Revelation 19

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors of grace. Somebody over there is stinky because this side is full. You guys, I don't know what you're avoiding over here, but this is ridiculous. It's good to see you. Thanks for coming in May in the rain. I keep expecting for us to get over. There's always a bump in attendance in the spring, January, February, March. And that usually lasts until Easter. And then you guys go to the beach like for the whole until August. I don't see you again. So I keep expecting that every week and you keep showing up. So I'm just I'm going to threaten you with this. You keep showing up. We're going to two services in the fall. OK, you just have to deal with it. I also just want to praise God sincerely for this. Gibby, our worship pastor, Aaron Gibson, Gibby. We have too many Aarons around here, so I have to give them all nicknames, except for Aaron Buchanan. He's just Aaron, which makes sense. If you know him, that fits. Gibby's sick as a dog this morning. Like legit could barely talk to me when he got in this morning. He was late. He was later than he normally is because he's sick. So he can sneeze in the lobby now. But you wouldn't believe how often we look at each other on a Sunday morning and go, I feel terrible. I don't know if I can preach. I don't know if I can sing. And we just pray for God to give us 30 good minutes. And He always does. He always does. That was fantastic. I was moved to tears. It's so fun and good to be a singing church, especially since I inherited a bunch of frozen Presbyterians eight years ago. We've had to work on that a little bit. If you know, you know. This morning we continue in our series that Haley mentioned called FAQs, where we sourced some questions out to the small groups, solicited some responses, and just said, hey, what is it that you're curious about? What do you want to know? What questions do you have? And so we took kind of the most common ones and we said, let's talk about these on a Sunday. And I'm particularly excited to talk about this topic this morning because I feel it's so important. And it came up a lot in a bunch of different ways. But it's basically questions about understanding the doctrine of salvation. What does it mean to be saved? How do I know I'm going to heaven? Am I going to be saved forever? Can I lose it? Why does the question we're going to focus on at the beginning of our time this morning is why does God accept deathbed confessions, which is an interesting question, but there was a lot of questions around this doctrine of salvation and seeking to understand what it does mean to be saved and having a better understanding around that. And I think it's such an important question because once we get into church world, we kind of stop asking about salvation because I think we feel like we're supposed to know. And so we're embarrassed to ask. But here's what I know is that my understanding of salvation has worked progressively through my life that with each year or decade that passes, I come to understand salvation and what it is a little bit better. And I think that your understanding of salvation should progress as well. Even if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, there's a reason you're in church on a random May in the rain. And it has to be because you're at least curious. You're at least thoughtful about it. And so I would love to have the opportunity to tell you more about what it means to be a Christian. And I want the Christians in the room to understand their salvation more deeply. Because it's my suspicion that everybody here who is a Christian has at some point in their life, and many of you, and I have to, I hope that you'll trust me this morning that I'm not trying to be hard on anybody. I'm not trying to make you feel small for the way that you think. I'm not trying to make you feel uneducated or dumb. I just think this is a necessary phase of our understanding of our salvation that every Christian goes through. And I also know from experience that many Christians spend their entire life kind of misunderstanding the doctrine of salvation and being overly reductive about the incredible miracle that it is and what it actually means. And so this morning, what I'm hoping to do is to give us all a more rich understanding of our salvation. So either we're kind of locked into how we initially understand it, and this will kind of open up our minds and help us understand it better, God and more grateful to him for the miraculous event and process of our salvation. So that's where we're going this morning. That's what I want to do. To get there, I want to start with this question that came up in our emails, which is why does God accept a deathbed confession? This is an interesting question because it belies the motives behind it. And the motives behind that question generate a lot of the other questions that we have around salvation. This question comes most of the time from a sense of jealousy or resentment or entitlement or frustration. This question is most likely, and if you're the one that asked this, please hear me. It makes sense to ask it. I understand why you would. Every Christian has asked it. It's asked so often that Jesus talks about it in the Bible, and we're about to go to exactly where Jesus answers this question. But I want us to understand why we're asking it first. Let's just put it out there and be honest about it, because all of us do it. And again, I don't want anyone to feel bad for asking this question. I just want to understand why it comes up. The main motive in my estimation behind this question, why would God accept a deathbed confession, is essentially this, if we're going to use real language. I've been saved for decades. And I've been denying myself and keeping it between the ditches and trying to follow God's rules for years. And I've lived without the freedom of a pagan. And I'm going to use the word pagan this morning because a pagan is someone who doesn't believe in God. I'm not trying to be dismissive of those people, of non-believers. It's just pagans easier to say than non-believer? So we as Christians, and we know this, especially those of us that were Christians in high school and college, we are jealous of the freedom of the pagan, right? We're jealous of what they get to do and what we can't do. We've spent our life trying to follow the rules, trying to do the right things, trying to live the right way. And now here's this person who spent their life as a free pagan doing whatever they wanted to do, following any rules that they felt like they needed to follow, never committed to God, no fidelity, didn't put in the work that I did. And now at the very end, they're just going to slip in the door and we're going to the same heaven. That's not fair. I know it's hard to hear that out loud, but I can see about half of you grinning at me right now. You'll all have these smirks on your face like, yeah, that's pretty true. You got me. We've all thought that, and it's okay to think that. It makes sense why we would. It makes sense that we would think that. But here's Jesus' answer to that question. Why does he accept deathbed confessions? This is actually a parable. In the Gospel of Matthew, you can turn to chapter 20 if you want to. I'm going to read you verses 13 through 16, but first I need to tell you what's going on. Somebody comes up to Jesus and they ask this question. And so Jesus tells this story. He says there's an owner of a vineyard and he goes out one day where he can get some day laborers. And I've told you before, Israel was a poor country. They were impoverished. And so there was hubs where you would go and you could get men to come and put in a day's labor at whatever business you owned. And this was their livelihood. This was all that. They just hope they got picked that day. That was their livelihood. And so there's these people and the owner goes and he says, hey, I need y'all to come work for me in my vineyard. I'm going to pay you one denarius. I don't know how much that is. I could have done the research on what it was, but that feels like a waste of time. Google it if you care. I'm going to give you one denarius. And they're like, okay, great deal. So they go with him, they get in the Ford Ranger and they go to the vineyard and they start to work, right? And I don't know why Ford Ranger is funny, but it is. And they start to work and they're working all day. About the middle of the day, some other workers come by the field and they go, hey, we're looking for work. Can we help you today? And the owner says, yeah, sure. Come on. You can work for me. And so they start working by the middle of the day. And then about the last hour of the day, some other workers show up and they go, hey, we're looking for work. Can we work for you? The owner says, that's great. Yeah, come on. And they're working for him. So then when the work's done, the owner lines them up and begins to pay them. And he starts with the first group of workers that he hired that morning. Here's your one denarius for your day's labor. Thank you very much. And then he goes to the group that he hired in the middle. And he says, here's your one denarius. Thank you very much. And then he goes to the group that he hired with just an hour to go. And he said, here's your one denarius. Thank you very much. And the guys that have been working all day are ticked. Like, that's not fair. I worked eight hours for my denarius. That dude worked two hours, worked one hour. He had missed the smoke breaks and the lunch break and everything and just came in during the last hour. That's not fair. And the owner responds to them like this in verse 13. But he answered one of them, I am not being unfair to unfair to you friend didn't you agree to work for a denarius take your pay and go I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money or are you envious because I am generous so So the last will be first. And the first will be last. I love that response. They go, hey, that's not fair. We've been working for eight hours. They've been working for one hour. And you're giving us the same pay. And he goes, what do you care? That's basically the answer. It's my money. Do you care what I do with my own possession? Do you care what I do with my own resources? What right is it of yours to tell me what I should do? I chose to be generous to him. Are you envious of my generosity? You agreed to a denarius. I gave you a denarius. They agreed to this. I gave them this. It's my resources to do with what I want. And so to our question of why does God accept a deathbed confession where the implication is, hey, I've been laboring in the vineyard all day, my whole life. I've been working at this for decades. I put in a full eight hours. And I get my salvation. I get my eternity in heaven. I get my utopia. But they just slid in at the last minute. They don't deserve what I deserve. Maybe we can believe in purgatory so they have to suffer a little bit before they get the glory that I get. This is the jealousy that we express. And in that is implied exactly what the workers were frustrated about. Hey, that's not fair. I've put in my time and my effort. I've done my work. And the pay shouldn't be the same. And here's what this does. When we ask that question and we think that way. And here's what I wanted to talk about. When we think like that, we make salvation something that we think of in terms of being in or out. And very often, there's a lot of questions that Christians ask about salvation, and the motivation behind that question is, am I in or am I out? Did I say the prayer the right way? Am I in or am I out? Am I in heaven or am I burning in hell forever? That's what we're asking. How much sinning can I do and still be saved? Can I lose my salvation or does God hold on to me and I can't lose my salvation? That's an in or out question. How do I, if I feel like I lost my salvation, can I get it back? If someone wanders away, were they ever truly saved? All these questions that we ask about salvation are indicative of this thought process of in or out. And that's how we think about our salvation. And this is the place where many of us get stuck for our whole lives. But what I want us to see is that in or out salvation is a small salvation. Thinking of it that way reduces it to something that it should have never been. And if you're there, if you think about it this way, if you've thought about it that way, I don't want you to feel bad because that in or out mentality was probably handed to you by a well-meaning teacher in your church who also adopted that, who never got a more expansive view of salvation. I got saved when I was four. I was four and a half years old. We went to a special service on Sunday night, and the teacher taught us about the doctrine of hell. And I don't know if Aaron Winston's in here, but if I find out that we're teaching our four-year-olds about hell and scaring them into salvation, that's not going to be okay. They taught us about hell. They told us what it was. And they said, do you want to go there? No. No way. That sounds terrible. What's in heaven? Well, you sing a lot. I mean, that's better than hell. Okay. What do I have to do to go to heaven? Well, you have to believe in Jesus. Deal. What do I do to believe in Jesus? Will you repeat this prayer after me? Okay. You say the words and I'll do them too. And I was saved into an in or out understanding of salvation. What four-year-old isn't going to take out a fire insurance policy by threat of hell. Of course I got saved. God in his goodness has progressed my understanding of what salvation is over the decades. But many of us get saved into this kind of faith where for us it's a matter of are we in or are we out? And when we think of it that way, we become the jealous workers in the vineyard that get upset that we've been, and some of you will understand this reference, we've been the good brother in Luke 15, the one that stayed home and worked. And then the prodigal son comes home and God lets him into heaven and throws a party for him too. And we're like, what in the world? I've been doing my part the whole time. Because for us, salvation is, am I in? Am I going to heaven? Or am I not? And many of us get saved. And with this reductive view of what salvation is, we spend the rest of our lives just trying to stay in and trying to understand what's going to keep us there. But I think that there is a much bigger, better view of salvation. And I think it's presented to us in plain language in the greatest chapter in the Bible, Romans chapter 8. I'm going to read to you what Paul writes about what salvation is. But before I do, I want you to understand where we're picking this up. The first eight chapters of Romans, the first seven chapters of Romans, are a lengthy explanation of the doctrine of salvation. It's a lengthy explanation of the doctrine of salvation. Now, also, I want to pause here before I read. I forgot to say this, and I want to make sure that we're clear on this. When I talk about salvation, when I say saved or not, I want to just pause and be very clear that we understand what this means together, okay? The way that we explain salvation at grace, and when I say we, I mean me, because I'm the one that does it. The way that we explain salvation at grace is to say, to be saved, to be a Christian means that we believe Jesus is who he says he is. He says he's the son of God who's come to take away the sins of the world. We believe that. We believe that it means that Jesus did what he said he did. He lived a perfect life. He died a perfect death and he resurrected and rescued us from death and sin and shame. And it means that we believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do, which in Revelation 19 is to come crashing through the clouds to reclaim us and his creation and restore it back to himself and its original glory. To be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And that to become a Christian, all we need to engage in is the fundamental repentance of Christianity, which Peter describes to us in Acts. He's preaching a sermon. Jesus has been crucified. They're hanging out in the upper room for 40 days trying to figure out what to do. The Holy Spirit descends on them. Peter goes out to the crowd and he preaches. And the sermon is, hey, that guy that you killed was the Messiah and he came to save you. And the crowd believes him. And they say, what do we do? We messed up. And Peter says, repent and be baptized. Repent of what? I believe it's the fundamental repentance of salvation, which is to repent of who you thought Jesus was before you came to agree with him about who he says he is. So to be saved, we repent of who we thought Jesus was before we moved into this moment and this process of salvation. And we accept who he says he is from his word. That's what being a Christian is. Now, Romans is the most detailed theological lesson we get in the Bible. And the first seven chapters are written to help us understand what salvation is and what God did in it and what his responsibility is, what our responsibility is. Then in Romans 8, he culminates that seven chapter argument with what I think is the greatest chapter of the Bible and the culmination of the glory of salvation. And he proclaims to us what salvation is. So I want you to hear how Paul talks about it in Romans chapter 8 and see if this can't begin to expand our view of salvation. I've got my old Bible out. This is the ESV. I was reading this passage this morning in the NIV as I was going through the sermon. Sorry, sorry, DeVos. I know I bought you a Bible and now I'm ruining it. And I just didn't, I don't like the way the NIV reads. This is way better. So if you'll indulge me, I'm going to read you from the ESV. This is the soaring doctrine of salvation that Paul gives us. Verse 19. And I'm going to read all the way down through verse 30, so buckle up. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons in God. The creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it. In hopes that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning who have the firstfruits of the Spirit grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for the adoption of sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope for who hopes for what he sees, but if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought. But the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. Okay, lock in. You may have faded away, and you're not paying attention to the words anymore, but these three verses are super important. And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And this is the important part. And those whom he predestined, he also called. And those whom he called, he also justified. And those whom he justified, he also glorified. This is Paul's soaring description of what it means to be saved and what salvation is seeking to do and what God is seeking to work in that salvation. So the first thing that we see is in the very first verse where Paul says, I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. What Paul is saying here is, whatever we had to suffer to be Christians, whatever we had to suffer to be in and to build God's kingdom, whatever that work was for the day in the vineyard, and we've put in our time, whatever suffering we've endured for the sake of the kingdom and for the sake of God is not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed to us. In other words, there is no possible way you will spend any time at all being saved, being a Christian, being a child of God, and come to regret it. It is impossible that you would be a Christian your whole life and serve God your whole life and get to heaven and be jealous of the people who partied in college. That will not happen. As a matter of fact, what I want us to see, and Paul's talking to a persecuted church, to people who actually suffer. Very few of us, if any, have suffered for our faith. The bar to entry in the American evangelical church is so low that it costs us nothing to come. We have not suffered. Furthermore, the Bible makes it very clear that life with God is the best life possible. Scripture is replete of verses and passages that remind us that being a Christian is the best life possible. And I can go through the Rolodex, John 10.10, that I talk about all the time. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy. But Jesus says, I have come that you might have life and have it to the full, have the most rich, full life possible. We're told in Psalms that at God's right hand are pleasures forevermore, that in his presence, there is a fullness of joy. We're told again in Psalms that one day in his courts is better than thousands elsewhere. We're told that we serve a God in Ephesians that is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine. We're told in John that from his fullness, we receive grace upon grace. We're told these things over and over again in scripture, that life with God is the best life possible. It's the fullest life possible. And so the reality is that if you're a Christian who's been saved your whole life and someone slips in at the last minute and they get to go to heaven too, you shouldn't feel jealousy. You should feel empathy because you just got to live your whole life with God and they missed out on all that joy. It is to our advantage to be picked up early and work in the vineyard all day. It's the life that we should desire and what we want. We should not feel jealousy to the deathbed conversion. We should feel empathy because they had to go through their whole life without God. And that's what salvation is. It's not in or out. It's with or without. You understand? It's not am I in, am I in, am I going or am I not? It's do I, am I living life with God? Am I abiding in him or am I not? And when someone is not saved, when someone doesn't know the Lord, the great tragedy is that they go through their life without experiencing the joy of the Lord and the joy of heaven. Without experiencing that relationship with him and the richness and fullness of life. We should not be jealous of that. We should be empathetic and continue to invite them in because through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. We needn't be jealous of the people who don't put in the work that we do. Because there is joy in that work. So right off the bat, Paul's not talking about in or out. Paul says with or without. And that there is no suffering that will not make it worth the glory that is to be revealed to us. Then, in the rest of this passage, we see this. And this is an important phrase. I want us to rest on it for a little bit. Salvation is a process of restoration and renewal. Salvation is a process of restoration and renewal. This is why this is important. Those words, process is important, restoration, renewal is important, and I want to show you why. But first, we're going to go to that word process. Because I think that many of us think about salvation as this moment in time. I wasn't saved. I prayed the prayer, said the confession, did whatever moment you look to where your belief changed. I wasn't saved. Then I prayed the prayer. I am saved. Done. And that's not true. Salvation is a process. And we know that salvation is a process because of what Paul writes in verse 30 that I said was really important. And those whom he predestined, he also called. And those whom he called, he also justified. And those whom he justified, he also glorified. That's a process. So let's walk through it so we understand it. Those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom God knew before time were going to accept his invitation to salvation, he also called them to himself. With the urging of the Holy Spirit, he called you to himself. It wasn't your work that found God. It was God calling you to himself through his love and through his kindness and through his goodness. Now, I know that some of you in the room are Calvinist and you care deeply about these words. I am not and I don't. So I'm not going to last a long time there. OK, but those whom he predestined, he also called those whom he called. He also justified that justification is what many of us think of as the moment of our salvation. That's when you were set righteous. You were clothed in the righteousness of Christ. You were set right in the court of God. You were justified before him. You are no longer guilty. You were absolved from your sin because Jesus died, lived a perfect life and died a perfect death. You are now justified before God. And the good news is that in the culmination of this chapter, there's this incredibly powerful verse of the assurance of salvation where Paul writes, So once you are justified, Paul says, I am convinced that nothing can unjustify you. Nothing can unsave you. But the process doesn't stop there. Those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom he called, he also justified. Those whom he justified, he also glorified. Now Paul speaks as if it's already been done because the work has been done. But we are not yet glorified. We are glorified when we occupy our bodies in heaven. We are glorified when we sit in the presence of God. I love that verse that he sneaks in there in the middle. We do not hope for what we see. We hope for what we do not see. So we wait for it with patience. Meaning, when we get to heaven, we don't need faith and hope anymore because we have God there. So he says that glorification is coming later. So what I want you to understand about your salvation is that it is in process. It's not done. When you are justified, you're secure. You will not be unjustified. But there is another step. And that doesn't happen until eternity. And that's what's in this text. So it's a process, I said, and that's the process. It starts at predestination, at call, at justification, and it's finished at glorification when we're in eternity with God forever. But it's also a process of renewal and restoration. We think about salvation as just our issue. It's just me and God. It's just for me. Jesus died for me, but that's not what we see in the text. In the text, we see that we groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and the redemption of our bodies, the completion of the salvation process. But so does the world groans in the pains of childbirth waiting for its redemption and restoration as well. So what I want us to understand about salvation is it's bigger than you. It's about restoring all of creation. When God made heaven and earth in Genesis, he made it perfect. He was pleased with it. And I am convinced that it looks completely different than our earth now. And we have mucked up this earth with sin and brokenness. And that one day he will restore all things. He will return and he will make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And he will be with us and we will be with our God and the former things will have passed away. And he'll create a new heaven and a new earth. And he will have restored creation back to himself and its original purpose. So when Jesus dies on the cross, he's not just dying for souls. He's dying for everything that he created to restore it back to himself. Because we're told in Romans that all of creation groans for the return of the king. The earth groans for God. And when we think about salvation as being in or being out, we miss virtually everything that's said in Romans 8. We make it so overly reductive as if to think that what we're teaching the kids over there is the greatest understanding that we ever need of this incredible doctrine. And we miss out on what it truly means to be saved. Here's the last thing that I want us to understand about salvation. Being saved allows us to experience glimpses of heaven here and now. If being in heaven is being with God and not being in heaven is being without God, then as people, we are literally experiencing either hell on earth or heaven on earth. Sometimes we get glimpses of what it is when we're in God's presence, at moments with our children, a hike, a sunset, a hug, singing. When we raise our voices, every time we sing and you guys sing loud and Aaron backs off and it's just us, every time that happens, I have to stop singing because I start crying. Because that's what heaven will be like. We will sing together. And so in being believers, we get these glimpses of heaven and what it will be like. And we usher God into our life and and we invite him in, and we allow him in. This is, again, why we should not be envious of the person who gets saved on their deathbed and got, oh, you got this whole life of freedom. No, we're actually taught in Romans that we are slaves to sin. We're slaves to this bondage of corruption, but that by being saved, we are finally free from sin. We live with more freedom than anyone. We should have more joy than anyone. I said this on Easter. Easter is the most joyful day and we are the most joyful people because of the hope that we have in Christ. So I want you to see this morning. I don't know if you can tell I'm fired up about it because I really want you to understand what it means to be saved it's not it's it's too small to understand it as am I going to heaven or am I not am I in or am I out with all gentleness that's a childlike understanding of our faith. And as we grow, and as we move towards glorification through our sanctification, we should allow God to deepen our understanding of what it means to be his child. And we should understand that he's going to restore all of creation to himself, not just us. And we should understand that every day we get to live as Christians is a day that we spend in the presence of God. And at his right hand, there are pleasures forevermore. In his presence, there is fullness of joy. We should be happy and proud and grateful if we're already laboring in the vineyard because of our understanding of what salvation is and how much God loves us through it. So let's progress in that and develop a far more deep, rich, helpful, gratitude-inducing understanding of what it means to be saved. Let's pray. Father, thank you for saving us. Thank you for sending your son. Thank you for sharing him with us. Thank you for watching him suffer for us. Thank you for the promise that you will renew and restore us. Thank you for the promise that you will renew and restore creation. Thank you for who you are. God, if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, I pray that your Holy Spirit would beckon them even now to desire to be with you and begin to experience glimpses of eternity here in this life. For those of us who are saved, God, thank you. Thank you for calling us to work early. Thank you for letting us labor in your vineyard. Thank you for the joy that it brings in what it is. God, we pray all these things in the name of your son, Jesus. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors of grace. Somebody over there is stinky because this side is full. You guys, I don't know what you're avoiding over here, but this is ridiculous. It's good to see you. Thanks for coming in May in the rain. I keep expecting for us to get over. There's always a bump in attendance in the spring, January, February, March. And that usually lasts until Easter. And then you guys go to the beach like for the whole until August. I don't see you again. So I keep expecting that every week and you keep showing up. So I'm just I'm going to threaten you with this. You keep showing up. We're going to two services in the fall. OK, you just have to deal with it. I also just want to praise God sincerely for this. Gibby, our worship pastor, Aaron Gibson, Gibby. We have too many Aarons around here, so I have to give them all nicknames, except for Aaron Buchanan. He's just Aaron, which makes sense. If you know him, that fits. Gibby's sick as a dog this morning. Like legit could barely talk to me when he got in this morning. He was late. He was later than he normally is because he's sick. So he can sneeze in the lobby now. But you wouldn't believe how often we look at each other on a Sunday morning and go, I feel terrible. I don't know if I can preach. I don't know if I can sing. And we just pray for God to give us 30 good minutes. And He always does. He always does. That was fantastic. I was moved to tears. It's so fun and good to be a singing church, especially since I inherited a bunch of frozen Presbyterians eight years ago. We've had to work on that a little bit. If you know, you know. This morning we continue in our series that Haley mentioned called FAQs, where we sourced some questions out to the small groups, solicited some responses, and just said, hey, what is it that you're curious about? What do you want to know? What questions do you have? And so we took kind of the most common ones and we said, let's talk about these on a Sunday. And I'm particularly excited to talk about this topic this morning because I feel it's so important. And it came up a lot in a bunch of different ways. But it's basically questions about understanding the doctrine of salvation. What does it mean to be saved? How do I know I'm going to heaven? Am I going to be saved forever? Can I lose it? Why does the question we're going to focus on at the beginning of our time this morning is why does God accept deathbed confessions, which is an interesting question, but there was a lot of questions around this doctrine of salvation and seeking to understand what it does mean to be saved and having a better understanding around that. And I think it's such an important question because once we get into church world, we kind of stop asking about salvation because I think we feel like we're supposed to know. And so we're embarrassed to ask. But here's what I know is that my understanding of salvation has worked progressively through my life that with each year or decade that passes, I come to understand salvation and what it is a little bit better. And I think that your understanding of salvation should progress as well. Even if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, there's a reason you're in church on a random May in the rain. And it has to be because you're at least curious. You're at least thoughtful about it. And so I would love to have the opportunity to tell you more about what it means to be a Christian. And I want the Christians in the room to understand their salvation more deeply. Because it's my suspicion that everybody here who is a Christian has at some point in their life, and many of you, and I have to, I hope that you'll trust me this morning that I'm not trying to be hard on anybody. I'm not trying to make you feel small for the way that you think. I'm not trying to make you feel uneducated or dumb. I just think this is a necessary phase of our understanding of our salvation that every Christian goes through. And I also know from experience that many Christians spend their entire life kind of misunderstanding the doctrine of salvation and being overly reductive about the incredible miracle that it is and what it actually means. And so this morning, what I'm hoping to do is to give us all a more rich understanding of our salvation. So either we're kind of locked into how we initially understand it, and this will kind of open up our minds and help us understand it better, God and more grateful to him for the miraculous event and process of our salvation. So that's where we're going this morning. That's what I want to do. To get there, I want to start with this question that came up in our emails, which is why does God accept a deathbed confession? This is an interesting question because it belies the motives behind it. And the motives behind that question generate a lot of the other questions that we have around salvation. This question comes most of the time from a sense of jealousy or resentment or entitlement or frustration. This question is most likely, and if you're the one that asked this, please hear me. It makes sense to ask it. I understand why you would. Every Christian has asked it. It's asked so often that Jesus talks about it in the Bible, and we're about to go to exactly where Jesus answers this question. But I want us to understand why we're asking it first. Let's just put it out there and be honest about it, because all of us do it. And again, I don't want anyone to feel bad for asking this question. I just want to understand why it comes up. The main motive in my estimation behind this question, why would God accept a deathbed confession, is essentially this, if we're going to use real language. I've been saved for decades. And I've been denying myself and keeping it between the ditches and trying to follow God's rules for years. And I've lived without the freedom of a pagan. And I'm going to use the word pagan this morning because a pagan is someone who doesn't believe in God. I'm not trying to be dismissive of those people, of non-believers. It's just pagans easier to say than non-believer? So we as Christians, and we know this, especially those of us that were Christians in high school and college, we are jealous of the freedom of the pagan, right? We're jealous of what they get to do and what we can't do. We've spent our life trying to follow the rules, trying to do the right things, trying to live the right way. And now here's this person who spent their life as a free pagan doing whatever they wanted to do, following any rules that they felt like they needed to follow, never committed to God, no fidelity, didn't put in the work that I did. And now at the very end, they're just going to slip in the door and we're going to the same heaven. That's not fair. I know it's hard to hear that out loud, but I can see about half of you grinning at me right now. You'll all have these smirks on your face like, yeah, that's pretty true. You got me. We've all thought that, and it's okay to think that. It makes sense why we would. It makes sense that we would think that. But here's Jesus' answer to that question. Why does he accept deathbed confessions? This is actually a parable. In the Gospel of Matthew, you can turn to chapter 20 if you want to. I'm going to read you verses 13 through 16, but first I need to tell you what's going on. Somebody comes up to Jesus and they ask this question. And so Jesus tells this story. He says there's an owner of a vineyard and he goes out one day where he can get some day laborers. And I've told you before, Israel was a poor country. They were impoverished. And so there was hubs where you would go and you could get men to come and put in a day's labor at whatever business you owned. And this was their livelihood. This was all that. They just hope they got picked that day. That was their livelihood. And so there's these people and the owner goes and he says, hey, I need y'all to come work for me in my vineyard. I'm going to pay you one denarius. I don't know how much that is. I could have done the research on what it was, but that feels like a waste of time. Google it if you care. I'm going to give you one denarius. And they're like, okay, great deal. So they go with him, they get in the Ford Ranger and they go to the vineyard and they start to work, right? And I don't know why Ford Ranger is funny, but it is. And they start to work and they're working all day. About the middle of the day, some other workers come by the field and they go, hey, we're looking for work. Can we help you today? And the owner says, yeah, sure. Come on. You can work for me. And so they start working by the middle of the day. And then about the last hour of the day, some other workers show up and they go, hey, we're looking for work. Can we work for you? The owner says, that's great. Yeah, come on. And they're working for him. So then when the work's done, the owner lines them up and begins to pay them. And he starts with the first group of workers that he hired that morning. Here's your one denarius for your day's labor. Thank you very much. And then he goes to the group that he hired in the middle. And he says, here's your one denarius. Thank you very much. And then he goes to the group that he hired with just an hour to go. And he said, here's your one denarius. Thank you very much. And the guys that have been working all day are ticked. Like, that's not fair. I worked eight hours for my denarius. That dude worked two hours, worked one hour. He had missed the smoke breaks and the lunch break and everything and just came in during the last hour. That's not fair. And the owner responds to them like this in verse 13. But he answered one of them, I am not being unfair to unfair to you friend didn't you agree to work for a denarius take your pay and go I want to give the one who was hired last the same as I gave you don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money or are you envious because I am generous so So the last will be first. And the first will be last. I love that response. They go, hey, that's not fair. We've been working for eight hours. They've been working for one hour. And you're giving us the same pay. And he goes, what do you care? That's basically the answer. It's my money. Do you care what I do with my own possession? Do you care what I do with my own resources? What right is it of yours to tell me what I should do? I chose to be generous to him. Are you envious of my generosity? You agreed to a denarius. I gave you a denarius. They agreed to this. I gave them this. It's my resources to do with what I want. And so to our question of why does God accept a deathbed confession where the implication is, hey, I've been laboring in the vineyard all day, my whole life. I've been working at this for decades. I put in a full eight hours. And I get my salvation. I get my eternity in heaven. I get my utopia. But they just slid in at the last minute. They don't deserve what I deserve. Maybe we can believe in purgatory so they have to suffer a little bit before they get the glory that I get. This is the jealousy that we express. And in that is implied exactly what the workers were frustrated about. Hey, that's not fair. I've put in my time and my effort. I've done my work. And the pay shouldn't be the same. And here's what this does. When we ask that question and we think that way. And here's what I wanted to talk about. When we think like that, we make salvation something that we think of in terms of being in or out. And very often, there's a lot of questions that Christians ask about salvation, and the motivation behind that question is, am I in or am I out? Did I say the prayer the right way? Am I in or am I out? Am I in heaven or am I burning in hell forever? That's what we're asking. How much sinning can I do and still be saved? Can I lose my salvation or does God hold on to me and I can't lose my salvation? That's an in or out question. How do I, if I feel like I lost my salvation, can I get it back? If someone wanders away, were they ever truly saved? All these questions that we ask about salvation are indicative of this thought process of in or out. And that's how we think about our salvation. And this is the place where many of us get stuck for our whole lives. But what I want us to see is that in or out salvation is a small salvation. Thinking of it that way reduces it to something that it should have never been. And if you're there, if you think about it this way, if you've thought about it that way, I don't want you to feel bad because that in or out mentality was probably handed to you by a well-meaning teacher in your church who also adopted that, who never got a more expansive view of salvation. I got saved when I was four. I was four and a half years old. We went to a special service on Sunday night, and the teacher taught us about the doctrine of hell. And I don't know if Aaron Winston's in here, but if I find out that we're teaching our four-year-olds about hell and scaring them into salvation, that's not going to be okay. They taught us about hell. They told us what it was. And they said, do you want to go there? No. No way. That sounds terrible. What's in heaven? Well, you sing a lot. I mean, that's better than hell. Okay. What do I have to do to go to heaven? Well, you have to believe in Jesus. Deal. What do I do to believe in Jesus? Will you repeat this prayer after me? Okay. You say the words and I'll do them too. And I was saved into an in or out understanding of salvation. What four-year-old isn't going to take out a fire insurance policy by threat of hell. Of course I got saved. God in his goodness has progressed my understanding of what salvation is over the decades. But many of us get saved into this kind of faith where for us it's a matter of are we in or are we out? And when we think of it that way, we become the jealous workers in the vineyard that get upset that we've been, and some of you will understand this reference, we've been the good brother in Luke 15, the one that stayed home and worked. And then the prodigal son comes home and God lets him into heaven and throws a party for him too. And we're like, what in the world? I've been doing my part the whole time. Because for us, salvation is, am I in? Am I going to heaven? Or am I not? And many of us get saved. And with this reductive view of what salvation is, we spend the rest of our lives just trying to stay in and trying to understand what's going to keep us there. But I think that there is a much bigger, better view of salvation. And I think it's presented to us in plain language in the greatest chapter in the Bible, Romans chapter 8. I'm going to read to you what Paul writes about what salvation is. But before I do, I want you to understand where we're picking this up. The first eight chapters of Romans, the first seven chapters of Romans, are a lengthy explanation of the doctrine of salvation. It's a lengthy explanation of the doctrine of salvation. Now, also, I want to pause here before I read. I forgot to say this, and I want to make sure that we're clear on this. When I talk about salvation, when I say saved or not, I want to just pause and be very clear that we understand what this means together, okay? The way that we explain salvation at grace, and when I say we, I mean me, because I'm the one that does it. The way that we explain salvation at grace is to say, to be saved, to be a Christian means that we believe Jesus is who he says he is. He says he's the son of God who's come to take away the sins of the world. We believe that. We believe that it means that Jesus did what he said he did. He lived a perfect life. He died a perfect death and he resurrected and rescued us from death and sin and shame. And it means that we believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do, which in Revelation 19 is to come crashing through the clouds to reclaim us and his creation and restore it back to himself and its original glory. To be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And that to become a Christian, all we need to engage in is the fundamental repentance of Christianity, which Peter describes to us in Acts. He's preaching a sermon. Jesus has been crucified. They're hanging out in the upper room for 40 days trying to figure out what to do. The Holy Spirit descends on them. Peter goes out to the crowd and he preaches. And the sermon is, hey, that guy that you killed was the Messiah and he came to save you. And the crowd believes him. And they say, what do we do? We messed up. And Peter says, repent and be baptized. Repent of what? I believe it's the fundamental repentance of salvation, which is to repent of who you thought Jesus was before you came to agree with him about who he says he is. So to be saved, we repent of who we thought Jesus was before we moved into this moment and this process of salvation. And we accept who he says he is from his word. That's what being a Christian is. Now, Romans is the most detailed theological lesson we get in the Bible. And the first seven chapters are written to help us understand what salvation is and what God did in it and what his responsibility is, what our responsibility is. Then in Romans 8, he culminates that seven chapter argument with what I think is the greatest chapter of the Bible and the culmination of the glory of salvation. And he proclaims to us what salvation is. So I want you to hear how Paul talks about it in Romans chapter 8 and see if this can't begin to expand our view of salvation. I've got my old Bible out. This is the ESV. I was reading this passage this morning in the NIV as I was going through the sermon. Sorry, sorry, DeVos. I know I bought you a Bible and now I'm ruining it. And I just didn't, I don't like the way the NIV reads. This is way better. So if you'll indulge me, I'm going to read you from the ESV. This is the soaring doctrine of salvation that Paul gives us. Verse 19. And I'm going to read all the way down through verse 30, so buckle up. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons in God. The creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it. In hopes that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning who have the firstfruits of the Spirit grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for the adoption of sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope for who hopes for what he sees, but if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought. But the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. Okay, lock in. You may have faded away, and you're not paying attention to the words anymore, but these three verses are super important. And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And this is the important part. And those whom he predestined, he also called. And those whom he called, he also justified. And those whom he justified, he also glorified. This is Paul's soaring description of what it means to be saved and what salvation is seeking to do and what God is seeking to work in that salvation. So the first thing that we see is in the very first verse where Paul says, I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. What Paul is saying here is, whatever we had to suffer to be Christians, whatever we had to suffer to be in and to build God's kingdom, whatever that work was for the day in the vineyard, and we've put in our time, whatever suffering we've endured for the sake of the kingdom and for the sake of God is not worth comparing to the glory that will be revealed to us. In other words, there is no possible way you will spend any time at all being saved, being a Christian, being a child of God, and come to regret it. It is impossible that you would be a Christian your whole life and serve God your whole life and get to heaven and be jealous of the people who partied in college. That will not happen. As a matter of fact, what I want us to see, and Paul's talking to a persecuted church, to people who actually suffer. Very few of us, if any, have suffered for our faith. The bar to entry in the American evangelical church is so low that it costs us nothing to come. We have not suffered. Furthermore, the Bible makes it very clear that life with God is the best life possible. Scripture is replete of verses and passages that remind us that being a Christian is the best life possible. And I can go through the Rolodex, John 10.10, that I talk about all the time. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy. But Jesus says, I have come that you might have life and have it to the full, have the most rich, full life possible. We're told in Psalms that at God's right hand are pleasures forevermore, that in his presence, there is a fullness of joy. We're told again in Psalms that one day in his courts is better than thousands elsewhere. We're told that we serve a God in Ephesians that is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine. We're told in John that from his fullness, we receive grace upon grace. We're told these things over and over again in scripture, that life with God is the best life possible. It's the fullest life possible. And so the reality is that if you're a Christian who's been saved your whole life and someone slips in at the last minute and they get to go to heaven too, you shouldn't feel jealousy. You should feel empathy because you just got to live your whole life with God and they missed out on all that joy. It is to our advantage to be picked up early and work in the vineyard all day. It's the life that we should desire and what we want. We should not feel jealousy to the deathbed conversion. We should feel empathy because they had to go through their whole life without God. And that's what salvation is. It's not in or out. It's with or without. You understand? It's not am I in, am I in, am I going or am I not? It's do I, am I living life with God? Am I abiding in him or am I not? And when someone is not saved, when someone doesn't know the Lord, the great tragedy is that they go through their life without experiencing the joy of the Lord and the joy of heaven. Without experiencing that relationship with him and the richness and fullness of life. We should not be jealous of that. We should be empathetic and continue to invite them in because through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. We needn't be jealous of the people who don't put in the work that we do. Because there is joy in that work. So right off the bat, Paul's not talking about in or out. Paul says with or without. And that there is no suffering that will not make it worth the glory that is to be revealed to us. Then, in the rest of this passage, we see this. And this is an important phrase. I want us to rest on it for a little bit. Salvation is a process of restoration and renewal. Salvation is a process of restoration and renewal. This is why this is important. Those words, process is important, restoration, renewal is important, and I want to show you why. But first, we're going to go to that word process. Because I think that many of us think about salvation as this moment in time. I wasn't saved. I prayed the prayer, said the confession, did whatever moment you look to where your belief changed. I wasn't saved. Then I prayed the prayer. I am saved. Done. And that's not true. Salvation is a process. And we know that salvation is a process because of what Paul writes in verse 30 that I said was really important. And those whom he predestined, he also called. And those whom he called, he also justified. And those whom he justified, he also glorified. That's a process. So let's walk through it so we understand it. Those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom God knew before time were going to accept his invitation to salvation, he also called them to himself. With the urging of the Holy Spirit, he called you to himself. It wasn't your work that found God. It was God calling you to himself through his love and through his kindness and through his goodness. Now, I know that some of you in the room are Calvinist and you care deeply about these words. I am not and I don't. So I'm not going to last a long time there. OK, but those whom he predestined, he also called those whom he called. He also justified that justification is what many of us think of as the moment of our salvation. That's when you were set righteous. You were clothed in the righteousness of Christ. You were set right in the court of God. You were justified before him. You are no longer guilty. You were absolved from your sin because Jesus died, lived a perfect life and died a perfect death. You are now justified before God. And the good news is that in the culmination of this chapter, there's this incredibly powerful verse of the assurance of salvation where Paul writes, So once you are justified, Paul says, I am convinced that nothing can unjustify you. Nothing can unsave you. But the process doesn't stop there. Those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom he called, he also justified. Those whom he justified, he also glorified. Now Paul speaks as if it's already been done because the work has been done. But we are not yet glorified. We are glorified when we occupy our bodies in heaven. We are glorified when we sit in the presence of God. I love that verse that he sneaks in there in the middle. We do not hope for what we see. We hope for what we do not see. So we wait for it with patience. Meaning, when we get to heaven, we don't need faith and hope anymore because we have God there. So he says that glorification is coming later. So what I want you to understand about your salvation is that it is in process. It's not done. When you are justified, you're secure. You will not be unjustified. But there is another step. And that doesn't happen until eternity. And that's what's in this text. So it's a process, I said, and that's the process. It starts at predestination, at call, at justification, and it's finished at glorification when we're in eternity with God forever. But it's also a process of renewal and restoration. We think about salvation as just our issue. It's just me and God. It's just for me. Jesus died for me, but that's not what we see in the text. In the text, we see that we groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and the redemption of our bodies, the completion of the salvation process. But so does the world groans in the pains of childbirth waiting for its redemption and restoration as well. So what I want us to understand about salvation is it's bigger than you. It's about restoring all of creation. When God made heaven and earth in Genesis, he made it perfect. He was pleased with it. And I am convinced that it looks completely different than our earth now. And we have mucked up this earth with sin and brokenness. And that one day he will restore all things. He will return and he will make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And he will be with us and we will be with our God and the former things will have passed away. And he'll create a new heaven and a new earth. And he will have restored creation back to himself and its original purpose. So when Jesus dies on the cross, he's not just dying for souls. He's dying for everything that he created to restore it back to himself. Because we're told in Romans that all of creation groans for the return of the king. The earth groans for God. And when we think about salvation as being in or being out, we miss virtually everything that's said in Romans 8. We make it so overly reductive as if to think that what we're teaching the kids over there is the greatest understanding that we ever need of this incredible doctrine. And we miss out on what it truly means to be saved. Here's the last thing that I want us to understand about salvation. Being saved allows us to experience glimpses of heaven here and now. If being in heaven is being with God and not being in heaven is being without God, then as people, we are literally experiencing either hell on earth or heaven on earth. Sometimes we get glimpses of what it is when we're in God's presence, at moments with our children, a hike, a sunset, a hug, singing. When we raise our voices, every time we sing and you guys sing loud and Aaron backs off and it's just us, every time that happens, I have to stop singing because I start crying. Because that's what heaven will be like. We will sing together. And so in being believers, we get these glimpses of heaven and what it will be like. And we usher God into our life and and we invite him in, and we allow him in. This is, again, why we should not be envious of the person who gets saved on their deathbed and got, oh, you got this whole life of freedom. No, we're actually taught in Romans that we are slaves to sin. We're slaves to this bondage of corruption, but that by being saved, we are finally free from sin. We live with more freedom than anyone. We should have more joy than anyone. I said this on Easter. Easter is the most joyful day and we are the most joyful people because of the hope that we have in Christ. So I want you to see this morning. I don't know if you can tell I'm fired up about it because I really want you to understand what it means to be saved it's not it's it's too small to understand it as am I going to heaven or am I not am I in or am I out with all gentleness that's a childlike understanding of our faith. And as we grow, and as we move towards glorification through our sanctification, we should allow God to deepen our understanding of what it means to be his child. And we should understand that he's going to restore all of creation to himself, not just us. And we should understand that every day we get to live as Christians is a day that we spend in the presence of God. And at his right hand, there are pleasures forevermore. In his presence, there is fullness of joy. We should be happy and proud and grateful if we're already laboring in the vineyard because of our understanding of what salvation is and how much God loves us through it. So let's progress in that and develop a far more deep, rich, helpful, gratitude-inducing understanding of what it means to be saved. Let's pray. Father, thank you for saving us. Thank you for sending your son. Thank you for sharing him with us. Thank you for watching him suffer for us. Thank you for the promise that you will renew and restore us. Thank you for the promise that you will renew and restore creation. Thank you for who you are. God, if there's anybody here who doesn't know you, I pray that your Holy Spirit would beckon them even now to desire to be with you and begin to experience glimpses of eternity here in this life. For those of us who are saved, God, thank you. Thank you for calling us to work early. Thank you for letting us labor in your vineyard. Thank you for the joy that it brings in what it is. God, we pray all these things in the name of your son, Jesus. Amen.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Welcome to Grace. It looks like I'm a little inside information, give a little praise to Gibson, Aaron Gibson and his team. A couple months ago, Aaron, our worship pastor, sent me an email with a link to that song, Honey in the Rock. And he said, hey, what do you think of this? And I listened to it for about 20 seconds and said, I think it's dumb, but you know, do it if you want. And that was it. I didn't like it. I'm not a fool I mean, that was great, wasn't it? That was really, really good. So Aaron, I don't know where you are, but listen to me less. But, you know, another reason that it could have been good is he didn't sing. So that was also helpful. But that was a really, really good worship set, guys. Thank you very much for leading us in that way. As we begin our series, Merry Christmas season to everybody. I'm excited. I love the Christmas season. I love Christmas carols. I spent more time than I should have this last week making this year's Christmas mix for me. It is the only thing that will be playing on my Spotify for the rest of the month. And I just, I love this season. And this week, the idea was to bring an ornament. There's an angel tree out front. You take a card off of that that gives you the opportunity to give charitably to a family that needs it and replace it with your ornament that represents your family. And in that way, that's the Grace Family Christmas tree. So if you didn't do it this week, bring an ornament next week, hang it on the tree, and we'll see a bunch of different ornaments that represent us as a big family. Because we are family and because this is a fun part of Christmas, next week is one of my favorite weeks of the year. We started it last year, and I thought it was great, so we're bringing it back this year, but it's Christmas Jammy Sunday. So dress in your best Christmas jammies. We want your families to be matching. There will be an award that goes to the most festive and I will publicly ridicule the least festive. So let's all participate. The week after that is our first ever holiday hoot. If you've been a part of Grace, you know that hoot nannies are a big deal. So the first ever holiday hoot where we're going to have a Christmas party. Bring something shareable. We'll put it on the table out there. We'll just hang out for a little while after the service. Load your kids up with sugar and then send you home. So that's going to be great. And then, of course, we've got our Christmas Eve celebration. So I'm really looking forward to celebrating December with you as we celebrate Christmas and all that it means. In our new series, Not Home Alone, which is obviously a play off of, it's in my top three Christmas movies of all time. We had a team of folks here this week led by Aaron and Julie, not Aaron Gibson. He didn't have anything to do with it. He's gotten enough credit this morning. Aaron Winston. And Julie and a team of those folks who decorated this place. And it looks amazing, doesn't it? Like all the different Home Alone touches. Yeah, they did such a good job. There's even a Kevin McAllister battle plan up here if you want to come look later. That's really, really great. So they really did a good job decorating the church. But in this series, Not Home Alone, we're going to be looking at Christmas and the different ways that it reminds us that we are not alone. And that it points out that God has actually put people in our life for a reason, to remind us of his presence. And that God actually places us in the lives of other people and gives us eyes to see those who might feel alone. And so as we walk through this month, we're going to be reminded of all the ways that Christmas reminds us that we are not alone. And as we start the series, I'm reminded of this generation of people between Malachi and Matthew. I don't know if you know this about your Bibles. I'm pretty certain that most of you know that there's an Old and New Testament. If you don't, that's all right. But now you do, okay? And you should never be embarrassed again. But there's an Old and New Testament in your Bible. And in the Old Testament, it's a chronology of the people of Israel, of God's chosen people. But it moves from the very beginning of human history in Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and to the flood, to what's called the first 11 chapters of Genesis, the prehistoric narrative. And then in Genesis chapter 12, we meet Abraham. And then the rest of the Old Testament is tracking the family and the descendants of Abraham through history. And it's a pretty good chronology of history starting in the Sumerian dynasty. That's when God shows up and calls Abraham out of the place called Ur in the land of the Chaldeans. That's the Sumerian dynasty. If you can remember all the way back to sixth grade history, that's probably when you learned about that. So for most of you, no, you don't know what I'm talking about. But some of us can remember back that far, and God called Abraham out of Ur. And he spoke to him, and he made him promises. And then the Old Testament tracks those promises, and we see his descendants in Egypt and struggling in the desert. That song, Honey in the Rock, is about that time in the desert. And then the period of the judges and the period of the kings and David. And then it moves into the period of exile and then post-exile when they come back. And then the prophets are speaking into this period. And so you can kind of read the Bible, the first 39 books of the Bible, and get a good chronology, a good history of the world all the way up to a certain point. And that certain point is Malachi. So if you're reading your Bible and you're reading it from page one to the end and you're turning the pages as you go and you're reading through this chronology of history and God's involvement in the generations. And now the Old Testament is important that we understand isn't laid out chronologically. But as you read it, you're getting snippets and you can reorganize it and it does flow from the beginning of history to this point in Malachi. But as you're reading it and you're turning the pages, when you read the last verse in Malachi and flip it over, the Old Testament's done. And then, I don't know, depending on who your publisher is, there'll be maybe a title page for the New Testament, maybe some explanatory notes, but you turn the page and it's Matthew chapter one. And in between the last verse of Malachi and the first verse of Matthew is what's called in church circles 400 years of silence. These are 400 years where there was no recorded books of the Bible written. Where presumably there were no prophets speaking. God didn't have any mouthpieces that he was using to speak to the people. Now I'm sure they were there, but they're lost to history. And I'm positive that God was moving in those generations, but we don't see them. So in the middle of our Bible is this 400-year period called the 400 years of silence. Because from the beginning of time until Malachi, God had been moving. From the beginning of time until Malachi, God had been speaking. From the beginning of time until Malachi, he had been assigning prophets and teachers to speak to his people and to copy down his words and to record his deeds and the deeds of his people here on earth. And in Malachi, that stops. And we don't pick it up again for another 400 years. And I always wonder, what must it have been like for what I think of as the silent generations? What must it have been like for the silent generations of those 400 years to see that God, he spoke to other generations, but he's not speaking to us. He moved in other generations, but he's not moving now. He sent prophets to others where in the past he's given miracles to Elijah and Elisha and he's given words of wisdom to, and he's given prophecies to Isaiah and to Ezekiel, but he's not moving now, and he's not moving here. Why has he spoken to other generations and he hasn't spoken to us? I can't help but wonder if they somehow felt like the neglected generation, the forgotten generation, the waiting generations, the lonely generations. They were unique in the history of Israel and God's voice coming to them. And I think that we can all relate to these silent generations. Because I think for us, we also have times in our life where we feel alone, where we feel isolated, where we feel like we are waiting, where we feel like we are praying and praying and praying and nothing meets us there but silence. And we must think, like the silent generations, we can relate to them by asking, God has shown up for others, why isn't he showing up for me? He's shown up for other people, why isn't he showing up for me? And what I mean can be isolating any number of examples. I remember when Jen and I were walking through our season of childlessness. We wanted very much to have a kid, and we didn't, and we couldn't. And the more you pray about something, and the more it hurts, the more alone you feel in that. And you look around, and your friends are having kids, and the kids you taught, I used to be a high school teacher, the kids you taught in high school are now having kids, and you're like, what gives, God? How come you're not listening to us? I see you blessing them. Why aren't you blessing us? What are we doing wrong? I see you loving them and answering their prayers. Why don't you hear our prayers? And I know the pain of going into meetings and lunches and being asked the question, and you give the painful answer. And in those seasons of loneliness and in those seasons of hurt and of waiting, even holidays like Christmas can feel painful because they only serve as reminders of what you don't yet have. They only serve as reminders of the things that make you feel more isolated, not less. I think of families who have elderly parents who are walking through the struggle of caring for them, who don't have a lot of good options. And my heart goes out to the families that have elderly parents, and those elderly parents have made arrangements and they have ways to take care of themselves, but it's the hard conversations and it's the hard reality and it's sometimes it can begin to consume you like you're facing it alone. But then my heart hurts even more for the folks in our church that I know who there are no good options on how to care for their family. They don't have the resources. Their parents don't have the resources. They don't have the resources. They don't know what to do. They're just stringing every day together, knowing that today is not enough to take care of tomorrow. And I don't really know how to take care of tomorrow either. I don't know what to do. And they're praying and they're crying out and they've got to be thinking, God, I see you moving for other people. Why aren't you moving here? I see you working things out for other families. Why don't you work them out for our family? I think of people in families where you're the only believer. Your spouse doesn't share the faith that you share. In fact, they deride you for it. Your children who you brought up to believe what you believe have walked away from what you believe, and you just feel alone. And you see other families, and it seems to work out for them. Their grandkids come to church with them, and I can't even get my spouse to come to church with me. God, why do you listen to their prayers and not mine? Why do they experience joy that I don't get to experience? I think of the people in our church who walk through depression and mental health disorders. And you see the joy that other people have. You see the laughter that other people experience. And you wonder to yourself, why can't I experience that? God, I see you giving them happiness. I see you answering their prayers. Why don't you answer my prayers? I think of stay-at-home moms who have so much to give and offer to the world around them. But because of seasons of life, they feel that they are reduced to a handmaid, to an 18-month-old tyrant. Not that we can relate to this in any way in our home. Or to an Uber service for the social calendar and practices of a middle school kid, and the world just reduces you to this shell of what you feel like you are and were, and you don't even know yourself anymore, and you feel so isolated in that. You feel so reduced in that. I think of people who have experienced grief, and the grief won't let go. The loss happened two years ago. It happened five years ago, and every now and again, God in his goodness gives you a little bit of reprieve from that where you forget that you're sad, but in your quiet moments, you're still sad. And in the times that you're reminded that God sees you and he's looking out for you, you agree with that in principle, but you don't feel it in your guts and you just feel alone. Or the people in the marriages that when you come to church on Sunday and you hang out with your friends, we're good. And when you're at home, it's hell. And you're just hanging on. And you both know the only reason you're in that marriage is so neither of you have to admit anything to your friends. We can feel isolated. We can feel alone. Sometimes it's because of choices that we make. Sometimes it's because of things that happen to us. Sometimes it's because we're simply isolated. But I think that each one of us has felt like, will again feel like, these silent generations. These generations of people between Malachi and Matthew who have seen God move for others and we just wonder why God isn't moving for us. I've tried to be your faithful servant, God. I know that I'm not perfect, but I try to do the right thing, and it just won't give. And God, if something doesn't give soon, I'm gonna lose my mind. My life is untenable, and I don't know how to hang on. And it's in those moments when we feel alone and when we feel isolated and we feel like maybe God has forgotten to answer our prayers that we most identify with these silent generations. And so if you feel that way, what can you do? Well, you can look to what the silent generations did. And what did they do? The silent generations clung to Christmas. The silent generations clung to Christmas. Now, they wouldn't yet call it Christmas, but they clung to the promises of God. They taught them to their children and to their grandchildren. And they kept them in their homes. And they upheld the law of God and the principles and the teachings of God. And they took their kids to synagogue every week. And they listened to the rabbis and they praised together. And they clung to the promises of God that they believed in in their Bible. It was called the Tanakh at the time, the 39 books of the Old Testament. They clung to the promises in that book. They remembered the promises of Genesis 12 when God isolates Abraham and he takes him to the land of Canaan and he makes him a promise. He makes him three promises that every generation of Jewish person clung to for those thousands of years leading up to Jesus. And the last promise that he made him was that one of your descendants is going to bless the whole earth. One of your descendants is going to be the Messiah. He's going to be the Savior of the world. So just hang on, believe in me and trust me, and one day I will send him to you. And then those generations that followed, and Joseph, and in Moses, and in Joshua, and in the judges, and in Samson, they clung to that promise that God made to Abraham. And then we see David in the middle of the Old Testament, and David up and he starts asking questions and he starts praying and everybody's wondering when is the Messiah going to come, the one who is to come, when will he arrive? And God tells David he's not coming yet. But in 2 Samuel chapter 7, we see the Davidic covenant where God tells David he's not coming yet, but when he does, he's going to sit on your throne forever. And it's this reminder and this restoration of the promise that they've been clinging to that God gives them kind of as a lifting up in the middle of their history to David that Jesus is going to come. You should still look for him. You should still teach your children about him and cling to the promises of the Messiah. And when he comes, he's gonna sit on your throne forever. And then we move into the period of the prophets where God gave visions to some of these great prophets of old, Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Amos. And he gave them messianic prophecies. Prophecies about the Messiah who was to come. And Isaiah prophesies that when the Messiah comes, that the blind will receive their sight and the deaf will receive their hearing and that the people who can't walk will be able to walk and that prisoners will be set free. And we see Isaiah call him Emmanuel, which means God with us, God coming from heaven to earth with us. Isaiah promises that and that when he does that, he will be the king of kings and the Lord of lords and the prince of peace and his name will be called Emmanuel. And then we learn that by his stripes, we will be healed through his sacrifice and through his death. We will be healed and restored forever the way that God intended it at the beginning of creation when he walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening. That God has this grand plan to restore creation and you to himself. And so this Old Testament generation, the silent generations, clung to those promises that they could track throughout their Bible that they taught generation after generation knowing that one day God promised that he was going to send a savior. And then you turn the page to Matthew chapter one and you see the genealogies of all the people who were a part of Israel through the years or grafted into Israel and Ruth and Rahab. And then you see the arrival of Jesus. You have the very first Christmas. And in that Christmas, we see a God who keeps his promises. And I will remind you of this every year that you allow me to be your pastor and Christmas time rolls around, that Christmas is our annual reminder from God that we serve a God who keeps his promises. We serve a God who keeps his promises. Romans 5 tells us that we hope in him and in that hope we will not be put to shame. And I don't know about you, but every other thing that we have hoped in in our life at some point or another lets us down and puts us to shame. Especially if you're a UNC fan. There is nothing in our life that is guaranteed that will not let us down. There is no promise we can receive from anyone that is ironclad and will not eventually disappoint us. But God does not put us to shame. God keeps his promises, and Christmas is our annual reminder that we serve and worship and cling to a God who has not forgotten us, who does see us, that reminds us that we are not alone, who whispers in our ear in the book of Isaiah that the Lord is close to the broken heart, and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit, who reminds us through the Psalms that he is our strong fortress, that we can run to his wings for protection and that with him in Isaiah we are told that we will soar on wings like eagles, that we will run and not be weary, that we will walk and we will not faint, that he will give us strength. We know these things and we can run to him and we can claim those because he's promised us. And Christmas reminds us that he keeps his promises because he promised that baby boy for 4,000 years. For generation after generation, they said, he's coming. He's coming. When? Soon? We hope. But we don't know. He's coming. He's coming. And there's 400 years of silence. And they clung to it. He's coming. We know he is. And then he shows up. And the angels declare him. And the shepherds worship him. And the wise men bow down to him. And his mother Mary stores it all up in her heart. And those generations clung to Christmas. So what do we do when we feel alone? What do we do when we feel forgotten? What do we do when life feels untenable and I don't know the way out and I don't know how this is going to be resolved and I'm praying like crazy and God does not seem to be answering my prayers? What do we do? In our waiting, we cling to Christmas. We cling to what Christmas is. We cling to the reality that we serve a God who keeps His promises. And we acknowledge that not only did God in the Old Testament make promises to the generations before us that He fulfilled in the sending of His Son, but that that Son, when He came, He made us promises too. And the people who came after him made us promises in God's name. We cling to the promises of Jesus when he talked to the disciples and Jesus says, you know, in a little bit, I've got to go. And they're like, where are you going, man? We'll come with you. And he says, where I'm going, you can't go there yet. But I'm going to go and prepare a place for you. I'm going to go and make sure that when you get to heaven, there's going to be a house for you. I'm going where you can't yet go because you're still in your mortal body, but when you are released from your mortal body, you will join me in eternity, and I am preparing a place for you there. It's a promise from Jesus. It's a promise from Jesus in the marriage supper of the Lamb in Revelation. That there's going to be the greatest banquet of all time when we get to heaven and he saved us a seat. It's a promise. Paul reminds us of these promises all throughout his writings, but most pointedly in Romans. When he tells us in Romans 8 that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of Jesus Christ. Not angels or demon or height nor depth nor any other created thing will be able to separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. If you know Jesus, if you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, he's the son of God, that he did what he said he did, he descended to earth, he took on human form, he died on the cross for our sins and he rose again on the third day. And that he's gonna do what he says he's gonna do, that he's gonna, he's gonna come back crashing into the clouds on a white horse. And on his thigh, it's going to say righteous and true. And he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. He promises us that. That he will restore this creation. And he acknowledges in Romans 8 that all of creation groans for that return. But as Christians in this era, we cling to those promises. We allow Christmas to remind us that God always keeps his promises. And like the 4,000 years of generations before us, and like the 400 years of silence in the generations within there, we cling to God's promises and we know that we serve a God who always keeps his promises and the last promise he makes to us in Revelation 21 that he is going to create a new heaven and a new earth and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain for the former things, all those things that bring us grief, all those things that make us feel isolated, all those things that make us wonder if God really hears us, the former things have passed away. That's a promise that we have from our God. And we are reminded at Christmas that we serve a God who keeps his promises. So let Christmas season be what it is. Let it be fun. Go see the lights. Decorate the tree. Buy your gifts. Spend your time with your friends, go to your parties, do all the stuff. But please, this December, don't lose sight of the fact that Christmas is a gift from God that reminds us that he keeps his promises. Christmas reminds us that he's done it once and we believe he'll do it again. He sent his son one time and they clung to that promise for 4,000 years. And it's been 2,000 years since he sent his son the last time. But we know that he's going to do it again. And when he does, he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue and all these former things will have passed away. So even when it feels like God can't hear us, he doesn't see us, we feel alone. We remember that generations before us have felt that way too. And so we cling to Christmas because it reminds us that he's done it once and we believe that he'll do it again.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Welcome to Grace. It looks like I'm a little inside information, give a little praise to Gibson, Aaron Gibson and his team. A couple months ago, Aaron, our worship pastor, sent me an email with a link to that song, Honey in the Rock. And he said, hey, what do you think of this? And I listened to it for about 20 seconds and said, I think it's dumb, but you know, do it if you want. And that was it. I didn't like it. I'm not a fool I mean, that was great, wasn't it? That was really, really good. So Aaron, I don't know where you are, but listen to me less. But, you know, another reason that it could have been good is he didn't sing. So that was also helpful. But that was a really, really good worship set, guys. Thank you very much for leading us in that way. As we begin our series, Merry Christmas season to everybody. I'm excited. I love the Christmas season. I love Christmas carols. I spent more time than I should have this last week making this year's Christmas mix for me. It is the only thing that will be playing on my Spotify for the rest of the month. And I just, I love this season. And this week, the idea was to bring an ornament. There's an angel tree out front. You take a card off of that that gives you the opportunity to give charitably to a family that needs it and replace it with your ornament that represents your family. And in that way, that's the Grace Family Christmas tree. So if you didn't do it this week, bring an ornament next week, hang it on the tree, and we'll see a bunch of different ornaments that represent us as a big family. Because we are family and because this is a fun part of Christmas, next week is one of my favorite weeks of the year. We started it last year, and I thought it was great, so we're bringing it back this year, but it's Christmas Jammy Sunday. So dress in your best Christmas jammies. We want your families to be matching. There will be an award that goes to the most festive and I will publicly ridicule the least festive. So let's all participate. The week after that is our first ever holiday hoot. If you've been a part of Grace, you know that hoot nannies are a big deal. So the first ever holiday hoot where we're going to have a Christmas party. Bring something shareable. We'll put it on the table out there. We'll just hang out for a little while after the service. Load your kids up with sugar and then send you home. So that's going to be great. And then, of course, we've got our Christmas Eve celebration. So I'm really looking forward to celebrating December with you as we celebrate Christmas and all that it means. In our new series, Not Home Alone, which is obviously a play off of, it's in my top three Christmas movies of all time. We had a team of folks here this week led by Aaron and Julie, not Aaron Gibson. He didn't have anything to do with it. He's gotten enough credit this morning. Aaron Winston. And Julie and a team of those folks who decorated this place. And it looks amazing, doesn't it? Like all the different Home Alone touches. Yeah, they did such a good job. There's even a Kevin McAllister battle plan up here if you want to come look later. That's really, really great. So they really did a good job decorating the church. But in this series, Not Home Alone, we're going to be looking at Christmas and the different ways that it reminds us that we are not alone. And that it points out that God has actually put people in our life for a reason, to remind us of his presence. And that God actually places us in the lives of other people and gives us eyes to see those who might feel alone. And so as we walk through this month, we're going to be reminded of all the ways that Christmas reminds us that we are not alone. And as we start the series, I'm reminded of this generation of people between Malachi and Matthew. I don't know if you know this about your Bibles. I'm pretty certain that most of you know that there's an Old and New Testament. If you don't, that's all right. But now you do, okay? And you should never be embarrassed again. But there's an Old and New Testament in your Bible. And in the Old Testament, it's a chronology of the people of Israel, of God's chosen people. But it moves from the very beginning of human history in Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and to the flood, to what's called the first 11 chapters of Genesis, the prehistoric narrative. And then in Genesis chapter 12, we meet Abraham. And then the rest of the Old Testament is tracking the family and the descendants of Abraham through history. And it's a pretty good chronology of history starting in the Sumerian dynasty. That's when God shows up and calls Abraham out of the place called Ur in the land of the Chaldeans. That's the Sumerian dynasty. If you can remember all the way back to sixth grade history, that's probably when you learned about that. So for most of you, no, you don't know what I'm talking about. But some of us can remember back that far, and God called Abraham out of Ur. And he spoke to him, and he made him promises. And then the Old Testament tracks those promises, and we see his descendants in Egypt and struggling in the desert. That song, Honey in the Rock, is about that time in the desert. And then the period of the judges and the period of the kings and David. And then it moves into the period of exile and then post-exile when they come back. And then the prophets are speaking into this period. And so you can kind of read the Bible, the first 39 books of the Bible, and get a good chronology, a good history of the world all the way up to a certain point. And that certain point is Malachi. So if you're reading your Bible and you're reading it from page one to the end and you're turning the pages as you go and you're reading through this chronology of history and God's involvement in the generations. And now the Old Testament is important that we understand isn't laid out chronologically. But as you read it, you're getting snippets and you can reorganize it and it does flow from the beginning of history to this point in Malachi. But as you're reading it and you're turning the pages, when you read the last verse in Malachi and flip it over, the Old Testament's done. And then, I don't know, depending on who your publisher is, there'll be maybe a title page for the New Testament, maybe some explanatory notes, but you turn the page and it's Matthew chapter one. And in between the last verse of Malachi and the first verse of Matthew is what's called in church circles 400 years of silence. These are 400 years where there was no recorded books of the Bible written. Where presumably there were no prophets speaking. God didn't have any mouthpieces that he was using to speak to the people. Now I'm sure they were there, but they're lost to history. And I'm positive that God was moving in those generations, but we don't see them. So in the middle of our Bible is this 400-year period called the 400 years of silence. Because from the beginning of time until Malachi, God had been moving. From the beginning of time until Malachi, God had been speaking. From the beginning of time until Malachi, he had been assigning prophets and teachers to speak to his people and to copy down his words and to record his deeds and the deeds of his people here on earth. And in Malachi, that stops. And we don't pick it up again for another 400 years. And I always wonder, what must it have been like for what I think of as the silent generations? What must it have been like for the silent generations of those 400 years to see that God, he spoke to other generations, but he's not speaking to us. He moved in other generations, but he's not moving now. He sent prophets to others where in the past he's given miracles to Elijah and Elisha and he's given words of wisdom to, and he's given prophecies to Isaiah and to Ezekiel, but he's not moving now, and he's not moving here. Why has he spoken to other generations and he hasn't spoken to us? I can't help but wonder if they somehow felt like the neglected generation, the forgotten generation, the waiting generations, the lonely generations. They were unique in the history of Israel and God's voice coming to them. And I think that we can all relate to these silent generations. Because I think for us, we also have times in our life where we feel alone, where we feel isolated, where we feel like we are waiting, where we feel like we are praying and praying and praying and nothing meets us there but silence. And we must think, like the silent generations, we can relate to them by asking, God has shown up for others, why isn't he showing up for me? He's shown up for other people, why isn't he showing up for me? And what I mean can be isolating any number of examples. I remember when Jen and I were walking through our season of childlessness. We wanted very much to have a kid, and we didn't, and we couldn't. And the more you pray about something, and the more it hurts, the more alone you feel in that. And you look around, and your friends are having kids, and the kids you taught, I used to be a high school teacher, the kids you taught in high school are now having kids, and you're like, what gives, God? How come you're not listening to us? I see you blessing them. Why aren't you blessing us? What are we doing wrong? I see you loving them and answering their prayers. Why don't you hear our prayers? And I know the pain of going into meetings and lunches and being asked the question, and you give the painful answer. And in those seasons of loneliness and in those seasons of hurt and of waiting, even holidays like Christmas can feel painful because they only serve as reminders of what you don't yet have. They only serve as reminders of the things that make you feel more isolated, not less. I think of families who have elderly parents who are walking through the struggle of caring for them, who don't have a lot of good options. And my heart goes out to the families that have elderly parents, and those elderly parents have made arrangements and they have ways to take care of themselves, but it's the hard conversations and it's the hard reality and it's sometimes it can begin to consume you like you're facing it alone. But then my heart hurts even more for the folks in our church that I know who there are no good options on how to care for their family. They don't have the resources. Their parents don't have the resources. They don't have the resources. They don't know what to do. They're just stringing every day together, knowing that today is not enough to take care of tomorrow. And I don't really know how to take care of tomorrow either. I don't know what to do. And they're praying and they're crying out and they've got to be thinking, God, I see you moving for other people. Why aren't you moving here? I see you working things out for other families. Why don't you work them out for our family? I think of people in families where you're the only believer. Your spouse doesn't share the faith that you share. In fact, they deride you for it. Your children who you brought up to believe what you believe have walked away from what you believe, and you just feel alone. And you see other families, and it seems to work out for them. Their grandkids come to church with them, and I can't even get my spouse to come to church with me. God, why do you listen to their prayers and not mine? Why do they experience joy that I don't get to experience? I think of the people in our church who walk through depression and mental health disorders. And you see the joy that other people have. You see the laughter that other people experience. And you wonder to yourself, why can't I experience that? God, I see you giving them happiness. I see you answering their prayers. Why don't you answer my prayers? I think of stay-at-home moms who have so much to give and offer to the world around them. But because of seasons of life, they feel that they are reduced to a handmaid, to an 18-month-old tyrant. Not that we can relate to this in any way in our home. Or to an Uber service for the social calendar and practices of a middle school kid, and the world just reduces you to this shell of what you feel like you are and were, and you don't even know yourself anymore, and you feel so isolated in that. You feel so reduced in that. I think of people who have experienced grief, and the grief won't let go. The loss happened two years ago. It happened five years ago, and every now and again, God in his goodness gives you a little bit of reprieve from that where you forget that you're sad, but in your quiet moments, you're still sad. And in the times that you're reminded that God sees you and he's looking out for you, you agree with that in principle, but you don't feel it in your guts and you just feel alone. Or the people in the marriages that when you come to church on Sunday and you hang out with your friends, we're good. And when you're at home, it's hell. And you're just hanging on. And you both know the only reason you're in that marriage is so neither of you have to admit anything to your friends. We can feel isolated. We can feel alone. Sometimes it's because of choices that we make. Sometimes it's because of things that happen to us. Sometimes it's because we're simply isolated. But I think that each one of us has felt like, will again feel like, these silent generations. These generations of people between Malachi and Matthew who have seen God move for others and we just wonder why God isn't moving for us. I've tried to be your faithful servant, God. I know that I'm not perfect, but I try to do the right thing, and it just won't give. And God, if something doesn't give soon, I'm gonna lose my mind. My life is untenable, and I don't know how to hang on. And it's in those moments when we feel alone and when we feel isolated and we feel like maybe God has forgotten to answer our prayers that we most identify with these silent generations. And so if you feel that way, what can you do? Well, you can look to what the silent generations did. And what did they do? The silent generations clung to Christmas. The silent generations clung to Christmas. Now, they wouldn't yet call it Christmas, but they clung to the promises of God. They taught them to their children and to their grandchildren. And they kept them in their homes. And they upheld the law of God and the principles and the teachings of God. And they took their kids to synagogue every week. And they listened to the rabbis and they praised together. And they clung to the promises of God that they believed in in their Bible. It was called the Tanakh at the time, the 39 books of the Old Testament. They clung to the promises in that book. They remembered the promises of Genesis 12 when God isolates Abraham and he takes him to the land of Canaan and he makes him a promise. He makes him three promises that every generation of Jewish person clung to for those thousands of years leading up to Jesus. And the last promise that he made him was that one of your descendants is going to bless the whole earth. One of your descendants is going to be the Messiah. He's going to be the Savior of the world. So just hang on, believe in me and trust me, and one day I will send him to you. And then those generations that followed, and Joseph, and in Moses, and in Joshua, and in the judges, and in Samson, they clung to that promise that God made to Abraham. And then we see David in the middle of the Old Testament, and David up and he starts asking questions and he starts praying and everybody's wondering when is the Messiah going to come, the one who is to come, when will he arrive? And God tells David he's not coming yet. But in 2 Samuel chapter 7, we see the Davidic covenant where God tells David he's not coming yet, but when he does, he's going to sit on your throne forever. And it's this reminder and this restoration of the promise that they've been clinging to that God gives them kind of as a lifting up in the middle of their history to David that Jesus is going to come. You should still look for him. You should still teach your children about him and cling to the promises of the Messiah. And when he comes, he's gonna sit on your throne forever. And then we move into the period of the prophets where God gave visions to some of these great prophets of old, Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Amos. And he gave them messianic prophecies. Prophecies about the Messiah who was to come. And Isaiah prophesies that when the Messiah comes, that the blind will receive their sight and the deaf will receive their hearing and that the people who can't walk will be able to walk and that prisoners will be set free. And we see Isaiah call him Emmanuel, which means God with us, God coming from heaven to earth with us. Isaiah promises that and that when he does that, he will be the king of kings and the Lord of lords and the prince of peace and his name will be called Emmanuel. And then we learn that by his stripes, we will be healed through his sacrifice and through his death. We will be healed and restored forever the way that God intended it at the beginning of creation when he walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening. That God has this grand plan to restore creation and you to himself. And so this Old Testament generation, the silent generations, clung to those promises that they could track throughout their Bible that they taught generation after generation knowing that one day God promised that he was going to send a savior. And then you turn the page to Matthew chapter one and you see the genealogies of all the people who were a part of Israel through the years or grafted into Israel and Ruth and Rahab. And then you see the arrival of Jesus. You have the very first Christmas. And in that Christmas, we see a God who keeps his promises. And I will remind you of this every year that you allow me to be your pastor and Christmas time rolls around, that Christmas is our annual reminder from God that we serve a God who keeps his promises. We serve a God who keeps his promises. Romans 5 tells us that we hope in him and in that hope we will not be put to shame. And I don't know about you, but every other thing that we have hoped in in our life at some point or another lets us down and puts us to shame. Especially if you're a UNC fan. There is nothing in our life that is guaranteed that will not let us down. There is no promise we can receive from anyone that is ironclad and will not eventually disappoint us. But God does not put us to shame. God keeps his promises, and Christmas is our annual reminder that we serve and worship and cling to a God who has not forgotten us, who does see us, that reminds us that we are not alone, who whispers in our ear in the book of Isaiah that the Lord is close to the broken heart, and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit, who reminds us through the Psalms that he is our strong fortress, that we can run to his wings for protection and that with him in Isaiah we are told that we will soar on wings like eagles, that we will run and not be weary, that we will walk and we will not faint, that he will give us strength. We know these things and we can run to him and we can claim those because he's promised us. And Christmas reminds us that he keeps his promises because he promised that baby boy for 4,000 years. For generation after generation, they said, he's coming. He's coming. When? Soon? We hope. But we don't know. He's coming. He's coming. And there's 400 years of silence. And they clung to it. He's coming. We know he is. And then he shows up. And the angels declare him. And the shepherds worship him. And the wise men bow down to him. And his mother Mary stores it all up in her heart. And those generations clung to Christmas. So what do we do when we feel alone? What do we do when we feel forgotten? What do we do when life feels untenable and I don't know the way out and I don't know how this is going to be resolved and I'm praying like crazy and God does not seem to be answering my prayers? What do we do? In our waiting, we cling to Christmas. We cling to what Christmas is. We cling to the reality that we serve a God who keeps His promises. And we acknowledge that not only did God in the Old Testament make promises to the generations before us that He fulfilled in the sending of His Son, but that that Son, when He came, He made us promises too. And the people who came after him made us promises in God's name. We cling to the promises of Jesus when he talked to the disciples and Jesus says, you know, in a little bit, I've got to go. And they're like, where are you going, man? We'll come with you. And he says, where I'm going, you can't go there yet. But I'm going to go and prepare a place for you. I'm going to go and make sure that when you get to heaven, there's going to be a house for you. I'm going where you can't yet go because you're still in your mortal body, but when you are released from your mortal body, you will join me in eternity, and I am preparing a place for you there. It's a promise from Jesus. It's a promise from Jesus in the marriage supper of the Lamb in Revelation. That there's going to be the greatest banquet of all time when we get to heaven and he saved us a seat. It's a promise. Paul reminds us of these promises all throughout his writings, but most pointedly in Romans. When he tells us in Romans 8 that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of Jesus Christ. Not angels or demon or height nor depth nor any other created thing will be able to separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. If you know Jesus, if you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, he's the son of God, that he did what he said he did, he descended to earth, he took on human form, he died on the cross for our sins and he rose again on the third day. And that he's gonna do what he says he's gonna do, that he's gonna, he's gonna come back crashing into the clouds on a white horse. And on his thigh, it's going to say righteous and true. And he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. He promises us that. That he will restore this creation. And he acknowledges in Romans 8 that all of creation groans for that return. But as Christians in this era, we cling to those promises. We allow Christmas to remind us that God always keeps his promises. And like the 4,000 years of generations before us, and like the 400 years of silence in the generations within there, we cling to God's promises and we know that we serve a God who always keeps his promises and the last promise he makes to us in Revelation 21 that he is going to create a new heaven and a new earth and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain for the former things, all those things that bring us grief, all those things that make us feel isolated, all those things that make us wonder if God really hears us, the former things have passed away. That's a promise that we have from our God. And we are reminded at Christmas that we serve a God who keeps his promises. So let Christmas season be what it is. Let it be fun. Go see the lights. Decorate the tree. Buy your gifts. Spend your time with your friends, go to your parties, do all the stuff. But please, this December, don't lose sight of the fact that Christmas is a gift from God that reminds us that he keeps his promises. Christmas reminds us that he's done it once and we believe he'll do it again. He sent his son one time and they clung to that promise for 4,000 years. And it's been 2,000 years since he sent his son the last time. But we know that he's going to do it again. And when he does, he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue and all these former things will have passed away. So even when it feels like God can't hear us, he doesn't see us, we feel alone. We remember that generations before us have felt that way too. And so we cling to Christmas because it reminds us that he's done it once and we believe that he'll do it again.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Welcome to Grace. It looks like I'm a little inside information, give a little praise to Gibson, Aaron Gibson and his team. A couple months ago, Aaron, our worship pastor, sent me an email with a link to that song, Honey in the Rock. And he said, hey, what do you think of this? And I listened to it for about 20 seconds and said, I think it's dumb, but you know, do it if you want. And that was it. I didn't like it. I'm not a fool I mean, that was great, wasn't it? That was really, really good. So Aaron, I don't know where you are, but listen to me less. But, you know, another reason that it could have been good is he didn't sing. So that was also helpful. But that was a really, really good worship set, guys. Thank you very much for leading us in that way. As we begin our series, Merry Christmas season to everybody. I'm excited. I love the Christmas season. I love Christmas carols. I spent more time than I should have this last week making this year's Christmas mix for me. It is the only thing that will be playing on my Spotify for the rest of the month. And I just, I love this season. And this week, the idea was to bring an ornament. There's an angel tree out front. You take a card off of that that gives you the opportunity to give charitably to a family that needs it and replace it with your ornament that represents your family. And in that way, that's the Grace Family Christmas tree. So if you didn't do it this week, bring an ornament next week, hang it on the tree, and we'll see a bunch of different ornaments that represent us as a big family. Because we are family and because this is a fun part of Christmas, next week is one of my favorite weeks of the year. We started it last year, and I thought it was great, so we're bringing it back this year, but it's Christmas Jammy Sunday. So dress in your best Christmas jammies. We want your families to be matching. There will be an award that goes to the most festive and I will publicly ridicule the least festive. So let's all participate. The week after that is our first ever holiday hoot. If you've been a part of Grace, you know that hoot nannies are a big deal. So the first ever holiday hoot where we're going to have a Christmas party. Bring something shareable. We'll put it on the table out there. We'll just hang out for a little while after the service. Load your kids up with sugar and then send you home. So that's going to be great. And then, of course, we've got our Christmas Eve celebration. So I'm really looking forward to celebrating December with you as we celebrate Christmas and all that it means. In our new series, Not Home Alone, which is obviously a play off of, it's in my top three Christmas movies of all time. We had a team of folks here this week led by Aaron and Julie, not Aaron Gibson. He didn't have anything to do with it. He's gotten enough credit this morning. Aaron Winston. And Julie and a team of those folks who decorated this place. And it looks amazing, doesn't it? Like all the different Home Alone touches. Yeah, they did such a good job. There's even a Kevin McAllister battle plan up here if you want to come look later. That's really, really great. So they really did a good job decorating the church. But in this series, Not Home Alone, we're going to be looking at Christmas and the different ways that it reminds us that we are not alone. And that it points out that God has actually put people in our life for a reason, to remind us of his presence. And that God actually places us in the lives of other people and gives us eyes to see those who might feel alone. And so as we walk through this month, we're going to be reminded of all the ways that Christmas reminds us that we are not alone. And as we start the series, I'm reminded of this generation of people between Malachi and Matthew. I don't know if you know this about your Bibles. I'm pretty certain that most of you know that there's an Old and New Testament. If you don't, that's all right. But now you do, okay? And you should never be embarrassed again. But there's an Old and New Testament in your Bible. And in the Old Testament, it's a chronology of the people of Israel, of God's chosen people. But it moves from the very beginning of human history in Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and to the flood, to what's called the first 11 chapters of Genesis, the prehistoric narrative. And then in Genesis chapter 12, we meet Abraham. And then the rest of the Old Testament is tracking the family and the descendants of Abraham through history. And it's a pretty good chronology of history starting in the Sumerian dynasty. That's when God shows up and calls Abraham out of the place called Ur in the land of the Chaldeans. That's the Sumerian dynasty. If you can remember all the way back to sixth grade history, that's probably when you learned about that. So for most of you, no, you don't know what I'm talking about. But some of us can remember back that far, and God called Abraham out of Ur. And he spoke to him, and he made him promises. And then the Old Testament tracks those promises, and we see his descendants in Egypt and struggling in the desert. That song, Honey in the Rock, is about that time in the desert. And then the period of the judges and the period of the kings and David. And then it moves into the period of exile and then post-exile when they come back. And then the prophets are speaking into this period. And so you can kind of read the Bible, the first 39 books of the Bible, and get a good chronology, a good history of the world all the way up to a certain point. And that certain point is Malachi. So if you're reading your Bible and you're reading it from page one to the end and you're turning the pages as you go and you're reading through this chronology of history and God's involvement in the generations. And now the Old Testament is important that we understand isn't laid out chronologically. But as you read it, you're getting snippets and you can reorganize it and it does flow from the beginning of history to this point in Malachi. But as you're reading it and you're turning the pages, when you read the last verse in Malachi and flip it over, the Old Testament's done. And then, I don't know, depending on who your publisher is, there'll be maybe a title page for the New Testament, maybe some explanatory notes, but you turn the page and it's Matthew chapter one. And in between the last verse of Malachi and the first verse of Matthew is what's called in church circles 400 years of silence. These are 400 years where there was no recorded books of the Bible written. Where presumably there were no prophets speaking. God didn't have any mouthpieces that he was using to speak to the people. Now I'm sure they were there, but they're lost to history. And I'm positive that God was moving in those generations, but we don't see them. So in the middle of our Bible is this 400-year period called the 400 years of silence. Because from the beginning of time until Malachi, God had been moving. From the beginning of time until Malachi, God had been speaking. From the beginning of time until Malachi, he had been assigning prophets and teachers to speak to his people and to copy down his words and to record his deeds and the deeds of his people here on earth. And in Malachi, that stops. And we don't pick it up again for another 400 years. And I always wonder, what must it have been like for what I think of as the silent generations? What must it have been like for the silent generations of those 400 years to see that God, he spoke to other generations, but he's not speaking to us. He moved in other generations, but he's not moving now. He sent prophets to others where in the past he's given miracles to Elijah and Elisha and he's given words of wisdom to, and he's given prophecies to Isaiah and to Ezekiel, but he's not moving now, and he's not moving here. Why has he spoken to other generations and he hasn't spoken to us? I can't help but wonder if they somehow felt like the neglected generation, the forgotten generation, the waiting generations, the lonely generations. They were unique in the history of Israel and God's voice coming to them. And I think that we can all relate to these silent generations. Because I think for us, we also have times in our life where we feel alone, where we feel isolated, where we feel like we are waiting, where we feel like we are praying and praying and praying and nothing meets us there but silence. And we must think, like the silent generations, we can relate to them by asking, God has shown up for others, why isn't he showing up for me? He's shown up for other people, why isn't he showing up for me? And what I mean can be isolating any number of examples. I remember when Jen and I were walking through our season of childlessness. We wanted very much to have a kid, and we didn't, and we couldn't. And the more you pray about something, and the more it hurts, the more alone you feel in that. And you look around, and your friends are having kids, and the kids you taught, I used to be a high school teacher, the kids you taught in high school are now having kids, and you're like, what gives, God? How come you're not listening to us? I see you blessing them. Why aren't you blessing us? What are we doing wrong? I see you loving them and answering their prayers. Why don't you hear our prayers? And I know the pain of going into meetings and lunches and being asked the question, and you give the painful answer. And in those seasons of loneliness and in those seasons of hurt and of waiting, even holidays like Christmas can feel painful because they only serve as reminders of what you don't yet have. They only serve as reminders of the things that make you feel more isolated, not less. I think of families who have elderly parents who are walking through the struggle of caring for them, who don't have a lot of good options. And my heart goes out to the families that have elderly parents, and those elderly parents have made arrangements and they have ways to take care of themselves, but it's the hard conversations and it's the hard reality and it's sometimes it can begin to consume you like you're facing it alone. But then my heart hurts even more for the folks in our church that I know who there are no good options on how to care for their family. They don't have the resources. Their parents don't have the resources. They don't have the resources. They don't know what to do. They're just stringing every day together, knowing that today is not enough to take care of tomorrow. And I don't really know how to take care of tomorrow either. I don't know what to do. And they're praying and they're crying out and they've got to be thinking, God, I see you moving for other people. Why aren't you moving here? I see you working things out for other families. Why don't you work them out for our family? I think of people in families where you're the only believer. Your spouse doesn't share the faith that you share. In fact, they deride you for it. Your children who you brought up to believe what you believe have walked away from what you believe, and you just feel alone. And you see other families, and it seems to work out for them. Their grandkids come to church with them, and I can't even get my spouse to come to church with me. God, why do you listen to their prayers and not mine? Why do they experience joy that I don't get to experience? I think of the people in our church who walk through depression and mental health disorders. And you see the joy that other people have. You see the laughter that other people experience. And you wonder to yourself, why can't I experience that? God, I see you giving them happiness. I see you answering their prayers. Why don't you answer my prayers? I think of stay-at-home moms who have so much to give and offer to the world around them. But because of seasons of life, they feel that they are reduced to a handmaid, to an 18-month-old tyrant. Not that we can relate to this in any way in our home. Or to an Uber service for the social calendar and practices of a middle school kid, and the world just reduces you to this shell of what you feel like you are and were, and you don't even know yourself anymore, and you feel so isolated in that. You feel so reduced in that. I think of people who have experienced grief, and the grief won't let go. The loss happened two years ago. It happened five years ago, and every now and again, God in his goodness gives you a little bit of reprieve from that where you forget that you're sad, but in your quiet moments, you're still sad. And in the times that you're reminded that God sees you and he's looking out for you, you agree with that in principle, but you don't feel it in your guts and you just feel alone. Or the people in the marriages that when you come to church on Sunday and you hang out with your friends, we're good. And when you're at home, it's hell. And you're just hanging on. And you both know the only reason you're in that marriage is so neither of you have to admit anything to your friends. We can feel isolated. We can feel alone. Sometimes it's because of choices that we make. Sometimes it's because of things that happen to us. Sometimes it's because we're simply isolated. But I think that each one of us has felt like, will again feel like, these silent generations. These generations of people between Malachi and Matthew who have seen God move for others and we just wonder why God isn't moving for us. I've tried to be your faithful servant, God. I know that I'm not perfect, but I try to do the right thing, and it just won't give. And God, if something doesn't give soon, I'm gonna lose my mind. My life is untenable, and I don't know how to hang on. And it's in those moments when we feel alone and when we feel isolated and we feel like maybe God has forgotten to answer our prayers that we most identify with these silent generations. And so if you feel that way, what can you do? Well, you can look to what the silent generations did. And what did they do? The silent generations clung to Christmas. The silent generations clung to Christmas. Now, they wouldn't yet call it Christmas, but they clung to the promises of God. They taught them to their children and to their grandchildren. And they kept them in their homes. And they upheld the law of God and the principles and the teachings of God. And they took their kids to synagogue every week. And they listened to the rabbis and they praised together. And they clung to the promises of God that they believed in in their Bible. It was called the Tanakh at the time, the 39 books of the Old Testament. They clung to the promises in that book. They remembered the promises of Genesis 12 when God isolates Abraham and he takes him to the land of Canaan and he makes him a promise. He makes him three promises that every generation of Jewish person clung to for those thousands of years leading up to Jesus. And the last promise that he made him was that one of your descendants is going to bless the whole earth. One of your descendants is going to be the Messiah. He's going to be the Savior of the world. So just hang on, believe in me and trust me, and one day I will send him to you. And then those generations that followed, and Joseph, and in Moses, and in Joshua, and in the judges, and in Samson, they clung to that promise that God made to Abraham. And then we see David in the middle of the Old Testament, and David up and he starts asking questions and he starts praying and everybody's wondering when is the Messiah going to come, the one who is to come, when will he arrive? And God tells David he's not coming yet. But in 2 Samuel chapter 7, we see the Davidic covenant where God tells David he's not coming yet, but when he does, he's going to sit on your throne forever. And it's this reminder and this restoration of the promise that they've been clinging to that God gives them kind of as a lifting up in the middle of their history to David that Jesus is going to come. You should still look for him. You should still teach your children about him and cling to the promises of the Messiah. And when he comes, he's gonna sit on your throne forever. And then we move into the period of the prophets where God gave visions to some of these great prophets of old, Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Amos. And he gave them messianic prophecies. Prophecies about the Messiah who was to come. And Isaiah prophesies that when the Messiah comes, that the blind will receive their sight and the deaf will receive their hearing and that the people who can't walk will be able to walk and that prisoners will be set free. And we see Isaiah call him Emmanuel, which means God with us, God coming from heaven to earth with us. Isaiah promises that and that when he does that, he will be the king of kings and the Lord of lords and the prince of peace and his name will be called Emmanuel. And then we learn that by his stripes, we will be healed through his sacrifice and through his death. We will be healed and restored forever the way that God intended it at the beginning of creation when he walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening. That God has this grand plan to restore creation and you to himself. And so this Old Testament generation, the silent generations, clung to those promises that they could track throughout their Bible that they taught generation after generation knowing that one day God promised that he was going to send a savior. And then you turn the page to Matthew chapter one and you see the genealogies of all the people who were a part of Israel through the years or grafted into Israel and Ruth and Rahab. And then you see the arrival of Jesus. You have the very first Christmas. And in that Christmas, we see a God who keeps his promises. And I will remind you of this every year that you allow me to be your pastor and Christmas time rolls around, that Christmas is our annual reminder from God that we serve a God who keeps his promises. We serve a God who keeps his promises. Romans 5 tells us that we hope in him and in that hope we will not be put to shame. And I don't know about you, but every other thing that we have hoped in in our life at some point or another lets us down and puts us to shame. Especially if you're a UNC fan. There is nothing in our life that is guaranteed that will not let us down. There is no promise we can receive from anyone that is ironclad and will not eventually disappoint us. But God does not put us to shame. God keeps his promises, and Christmas is our annual reminder that we serve and worship and cling to a God who has not forgotten us, who does see us, that reminds us that we are not alone, who whispers in our ear in the book of Isaiah that the Lord is close to the broken heart, and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit, who reminds us through the Psalms that he is our strong fortress, that we can run to his wings for protection and that with him in Isaiah we are told that we will soar on wings like eagles, that we will run and not be weary, that we will walk and we will not faint, that he will give us strength. We know these things and we can run to him and we can claim those because he's promised us. And Christmas reminds us that he keeps his promises because he promised that baby boy for 4,000 years. For generation after generation, they said, he's coming. He's coming. When? Soon? We hope. But we don't know. He's coming. He's coming. And there's 400 years of silence. And they clung to it. He's coming. We know he is. And then he shows up. And the angels declare him. And the shepherds worship him. And the wise men bow down to him. And his mother Mary stores it all up in her heart. And those generations clung to Christmas. So what do we do when we feel alone? What do we do when we feel forgotten? What do we do when life feels untenable and I don't know the way out and I don't know how this is going to be resolved and I'm praying like crazy and God does not seem to be answering my prayers? What do we do? In our waiting, we cling to Christmas. We cling to what Christmas is. We cling to the reality that we serve a God who keeps His promises. And we acknowledge that not only did God in the Old Testament make promises to the generations before us that He fulfilled in the sending of His Son, but that that Son, when He came, He made us promises too. And the people who came after him made us promises in God's name. We cling to the promises of Jesus when he talked to the disciples and Jesus says, you know, in a little bit, I've got to go. And they're like, where are you going, man? We'll come with you. And he says, where I'm going, you can't go there yet. But I'm going to go and prepare a place for you. I'm going to go and make sure that when you get to heaven, there's going to be a house for you. I'm going where you can't yet go because you're still in your mortal body, but when you are released from your mortal body, you will join me in eternity, and I am preparing a place for you there. It's a promise from Jesus. It's a promise from Jesus in the marriage supper of the Lamb in Revelation. That there's going to be the greatest banquet of all time when we get to heaven and he saved us a seat. It's a promise. Paul reminds us of these promises all throughout his writings, but most pointedly in Romans. When he tells us in Romans 8 that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of Jesus Christ. Not angels or demon or height nor depth nor any other created thing will be able to separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. If you know Jesus, if you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, he's the son of God, that he did what he said he did, he descended to earth, he took on human form, he died on the cross for our sins and he rose again on the third day. And that he's gonna do what he says he's gonna do, that he's gonna, he's gonna come back crashing into the clouds on a white horse. And on his thigh, it's going to say righteous and true. And he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. He promises us that. That he will restore this creation. And he acknowledges in Romans 8 that all of creation groans for that return. But as Christians in this era, we cling to those promises. We allow Christmas to remind us that God always keeps his promises. And like the 4,000 years of generations before us, and like the 400 years of silence in the generations within there, we cling to God's promises and we know that we serve a God who always keeps his promises and the last promise he makes to us in Revelation 21 that he is going to create a new heaven and a new earth and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain for the former things, all those things that bring us grief, all those things that make us feel isolated, all those things that make us wonder if God really hears us, the former things have passed away. That's a promise that we have from our God. And we are reminded at Christmas that we serve a God who keeps his promises. So let Christmas season be what it is. Let it be fun. Go see the lights. Decorate the tree. Buy your gifts. Spend your time with your friends, go to your parties, do all the stuff. But please, this December, don't lose sight of the fact that Christmas is a gift from God that reminds us that he keeps his promises. Christmas reminds us that he's done it once and we believe he'll do it again. He sent his son one time and they clung to that promise for 4,000 years. And it's been 2,000 years since he sent his son the last time. But we know that he's going to do it again. And when he does, he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue and all these former things will have passed away. So even when it feels like God can't hear us, he doesn't see us, we feel alone. We remember that generations before us have felt that way too. And so we cling to Christmas because it reminds us that he's done it once and we believe that he'll do it again.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Welcome to Grace. It looks like I'm a little inside information, give a little praise to Gibson, Aaron Gibson and his team. A couple months ago, Aaron, our worship pastor, sent me an email with a link to that song, Honey in the Rock. And he said, hey, what do you think of this? And I listened to it for about 20 seconds and said, I think it's dumb, but you know, do it if you want. And that was it. I didn't like it. I'm not a fool I mean, that was great, wasn't it? That was really, really good. So Aaron, I don't know where you are, but listen to me less. But, you know, another reason that it could have been good is he didn't sing. So that was also helpful. But that was a really, really good worship set, guys. Thank you very much for leading us in that way. As we begin our series, Merry Christmas season to everybody. I'm excited. I love the Christmas season. I love Christmas carols. I spent more time than I should have this last week making this year's Christmas mix for me. It is the only thing that will be playing on my Spotify for the rest of the month. And I just, I love this season. And this week, the idea was to bring an ornament. There's an angel tree out front. You take a card off of that that gives you the opportunity to give charitably to a family that needs it and replace it with your ornament that represents your family. And in that way, that's the Grace Family Christmas tree. So if you didn't do it this week, bring an ornament next week, hang it on the tree, and we'll see a bunch of different ornaments that represent us as a big family. Because we are family and because this is a fun part of Christmas, next week is one of my favorite weeks of the year. We started it last year, and I thought it was great, so we're bringing it back this year, but it's Christmas Jammy Sunday. So dress in your best Christmas jammies. We want your families to be matching. There will be an award that goes to the most festive and I will publicly ridicule the least festive. So let's all participate. The week after that is our first ever holiday hoot. If you've been a part of Grace, you know that hoot nannies are a big deal. So the first ever holiday hoot where we're going to have a Christmas party. Bring something shareable. We'll put it on the table out there. We'll just hang out for a little while after the service. Load your kids up with sugar and then send you home. So that's going to be great. And then, of course, we've got our Christmas Eve celebration. So I'm really looking forward to celebrating December with you as we celebrate Christmas and all that it means. In our new series, Not Home Alone, which is obviously a play off of, it's in my top three Christmas movies of all time. We had a team of folks here this week led by Aaron and Julie, not Aaron Gibson. He didn't have anything to do with it. He's gotten enough credit this morning. Aaron Winston. And Julie and a team of those folks who decorated this place. And it looks amazing, doesn't it? Like all the different Home Alone touches. Yeah, they did such a good job. There's even a Kevin McAllister battle plan up here if you want to come look later. That's really, really great. So they really did a good job decorating the church. But in this series, Not Home Alone, we're going to be looking at Christmas and the different ways that it reminds us that we are not alone. And that it points out that God has actually put people in our life for a reason, to remind us of his presence. And that God actually places us in the lives of other people and gives us eyes to see those who might feel alone. And so as we walk through this month, we're going to be reminded of all the ways that Christmas reminds us that we are not alone. And as we start the series, I'm reminded of this generation of people between Malachi and Matthew. I don't know if you know this about your Bibles. I'm pretty certain that most of you know that there's an Old and New Testament. If you don't, that's all right. But now you do, okay? And you should never be embarrassed again. But there's an Old and New Testament in your Bible. And in the Old Testament, it's a chronology of the people of Israel, of God's chosen people. But it moves from the very beginning of human history in Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and to the flood, to what's called the first 11 chapters of Genesis, the prehistoric narrative. And then in Genesis chapter 12, we meet Abraham. And then the rest of the Old Testament is tracking the family and the descendants of Abraham through history. And it's a pretty good chronology of history starting in the Sumerian dynasty. That's when God shows up and calls Abraham out of the place called Ur in the land of the Chaldeans. That's the Sumerian dynasty. If you can remember all the way back to sixth grade history, that's probably when you learned about that. So for most of you, no, you don't know what I'm talking about. But some of us can remember back that far, and God called Abraham out of Ur. And he spoke to him, and he made him promises. And then the Old Testament tracks those promises, and we see his descendants in Egypt and struggling in the desert. That song, Honey in the Rock, is about that time in the desert. And then the period of the judges and the period of the kings and David. And then it moves into the period of exile and then post-exile when they come back. And then the prophets are speaking into this period. And so you can kind of read the Bible, the first 39 books of the Bible, and get a good chronology, a good history of the world all the way up to a certain point. And that certain point is Malachi. So if you're reading your Bible and you're reading it from page one to the end and you're turning the pages as you go and you're reading through this chronology of history and God's involvement in the generations. And now the Old Testament is important that we understand isn't laid out chronologically. But as you read it, you're getting snippets and you can reorganize it and it does flow from the beginning of history to this point in Malachi. But as you're reading it and you're turning the pages, when you read the last verse in Malachi and flip it over, the Old Testament's done. And then, I don't know, depending on who your publisher is, there'll be maybe a title page for the New Testament, maybe some explanatory notes, but you turn the page and it's Matthew chapter one. And in between the last verse of Malachi and the first verse of Matthew is what's called in church circles 400 years of silence. These are 400 years where there was no recorded books of the Bible written. Where presumably there were no prophets speaking. God didn't have any mouthpieces that he was using to speak to the people. Now I'm sure they were there, but they're lost to history. And I'm positive that God was moving in those generations, but we don't see them. So in the middle of our Bible is this 400-year period called the 400 years of silence. Because from the beginning of time until Malachi, God had been moving. From the beginning of time until Malachi, God had been speaking. From the beginning of time until Malachi, he had been assigning prophets and teachers to speak to his people and to copy down his words and to record his deeds and the deeds of his people here on earth. And in Malachi, that stops. And we don't pick it up again for another 400 years. And I always wonder, what must it have been like for what I think of as the silent generations? What must it have been like for the silent generations of those 400 years to see that God, he spoke to other generations, but he's not speaking to us. He moved in other generations, but he's not moving now. He sent prophets to others where in the past he's given miracles to Elijah and Elisha and he's given words of wisdom to, and he's given prophecies to Isaiah and to Ezekiel, but he's not moving now, and he's not moving here. Why has he spoken to other generations and he hasn't spoken to us? I can't help but wonder if they somehow felt like the neglected generation, the forgotten generation, the waiting generations, the lonely generations. They were unique in the history of Israel and God's voice coming to them. And I think that we can all relate to these silent generations. Because I think for us, we also have times in our life where we feel alone, where we feel isolated, where we feel like we are waiting, where we feel like we are praying and praying and praying and nothing meets us there but silence. And we must think, like the silent generations, we can relate to them by asking, God has shown up for others, why isn't he showing up for me? He's shown up for other people, why isn't he showing up for me? And what I mean can be isolating any number of examples. I remember when Jen and I were walking through our season of childlessness. We wanted very much to have a kid, and we didn't, and we couldn't. And the more you pray about something, and the more it hurts, the more alone you feel in that. And you look around, and your friends are having kids, and the kids you taught, I used to be a high school teacher, the kids you taught in high school are now having kids, and you're like, what gives, God? How come you're not listening to us? I see you blessing them. Why aren't you blessing us? What are we doing wrong? I see you loving them and answering their prayers. Why don't you hear our prayers? And I know the pain of going into meetings and lunches and being asked the question, and you give the painful answer. And in those seasons of loneliness and in those seasons of hurt and of waiting, even holidays like Christmas can feel painful because they only serve as reminders of what you don't yet have. They only serve as reminders of the things that make you feel more isolated, not less. I think of families who have elderly parents who are walking through the struggle of caring for them, who don't have a lot of good options. And my heart goes out to the families that have elderly parents, and those elderly parents have made arrangements and they have ways to take care of themselves, but it's the hard conversations and it's the hard reality and it's sometimes it can begin to consume you like you're facing it alone. But then my heart hurts even more for the folks in our church that I know who there are no good options on how to care for their family. They don't have the resources. Their parents don't have the resources. They don't have the resources. They don't know what to do. They're just stringing every day together, knowing that today is not enough to take care of tomorrow. And I don't really know how to take care of tomorrow either. I don't know what to do. And they're praying and they're crying out and they've got to be thinking, God, I see you moving for other people. Why aren't you moving here? I see you working things out for other families. Why don't you work them out for our family? I think of people in families where you're the only believer. Your spouse doesn't share the faith that you share. In fact, they deride you for it. Your children who you brought up to believe what you believe have walked away from what you believe, and you just feel alone. And you see other families, and it seems to work out for them. Their grandkids come to church with them, and I can't even get my spouse to come to church with me. God, why do you listen to their prayers and not mine? Why do they experience joy that I don't get to experience? I think of the people in our church who walk through depression and mental health disorders. And you see the joy that other people have. You see the laughter that other people experience. And you wonder to yourself, why can't I experience that? God, I see you giving them happiness. I see you answering their prayers. Why don't you answer my prayers? I think of stay-at-home moms who have so much to give and offer to the world around them. But because of seasons of life, they feel that they are reduced to a handmaid, to an 18-month-old tyrant. Not that we can relate to this in any way in our home. Or to an Uber service for the social calendar and practices of a middle school kid, and the world just reduces you to this shell of what you feel like you are and were, and you don't even know yourself anymore, and you feel so isolated in that. You feel so reduced in that. I think of people who have experienced grief, and the grief won't let go. The loss happened two years ago. It happened five years ago, and every now and again, God in his goodness gives you a little bit of reprieve from that where you forget that you're sad, but in your quiet moments, you're still sad. And in the times that you're reminded that God sees you and he's looking out for you, you agree with that in principle, but you don't feel it in your guts and you just feel alone. Or the people in the marriages that when you come to church on Sunday and you hang out with your friends, we're good. And when you're at home, it's hell. And you're just hanging on. And you both know the only reason you're in that marriage is so neither of you have to admit anything to your friends. We can feel isolated. We can feel alone. Sometimes it's because of choices that we make. Sometimes it's because of things that happen to us. Sometimes it's because we're simply isolated. But I think that each one of us has felt like, will again feel like, these silent generations. These generations of people between Malachi and Matthew who have seen God move for others and we just wonder why God isn't moving for us. I've tried to be your faithful servant, God. I know that I'm not perfect, but I try to do the right thing, and it just won't give. And God, if something doesn't give soon, I'm gonna lose my mind. My life is untenable, and I don't know how to hang on. And it's in those moments when we feel alone and when we feel isolated and we feel like maybe God has forgotten to answer our prayers that we most identify with these silent generations. And so if you feel that way, what can you do? Well, you can look to what the silent generations did. And what did they do? The silent generations clung to Christmas. The silent generations clung to Christmas. Now, they wouldn't yet call it Christmas, but they clung to the promises of God. They taught them to their children and to their grandchildren. And they kept them in their homes. And they upheld the law of God and the principles and the teachings of God. And they took their kids to synagogue every week. And they listened to the rabbis and they praised together. And they clung to the promises of God that they believed in in their Bible. It was called the Tanakh at the time, the 39 books of the Old Testament. They clung to the promises in that book. They remembered the promises of Genesis 12 when God isolates Abraham and he takes him to the land of Canaan and he makes him a promise. He makes him three promises that every generation of Jewish person clung to for those thousands of years leading up to Jesus. And the last promise that he made him was that one of your descendants is going to bless the whole earth. One of your descendants is going to be the Messiah. He's going to be the Savior of the world. So just hang on, believe in me and trust me, and one day I will send him to you. And then those generations that followed, and Joseph, and in Moses, and in Joshua, and in the judges, and in Samson, they clung to that promise that God made to Abraham. And then we see David in the middle of the Old Testament, and David up and he starts asking questions and he starts praying and everybody's wondering when is the Messiah going to come, the one who is to come, when will he arrive? And God tells David he's not coming yet. But in 2 Samuel chapter 7, we see the Davidic covenant where God tells David he's not coming yet, but when he does, he's going to sit on your throne forever. And it's this reminder and this restoration of the promise that they've been clinging to that God gives them kind of as a lifting up in the middle of their history to David that Jesus is going to come. You should still look for him. You should still teach your children about him and cling to the promises of the Messiah. And when he comes, he's gonna sit on your throne forever. And then we move into the period of the prophets where God gave visions to some of these great prophets of old, Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Amos. And he gave them messianic prophecies. Prophecies about the Messiah who was to come. And Isaiah prophesies that when the Messiah comes, that the blind will receive their sight and the deaf will receive their hearing and that the people who can't walk will be able to walk and that prisoners will be set free. And we see Isaiah call him Emmanuel, which means God with us, God coming from heaven to earth with us. Isaiah promises that and that when he does that, he will be the king of kings and the Lord of lords and the prince of peace and his name will be called Emmanuel. And then we learn that by his stripes, we will be healed through his sacrifice and through his death. We will be healed and restored forever the way that God intended it at the beginning of creation when he walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening. That God has this grand plan to restore creation and you to himself. And so this Old Testament generation, the silent generations, clung to those promises that they could track throughout their Bible that they taught generation after generation knowing that one day God promised that he was going to send a savior. And then you turn the page to Matthew chapter one and you see the genealogies of all the people who were a part of Israel through the years or grafted into Israel and Ruth and Rahab. And then you see the arrival of Jesus. You have the very first Christmas. And in that Christmas, we see a God who keeps his promises. And I will remind you of this every year that you allow me to be your pastor and Christmas time rolls around, that Christmas is our annual reminder from God that we serve a God who keeps his promises. We serve a God who keeps his promises. Romans 5 tells us that we hope in him and in that hope we will not be put to shame. And I don't know about you, but every other thing that we have hoped in in our life at some point or another lets us down and puts us to shame. Especially if you're a UNC fan. There is nothing in our life that is guaranteed that will not let us down. There is no promise we can receive from anyone that is ironclad and will not eventually disappoint us. But God does not put us to shame. God keeps his promises, and Christmas is our annual reminder that we serve and worship and cling to a God who has not forgotten us, who does see us, that reminds us that we are not alone, who whispers in our ear in the book of Isaiah that the Lord is close to the broken heart, and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit, who reminds us through the Psalms that he is our strong fortress, that we can run to his wings for protection and that with him in Isaiah we are told that we will soar on wings like eagles, that we will run and not be weary, that we will walk and we will not faint, that he will give us strength. We know these things and we can run to him and we can claim those because he's promised us. And Christmas reminds us that he keeps his promises because he promised that baby boy for 4,000 years. For generation after generation, they said, he's coming. He's coming. When? Soon? We hope. But we don't know. He's coming. He's coming. And there's 400 years of silence. And they clung to it. He's coming. We know he is. And then he shows up. And the angels declare him. And the shepherds worship him. And the wise men bow down to him. And his mother Mary stores it all up in her heart. And those generations clung to Christmas. So what do we do when we feel alone? What do we do when we feel forgotten? What do we do when life feels untenable and I don't know the way out and I don't know how this is going to be resolved and I'm praying like crazy and God does not seem to be answering my prayers? What do we do? In our waiting, we cling to Christmas. We cling to what Christmas is. We cling to the reality that we serve a God who keeps His promises. And we acknowledge that not only did God in the Old Testament make promises to the generations before us that He fulfilled in the sending of His Son, but that that Son, when He came, He made us promises too. And the people who came after him made us promises in God's name. We cling to the promises of Jesus when he talked to the disciples and Jesus says, you know, in a little bit, I've got to go. And they're like, where are you going, man? We'll come with you. And he says, where I'm going, you can't go there yet. But I'm going to go and prepare a place for you. I'm going to go and make sure that when you get to heaven, there's going to be a house for you. I'm going where you can't yet go because you're still in your mortal body, but when you are released from your mortal body, you will join me in eternity, and I am preparing a place for you there. It's a promise from Jesus. It's a promise from Jesus in the marriage supper of the Lamb in Revelation. That there's going to be the greatest banquet of all time when we get to heaven and he saved us a seat. It's a promise. Paul reminds us of these promises all throughout his writings, but most pointedly in Romans. When he tells us in Romans 8 that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of Jesus Christ. Not angels or demon or height nor depth nor any other created thing will be able to separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. If you know Jesus, if you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, he's the son of God, that he did what he said he did, he descended to earth, he took on human form, he died on the cross for our sins and he rose again on the third day. And that he's gonna do what he says he's gonna do, that he's gonna, he's gonna come back crashing into the clouds on a white horse. And on his thigh, it's going to say righteous and true. And he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. He promises us that. That he will restore this creation. And he acknowledges in Romans 8 that all of creation groans for that return. But as Christians in this era, we cling to those promises. We allow Christmas to remind us that God always keeps his promises. And like the 4,000 years of generations before us, and like the 400 years of silence in the generations within there, we cling to God's promises and we know that we serve a God who always keeps his promises and the last promise he makes to us in Revelation 21 that he is going to create a new heaven and a new earth and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain for the former things, all those things that bring us grief, all those things that make us feel isolated, all those things that make us wonder if God really hears us, the former things have passed away. That's a promise that we have from our God. And we are reminded at Christmas that we serve a God who keeps his promises. So let Christmas season be what it is. Let it be fun. Go see the lights. Decorate the tree. Buy your gifts. Spend your time with your friends, go to your parties, do all the stuff. But please, this December, don't lose sight of the fact that Christmas is a gift from God that reminds us that he keeps his promises. Christmas reminds us that he's done it once and we believe he'll do it again. He sent his son one time and they clung to that promise for 4,000 years. And it's been 2,000 years since he sent his son the last time. But we know that he's going to do it again. And when he does, he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue and all these former things will have passed away. So even when it feels like God can't hear us, he doesn't see us, we feel alone. We remember that generations before us have felt that way too. And so we cling to Christmas because it reminds us that he's done it once and we believe that he'll do it again.

Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Welcome to Grace. It looks like I'm a little inside information, give a little praise to Gibson, Aaron Gibson and his team. A couple months ago, Aaron, our worship pastor, sent me an email with a link to that song, Honey in the Rock. And he said, hey, what do you think of this? And I listened to it for about 20 seconds and said, I think it's dumb, but you know, do it if you want. And that was it. I didn't like it. I'm not a fool I mean, that was great, wasn't it? That was really, really good. So Aaron, I don't know where you are, but listen to me less. But, you know, another reason that it could have been good is he didn't sing. So that was also helpful. But that was a really, really good worship set, guys. Thank you very much for leading us in that way. As we begin our series, Merry Christmas season to everybody. I'm excited. I love the Christmas season. I love Christmas carols. I spent more time than I should have this last week making this year's Christmas mix for me. It is the only thing that will be playing on my Spotify for the rest of the month. And I just, I love this season. And this week, the idea was to bring an ornament. There's an angel tree out front. You take a card off of that that gives you the opportunity to give charitably to a family that needs it and replace it with your ornament that represents your family. And in that way, that's the Grace Family Christmas tree. So if you didn't do it this week, bring an ornament next week, hang it on the tree, and we'll see a bunch of different ornaments that represent us as a big family. Because we are family and because this is a fun part of Christmas, next week is one of my favorite weeks of the year. We started it last year, and I thought it was great, so we're bringing it back this year, but it's Christmas Jammy Sunday. So dress in your best Christmas jammies. We want your families to be matching. There will be an award that goes to the most festive and I will publicly ridicule the least festive. So let's all participate. The week after that is our first ever holiday hoot. If you've been a part of Grace, you know that hoot nannies are a big deal. So the first ever holiday hoot where we're going to have a Christmas party. Bring something shareable. We'll put it on the table out there. We'll just hang out for a little while after the service. Load your kids up with sugar and then send you home. So that's going to be great. And then, of course, we've got our Christmas Eve celebration. So I'm really looking forward to celebrating December with you as we celebrate Christmas and all that it means. In our new series, Not Home Alone, which is obviously a play off of, it's in my top three Christmas movies of all time. We had a team of folks here this week led by Aaron and Julie, not Aaron Gibson. He didn't have anything to do with it. He's gotten enough credit this morning. Aaron Winston. And Julie and a team of those folks who decorated this place. And it looks amazing, doesn't it? Like all the different Home Alone touches. Yeah, they did such a good job. There's even a Kevin McAllister battle plan up here if you want to come look later. That's really, really great. So they really did a good job decorating the church. But in this series, Not Home Alone, we're going to be looking at Christmas and the different ways that it reminds us that we are not alone. And that it points out that God has actually put people in our life for a reason, to remind us of his presence. And that God actually places us in the lives of other people and gives us eyes to see those who might feel alone. And so as we walk through this month, we're going to be reminded of all the ways that Christmas reminds us that we are not alone. And as we start the series, I'm reminded of this generation of people between Malachi and Matthew. I don't know if you know this about your Bibles. I'm pretty certain that most of you know that there's an Old and New Testament. If you don't, that's all right. But now you do, okay? And you should never be embarrassed again. But there's an Old and New Testament in your Bible. And in the Old Testament, it's a chronology of the people of Israel, of God's chosen people. But it moves from the very beginning of human history in Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and to the flood, to what's called the first 11 chapters of Genesis, the prehistoric narrative. And then in Genesis chapter 12, we meet Abraham. And then the rest of the Old Testament is tracking the family and the descendants of Abraham through history. And it's a pretty good chronology of history starting in the Sumerian dynasty. That's when God shows up and calls Abraham out of the place called Ur in the land of the Chaldeans. That's the Sumerian dynasty. If you can remember all the way back to sixth grade history, that's probably when you learned about that. So for most of you, no, you don't know what I'm talking about. But some of us can remember back that far, and God called Abraham out of Ur. And he spoke to him, and he made him promises. And then the Old Testament tracks those promises, and we see his descendants in Egypt and struggling in the desert. That song, Honey in the Rock, is about that time in the desert. And then the period of the judges and the period of the kings and David. And then it moves into the period of exile and then post-exile when they come back. And then the prophets are speaking into this period. And so you can kind of read the Bible, the first 39 books of the Bible, and get a good chronology, a good history of the world all the way up to a certain point. And that certain point is Malachi. So if you're reading your Bible and you're reading it from page one to the end and you're turning the pages as you go and you're reading through this chronology of history and God's involvement in the generations. And now the Old Testament is important that we understand isn't laid out chronologically. But as you read it, you're getting snippets and you can reorganize it and it does flow from the beginning of history to this point in Malachi. But as you're reading it and you're turning the pages, when you read the last verse in Malachi and flip it over, the Old Testament's done. And then, I don't know, depending on who your publisher is, there'll be maybe a title page for the New Testament, maybe some explanatory notes, but you turn the page and it's Matthew chapter one. And in between the last verse of Malachi and the first verse of Matthew is what's called in church circles 400 years of silence. These are 400 years where there was no recorded books of the Bible written. Where presumably there were no prophets speaking. God didn't have any mouthpieces that he was using to speak to the people. Now I'm sure they were there, but they're lost to history. And I'm positive that God was moving in those generations, but we don't see them. So in the middle of our Bible is this 400-year period called the 400 years of silence. Because from the beginning of time until Malachi, God had been moving. From the beginning of time until Malachi, God had been speaking. From the beginning of time until Malachi, he had been assigning prophets and teachers to speak to his people and to copy down his words and to record his deeds and the deeds of his people here on earth. And in Malachi, that stops. And we don't pick it up again for another 400 years. And I always wonder, what must it have been like for what I think of as the silent generations? What must it have been like for the silent generations of those 400 years to see that God, he spoke to other generations, but he's not speaking to us. He moved in other generations, but he's not moving now. He sent prophets to others where in the past he's given miracles to Elijah and Elisha and he's given words of wisdom to, and he's given prophecies to Isaiah and to Ezekiel, but he's not moving now, and he's not moving here. Why has he spoken to other generations and he hasn't spoken to us? I can't help but wonder if they somehow felt like the neglected generation, the forgotten generation, the waiting generations, the lonely generations. They were unique in the history of Israel and God's voice coming to them. And I think that we can all relate to these silent generations. Because I think for us, we also have times in our life where we feel alone, where we feel isolated, where we feel like we are waiting, where we feel like we are praying and praying and praying and nothing meets us there but silence. And we must think, like the silent generations, we can relate to them by asking, God has shown up for others, why isn't he showing up for me? He's shown up for other people, why isn't he showing up for me? And what I mean can be isolating any number of examples. I remember when Jen and I were walking through our season of childlessness. We wanted very much to have a kid, and we didn't, and we couldn't. And the more you pray about something, and the more it hurts, the more alone you feel in that. And you look around, and your friends are having kids, and the kids you taught, I used to be a high school teacher, the kids you taught in high school are now having kids, and you're like, what gives, God? How come you're not listening to us? I see you blessing them. Why aren't you blessing us? What are we doing wrong? I see you loving them and answering their prayers. Why don't you hear our prayers? And I know the pain of going into meetings and lunches and being asked the question, and you give the painful answer. And in those seasons of loneliness and in those seasons of hurt and of waiting, even holidays like Christmas can feel painful because they only serve as reminders of what you don't yet have. They only serve as reminders of the things that make you feel more isolated, not less. I think of families who have elderly parents who are walking through the struggle of caring for them, who don't have a lot of good options. And my heart goes out to the families that have elderly parents, and those elderly parents have made arrangements and they have ways to take care of themselves, but it's the hard conversations and it's the hard reality and it's sometimes it can begin to consume you like you're facing it alone. But then my heart hurts even more for the folks in our church that I know who there are no good options on how to care for their family. They don't have the resources. Their parents don't have the resources. They don't have the resources. They don't know what to do. They're just stringing every day together, knowing that today is not enough to take care of tomorrow. And I don't really know how to take care of tomorrow either. I don't know what to do. And they're praying and they're crying out and they've got to be thinking, God, I see you moving for other people. Why aren't you moving here? I see you working things out for other families. Why don't you work them out for our family? I think of people in families where you're the only believer. Your spouse doesn't share the faith that you share. In fact, they deride you for it. Your children who you brought up to believe what you believe have walked away from what you believe, and you just feel alone. And you see other families, and it seems to work out for them. Their grandkids come to church with them, and I can't even get my spouse to come to church with me. God, why do you listen to their prayers and not mine? Why do they experience joy that I don't get to experience? I think of the people in our church who walk through depression and mental health disorders. And you see the joy that other people have. You see the laughter that other people experience. And you wonder to yourself, why can't I experience that? God, I see you giving them happiness. I see you answering their prayers. Why don't you answer my prayers? I think of stay-at-home moms who have so much to give and offer to the world around them. But because of seasons of life, they feel that they are reduced to a handmaid, to an 18-month-old tyrant. Not that we can relate to this in any way in our home. Or to an Uber service for the social calendar and practices of a middle school kid, and the world just reduces you to this shell of what you feel like you are and were, and you don't even know yourself anymore, and you feel so isolated in that. You feel so reduced in that. I think of people who have experienced grief, and the grief won't let go. The loss happened two years ago. It happened five years ago, and every now and again, God in his goodness gives you a little bit of reprieve from that where you forget that you're sad, but in your quiet moments, you're still sad. And in the times that you're reminded that God sees you and he's looking out for you, you agree with that in principle, but you don't feel it in your guts and you just feel alone. Or the people in the marriages that when you come to church on Sunday and you hang out with your friends, we're good. And when you're at home, it's hell. And you're just hanging on. And you both know the only reason you're in that marriage is so neither of you have to admit anything to your friends. We can feel isolated. We can feel alone. Sometimes it's because of choices that we make. Sometimes it's because of things that happen to us. Sometimes it's because we're simply isolated. But I think that each one of us has felt like, will again feel like, these silent generations. These generations of people between Malachi and Matthew who have seen God move for others and we just wonder why God isn't moving for us. I've tried to be your faithful servant, God. I know that I'm not perfect, but I try to do the right thing, and it just won't give. And God, if something doesn't give soon, I'm gonna lose my mind. My life is untenable, and I don't know how to hang on. And it's in those moments when we feel alone and when we feel isolated and we feel like maybe God has forgotten to answer our prayers that we most identify with these silent generations. And so if you feel that way, what can you do? Well, you can look to what the silent generations did. And what did they do? The silent generations clung to Christmas. The silent generations clung to Christmas. Now, they wouldn't yet call it Christmas, but they clung to the promises of God. They taught them to their children and to their grandchildren. And they kept them in their homes. And they upheld the law of God and the principles and the teachings of God. And they took their kids to synagogue every week. And they listened to the rabbis and they praised together. And they clung to the promises of God that they believed in in their Bible. It was called the Tanakh at the time, the 39 books of the Old Testament. They clung to the promises in that book. They remembered the promises of Genesis 12 when God isolates Abraham and he takes him to the land of Canaan and he makes him a promise. He makes him three promises that every generation of Jewish person clung to for those thousands of years leading up to Jesus. And the last promise that he made him was that one of your descendants is going to bless the whole earth. One of your descendants is going to be the Messiah. He's going to be the Savior of the world. So just hang on, believe in me and trust me, and one day I will send him to you. And then those generations that followed, and Joseph, and in Moses, and in Joshua, and in the judges, and in Samson, they clung to that promise that God made to Abraham. And then we see David in the middle of the Old Testament, and David up and he starts asking questions and he starts praying and everybody's wondering when is the Messiah going to come, the one who is to come, when will he arrive? And God tells David he's not coming yet. But in 2 Samuel chapter 7, we see the Davidic covenant where God tells David he's not coming yet, but when he does, he's going to sit on your throne forever. And it's this reminder and this restoration of the promise that they've been clinging to that God gives them kind of as a lifting up in the middle of their history to David that Jesus is going to come. You should still look for him. You should still teach your children about him and cling to the promises of the Messiah. And when he comes, he's gonna sit on your throne forever. And then we move into the period of the prophets where God gave visions to some of these great prophets of old, Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Amos. And he gave them messianic prophecies. Prophecies about the Messiah who was to come. And Isaiah prophesies that when the Messiah comes, that the blind will receive their sight and the deaf will receive their hearing and that the people who can't walk will be able to walk and that prisoners will be set free. And we see Isaiah call him Emmanuel, which means God with us, God coming from heaven to earth with us. Isaiah promises that and that when he does that, he will be the king of kings and the Lord of lords and the prince of peace and his name will be called Emmanuel. And then we learn that by his stripes, we will be healed through his sacrifice and through his death. We will be healed and restored forever the way that God intended it at the beginning of creation when he walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the evening. That God has this grand plan to restore creation and you to himself. And so this Old Testament generation, the silent generations, clung to those promises that they could track throughout their Bible that they taught generation after generation knowing that one day God promised that he was going to send a savior. And then you turn the page to Matthew chapter one and you see the genealogies of all the people who were a part of Israel through the years or grafted into Israel and Ruth and Rahab. And then you see the arrival of Jesus. You have the very first Christmas. And in that Christmas, we see a God who keeps his promises. And I will remind you of this every year that you allow me to be your pastor and Christmas time rolls around, that Christmas is our annual reminder from God that we serve a God who keeps his promises. We serve a God who keeps his promises. Romans 5 tells us that we hope in him and in that hope we will not be put to shame. And I don't know about you, but every other thing that we have hoped in in our life at some point or another lets us down and puts us to shame. Especially if you're a UNC fan. There is nothing in our life that is guaranteed that will not let us down. There is no promise we can receive from anyone that is ironclad and will not eventually disappoint us. But God does not put us to shame. God keeps his promises, and Christmas is our annual reminder that we serve and worship and cling to a God who has not forgotten us, who does see us, that reminds us that we are not alone, who whispers in our ear in the book of Isaiah that the Lord is close to the broken heart, and he comforts those who are crushed in spirit, who reminds us through the Psalms that he is our strong fortress, that we can run to his wings for protection and that with him in Isaiah we are told that we will soar on wings like eagles, that we will run and not be weary, that we will walk and we will not faint, that he will give us strength. We know these things and we can run to him and we can claim those because he's promised us. And Christmas reminds us that he keeps his promises because he promised that baby boy for 4,000 years. For generation after generation, they said, he's coming. He's coming. When? Soon? We hope. But we don't know. He's coming. He's coming. And there's 400 years of silence. And they clung to it. He's coming. We know he is. And then he shows up. And the angels declare him. And the shepherds worship him. And the wise men bow down to him. And his mother Mary stores it all up in her heart. And those generations clung to Christmas. So what do we do when we feel alone? What do we do when we feel forgotten? What do we do when life feels untenable and I don't know the way out and I don't know how this is going to be resolved and I'm praying like crazy and God does not seem to be answering my prayers? What do we do? In our waiting, we cling to Christmas. We cling to what Christmas is. We cling to the reality that we serve a God who keeps His promises. And we acknowledge that not only did God in the Old Testament make promises to the generations before us that He fulfilled in the sending of His Son, but that that Son, when He came, He made us promises too. And the people who came after him made us promises in God's name. We cling to the promises of Jesus when he talked to the disciples and Jesus says, you know, in a little bit, I've got to go. And they're like, where are you going, man? We'll come with you. And he says, where I'm going, you can't go there yet. But I'm going to go and prepare a place for you. I'm going to go and make sure that when you get to heaven, there's going to be a house for you. I'm going where you can't yet go because you're still in your mortal body, but when you are released from your mortal body, you will join me in eternity, and I am preparing a place for you there. It's a promise from Jesus. It's a promise from Jesus in the marriage supper of the Lamb in Revelation. That there's going to be the greatest banquet of all time when we get to heaven and he saved us a seat. It's a promise. Paul reminds us of these promises all throughout his writings, but most pointedly in Romans. When he tells us in Romans 8 that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of Jesus Christ. Not angels or demon or height nor depth nor any other created thing will be able to separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. If you know Jesus, if you believe that Jesus is who he says he is, he's the son of God, that he did what he said he did, he descended to earth, he took on human form, he died on the cross for our sins and he rose again on the third day. And that he's gonna do what he says he's gonna do, that he's gonna, he's gonna come back crashing into the clouds on a white horse. And on his thigh, it's going to say righteous and true. And he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. He promises us that. That he will restore this creation. And he acknowledges in Romans 8 that all of creation groans for that return. But as Christians in this era, we cling to those promises. We allow Christmas to remind us that God always keeps his promises. And like the 4,000 years of generations before us, and like the 400 years of silence in the generations within there, we cling to God's promises and we know that we serve a God who always keeps his promises and the last promise he makes to us in Revelation 21 that he is going to create a new heaven and a new earth and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain for the former things, all those things that bring us grief, all those things that make us feel isolated, all those things that make us wonder if God really hears us, the former things have passed away. That's a promise that we have from our God. And we are reminded at Christmas that we serve a God who keeps his promises. So let Christmas season be what it is. Let it be fun. Go see the lights. Decorate the tree. Buy your gifts. Spend your time with your friends, go to your parties, do all the stuff. But please, this December, don't lose sight of the fact that Christmas is a gift from God that reminds us that he keeps his promises. Christmas reminds us that he's done it once and we believe he'll do it again. He sent his son one time and they clung to that promise for 4,000 years. And it's been 2,000 years since he sent his son the last time. But we know that he's going to do it again. And when he does, he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue and all these former things will have passed away. So even when it feels like God can't hear us, he doesn't see us, we feel alone. We remember that generations before us have felt that way too. And so we cling to Christmas because it reminds us that he's done it once and we believe that he'll do it again.

Amen. Thank you, Aaron. That was great. A little bit different this morning. I know some of you who have been coming to Grace for a while are freaking out right now because it's way too early for the sermon and you don't know what's happening. That is on purpose. We're doing that on purpose because this is a series that is focused on worship. And so we are flipping around the way that we do things in some of the services so that we can respond to the sermon about a song or about worship in worship. This is a series that we've been wanting to do for, I've been wanting to do it since COVID. And when I say since COVID, I realize in preparation for this that I say things like in COVID and since COVID as if it doesn't exist anymore. And it would stop existing if we would just quit testing. But I think we're far enough removed now that I can make that joke and nobody thinks I'm making any statements. What I learned in COVID, and when I say in COVID, that is from 2020 to halfway through 2022. That's in COVID. Okay, so what I learned in COVID about church, one of my biggest takeaways was how important it is that we sing together. There was a lot about that season that I didn't care for. I was coming in here on Thursdays, one o'clock in the afternoon, preaching to that camera with two other people in the room, and then Sunday morning I would watch myself with my family, and my daughter would tell me that I was boring. And I would agree. I would agree with her. And it just made me realize that singing together when we come is maybe the most important part about Sunday morning. When Aaron was interviewing, we were searching for a worship pastor. He asked me, he said, I have a question just for Nate. What does Sunday morning worship mean to you? Why is it important to you? And I said, well, you know, the service lasts an hour and I'm only going to speak for 30 to 35 minutes, so we need an effective filler to get to me. And he laughed, which is what you're supposed to do when your potential boss makes a joke in an interview. You laugh at it, even if it's not that funny. And I said, no, I think it's the most important thing that happens on Sundays. Besides being together, besides what happens in the lobby before and after the service, besides going out to lunch together afterwards, besides being around each other and seeing each other, I think the most important thing that happens on Sunday morning is singing together. You can listen to this sermon anytime. You can download the best pastors in the world every week. But what you cannot download is singing with your family of faith. What you cannot download is the experience of praising God together. So I think it's the most important thing that happens on Sunday morning. And it occurs to me that as I was visiting other churches in sabbatical, and then as I was thinking about this idea of worship and worship in the service, we do it every week. It's my favorite part of the service. My favorite noise in the world, one of my favorite noises in the world is to sit in the front and listen to you guys belt it out. At the end of last week, I don't know what happened, the spirit was moving, but that last song we sang was powerful. And I just listened to y'all sing it because I like hearing my family of faith praise God together. But as I was getting ready for this series, doing research on worship and thinking about it, I think someone wrote it somewhere and I thought about it a little bit more and found it to be true. You know that every church everywhere sings? Every church service that's happening in the city this morning, there's going to be singing. I know of no traditions or denominations that do not sing in their service. It's a mandatory part of all services, which is really kind of crazy because so many different traditions have so many different things that they include in their Sunday morning liturgy. A read, a call and response, an altar call, a message, or a homily. But they all sing. And we do it every week. And so this series is called The Songs We Sing. And we're going to look at a few of the songs that we sing as a body, and we're going to ask where they come from in Scripture. We're going to ask what they can teach us, and we're going to really spend time as a body of believers focusing on the importance of worship. Because I really did come out of COVID thinking that the most important thing we do when we gather on Sunday morning is we sing together. Now, why do we sing? That's a natural question to ask. Some of us don't like it. Some of us wish we could skip it. But why is it a part of all the services? Why is it so ubiquitous? I think it's simply this. I think we sing because God designs and commands us to do so. We sing because God designs and commands us to do so. He designed us to sing. There is something, I believe, in your very soul, in your nature, that is knit into you, that longs to praise, that longs to sing. We're told in Scripture that if we don't praise God, that the rocks will cry out on our behalf, that creation itself will praise God if we refuse to do it. I think we were born to praise. I think we were born to sing. I honestly think that when you go to a concert and it's not a Christian artist and they're singing the song and the whole crowd sings the song and it's a really powerful thing when a whole venue or a whole arena is singing a song together. And I honestly think that's probably a spiritual moment. That's just a moment that's being misappropriated to sing something else and find joy in other places. But that's a response that we have to this natural desire to sing and to cry out that God knit into us. I believe that we were designed to worship. And I believe that we were designed to worship because I don't know if you've ever thought about this or realized this, but all of creation is bracketed with praise. All of creation is bracketed with song. There was singing going on in the heavens before earth was a thing, and there will be singing at the end of the story when the new heaven and the new earth becomes a thing. I know this because of what I see in Job 38. Job 38.7 very simply says, look at it with me. When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. In the preceding verses 5 and 6, God is asking Job, where were you when I was doing these things? And so he's saying, where were you when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? The stars of the story, Revelation 19. Bracketing all of time, all of creation, is the song of creation and the song of praise. Right now, in the throne room of God, there are angels surrounding him saying, Right now heaven is filled with choral praise. It's happening in this moment. And so when we sing we are joining that eternal echo of praise. There's something in our soul that wants to do that. And then we are commanded to do it. It's not just a natural thing to want to praise our God. Why do we do it? Well, we do it because we're designed to. But we also do it because God commands us to. God tells us to all through Scripture. He tells us that we're to praise Him, that we're to sing songs to Him, that we are to make a joyful noise. Did you know that in 2 Chronicles you can find a listing of the worship pastors at the tabernacle? That God actually invented Aaron's job? It's in the Bible. These are the ministers of praise, the ministers of song for the nation of Israel. We start to see songs in the Bible as early as, I think, Exodus 15, when God moves his people across the Red Sea, when he parts the Red Sea. There's a song of Moses immediately following that, where as a nation, they praise their God. A few chapters later, there's a song of Miriam. We see songs all through Scripture. We have a whole book in the middle of the Bible, Psalms. You ever do the drop and flop where you're like, dear God, what do you want me to read today? And then you just drop your Bible. It's always going to be Psalms that he wants you to read because it's big and it's in the middle. We have a whole book of songs intended to be sung to God. I'm not going to say too much about that book because next week is on Psalm 8, and I'm very excited about that. And the week after that is Great is Thy Faithfulness. I wrote that sermon this week and I cannot wait to preach it. I literally just wish we could fast forward to that. I cannot wait to preach that to you in a couple of weeks. But all through scripture we see singing. We see praising. One of my favorite scenes is when David gets too exuberant in his praise and his wife gets on to him and says, you're being undignified. And he's like, then I'm going to be undignified. That's fine. There's this great song that starts off, I will be undignified. I'm dancing as David danced. And the line is wild and free, something in romance, but I always like to sing wild and free in my underpants because that's what he did. Isn't this funnier? Even in Colossians, I was struck by this this week. Colossians 3, verses 16 and 17. This is what Paul writes about our command to sing. It's remarkable to me, Paul is writing this letter to the church in Colossae. He's getting towards the end of it, so he's beginning to give his closing instructions. And he says, he instructs the church, sing songs and hymns and spiritual songs. And he puts it on par with doing everything in the name of Jesus. So he doesn't say this is a thing that might be good for you guys to try. It's an essential ingredient of the church that we must do is to sing songs of praise to God. And in Pauline theology, it's put on par with doing everything in the name of Jesus. And so I would say gently this morning, and I do mean gently. I don't want anyone to feel bad. But if you go to church and there's music playing and you have an opportunity to sing with a family of faith and you don't do it, that's disobedient. God tells us to sing. God through Paul tells us that we need to sing. Sing these songs. You're wired to do that. And I know there's all kinds of reasons why we don't or why we wouldn't. We're worried about being heard and maybe because our voice isn't very good, especially when Aaron is like a jerk, and he lays out, and he's like, just your voices, and you're like, oh, jeez, everyone's going to hear me, you know? You've got to forget about that. You've got to let it rip. When people, nobody sits next to me up here. I sit up here, and there's very few people that actually come and sit next to me, but every now and again we're full, and they have to, and I always look at and I'll be like, you sing as loud as you want because I'm not going to hear you. Because I let it go. And Jen has said, maybe you need to think about how loud you sing. But here's one of the reasons I sing and I sing loud. First of all, I love singing with my church. Second, maybe this thought will help you. God created you. He's a good Father in heaven and he created you. And when he created you, he created you with your voice. And he knows that some of you can't carry a tune in a bucket, but he made you that way. And you know what he loves? He loves hearing that voice declare his praises. And sometimes I wonder if he doesn't like it more than the pretty voices. Because it's fun to sing with a pretty voice, I guess. I wouldn't know. But to overcome that and say, no, God, I'm going to belt this out for you anyways. God created your voice. What could be sweeter to a father's ears than to hear his children cry out and praise for him? We need to do it. We should be a singing people. The church for all of history has been a singing people. It occurs to me though, it is an odd on its face admonition from God. It's an odd standard for him to have that he should insist that we would praise him all the time. Right? It's kind of an egomaniacal thing to create a race of people and then instruct them and say, now tell me how good I am all the time. Praise me all the time. And if you're not doing it, that's wrong. Praise me more. You can't praise me enough. And in heaven, they're going to praise me even more all the time. It's going to be great. If you just look at it like that, it's like a six-year-old invented this whole thing. I'm going to make some people, and they're going to tell me I'm great all the time. So it's worth asking, why is it so important to God that we praise him? He designed us to do it. Why did he do that? Why does he command us? Why does he double down on that and command us to praise him? Well, as with everything with God, it's for our benefit. It's for our good. It's for our best. You'll find this the further you get into Christendom and Christianity. God never asks you to do anything that's not what's best for you. He never doesn't want you to do something because he doesn't have your best interest in mind. Every instruction, every admonition, every command, every wish, every revelation of God's will that we get is for our good and for our benefit. So is his instruction to praise him. There's an old theologian named Karl Barth that I think answers this question really well. It doesn't really matter that he's an old theologian. What matters is what he said. And if you were to ask, why does God want us to praise him? I think this quote captures it. I'm probably going to read it twice because it can be difficult to follow because it's not words we're used to. But here we go. It's words we're used to. We're just not used to putting them in this order. I'll read it again. So what Mr. Barth is saying here is that all of praise, all of praise through all the centuries, through all the years, the animals doing it, the rocks crying out, the people doing it, the angels singing it, it all culminates, it is at its best. Praise reaches its climax when it is sung by God's children in God's church. That what we do here on Sunday mornings is the culmination of all of praise. And in that culmination of praise, in that expression of praise to God, is one of the most important ministries of the church. And I really like that Carl uses the word ministry there. It's the ministry of the church. You know why I like that? Because a ministry serves us. Ministry serves. So it's not the job of the church. It's not the declaration of the church. It's not the business of the church. It's the ministry of the church. That singing songs together is one of the most important ministries of the church, which means that when we do that together, we are served. We get something out of it. We benefit. Corporate worship exalts God and serves us. It exalts God. It helps us remember who he is and who we are. It reminds us of that constantly. But it also serves us. And so I thought it worth asking here at the beginning of a series on worship, how does it serve us to corporately worship together? I have three things that I thought of and how it serves us to worship corporately together. There's more than three ways that it benefits us, but these are the three that I came up with and that I would put to you this morning. The first is corporate worship is an expression of the unity for which Jesus prayed. Corporate worship is an expression of the unity for which Jesus prayed. John chapter 17, to me in my thinking, is one of the most profound chapters in the Bible. In John chapter 17, we have what's called the high priestly prayer. It's the longest recorded prayer of Jesus'. He prays it at the end of his ministry before going to be crucified. It's one of the last times he's gathered with the disciples. And he stops and he prays over the disciples and then in turn prays over all who would be a part of the church to follow the disciples. So if you're here this morning and you're a believer, he prayed for you and he prayed for me in the high priestly prayer of John chapter 17. And the thing that Jesus prays for in that prayer, in his longest recorded prayer, is he's expressing in his heart what he wants for the church that will follow. The thing that Jesus prays for over and over and over again is unity. That we would be unified. That we would be one body. That we would be together in one body, in one spirit, in one mind. And I think that's such an important idea, and I think honestly as Christians, we undervalue that admonition from Jesus. We have a glimpse of his heart that he wants us to be unified, and yet we are really bad as Christians at being unified. We're so fractal. We have so many different denominations. We insist so much that if I'm going to worship with you, then you have to agree with me about all the finer points of theology. You have to agree with me about everything or I can't worship with you. We're really, as Christians, we can be a very divisive people, which is so antithetical to what Jesus prays in John chapter 17. Can I tell you, I got off, I quit scrolling Twitter back in February. It's not on my phone anymore. The big reason, the biggest reason I got rid of Twitter in particular in that instant is because every time I would scroll it was just Christians getting mad at other Christians for not being Christian the way they wanted them to be Christian. It was so stupid. Just as an aside, I have a feeling that this particular thing that I'm about to say is going to come up in a later sermon when I can articulate it a little bit more. But how can we possibly be obedient to Jesus' prayer and be unified as a global body of believers or even a local body of believers if we insist on a homogeny of theology and thought and doctrine? How can we possibly exist in unity if we have to have all the same ideas about all the same things and believe all the same implications from all the same verses? That's why we're not unified is because we've insisted on that for so long. But for the purposes of this morning, when we sing together the same words, the same songs, it unifies us as a body. In that moment, in that place, we are unified. We are together. We are one voice living in obedience to the prayer of Jesus in John chapter 17. You come in here Democrat or Republican, you lay it down, you praise God together. We are God's children here. Those are the only labels that matter. You're in your 70s, I'm in my 20s, doesn't matter. We lay that down and we praise God together. We are unified. Later in the service we're going to ordain Kyle, hold your applause. Which means that his family and his wife's family, they're all here. And they all go to different churches. Two of them work at other churches that are almost as good as this one. And they go to other churches and other places. But they come here and they lift their voices with us. And for this morning, they're a part of our family. As we praise together, they can go anywhere to any church and sing with them and be unified. I remember vividly being in Cape Town, South Africa, in a townage called, I think, Masa Pumaleli. And I went to church, and they were singing. And they were singing in Masi. And I don't remember what they were singing, but I knew that song. And I went outside, and I remember just looking up at the sky. And I remember they had these, it was the weirdest things, they had these things that they held that looked like throw pillows and then when you hit them they made a drum noise. It was wild. The women are dancing around, hitting these drum pillows, singing a song, and I went outside and just sang it to the sky, feeling completely unified with the church in South Africa, with where I was from, understanding that the global church sings too. When we sing together, it unifies us in Jesus in that moment, no matter what labels we brought in. And when we sing together as a church, it joins us with all the other expressions of God's faith and God's body all over the city who are singing this morning too. It's a unifying thing to sing together. The second thing, the second way it ministers to us when we sing together is when we sing, we participate in heaven. I don't know if you've ever thought of it that way. But I believe that heaven's not so much a location and over there a location as a different realm that's going to collide with ours when the fullness of time occurs. It's going to crash into our physical world. It's going to take us over and we will exist in heaven. And when we do, we will sing. There will be joy. And I think that there are times in life, moments of deep love or appreciation, times when God stirs your soul, times when you feel God speaking to you. Times when you're moved. That God allows us to experience just a little glint of heaven here in this dirty place. And I think that when we sing together, God moves in these moments. That if we lose ourself in that praise, and we can corporately lose ourself in that praise together, that we experience a little glimmer of heaven right in this room this morning. I think when we sing, we participate in what's already going on in heaven. And if singing unifies us, and if singing allows us to participate, then maybe it's even possible that we're singing with the ones that we've lost and that we've loved too. I think singing corporately allows us to participate just a little bit in what heaven is doing right now. And the third thing I would mention in the way that singing ministers to us, and this is not something that had occurred to me until I ran across a quote, and I'll read you the quote in a second. Singing teaches us theology. The songs we sing teach us about our God, about how our God views us, about our need for him. Singing songs teaches us about theology. I had never thought about it before, but as I was prepping, I was reading some guy's, I think, blog post on worship. I don't know. And I saw this quote, and I immediately sent it to Gibson because I thought, this is so important and so impactful. You need to be aware of this. And then I realized, I want to share this with the church, too, because it is important. So like I said, it's a quote. I don't know from who, some guy who wrote a blog. So some guy who wrote a blog said this. Since people tend to remember the theology they sing more than the theology that is preached, a congregation's repertoire of hymnody is often of critical importance in shaping the faith of its people. Do you get that? The songs we sing teach us who our God is. And so one of the most important things that can be done in the development of your theology and your children's theology and how you view God and how you think he views you is for Aaron to prayerfully and thoughtfully select the right songs to put in front of you to teach you more about your God. When we sing, we are learning. And as I processed this, I realized it was true. I realized it was true because I grew up Southern Baptist and we sing hymns and we sing Amazing Grace. And it was Amazing Grace that taught me that I was a wretch, which is a difficult truth for a six-year-old. But it was Amazing Grace that taught me that I was a wretch. Remember that word? And it wasn't until years later that I saw it in Romans 7, where Paul declares, Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death. Amazing grace taught me that theology before I encountered it in Scripture. Amazing grace taught me that it was grace that saved me. That it was God's grace and goodness that was chasing after me to save me and that was providing for my salvation. I didn't learn the theology of that until years later. I had no idea about from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I had no idea about the theology of grace and what that word meant and why God gives us his son and that is that he is a personification of grace. I didn't know that. I just knew that God was gracious and that his grace was amazing. Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full at his wonderful face and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace. Before I ever encountered Hebrews 12, 1 and 2, because we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw out the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us. How? By focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. It was years later that I learned those verses. And I learned that to be obedient to Jesus, all I need to do is focus on him and that the things of the world will fade. But my little spirit had been singing that for years because of what Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus taught me. So when we sing, we learn theology. And that's one of the big things I want to do in this series. This morning's a little bit different because I thought we needed kind of a theology of worship, why we worship, why we understand it the way that we do, why it's so very important. But the rest of the series, we're going to pick songs. We're going to go through them. And we're going to look at where they come from in the scriptures so that hopefully that can imbue them with more purpose and more meaning so that when we sing them, we know what we're singing. We're singing God's scriptures back to him. And I hope that as we walk through these, that some of the songs, I wish we could do all of them, but at least some of the songs that we do corporately, when we do them you'll know what you're singing and you'll know why you're singing it and you'll know what it means and I think it'll make the moment more sacred for you and for us. So this morning we're about to sing Graves into Gardens. Graves into Gardens is such a good example of this. There is so much in this song that comes straight out of Scripture. The very first lines, I searched the world and it couldn't fill me. Every desire and the man's empty praise, that's Ecclesiastes. Man's empty praise is from Proverbs. That the crucible is for silver, but praise tests a man's heart. That comes right out of Scripture. There's some others that I wanted to show you more pointedly. These words aren't going to be up on the screen, but there's a segment of the song where we say, because the God of the mountain is the God of the valley. That's Psalm 104.8 where it says that God set the mountains and the valleys in place. Right after that you sing these lines. There's not a place your mercy and grace won't find me again. That's Psalm 23. Mercy and grace will follow me all the days of my life. It's coming right out of Scripture. I like at the end, there's this part that we repeat. You turn graves into gardens. You turn bones into armies. Ezekiel 37, the valley of the dry bones, when God makes an army out of skeletons. You turn seas into highways. I mentioned that earlier, the parting of the Red Sea. So much scripture. But the one that I didn't know about that I want to point your attention to this morning as we sing is found in Isaiah 61.3. Look how closely these mimic one another. The scene is pulled right out of scripture. One of the reasons I wanted to do this series is I wanted you to see the Bible you've been singing without even knowing it. But look, Isaiah 61. To all who mourn in Israel, He will give a crown of beauty to ashes. You give beauty to ashes. A joyous blessing instead of mourning. You turn mourning to dancing. Festive praise instead of despair. In their righteousness they will be like great oaks. We're going to start with graves into gardens. We're going to sing God's Word back to Him. And then we've got two more songs to do after that. So sometimes in this series we're going to start with Graves in the Gardens. We're going to sing God's Word back to him. And then we've got two more songs to do after that. So sometimes in this series, we're going to preach up front and then respond in a prolonged period of praise after that. So join me in Graves in the Gardens.

Amen. Thank you, Aaron. That was great. A little bit different this morning. I know some of you who have been coming to Grace for a while are freaking out right now because it's way too early for the sermon and you don't know what's happening. That is on purpose. We're doing that on purpose because this is a series that is focused on worship. And so we are flipping around the way that we do things in some of the services so that we can respond to the sermon about a song or about worship in worship. This is a series that we've been wanting to do for, I've been wanting to do it since COVID. And when I say since COVID, I realize in preparation for this that I say things like in COVID and since COVID as if it doesn't exist anymore. And it would stop existing if we would just quit testing. But I think we're far enough removed now that I can make that joke and nobody thinks I'm making any statements. What I learned in COVID, and when I say in COVID, that is from 2020 to halfway through 2022. That's in COVID. Okay, so what I learned in COVID about church, one of my biggest takeaways was how important it is that we sing together. There was a lot about that season that I didn't care for. I was coming in here on Thursdays, one o'clock in the afternoon, preaching to that camera with two other people in the room, and then Sunday morning I would watch myself with my family, and my daughter would tell me that I was boring. And I would agree. I would agree with her. And it just made me realize that singing together when we come is maybe the most important part about Sunday morning. When Aaron was interviewing, we were searching for a worship pastor. He asked me, he said, I have a question just for Nate. What does Sunday morning worship mean to you? Why is it important to you? And I said, well, you know, the service lasts an hour and I'm only going to speak for 30 to 35 minutes, so we need an effective filler to get to me. And he laughed, which is what you're supposed to do when your potential boss makes a joke in an interview. You laugh at it, even if it's not that funny. And I said, no, I think it's the most important thing that happens on Sundays. Besides being together, besides what happens in the lobby before and after the service, besides going out to lunch together afterwards, besides being around each other and seeing each other, I think the most important thing that happens on Sunday morning is singing together. You can listen to this sermon anytime. You can download the best pastors in the world every week. But what you cannot download is singing with your family of faith. What you cannot download is the experience of praising God together. So I think it's the most important thing that happens on Sunday morning. And it occurs to me that as I was visiting other churches in sabbatical, and then as I was thinking about this idea of worship and worship in the service, we do it every week. It's my favorite part of the service. My favorite noise in the world, one of my favorite noises in the world is to sit in the front and listen to you guys belt it out. At the end of last week, I don't know what happened, the spirit was moving, but that last song we sang was powerful. And I just listened to y'all sing it because I like hearing my family of faith praise God together. But as I was getting ready for this series, doing research on worship and thinking about it, I think someone wrote it somewhere and I thought about it a little bit more and found it to be true. You know that every church everywhere sings? Every church service that's happening in the city this morning, there's going to be singing. I know of no traditions or denominations that do not sing in their service. It's a mandatory part of all services, which is really kind of crazy because so many different traditions have so many different things that they include in their Sunday morning liturgy. A read, a call and response, an altar call, a message, or a homily. But they all sing. And we do it every week. And so this series is called The Songs We Sing. And we're going to look at a few of the songs that we sing as a body, and we're going to ask where they come from in Scripture. We're going to ask what they can teach us, and we're going to really spend time as a body of believers focusing on the importance of worship. Because I really did come out of COVID thinking that the most important thing we do when we gather on Sunday morning is we sing together. Now, why do we sing? That's a natural question to ask. Some of us don't like it. Some of us wish we could skip it. But why is it a part of all the services? Why is it so ubiquitous? I think it's simply this. I think we sing because God designs and commands us to do so. We sing because God designs and commands us to do so. He designed us to sing. There is something, I believe, in your very soul, in your nature, that is knit into you, that longs to praise, that longs to sing. We're told in Scripture that if we don't praise God, that the rocks will cry out on our behalf, that creation itself will praise God if we refuse to do it. I think we were born to praise. I think we were born to sing. I honestly think that when you go to a concert and it's not a Christian artist and they're singing the song and the whole crowd sings the song and it's a really powerful thing when a whole venue or a whole arena is singing a song together. And I honestly think that's probably a spiritual moment. That's just a moment that's being misappropriated to sing something else and find joy in other places. But that's a response that we have to this natural desire to sing and to cry out that God knit into us. I believe that we were designed to worship. And I believe that we were designed to worship because I don't know if you've ever thought about this or realized this, but all of creation is bracketed with praise. All of creation is bracketed with song. There was singing going on in the heavens before earth was a thing, and there will be singing at the end of the story when the new heaven and the new earth becomes a thing. I know this because of what I see in Job 38. Job 38.7 very simply says, look at it with me. When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. In the preceding verses 5 and 6, God is asking Job, where were you when I was doing these things? And so he's saying, where were you when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? The stars of the story, Revelation 19. Bracketing all of time, all of creation, is the song of creation and the song of praise. Right now, in the throne room of God, there are angels surrounding him saying, Right now heaven is filled with choral praise. It's happening in this moment. And so when we sing we are joining that eternal echo of praise. There's something in our soul that wants to do that. And then we are commanded to do it. It's not just a natural thing to want to praise our God. Why do we do it? Well, we do it because we're designed to. But we also do it because God commands us to. God tells us to all through Scripture. He tells us that we're to praise Him, that we're to sing songs to Him, that we are to make a joyful noise. Did you know that in 2 Chronicles you can find a listing of the worship pastors at the tabernacle? That God actually invented Aaron's job? It's in the Bible. These are the ministers of praise, the ministers of song for the nation of Israel. We start to see songs in the Bible as early as, I think, Exodus 15, when God moves his people across the Red Sea, when he parts the Red Sea. There's a song of Moses immediately following that, where as a nation, they praise their God. A few chapters later, there's a song of Miriam. We see songs all through Scripture. We have a whole book in the middle of the Bible, Psalms. You ever do the drop and flop where you're like, dear God, what do you want me to read today? And then you just drop your Bible. It's always going to be Psalms that he wants you to read because it's big and it's in the middle. We have a whole book of songs intended to be sung to God. I'm not going to say too much about that book because next week is on Psalm 8, and I'm very excited about that. And the week after that is Great is Thy Faithfulness. I wrote that sermon this week and I cannot wait to preach it. I literally just wish we could fast forward to that. I cannot wait to preach that to you in a couple of weeks. But all through scripture we see singing. We see praising. One of my favorite scenes is when David gets too exuberant in his praise and his wife gets on to him and says, you're being undignified. And he's like, then I'm going to be undignified. That's fine. There's this great song that starts off, I will be undignified. I'm dancing as David danced. And the line is wild and free, something in romance, but I always like to sing wild and free in my underpants because that's what he did. Isn't this funnier? Even in Colossians, I was struck by this this week. Colossians 3, verses 16 and 17. This is what Paul writes about our command to sing. It's remarkable to me, Paul is writing this letter to the church in Colossae. He's getting towards the end of it, so he's beginning to give his closing instructions. And he says, he instructs the church, sing songs and hymns and spiritual songs. And he puts it on par with doing everything in the name of Jesus. So he doesn't say this is a thing that might be good for you guys to try. It's an essential ingredient of the church that we must do is to sing songs of praise to God. And in Pauline theology, it's put on par with doing everything in the name of Jesus. And so I would say gently this morning, and I do mean gently. I don't want anyone to feel bad. But if you go to church and there's music playing and you have an opportunity to sing with a family of faith and you don't do it, that's disobedient. God tells us to sing. God through Paul tells us that we need to sing. Sing these songs. You're wired to do that. And I know there's all kinds of reasons why we don't or why we wouldn't. We're worried about being heard and maybe because our voice isn't very good, especially when Aaron is like a jerk, and he lays out, and he's like, just your voices, and you're like, oh, jeez, everyone's going to hear me, you know? You've got to forget about that. You've got to let it rip. When people, nobody sits next to me up here. I sit up here, and there's very few people that actually come and sit next to me, but every now and again we're full, and they have to, and I always look at and I'll be like, you sing as loud as you want because I'm not going to hear you. Because I let it go. And Jen has said, maybe you need to think about how loud you sing. But here's one of the reasons I sing and I sing loud. First of all, I love singing with my church. Second, maybe this thought will help you. God created you. He's a good Father in heaven and he created you. And when he created you, he created you with your voice. And he knows that some of you can't carry a tune in a bucket, but he made you that way. And you know what he loves? He loves hearing that voice declare his praises. And sometimes I wonder if he doesn't like it more than the pretty voices. Because it's fun to sing with a pretty voice, I guess. I wouldn't know. But to overcome that and say, no, God, I'm going to belt this out for you anyways. God created your voice. What could be sweeter to a father's ears than to hear his children cry out and praise for him? We need to do it. We should be a singing people. The church for all of history has been a singing people. It occurs to me though, it is an odd on its face admonition from God. It's an odd standard for him to have that he should insist that we would praise him all the time. Right? It's kind of an egomaniacal thing to create a race of people and then instruct them and say, now tell me how good I am all the time. Praise me all the time. And if you're not doing it, that's wrong. Praise me more. You can't praise me enough. And in heaven, they're going to praise me even more all the time. It's going to be great. If you just look at it like that, it's like a six-year-old invented this whole thing. I'm going to make some people, and they're going to tell me I'm great all the time. So it's worth asking, why is it so important to God that we praise him? He designed us to do it. Why did he do that? Why does he command us? Why does he double down on that and command us to praise him? Well, as with everything with God, it's for our benefit. It's for our good. It's for our best. You'll find this the further you get into Christendom and Christianity. God never asks you to do anything that's not what's best for you. He never doesn't want you to do something because he doesn't have your best interest in mind. Every instruction, every admonition, every command, every wish, every revelation of God's will that we get is for our good and for our benefit. So is his instruction to praise him. There's an old theologian named Karl Barth that I think answers this question really well. It doesn't really matter that he's an old theologian. What matters is what he said. And if you were to ask, why does God want us to praise him? I think this quote captures it. I'm probably going to read it twice because it can be difficult to follow because it's not words we're used to. But here we go. It's words we're used to. We're just not used to putting them in this order. I'll read it again. So what Mr. Barth is saying here is that all of praise, all of praise through all the centuries, through all the years, the animals doing it, the rocks crying out, the people doing it, the angels singing it, it all culminates, it is at its best. Praise reaches its climax when it is sung by God's children in God's church. That what we do here on Sunday mornings is the culmination of all of praise. And in that culmination of praise, in that expression of praise to God, is one of the most important ministries of the church. And I really like that Carl uses the word ministry there. It's the ministry of the church. You know why I like that? Because a ministry serves us. Ministry serves. So it's not the job of the church. It's not the declaration of the church. It's not the business of the church. It's the ministry of the church. That singing songs together is one of the most important ministries of the church, which means that when we do that together, we are served. We get something out of it. We benefit. Corporate worship exalts God and serves us. It exalts God. It helps us remember who he is and who we are. It reminds us of that constantly. But it also serves us. And so I thought it worth asking here at the beginning of a series on worship, how does it serve us to corporately worship together? I have three things that I thought of and how it serves us to worship corporately together. There's more than three ways that it benefits us, but these are the three that I came up with and that I would put to you this morning. The first is corporate worship is an expression of the unity for which Jesus prayed. Corporate worship is an expression of the unity for which Jesus prayed. John chapter 17, to me in my thinking, is one of the most profound chapters in the Bible. In John chapter 17, we have what's called the high priestly prayer. It's the longest recorded prayer of Jesus'. He prays it at the end of his ministry before going to be crucified. It's one of the last times he's gathered with the disciples. And he stops and he prays over the disciples and then in turn prays over all who would be a part of the church to follow the disciples. So if you're here this morning and you're a believer, he prayed for you and he prayed for me in the high priestly prayer of John chapter 17. And the thing that Jesus prays for in that prayer, in his longest recorded prayer, is he's expressing in his heart what he wants for the church that will follow. The thing that Jesus prays for over and over and over again is unity. That we would be unified. That we would be one body. That we would be together in one body, in one spirit, in one mind. And I think that's such an important idea, and I think honestly as Christians, we undervalue that admonition from Jesus. We have a glimpse of his heart that he wants us to be unified, and yet we are really bad as Christians at being unified. We're so fractal. We have so many different denominations. We insist so much that if I'm going to worship with you, then you have to agree with me about all the finer points of theology. You have to agree with me about everything or I can't worship with you. We're really, as Christians, we can be a very divisive people, which is so antithetical to what Jesus prays in John chapter 17. Can I tell you, I got off, I quit scrolling Twitter back in February. It's not on my phone anymore. The big reason, the biggest reason I got rid of Twitter in particular in that instant is because every time I would scroll it was just Christians getting mad at other Christians for not being Christian the way they wanted them to be Christian. It was so stupid. Just as an aside, I have a feeling that this particular thing that I'm about to say is going to come up in a later sermon when I can articulate it a little bit more. But how can we possibly be obedient to Jesus' prayer and be unified as a global body of believers or even a local body of believers if we insist on a homogeny of theology and thought and doctrine? How can we possibly exist in unity if we have to have all the same ideas about all the same things and believe all the same implications from all the same verses? That's why we're not unified is because we've insisted on that for so long. But for the purposes of this morning, when we sing together the same words, the same songs, it unifies us as a body. In that moment, in that place, we are unified. We are together. We are one voice living in obedience to the prayer of Jesus in John chapter 17. You come in here Democrat or Republican, you lay it down, you praise God together. We are God's children here. Those are the only labels that matter. You're in your 70s, I'm in my 20s, doesn't matter. We lay that down and we praise God together. We are unified. Later in the service we're going to ordain Kyle, hold your applause. Which means that his family and his wife's family, they're all here. And they all go to different churches. Two of them work at other churches that are almost as good as this one. And they go to other churches and other places. But they come here and they lift their voices with us. And for this morning, they're a part of our family. As we praise together, they can go anywhere to any church and sing with them and be unified. I remember vividly being in Cape Town, South Africa, in a townage called, I think, Masa Pumaleli. And I went to church, and they were singing. And they were singing in Masi. And I don't remember what they were singing, but I knew that song. And I went outside, and I remember just looking up at the sky. And I remember they had these, it was the weirdest things, they had these things that they held that looked like throw pillows and then when you hit them they made a drum noise. It was wild. The women are dancing around, hitting these drum pillows, singing a song, and I went outside and just sang it to the sky, feeling completely unified with the church in South Africa, with where I was from, understanding that the global church sings too. When we sing together, it unifies us in Jesus in that moment, no matter what labels we brought in. And when we sing together as a church, it joins us with all the other expressions of God's faith and God's body all over the city who are singing this morning too. It's a unifying thing to sing together. The second thing, the second way it ministers to us when we sing together is when we sing, we participate in heaven. I don't know if you've ever thought of it that way. But I believe that heaven's not so much a location and over there a location as a different realm that's going to collide with ours when the fullness of time occurs. It's going to crash into our physical world. It's going to take us over and we will exist in heaven. And when we do, we will sing. There will be joy. And I think that there are times in life, moments of deep love or appreciation, times when God stirs your soul, times when you feel God speaking to you. Times when you're moved. That God allows us to experience just a little glint of heaven here in this dirty place. And I think that when we sing together, God moves in these moments. That if we lose ourself in that praise, and we can corporately lose ourself in that praise together, that we experience a little glimmer of heaven right in this room this morning. I think when we sing, we participate in what's already going on in heaven. And if singing unifies us, and if singing allows us to participate, then maybe it's even possible that we're singing with the ones that we've lost and that we've loved too. I think singing corporately allows us to participate just a little bit in what heaven is doing right now. And the third thing I would mention in the way that singing ministers to us, and this is not something that had occurred to me until I ran across a quote, and I'll read you the quote in a second. Singing teaches us theology. The songs we sing teach us about our God, about how our God views us, about our need for him. Singing songs teaches us about theology. I had never thought about it before, but as I was prepping, I was reading some guy's, I think, blog post on worship. I don't know. And I saw this quote, and I immediately sent it to Gibson because I thought, this is so important and so impactful. You need to be aware of this. And then I realized, I want to share this with the church, too, because it is important. So like I said, it's a quote. I don't know from who, some guy who wrote a blog. So some guy who wrote a blog said this. Since people tend to remember the theology they sing more than the theology that is preached, a congregation's repertoire of hymnody is often of critical importance in shaping the faith of its people. Do you get that? The songs we sing teach us who our God is. And so one of the most important things that can be done in the development of your theology and your children's theology and how you view God and how you think he views you is for Aaron to prayerfully and thoughtfully select the right songs to put in front of you to teach you more about your God. When we sing, we are learning. And as I processed this, I realized it was true. I realized it was true because I grew up Southern Baptist and we sing hymns and we sing Amazing Grace. And it was Amazing Grace that taught me that I was a wretch, which is a difficult truth for a six-year-old. But it was Amazing Grace that taught me that I was a wretch. Remember that word? And it wasn't until years later that I saw it in Romans 7, where Paul declares, Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death. Amazing grace taught me that theology before I encountered it in Scripture. Amazing grace taught me that it was grace that saved me. That it was God's grace and goodness that was chasing after me to save me and that was providing for my salvation. I didn't learn the theology of that until years later. I had no idea about from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I had no idea about the theology of grace and what that word meant and why God gives us his son and that is that he is a personification of grace. I didn't know that. I just knew that God was gracious and that his grace was amazing. Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full at his wonderful face and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace. Before I ever encountered Hebrews 12, 1 and 2, because we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw out the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us. How? By focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. It was years later that I learned those verses. And I learned that to be obedient to Jesus, all I need to do is focus on him and that the things of the world will fade. But my little spirit had been singing that for years because of what Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus taught me. So when we sing, we learn theology. And that's one of the big things I want to do in this series. This morning's a little bit different because I thought we needed kind of a theology of worship, why we worship, why we understand it the way that we do, why it's so very important. But the rest of the series, we're going to pick songs. We're going to go through them. And we're going to look at where they come from in the scriptures so that hopefully that can imbue them with more purpose and more meaning so that when we sing them, we know what we're singing. We're singing God's scriptures back to him. And I hope that as we walk through these, that some of the songs, I wish we could do all of them, but at least some of the songs that we do corporately, when we do them you'll know what you're singing and you'll know why you're singing it and you'll know what it means and I think it'll make the moment more sacred for you and for us. So this morning we're about to sing Graves into Gardens. Graves into Gardens is such a good example of this. There is so much in this song that comes straight out of Scripture. The very first lines, I searched the world and it couldn't fill me. Every desire and the man's empty praise, that's Ecclesiastes. Man's empty praise is from Proverbs. That the crucible is for silver, but praise tests a man's heart. That comes right out of Scripture. There's some others that I wanted to show you more pointedly. These words aren't going to be up on the screen, but there's a segment of the song where we say, because the God of the mountain is the God of the valley. That's Psalm 104.8 where it says that God set the mountains and the valleys in place. Right after that you sing these lines. There's not a place your mercy and grace won't find me again. That's Psalm 23. Mercy and grace will follow me all the days of my life. It's coming right out of Scripture. I like at the end, there's this part that we repeat. You turn graves into gardens. You turn bones into armies. Ezekiel 37, the valley of the dry bones, when God makes an army out of skeletons. You turn seas into highways. I mentioned that earlier, the parting of the Red Sea. So much scripture. But the one that I didn't know about that I want to point your attention to this morning as we sing is found in Isaiah 61.3. Look how closely these mimic one another. The scene is pulled right out of scripture. One of the reasons I wanted to do this series is I wanted you to see the Bible you've been singing without even knowing it. But look, Isaiah 61. To all who mourn in Israel, He will give a crown of beauty to ashes. You give beauty to ashes. A joyous blessing instead of mourning. You turn mourning to dancing. Festive praise instead of despair. In their righteousness they will be like great oaks. We're going to start with graves into gardens. We're going to sing God's Word back to Him. And then we've got two more songs to do after that. So sometimes in this series we're going to start with Graves in the Gardens. We're going to sing God's Word back to him. And then we've got two more songs to do after that. So sometimes in this series, we're going to preach up front and then respond in a prolonged period of praise after that. So join me in Graves in the Gardens.

Amen. Thank you, Aaron. That was great. A little bit different this morning. I know some of you who have been coming to Grace for a while are freaking out right now because it's way too early for the sermon and you don't know what's happening. That is on purpose. We're doing that on purpose because this is a series that is focused on worship. And so we are flipping around the way that we do things in some of the services so that we can respond to the sermon about a song or about worship in worship. This is a series that we've been wanting to do for, I've been wanting to do it since COVID. And when I say since COVID, I realize in preparation for this that I say things like in COVID and since COVID as if it doesn't exist anymore. And it would stop existing if we would just quit testing. But I think we're far enough removed now that I can make that joke and nobody thinks I'm making any statements. What I learned in COVID, and when I say in COVID, that is from 2020 to halfway through 2022. That's in COVID. Okay, so what I learned in COVID about church, one of my biggest takeaways was how important it is that we sing together. There was a lot about that season that I didn't care for. I was coming in here on Thursdays, one o'clock in the afternoon, preaching to that camera with two other people in the room, and then Sunday morning I would watch myself with my family, and my daughter would tell me that I was boring. And I would agree. I would agree with her. And it just made me realize that singing together when we come is maybe the most important part about Sunday morning. When Aaron was interviewing, we were searching for a worship pastor. He asked me, he said, I have a question just for Nate. What does Sunday morning worship mean to you? Why is it important to you? And I said, well, you know, the service lasts an hour and I'm only going to speak for 30 to 35 minutes, so we need an effective filler to get to me. And he laughed, which is what you're supposed to do when your potential boss makes a joke in an interview. You laugh at it, even if it's not that funny. And I said, no, I think it's the most important thing that happens on Sundays. Besides being together, besides what happens in the lobby before and after the service, besides going out to lunch together afterwards, besides being around each other and seeing each other, I think the most important thing that happens on Sunday morning is singing together. You can listen to this sermon anytime. You can download the best pastors in the world every week. But what you cannot download is singing with your family of faith. What you cannot download is the experience of praising God together. So I think it's the most important thing that happens on Sunday morning. And it occurs to me that as I was visiting other churches in sabbatical, and then as I was thinking about this idea of worship and worship in the service, we do it every week. It's my favorite part of the service. My favorite noise in the world, one of my favorite noises in the world is to sit in the front and listen to you guys belt it out. At the end of last week, I don't know what happened, the spirit was moving, but that last song we sang was powerful. And I just listened to y'all sing it because I like hearing my family of faith praise God together. But as I was getting ready for this series, doing research on worship and thinking about it, I think someone wrote it somewhere and I thought about it a little bit more and found it to be true. You know that every church everywhere sings? Every church service that's happening in the city this morning, there's going to be singing. I know of no traditions or denominations that do not sing in their service. It's a mandatory part of all services, which is really kind of crazy because so many different traditions have so many different things that they include in their Sunday morning liturgy. A read, a call and response, an altar call, a message, or a homily. But they all sing. And we do it every week. And so this series is called The Songs We Sing. And we're going to look at a few of the songs that we sing as a body, and we're going to ask where they come from in Scripture. We're going to ask what they can teach us, and we're going to really spend time as a body of believers focusing on the importance of worship. Because I really did come out of COVID thinking that the most important thing we do when we gather on Sunday morning is we sing together. Now, why do we sing? That's a natural question to ask. Some of us don't like it. Some of us wish we could skip it. But why is it a part of all the services? Why is it so ubiquitous? I think it's simply this. I think we sing because God designs and commands us to do so. We sing because God designs and commands us to do so. He designed us to sing. There is something, I believe, in your very soul, in your nature, that is knit into you, that longs to praise, that longs to sing. We're told in Scripture that if we don't praise God, that the rocks will cry out on our behalf, that creation itself will praise God if we refuse to do it. I think we were born to praise. I think we were born to sing. I honestly think that when you go to a concert and it's not a Christian artist and they're singing the song and the whole crowd sings the song and it's a really powerful thing when a whole venue or a whole arena is singing a song together. And I honestly think that's probably a spiritual moment. That's just a moment that's being misappropriated to sing something else and find joy in other places. But that's a response that we have to this natural desire to sing and to cry out that God knit into us. I believe that we were designed to worship. And I believe that we were designed to worship because I don't know if you've ever thought about this or realized this, but all of creation is bracketed with praise. All of creation is bracketed with song. There was singing going on in the heavens before earth was a thing, and there will be singing at the end of the story when the new heaven and the new earth becomes a thing. I know this because of what I see in Job 38. Job 38.7 very simply says, look at it with me. When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. In the preceding verses 5 and 6, God is asking Job, where were you when I was doing these things? And so he's saying, where were you when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? The stars of the story, Revelation 19. Bracketing all of time, all of creation, is the song of creation and the song of praise. Right now, in the throne room of God, there are angels surrounding him saying, Right now heaven is filled with choral praise. It's happening in this moment. And so when we sing we are joining that eternal echo of praise. There's something in our soul that wants to do that. And then we are commanded to do it. It's not just a natural thing to want to praise our God. Why do we do it? Well, we do it because we're designed to. But we also do it because God commands us to. God tells us to all through Scripture. He tells us that we're to praise Him, that we're to sing songs to Him, that we are to make a joyful noise. Did you know that in 2 Chronicles you can find a listing of the worship pastors at the tabernacle? That God actually invented Aaron's job? It's in the Bible. These are the ministers of praise, the ministers of song for the nation of Israel. We start to see songs in the Bible as early as, I think, Exodus 15, when God moves his people across the Red Sea, when he parts the Red Sea. There's a song of Moses immediately following that, where as a nation, they praise their God. A few chapters later, there's a song of Miriam. We see songs all through Scripture. We have a whole book in the middle of the Bible, Psalms. You ever do the drop and flop where you're like, dear God, what do you want me to read today? And then you just drop your Bible. It's always going to be Psalms that he wants you to read because it's big and it's in the middle. We have a whole book of songs intended to be sung to God. I'm not going to say too much about that book because next week is on Psalm 8, and I'm very excited about that. And the week after that is Great is Thy Faithfulness. I wrote that sermon this week and I cannot wait to preach it. I literally just wish we could fast forward to that. I cannot wait to preach that to you in a couple of weeks. But all through scripture we see singing. We see praising. One of my favorite scenes is when David gets too exuberant in his praise and his wife gets on to him and says, you're being undignified. And he's like, then I'm going to be undignified. That's fine. There's this great song that starts off, I will be undignified. I'm dancing as David danced. And the line is wild and free, something in romance, but I always like to sing wild and free in my underpants because that's what he did. Isn't this funnier? Even in Colossians, I was struck by this this week. Colossians 3, verses 16 and 17. This is what Paul writes about our command to sing. It's remarkable to me, Paul is writing this letter to the church in Colossae. He's getting towards the end of it, so he's beginning to give his closing instructions. And he says, he instructs the church, sing songs and hymns and spiritual songs. And he puts it on par with doing everything in the name of Jesus. So he doesn't say this is a thing that might be good for you guys to try. It's an essential ingredient of the church that we must do is to sing songs of praise to God. And in Pauline theology, it's put on par with doing everything in the name of Jesus. And so I would say gently this morning, and I do mean gently. I don't want anyone to feel bad. But if you go to church and there's music playing and you have an opportunity to sing with a family of faith and you don't do it, that's disobedient. God tells us to sing. God through Paul tells us that we need to sing. Sing these songs. You're wired to do that. And I know there's all kinds of reasons why we don't or why we wouldn't. We're worried about being heard and maybe because our voice isn't very good, especially when Aaron is like a jerk, and he lays out, and he's like, just your voices, and you're like, oh, jeez, everyone's going to hear me, you know? You've got to forget about that. You've got to let it rip. When people, nobody sits next to me up here. I sit up here, and there's very few people that actually come and sit next to me, but every now and again we're full, and they have to, and I always look at and I'll be like, you sing as loud as you want because I'm not going to hear you. Because I let it go. And Jen has said, maybe you need to think about how loud you sing. But here's one of the reasons I sing and I sing loud. First of all, I love singing with my church. Second, maybe this thought will help you. God created you. He's a good Father in heaven and he created you. And when he created you, he created you with your voice. And he knows that some of you can't carry a tune in a bucket, but he made you that way. And you know what he loves? He loves hearing that voice declare his praises. And sometimes I wonder if he doesn't like it more than the pretty voices. Because it's fun to sing with a pretty voice, I guess. I wouldn't know. But to overcome that and say, no, God, I'm going to belt this out for you anyways. God created your voice. What could be sweeter to a father's ears than to hear his children cry out and praise for him? We need to do it. We should be a singing people. The church for all of history has been a singing people. It occurs to me though, it is an odd on its face admonition from God. It's an odd standard for him to have that he should insist that we would praise him all the time. Right? It's kind of an egomaniacal thing to create a race of people and then instruct them and say, now tell me how good I am all the time. Praise me all the time. And if you're not doing it, that's wrong. Praise me more. You can't praise me enough. And in heaven, they're going to praise me even more all the time. It's going to be great. If you just look at it like that, it's like a six-year-old invented this whole thing. I'm going to make some people, and they're going to tell me I'm great all the time. So it's worth asking, why is it so important to God that we praise him? He designed us to do it. Why did he do that? Why does he command us? Why does he double down on that and command us to praise him? Well, as with everything with God, it's for our benefit. It's for our good. It's for our best. You'll find this the further you get into Christendom and Christianity. God never asks you to do anything that's not what's best for you. He never doesn't want you to do something because he doesn't have your best interest in mind. Every instruction, every admonition, every command, every wish, every revelation of God's will that we get is for our good and for our benefit. So is his instruction to praise him. There's an old theologian named Karl Barth that I think answers this question really well. It doesn't really matter that he's an old theologian. What matters is what he said. And if you were to ask, why does God want us to praise him? I think this quote captures it. I'm probably going to read it twice because it can be difficult to follow because it's not words we're used to. But here we go. It's words we're used to. We're just not used to putting them in this order. I'll read it again. So what Mr. Barth is saying here is that all of praise, all of praise through all the centuries, through all the years, the animals doing it, the rocks crying out, the people doing it, the angels singing it, it all culminates, it is at its best. Praise reaches its climax when it is sung by God's children in God's church. That what we do here on Sunday mornings is the culmination of all of praise. And in that culmination of praise, in that expression of praise to God, is one of the most important ministries of the church. And I really like that Carl uses the word ministry there. It's the ministry of the church. You know why I like that? Because a ministry serves us. Ministry serves. So it's not the job of the church. It's not the declaration of the church. It's not the business of the church. It's the ministry of the church. That singing songs together is one of the most important ministries of the church, which means that when we do that together, we are served. We get something out of it. We benefit. Corporate worship exalts God and serves us. It exalts God. It helps us remember who he is and who we are. It reminds us of that constantly. But it also serves us. And so I thought it worth asking here at the beginning of a series on worship, how does it serve us to corporately worship together? I have three things that I thought of and how it serves us to worship corporately together. There's more than three ways that it benefits us, but these are the three that I came up with and that I would put to you this morning. The first is corporate worship is an expression of the unity for which Jesus prayed. Corporate worship is an expression of the unity for which Jesus prayed. John chapter 17, to me in my thinking, is one of the most profound chapters in the Bible. In John chapter 17, we have what's called the high priestly prayer. It's the longest recorded prayer of Jesus'. He prays it at the end of his ministry before going to be crucified. It's one of the last times he's gathered with the disciples. And he stops and he prays over the disciples and then in turn prays over all who would be a part of the church to follow the disciples. So if you're here this morning and you're a believer, he prayed for you and he prayed for me in the high priestly prayer of John chapter 17. And the thing that Jesus prays for in that prayer, in his longest recorded prayer, is he's expressing in his heart what he wants for the church that will follow. The thing that Jesus prays for over and over and over again is unity. That we would be unified. That we would be one body. That we would be together in one body, in one spirit, in one mind. And I think that's such an important idea, and I think honestly as Christians, we undervalue that admonition from Jesus. We have a glimpse of his heart that he wants us to be unified, and yet we are really bad as Christians at being unified. We're so fractal. We have so many different denominations. We insist so much that if I'm going to worship with you, then you have to agree with me about all the finer points of theology. You have to agree with me about everything or I can't worship with you. We're really, as Christians, we can be a very divisive people, which is so antithetical to what Jesus prays in John chapter 17. Can I tell you, I got off, I quit scrolling Twitter back in February. It's not on my phone anymore. The big reason, the biggest reason I got rid of Twitter in particular in that instant is because every time I would scroll it was just Christians getting mad at other Christians for not being Christian the way they wanted them to be Christian. It was so stupid. Just as an aside, I have a feeling that this particular thing that I'm about to say is going to come up in a later sermon when I can articulate it a little bit more. But how can we possibly be obedient to Jesus' prayer and be unified as a global body of believers or even a local body of believers if we insist on a homogeny of theology and thought and doctrine? How can we possibly exist in unity if we have to have all the same ideas about all the same things and believe all the same implications from all the same verses? That's why we're not unified is because we've insisted on that for so long. But for the purposes of this morning, when we sing together the same words, the same songs, it unifies us as a body. In that moment, in that place, we are unified. We are together. We are one voice living in obedience to the prayer of Jesus in John chapter 17. You come in here Democrat or Republican, you lay it down, you praise God together. We are God's children here. Those are the only labels that matter. You're in your 70s, I'm in my 20s, doesn't matter. We lay that down and we praise God together. We are unified. Later in the service we're going to ordain Kyle, hold your applause. Which means that his family and his wife's family, they're all here. And they all go to different churches. Two of them work at other churches that are almost as good as this one. And they go to other churches and other places. But they come here and they lift their voices with us. And for this morning, they're a part of our family. As we praise together, they can go anywhere to any church and sing with them and be unified. I remember vividly being in Cape Town, South Africa, in a townage called, I think, Masa Pumaleli. And I went to church, and they were singing. And they were singing in Masi. And I don't remember what they were singing, but I knew that song. And I went outside, and I remember just looking up at the sky. And I remember they had these, it was the weirdest things, they had these things that they held that looked like throw pillows and then when you hit them they made a drum noise. It was wild. The women are dancing around, hitting these drum pillows, singing a song, and I went outside and just sang it to the sky, feeling completely unified with the church in South Africa, with where I was from, understanding that the global church sings too. When we sing together, it unifies us in Jesus in that moment, no matter what labels we brought in. And when we sing together as a church, it joins us with all the other expressions of God's faith and God's body all over the city who are singing this morning too. It's a unifying thing to sing together. The second thing, the second way it ministers to us when we sing together is when we sing, we participate in heaven. I don't know if you've ever thought of it that way. But I believe that heaven's not so much a location and over there a location as a different realm that's going to collide with ours when the fullness of time occurs. It's going to crash into our physical world. It's going to take us over and we will exist in heaven. And when we do, we will sing. There will be joy. And I think that there are times in life, moments of deep love or appreciation, times when God stirs your soul, times when you feel God speaking to you. Times when you're moved. That God allows us to experience just a little glint of heaven here in this dirty place. And I think that when we sing together, God moves in these moments. That if we lose ourself in that praise, and we can corporately lose ourself in that praise together, that we experience a little glimmer of heaven right in this room this morning. I think when we sing, we participate in what's already going on in heaven. And if singing unifies us, and if singing allows us to participate, then maybe it's even possible that we're singing with the ones that we've lost and that we've loved too. I think singing corporately allows us to participate just a little bit in what heaven is doing right now. And the third thing I would mention in the way that singing ministers to us, and this is not something that had occurred to me until I ran across a quote, and I'll read you the quote in a second. Singing teaches us theology. The songs we sing teach us about our God, about how our God views us, about our need for him. Singing songs teaches us about theology. I had never thought about it before, but as I was prepping, I was reading some guy's, I think, blog post on worship. I don't know. And I saw this quote, and I immediately sent it to Gibson because I thought, this is so important and so impactful. You need to be aware of this. And then I realized, I want to share this with the church, too, because it is important. So like I said, it's a quote. I don't know from who, some guy who wrote a blog. So some guy who wrote a blog said this. Since people tend to remember the theology they sing more than the theology that is preached, a congregation's repertoire of hymnody is often of critical importance in shaping the faith of its people. Do you get that? The songs we sing teach us who our God is. And so one of the most important things that can be done in the development of your theology and your children's theology and how you view God and how you think he views you is for Aaron to prayerfully and thoughtfully select the right songs to put in front of you to teach you more about your God. When we sing, we are learning. And as I processed this, I realized it was true. I realized it was true because I grew up Southern Baptist and we sing hymns and we sing Amazing Grace. And it was Amazing Grace that taught me that I was a wretch, which is a difficult truth for a six-year-old. But it was Amazing Grace that taught me that I was a wretch. Remember that word? And it wasn't until years later that I saw it in Romans 7, where Paul declares, Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death. Amazing grace taught me that theology before I encountered it in Scripture. Amazing grace taught me that it was grace that saved me. That it was God's grace and goodness that was chasing after me to save me and that was providing for my salvation. I didn't learn the theology of that until years later. I had no idea about from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. I had no idea about the theology of grace and what that word meant and why God gives us his son and that is that he is a personification of grace. I didn't know that. I just knew that God was gracious and that his grace was amazing. Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full at his wonderful face and the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace. Before I ever encountered Hebrews 12, 1 and 2, because we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us throw out the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us. How? By focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. It was years later that I learned those verses. And I learned that to be obedient to Jesus, all I need to do is focus on him and that the things of the world will fade. But my little spirit had been singing that for years because of what Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus taught me. So when we sing, we learn theology. And that's one of the big things I want to do in this series. This morning's a little bit different because I thought we needed kind of a theology of worship, why we worship, why we understand it the way that we do, why it's so very important. But the rest of the series, we're going to pick songs. We're going to go through them. And we're going to look at where they come from in the scriptures so that hopefully that can imbue them with more purpose and more meaning so that when we sing them, we know what we're singing. We're singing God's scriptures back to him. And I hope that as we walk through these, that some of the songs, I wish we could do all of them, but at least some of the songs that we do corporately, when we do them you'll know what you're singing and you'll know why you're singing it and you'll know what it means and I think it'll make the moment more sacred for you and for us. So this morning we're about to sing Graves into Gardens. Graves into Gardens is such a good example of this. There is so much in this song that comes straight out of Scripture. The very first lines, I searched the world and it couldn't fill me. Every desire and the man's empty praise, that's Ecclesiastes. Man's empty praise is from Proverbs. That the crucible is for silver, but praise tests a man's heart. That comes right out of Scripture. There's some others that I wanted to show you more pointedly. These words aren't going to be up on the screen, but there's a segment of the song where we say, because the God of the mountain is the God of the valley. That's Psalm 104.8 where it says that God set the mountains and the valleys in place. Right after that you sing these lines. There's not a place your mercy and grace won't find me again. That's Psalm 23. Mercy and grace will follow me all the days of my life. It's coming right out of Scripture. I like at the end, there's this part that we repeat. You turn graves into gardens. You turn bones into armies. Ezekiel 37, the valley of the dry bones, when God makes an army out of skeletons. You turn seas into highways. I mentioned that earlier, the parting of the Red Sea. So much scripture. But the one that I didn't know about that I want to point your attention to this morning as we sing is found in Isaiah 61.3. Look how closely these mimic one another. The scene is pulled right out of scripture. One of the reasons I wanted to do this series is I wanted you to see the Bible you've been singing without even knowing it. But look, Isaiah 61. To all who mourn in Israel, He will give a crown of beauty to ashes. You give beauty to ashes. A joyous blessing instead of mourning. You turn mourning to dancing. Festive praise instead of despair. In their righteousness they will be like great oaks. We're going to start with graves into gardens. We're going to sing God's Word back to Him. And then we've got two more songs to do after that. So sometimes in this series we're going to start with Graves in the Gardens. We're going to sing God's Word back to him. And then we've got two more songs to do after that. So sometimes in this series, we're going to preach up front and then respond in a prolonged period of praise after that. So join me in Graves in the Gardens.