this characteristic. If those are the characteristics that we are to dedicate our life to pursuing that result in spiritual health, I would ask you, can you pursue those on a Sunday morning? If you just come to church every week, can you pursue these things? If you go to church and you add to that a small group and you add to that serving and that's your Jesus time, that's your God time, that's your spiritual health time during the week, can you build these characteristics in your life? Or as you read through those and think through the mechanics of pursuing them, does it sound like those need to be on your heart and on your mind every day? Do you think it's possible to come to church once a week, to go to our small group on Tuesday night, to serve once a month or twice a month when we're supposed to serve, and then go through the rest of our weeks like God's not a priority, to go through the rest of our weeks like he's almost an afterthought, to just wake up in the morning whenever our job requires us to wake up, to encounter the stress at our job as it comes to us, to maybe every now and again pray for our food before the meal, and then talk about spiritual things when it comes up. And if we're being honest, most of us get into a habit and into a cycle where that is really our spiritual effort. If that is true of us, is it possible to develop these characteristics in increasing measure in our lives? Does it sound like we are being obedient to what Paul tells us to do in Thessalonians where he says rejoice always and pray without ceasing? See, what I think is if we're going to be spiritually healthy, it requires a holistic commitment with our whole life. We can't just go to the gym three days a week and expect to get healthy. Do you see? That's the first step. But if we're actually serious about our spiritual health, and remember, even being here and listening to me, implicit in that action is that to some degree or another, my spiritual health matters to me. And what I want to tell you this morning is, if it really does, and if you really want to bear fruit, and if you really want to be spiritually healthy, then what it requires of you is a holistic spiritual commitment from your whole life to pursue the health that God outlines for you. It requires waking up in the morning and intentionally pursuing the presence of God, spending time in his word and spending time in prayer. It requires putting people around you who love you and who love Jesus. It requires being able to get to a place where you understand God's word and you grow in knowledge so that you can teach it. You at least have some sort of moderate understanding of how the Bible ties together. It is hard work to get spiritually healthy, but I think a lot of us live in this place where we can pursue spiritual health with a minimal commitment. And what I think Peter is telling us is it does not work that way. We have got to be holistically committed to spiritual health. We can't half-heartedly pursue it. And when people do this at the gym, we see what happens, right? I've been at the gym and I've seen these, it's usually dudes who, they can throw up a ton of weight, man. Like they get over there bench pressing and I'm like, yo, don't mess with that guy. Like they can really throw it up there. They're squatting all kinds of stuff. They got thighs the size of my waist. Like they're some big old dudes. But you can also look at them and you can go, but they don't really seem healthy. They had a bigger gut than me. They're strong. They're good at the gym. They're not healthy, right? I think this happens in church too. They're good at church. They know their Bible. But, man, there's some stuff about them. I don't know if they're healthy. They're kind of jerks. I don't know if I see fruit. I mean, they're good at church. Like, man, they are a killer in Bible study. You ask them a question, they know the answer. But I don't know if that's what I want to look like. Right? And so I wonder this. If you're in a place right now in your life where the after picture doesn't look like what you want it to look like, your spiritual health doesn't look like what you'd like it to look like, you would not look at where you are spiritually and say, this is where I wanted to be. And to me, to be a Christian is to have at least multiple seasons in your life where you look at yourself and you think in your heart and you know it. And this is so true of me. This has been true of me more times in my life and for more of a portion of my life than I even want to admit. But when I think about where I am spiritually, what I tend to think is, man, I should be so much further along. I should be past this now. And if you've ever thought that too, and we would sit where we are right now and say, you know what, I'm not spiritually where I'd like to be. I wonder if it's because we've just been going to the gym three days a week. I wonder if it's because we've just tried to half-heart it. And we haven't ever really made a holistic effort to being spiritually healthy. I wonder if it's because we know that there's something that we really like. And we want to be healthy, but we don't want to give that up. Some of us are still hanging on to that red meat. Right? But here's the thing, and this is why I love Peter. And this is why I love this passage. There's a promise at the end of this passage. Do you know what happens if you'll commit yourself to being spiritually healthy? If you'll radically change your priorities and make the holistic commitment to spiritual health? Look at what happens in verse 8, and I love this verse. It says, Isn't that great? If these qualities are yours and are increasing, if you will lean into these qualities, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive. If you lean into these qualities, if you pursue them with your whole heart, if you will commit to holistic spiritual health and do what it takes to allow God to work in your heart, to bring you closer to him, then Peter promises you that you will bear fruit. Your character will change. You will produce the fruit of the Spirit. And even, I think, more importantly than that, more impactful than that, more rewarding than that, is if you pursue these, then he guarantees you that when you get to the twilight of your life and you begin to look back on all the things that God did in you and through you, that what you will see in your wake is people who would point to you and say, I am closer to Jesus because you existed in my life. Isn't that what we want? All the other crap aside that we pursue with our life and that we put effort into, what could matter more than getting to the end of our life and being able to say what Paul said, that I have been poured out like a drink offering? What could possibly matter more than being able to look at the wake of our life over the decades and know in our heart that there are people who would point to us and say, I am closer to the Father because that person existed in my life. What could be more important to pursue than that? And Peter says, if you will make a commitment to pursuing spiritual health by making every effort to make these characteristics true of you, then I will promise you that one day as you look back on your life, you will see a wake of ministry and impact and character there that will lead to a fulfilling life. I promise you it is not wasted effort. I promise you it will not return null and void. I promise you this is the best possible way to invest your life. So I would just challenge you this morning by asking you, is it possible that your spiritual health isn't where you want it to be? Because in whole or in part, we've reduced that pursuit to going to the gym three days a week. And is your spiritual health worth making a life-altering, holistic commitment to the pursuit of it? I've been saying since the beginning of the year, I hope this is the year that you move closer to Jesus than you ever have. And a big part of that is, what are you willing to do to pursue it? Let's pray, and then I'm going to call the ushers forward for the offering. Father, we are so grateful for you. We are so grateful for the way that you love us. God, we are so grateful that you meet us in our effort, that you meet us in our cry to be closer to you, and that you do the hard work for us. Father, I pray that we would commit, that we wouldn't make a half-hearted effort towards you, but that we would offer our entire selves to you, that we would follow this roadmap that you lay out in 2 Peter. God, I pray that the people of this church would be people who bear fruit in ministry, who grow in their character. Let us not be a church who simply goes to the gym. Whatever stands between us and health, Father, I pray that you would give us the courage to get it out of the way. Let us be people who know you and are fruitful in that knowledge. It's in your Son's name I pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. I'm Nate. I'm one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here. You guys, it's a holiday weekend. I mean, for the love of Peter, you're supposed to be out doing fun stuff. You chose to come to church. I am so thrilled about that. So it's good to see all of you, and thank you for coming on this Sunday morning. This is the third part of our series, Lessons from the Gym. As a disclaimer in that video, I've had a lot of people asking me, like, why do you think you're too good for turn lanes? Okay, here's what was happening in that video, is the shot was supposed to be, Nate, let me, this is, Steve was filming this, he says, Nate, let me get a shot of you exiting the gym, like pulling away, like that's the shot that we need to get. So I'm like, okay, good. So I pull out of the gym, and then I let him get a shot of that for as long as he could, driving down the road, and then just cut into the parking lot real quick to go pick him back up and not strand him. And what does he do but put that in the video and make me look like a degenerate? So thanks, Steve. But that's the story. I do actually abide by some, not all, but some traffic laws that make sense. All right. For the first couple of weeks that we've been in this series, we've been looking at what we're calling lessons from the gym and talking about getting spiritually healthy, right? Pursuing spiritual health in our lives. And as I've thought about it, what we've really been doing and what I've really been bringing to you is as you pursue spiritual health in your life, here are some things that I'd like for you to consider or to be aware of. And so the first week we said, here's five things that I want to tell you on your first day as you begin to pursue spiritual health. And then the next week, what I said was, listen, you can't do this alone. So those were things that were really descriptive to you of what does it take to be spiritual, like what do I need to know to be spiritually healthy? And so for the next two weeks, for this week and next week, I want to begin to answer the question, okay, what does it really mean to pursue spiritual health? What does it really require of me? What does it take to get there? And this whole time, I've been doing a parallel between pursuing physical health at the gym or working out or whatever it is we do to care for ourselves physically and paralleling that with our pursuit of spiritual health. And so as I got into the gym and began to pursue this physical health, there's a couple of things that became apparent to me. To go to the gym, to wake up one day and decide to go for a jog, to do push-ups, to buy a Beachbody DVD and try to do that, to do whatever it is you decide to do to get into the physical shape you want to get into, implicit in doing that, implicit in going to the gym, implicit in going for a jog, is this admission that I care about my physical health, right? If you don't care at all about your physical health and you don't go to the gym, you don't do the workout, you don't do the jog. You just eat the cinnamon rolls and sit on the couch. That's what you do. But to do any of those things, implicit in that action is an admission that physical health is important to me. And so when I went to the gym, everybody there is saying being physically healthy matters to me. The other thing is, as you go and you decide you want to be physically healthy, there are myriad goals within physical health, right? Everybody's got the before picture, and then we're all shooting for the after picture. We've got the before with the gut hanging out, we're wearing the t-shirt, we look like an overstuffed sausage. We've got that deal, and then we've got the after picture in our head, whatever it is that we're going for. And to some people, like, get in the gym and some people like they're in it, they're in it for the competitions. Like they are, they like go to competitions, they are lifting weights, they have figured out ways to isolate an exercise to get one strand of their triceps so that when they rub baby oil on it, it's really going to pop at the competition. Like that's their deal and that's their goal, which is also my goal. I'm very close. But that's what they want to do, right? They're in it for the competition. Others just, they just want to, like me, I just wanted to look good in a t-shirt. Like I just wanted to be able to put on a t-shirt, feel confidence without seeing my man gut. I'd love to be able to take Lily swimming and take my shirt off in front of other people and not be embarrassed about myself. Like that's pretty much it for me. Other people, they want to look good, but they want to be built, but not too built, you know. And others, when they start to get healthy, it's really not the way, it's really not about the way they look at all. It's about performance for them. They want to do a marathon or triathlon or whatever it is. And so for them, it's really about getting the body to be disciplined to do what it's supposed to do. And so people can have all kinds of different goals for their physical health, right? But whatever your goal is for your physical health, whatever you want the after picture to look like, there's actually a portion of the scientific community that has defined health for you. Whatever you want to look like, whatever you want your after picture to look like, whatever your reason was for going into the gym, if your goal is to be healthy, the scientific community has actually given you guidelines on what that health looks like, right? They're like, there's guidelines for BMI, for our body mass index, and for fat percentage. There's guidelines for what our cholesterol should be. There's guidelines for what our heart rate should be, our resting heart rate should be, for what our blood pressure should be. And really, whatever's going on outside of those indicators is fine and good, but if we're talking about health, there's actually some guidelines that dictate for us whether or not we are truly healthy. Because we can look fit and not be able to run a mile, and we can be cardiovascularly healthy but have some weakness in some other areas. So it's actually good to have a standard of physical health regardless of what our goals are for it. And in the same way, I think pursuing spiritual health parallels all of that really well. To me, to be in church in January, to be listening to this on a podcast or watching it online, implicit in the decision to do that, implicit in your decision to get up this morning to shower, which I hope you did, and then come here. And if you have kids, the hassle of getting them up and getting them ready for the early service. To do that, implicit in that is, hey, I care about my spiritual health. It could be a lot. It could be a little. But implicit in your attendance here is spiritual health matters to you. Implicit in listening to sermons online is the idea that spiritual health matters to you. And it could have mattered for a very long time. This could be an ongoing thing to you. This January is no different than last January or dozens before that. Or it could be a new initiative. But what I think is true of everyone in the room is that we are saying with our attendance that spiritual health matters to us. Now, there could be a difference in our spiritual goals. If we think about it as a before picture, this is what I looked like last year. This is what I looked like before I began to prioritize my spiritual health. And this is what I'd like to do now. There really is a wide range of goals that we could have. We could say, listen, I just want to be a good mom. I just want to exist in the house with my kids without losing my mind at them. That's what I want to be able to do. I'm just looking for a little bit of peace. Maybe it's my life has just felt so crazy that I just need some peace. I want to feel a connection with God. Maybe it's just things haven't been going my way for a while, and I just want to get some clarity about this. Maybe it's things have been going great and I want to begin to live a life out of this feeling of gratitude. Maybe it's more than that. Maybe we think I want to get plugged into a small group. I want to meet other people. I'd love for God to use me in ways in other people's life. I'd love to be involved in ministry in a volunteer capacity or even in a professional capacity. That's what I want to do. I'd love to be an elder of the church. I see these people that I admire, and I want to do that. Maybe we've got big, huge spiritual goals. Maybe we've got very modest spiritual goals, but we all have them, and I would say they're all good, at least as a starting place. But it got me to thinking, does the Bible, like the scientific community offers to those who are pursuing physical health some guidelines for what it actually looks like to be healthy, does the Bible offer similar guidelines to us for what it means to be spiritually healthy? And if it does, what are they? And I actually think that the Bible does this. Regardless of what your goals are, just to be a good spouse or a good co-worker or a good church partner or beyond that, regardless of what your goals are, does the Bible give to us standards that really define for us what spiritual health looks like, and I think that it does that. In the Bible, Old and New Testament, it talks a lot about this idea of bearing fruit, that if we're healthy, if we're good and we're vibrant, we will bear fruit. The book of Psalms was written by a guy named King David. He was the greatest king that Israel ever had. Jesus is going to sit on his throne one day. The flag flying over Israel now bears his star. He's an important dude. And he wrote the longest book in the Bible, Psalms, which is actually a collection of five different books. And in the Psalms are basically journal entries from David. Worship songs, times when he was sad, times when he was joyful, times when he, blessed are those who do not invest their time with people who don't love Jesus and love them, like what we talked about last week. But if we will delight ourselves in the law of the Lord, if we will pursue him in spiritual health, then we will be like a tree planted by streams of water. We will yield our fruit in season, and all that we do, we will prosper. We will yield fruit if we follow the Lord. So then the question becomes, okay, what does that fruit look like? And I think that answer is twofold, and we find it in the New Testament. If we're going to ask ourselves, what does it look like to bear fruit, to be spiritually healthy to a place where we are bearing fruit, what does that look like? Well, Paul answers this question in the book of Galatians. I talk about Paul a lot. He was a really influential Christian. He planted churches, and then he wrote letters back to the churches. And one of the churches he planted was in Galatia. And he wrote a letter back to them that became the book of Galatians in our New Testament. And in the fifth chapter, there's this really famous, and you will bear the fruit of the Spirit, which are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And so, to that question of what does it look like to bear fruit, what does it look like to be spiritually healthy, well, it means that we're going to bear fruit. Well, what kind of fruit are we going to bear? Well, Paul tells us in Galatians, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. I think of that as character. So to answer the question first, if we are going to be spiritually healthy, what is an indicator of that? Well, our character is an indicator of that. As a matter of fact, I think this is such a good diagnostic tool that within churches there's always this question, am I really saved? How do I really know if I know Jesus? How do I really know if I'm going to heaven? And I say, well, Ephesians tells us that we receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment, as a deposit on our salvation, that God's going to make good on this promise. And we can tell if we have the Holy Spirit in our life by whether or not we bear the fruit that Paul lists out in Galatians chapter 5. So I would tell you, if you want to know whether or not you know Jesus, look at the wake of your life over the past three to five years and ask yourself the question, are those things growing in my life? Are those eight, nine characteristics that are in Galatians 5.22, are those things growing in my life? Are those nine characteristics that are in Galatians 5.22, are those increasing in my life, love and joy and peace and patience and all the rest? Are those increasing in my life? Am I growing in those areas? If you're not, it doesn't do you any good to lie to yourself about it. I think it does us a lot of good to get on our knees and pray about it. But if we're going to ask that question, what does it mean to be spiritually healthy? Well, we have to ask ourselves, am I bearing fruit? I think there's twofold ways that we bear that fruit. And the first is to be growing in our character as outlined in Galatians 5.22. The other way we see ourselves bearing fruit based on scripture is found in a lot of places, but I'm going to look at John 15, where Jesus says, and I've talked about this in recent weeks, I am the tree, essentially, I am the tree and you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. And in this instance, he's talking to the disciples. And when he's saying bearing much fruit, what he means is you will produce a lot of ministry. There will be people who are closer to me, closer to Jesus, as a result of you being in their life. And so biblically, to bear fruit means to grow in character and to grow our personal ministries. Does that make sense? And what that means is, can I look at my life, at the wake of my life, and point to individuals who would say, because that person is in my life, because I've been in PTA with them, because I work with them, because I played on the same tennis team as them, because I served in church with them, because I'm in a run group with them, because they are my friend. I am closer to Jesus because of them. If people would look at you and say that, then that is fruit. So when we ask the question, what does it mean to be spiritually healthy? The answer is, well, it means that we will bear fruit. And what does it look like to bear fruit? Well, it looks like we're growing in our character and we're growing in our ministry, okay? That's what that looks like. So as we define spiritual health this morning and say, what does it mean to pursue spiritual health? That's what we're going after. The after picture before is, I'm not doing that stuff. I need to grow in my character. I need to grow in my ministry. The after picture is I am bearing fruit, both in character and impact. So as I'm at the gym and I'm thinking about this idea of physical health, what it means to pursue physical health, one of the things I realized is I think I had committed at first to go three days a week. That's what I'm going to try to do. I'm going to go three days a week. I'm not going to do anything I don't want to do. I'm only going to do the stuff I want to do, and hopefully I get sweaty, and then I'll sit in the steam room, and then I'll go back to the house. That's what I'm going to do. But as I'm looking around at the people there, the people who look really healthy, and I'm thinking, I hope I can look like that. That's good for me. That's what I want to be, right? As I'm looking at those people, one of the things that occurred to me is, and it's really the thought for this week, is my goodness, what I see in them at the gym has a lot more to do with what they do at the gym. It has a lot more to do with what they do outside of the gym than what they do in it. You see? I'm looking at them going, man, their commitment to health is a lot more than 60 to 90 minutes three days a week. Their commitment to health is a lot more than coming into the gym and throwing up some weight and getting on a treadmill. And those of you who have pursued physical health before, you know that this is true. It takes a lot more. There's not just one thing that you can do. You can't just go to the gym three days a week and then do whatever you want to outside of the gym and get physically healthy. It doesn't take very long when you're valuing your physical health to realize that to get physically healthy, it really takes a holistic commitment to this health. If you're going to go to the gym and exercise or run or whatever it is you're going to do, at some point or another, you have to become at least moderately familiar with exercise science. You've got to know what the exercises are doing to your body when you do them. If you just repeat the same ones over and over and over again, you're not going to get physically healthy on a grand scale. You're just not. You're just going to have really big arms from doing curls. That's it. You've got to learn a little bit of exercise science, what it means to mix in some cardio. You have to learn to value that even though you don't want to. You have to learn what it means to eat right, not just healthily, but to eat right so that when you're at the gym, you're actually burning the stuff you want to burn off and not muscle, right? You have to learn that stuff. If you want to get physically healthy, then you have to be committed to eating right. You have to be committed to a diet. I would sometimes go to the gym in the afternoons, and that would impact the way that I ate lunch. I'd have a lunch meeting, and I'd want to eat something big and fun and filling, and realize I can't swim with that in my gut, so I've got to eat a wrap. Darn it. I have to eat fruit right now. But then I would actually feel decent later. So it begins to dictate all the things you do. You begin to think more holistically. You don't just eat to lose weight, but you eat to actually fuel yourself and get healthy. So you have to make a commitment to that. You make a commitment to sleep because you understand that the way that I sleep and the way that I rest really impacts the way that I'm able to perform when I'm trying to get healthy. And then sometimes to get healthy, and this is the hard part, means that you have to let go of something you really love, right? Any of you guys ever been to the doctor and they told you, all right, listen, here's the issue and you need to get better and if you want to get better, you got to chill out on the red meat red meat. That would be a tough one. I know that's coming. Both of my grandfathers on either side of the family had passed away from heart issues. So I'm really cruising for a bruising here if I keep it up with all the meat. I know that. At some point I'm going to have to give that up. I have found I'm a sucker for baked goods. I can be on quite the streak, and then some well-meaning jerk brings some stuff to, I'm just messing around about jerk. It's really sweet, sweet people bring stuff to the office, and I'm like, oh man, I really need to eat that right now. You know, like, and then staff members will mess with me, and they'll come and they'll put it on my desk, because they know that I'm a sucker for it, and I'm going to eat it. Like, I love that stuff, but sometimes getting physically healthy means giving up things that you really love, but it takes a holistic commitment, right? It doesn't just happen in the gym. And I think similarly, when we make a decision in our life and in our hearts that we want to pursue spiritual health, one of the things that we sometimes do is reduce that pursuit to a commitment to things like church and small group. And we don't intentionally reduce it to this, but we just start like anybody else does. Somebody says, I want to get physically healthy, and so they go, okay, I'm going to start going to the gym. I'm going to start running and pursuing prioritized physical health there. I'm going to make this important. And so they take a couple steps to make it important, but as you get into it, what you realize is, oh my gosh, this is not going to cut it. I really need to be entirely, like I need to be bought all the way in on this, or I'm never going to actually get healthy. And it works the same way spiritually. I think a lot of us make decisions to pursue spiritual health, and then as a follow-through on that decision, we go, I'm going to attend church more regularly. I'm going to try to listen to worship music in the car. I'm going to try to go to small group. I'm going to get involved in serving at the church. And as I think about those things, those are good things. But I wonder, is that enough? If we're serious about getting spiritually healthy, is that commitment, I'm going to go to church more, I'm going to sign up for a small group, I'm going to take the plunge, I'm going to do that. Is that commitment really enough to bring about holistic spiritual health in our life? And I think there's a passage that actually answers this question. It's one of my favorite passages in the Bible. It's in 2 Peter chapter 1. It'll be up on the screen in a minute when I start reading it. There's a Bible in front of you if you'd like to look at it yourself there. But it's one of my favorite passages in the Bible. Peter was like the leader of the disciples. And 30 to 40 years after the death of Jesus, as these disciples are popping up all over Asia Minor, Peter writes a letter. And the idea of this letter is for it to be circulated from church to church as he encourages them in their spiritual growth and their pursuit of spiritual health. And in the first chapter of the second letter that he wrote, that we call 2 Peter, he gives us what I think is a roadmap to spiritual health. He says, if you want to be spiritually healthy, then here's what you need to do. So I want us to look at this list together, verses 5, 6, and 7, and understand that this is really a roadmap to spiritual health. Here we go. For this very reason, Peter writes, make every effort. Another translation says, with all diligence. Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue. And virtue with knowledge. And knowledge with self-control. And self-control with steadfastness or perseverance, like we talked about a couple of weeks ago and steadfastness with godliness and godliness with brotherly affection and brotherly affection with love. Now, as an aside on this passage, this is not the point of the sermon, but just as an aside on this, one of the things I love about the Christian faith is that it is really so simple. Jesus, when he comes on the scene, he boils all the do's and the don'ts and the things that we get worked up about down to two very simple commandments, love God and love others. And so the greatest of these, Paul tells us, of all attributes is love, and that's what we're supposed to pursue. And so part of us goes, okay, this is great. I just have to focus on loving other people and I will fulfill the law. Me and God will be good. And that's true. But what Peter says is you cannot possibly love until you've mastered brotherly affection. You cannot possibly master brotherly affection until you have mastered godliness. And you can't master that until you've mastered what comes before that, perseverance and all the rest, so that there's actually building blocks to even be capable of loving. We don't start at love, we work to it. That's an aside, but I think it's an interesting part about this passage. And so I would ask you, if these, faith, virtue, or integrity, knowledge, learning more about God and the Bible, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly affection and love, if those are the characteristics that we should pursue, he says make every effort to add to this characteristic, this characteristic. If those are the characteristics that we are to dedicate our life to pursuing that result in spiritual health, I would ask you, can you pursue those on a Sunday morning? If you just come to church every week, can you pursue these things? If you go to church and you add to that a small group and you add to that serving and that's your Jesus time, that's your God time, that's your spiritual health time during the week, can you build these characteristics in your life? Or as you read through those and think through the mechanics of pursuing them, does it sound like those need to be on your heart and on your mind every day? Do you think it's possible to come to church once a week, to go to our small group on Tuesday night, to serve once a month or twice a month when we're supposed to serve, and then go through the rest of our weeks like God's not a priority, to go through the rest of our weeks like he's almost an afterthought, to just wake up in the morning whenever our job requires us to wake up, to encounter the stress at our job as it comes to us, to maybe every now and again pray for our food before the meal, and then talk about spiritual things when it comes up. And if we're being honest, most of us get into a habit and into a cycle where that is really our spiritual effort. If that is true of us, is it possible to develop these characteristics in increasing measure in our lives? Does it sound like we are being obedient to what Paul tells us to do in Thessalonians where he says rejoice always and pray without ceasing? See, what I think is if we're going to be spiritually healthy, it requires a holistic commitment with our whole life. We can't just go to the gym three days a week and expect to get healthy. Do you see? That's the first step. But if we're actually serious about our spiritual health, and remember, even being here and listening to me, implicit in that action is that to some degree or another, my spiritual health matters to me. And what I want to tell you this morning is, if it really does, and if you really want to bear fruit, and if you really want to be spiritually healthy, then what it requires of you is a holistic spiritual commitment from your whole life to pursue the health that God outlines for you. It requires waking up in the morning and intentionally pursuing the presence of God, spending time in his word and spending time in prayer. It requires putting people around you who love you and who love Jesus. It requires being able to get to a place where you understand God's word and you grow in knowledge so that you can teach it. You at least have some sort of moderate understanding of how the Bible ties together. It is hard work to get spiritually healthy, but I think a lot of us live in this place where we can pursue spiritual health with a minimal commitment. And what I think Peter is telling us is it does not work that way. We have got to be holistically committed to spiritual health. We can't half-heartedly pursue it. And when people do this at the gym, we see what happens, right? I've been at the gym and I've seen these, it's usually dudes who, they can throw up a ton of weight, man. Like they get over there bench pressing and I'm like, yo, don't mess with that guy. Like they can really throw it up there. They're squatting all kinds of stuff. They got thighs the size of my waist. Like they're some big old dudes. But you can also look at them and you can go, but they don't really seem healthy. They had a bigger gut than me. They're strong. They're good at the gym. They're not healthy, right? I think this happens in church too. They're good at church. They know their Bible. But, man, there's some stuff about them. I don't know if they're healthy. They're kind of jerks. I don't know if I see fruit. I mean, they're good at church. Like, man, they are a killer in Bible study. You ask them a question, they know the answer. But I don't know if that's what I want to look like. Right? And so I wonder this. If you're in a place right now in your life where the after picture doesn't look like what you want it to look like, your spiritual health doesn't look like what you'd like it to look like, you would not look at where you are spiritually and say, this is where I wanted to be. And to me, to be a Christian is to have at least multiple seasons in your life where you look at yourself and you think in your heart and you know it. And this is so true of me. This has been true of me more times in my life and for more of a portion of my life than I even want to admit. But when I think about where I am spiritually, what I tend to think is, man, I should be so much further along. I should be past this now. And if you've ever thought that too, and we would sit where we are right now and say, you know what, I'm not spiritually where I'd like to be. I wonder if it's because we've just been going to the gym three days a week. I wonder if it's because we've just tried to half-heart it. And we haven't ever really made a holistic effort to being spiritually healthy. I wonder if it's because we know that there's something that we really like. And we want to be healthy, but we don't want to give that up. Some of us are still hanging on to that red meat. Right? But here's the thing, and this is why I love Peter. And this is why I love this passage. There's a promise at the end of this passage. Do you know what happens if you'll commit yourself to being spiritually healthy? If you'll radically change your priorities and make the holistic commitment to spiritual health? Look at what happens in verse 8, and I love this verse. It says, Isn't that great? If these qualities are yours and are increasing, if you will lean into these qualities, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive. If you lean into these qualities, if you pursue them with your whole heart, if you will commit to holistic spiritual health and do what it takes to allow God to work in your heart, to bring you closer to him, then Peter promises you that you will bear fruit. Your character will change. You will produce the fruit of the Spirit. And even, I think, more importantly than that, more impactful than that, more rewarding than that, is if you pursue these, then he guarantees you that when you get to the twilight of your life and you begin to look back on all the things that God did in you and through you, that what you will see in your wake is people who would point to you and say, I am closer to Jesus because you existed in my life. Isn't that what we want? All the other crap aside that we pursue with our life and that we put effort into, what could matter more than getting to the end of our life and being able to say what Paul said, that I have been poured out like a drink offering? What could possibly matter more than being able to look at the wake of our life over the decades and know in our heart that there are people who would point to us and say, I am closer to the Father because that person existed in my life. What could be more important to pursue than that? And Peter says, if you will make a commitment to pursuing spiritual health by making every effort to make these characteristics true of you, then I will promise you that one day as you look back on your life, you will see a wake of ministry and impact and character there that will lead to a fulfilling life. I promise you it is not wasted effort. I promise you it will not return null and void. I promise you this is the best possible way to invest your life. So I would just challenge you this morning by asking you, is it possible that your spiritual health isn't where you want it to be? Because in whole or in part, we've reduced that pursuit to going to the gym three days a week. And is your spiritual health worth making a life-altering, holistic commitment to the pursuit of it? I've been saying since the beginning of the year, I hope this is the year that you move closer to Jesus than you ever have. And a big part of that is, what are you willing to do to pursue it? Let's pray, and then I'm going to call the ushers forward for the offering. Father, we are so grateful for you. We are so grateful for the way that you love us. God, we are so grateful that you meet us in our effort, that you meet us in our cry to be closer to you, and that you do the hard work for us. Father, I pray that we would commit, that we wouldn't make a half-hearted effort towards you, but that we would offer our entire selves to you, that we would follow this roadmap that you lay out in 2 Peter. God, I pray that the people of this church would be people who bear fruit in ministry, who grow in their character. Let us not be a church who simply goes to the gym. Whatever stands between us and health, Father, I pray that you would give us the courage to get it out of the way. Let us be people who know you and are fruitful in that knowledge. It's in your Son's name I pray. Amen.