Revelation

My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. As a pastor, it often falls on me to offer counsel and advice to people. Believe it or not, sometimes people will call the church and ask to talk to a pastor or ask to talk to me or even seek me out individually knowing full well who I am, and they will still ask me for advice on things or what to do in certain situations. And for a long time in those situations at my old church, it was a larger church in the Atlanta area, about 2,000 people. If you called that church, you got funneled to me. I was the one that you would talk to. It was a really talentless staff. So that was my role. And for a long time, my advice in those situations would pretty much default to suck it up. Like, get it together. Quit being a sissy. Let's go. Like, you just got to face the music. You got to stand up. You got to stick your chin out, and you got to take it. And I came by that advice honestly, because for a long time, that's what worked for me. Part of my story is that when I was younger, I was bullied pretty badly. For a couple years, elementary school and then in middle school, there was two kids in my neighborhood who just delighted in tormenting me. And I won't get into all the details of it, but one of the things they would do, just to give you a picture of what fifth grade looked like for Nate, is they were in middle school, so they got home before me. They would hide in the bushes at the bus stop and have an industrial strength rubber band, and they had sniffed it. So it was one big long rubber band, and then when I would get off the bus, they would pop me in the ears and in the neck and in the legs until I would cry or run, and then they would call me names. That was like most days. So we started diversion tactics. I got a letter to get off the bus at other bus stops. My mom would come pick me up at school sometimes, but that was a part of my life, and that was a part of my life for a couple of years. And at some point or another, as a kid, I just realized I can't care so much what they think about me. They would invite me over to play and I'd be like, oh good, we're friends now. And then I would get there and they would just make fun of me until I would go home. And it taught me to have a thick skin. It taught me to not let it affect me when other people pick on me. It taught me to be tough. And at some point in my adolescence, I decided I'm tired of them having this kind of control over me. I'm just going to tough it up. I'm just going to suck it up and figure out how to not care what they think. And that's what I did. And so in adulthood, when an issue came up, my thought was, suck it up. Just don't be a baby. That's what I did. Worked for me. Let's go. And that's kind of the mindset I had several years ago when I got one of those phone calls at the church that I was at. Some guy called the church and just said he was in a real tough way, needed to talk to a pastor. So pick up the phone. Hey, you know, one of the pastors here, what's going on? How can I help you? And he was 31 years old, and he had a girlfriend who had a bit of a drug issue, in his words, and she had just broken up with him. Nobody in his family liked him, liked her, but he was crestfallen over this breakup. And he wanted to know from a pastor, if there is a good God in heaven, how could he allow this girl to break my heart in this way? And I thought, are you freaking kidding me? Like, you're 31. She broke up with you. She's a drug addict. This is a good thing, dude. Get another girlfriend. There's a lot of them. Like, I could not muster any sympathy for this dude. In my life, there was a good friend of mine who had just lost her husband, and I'm comparing and contrasting these tragedies, and I'm like, bro, suck it up. Like take a day, you know, have a beer and then get back to it. It doesn't matter. Like I literally, I was nice to him. I wasn't mean. I had the hardest time caring about this guy's issue. Like the girl broke up with you, man, whatever whatever. And so a couple days after that, I had lunch with a counselor. Every now and again, a counselor will reach out to a pastor and invite you to lunch, and they're basically, they're kind of courting your reference. You want to get to know each other, and they know that I kind of funnel people into counseling, and so that's kind of how that goes. And so we went out to lunch, and we were talking, and I said, hey hey man, let me just ask you a question. So I have to counsel sometimes. Let me get a little bit of advice. I got this call the other day. How would you have handled that? And I told him about the guy's issues and my response. And he kind of thought about it a second and he said, I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that you grew up in a pretty good home. And I said, well, I mean, yeah, I did. I'm guessing that your parents are together and that you never really had to wonder if they were proud of you. And I said, that's true of me. Yeah, I would say that's true. I said, how'd you know that? And he said, it's just, you just kind of get a sense. I can just tell by the way you carry yourself. He said, I'd be willing to bet that that guy you talked to on the phone probably doesn't have a background like you. He probably doesn't have that family structure to lean on like you did. And he probably values the relationship with that girl and what it did for him and the value that it made him feel a lot more than you ever would. So your ability to detach yourself from that and move on is not the same as his. So I would probably handle that with a little bit more empathy. And I thought, whoa, this dude is smart. I'm going to give him all the referrals. How did he figure that out in 20 minutes of talking to me? I was super impressed. And it also dawned on me in that conversation, because I'm obtuse,ations are always a little bit more nuanced than they seem. And that most of the time when we're talking about issues of mental and emotional health, suck it up is really bad advice. It's really careless and thoughtless and obtuse. And since then, I've rethought about the way that I offer counsel. And that really got my wheels turning on mental health in general. It's something that I care about a lot. I care deeply about how the church engages it because I think historically the church has engaged mental health a little bit like I did. Suck it up and pray it away. Let's go. You're not a good enough Christian. If you were a better Christian, you wouldn't be so sad. So let's lean into God and let's quit being a sissy. And I just think historically that's how we've handled it and that's obtuse. That's not helpful. And more and more, it's being pressed into the national conscience. Last year, we had several athletes come out and say that they were struggling with anxiety, that they were struggling with depression. There was a very high-profile rookie in the NBA who had a terrible rookie year, and he confessed that it was because he struggles greatly with anxiety. There was an offensive lineman, a big, huge bear of a man for the Philadelphia Eagles, I believe, who missed a half of football because he was in the locker room at halftime throwing up because of anxiety attacks and could not get himself out on the field. So more and more we become aware of these things. Every time there's a shooting, then mental health and the epidemic gets thrust into the national conscience. And so as we approached this series and we said, I want a better life, and we thought through the four things that we were going to talk about, I just kind of felt like, based on all of those things, my experiences and what's going on in our culture now, that it would be good to take a Sunday and say, hey, you know what? I want a better me. I want to be more healthy. And so I wanted to take a Sunday and talk to those of you who do struggle with some sort of mental or emotional struggle. I wanted to talk to us as a church, as we encounter and engage and love people in our life who are walking through that struggle. And so as I prepared and thought through what I wanted to say and how I wanted to approach it, I actually had a conversation with my therapist. I started seeing a therapist this last summer. And normally when I tell people that I'm in counseling, I immediately tell them why I'm in counseling because I don't want them to think that I'm broken or crazy or that there's something going on. So I want to be very clear, but it's for this really good reason. But as I prepared for this sermon, I thought, I'm going to quit doing that. Because what do I care what you think about how I go to counseling? We need to destigmatize it anyways. So I had a conversation with my therapist. And he's a believer. And he's got a master's in divinity. And so he's very helpful for me. And I said, hey, man, I'm going to be doing a sermon on mental health. What does the church need to know about mental health? What do you wish pastors would say about it? And he said, well, you know, I don't really hear a lot of sermons on mental health, but the ones that I have heard tend to focus on unhealth and what that's like. And I just think that we do a disservice to the church when we don't paint a picture of what health is. So I would invest my time in that. That's interesting. How would you define health? And he defined it essentially this way. He said, a healthy person walks in a sense of security and worth. He said a healthy person, someone who's mentally and emotionally healthy and stable walks in a sense of security and worth. What he meant is, if we're going to be emotionally stable, if we're going to be mentally healthy, then we need to have a sense of security. We need to feel safe. We need to know that everything's going to be okay. If we're walking around in constant fear, a constant uncertainty, or like we've got our eyes covered and we don't know where our next step is going to go, that that's going to cause some mental instability. So we first need to feel secure, but we also need to feel valuable. We need to feel worth. We need to feel like we're enough. We need to feel like we're good enough for other people, that we have some intrinsic value. We need to understand that about ourselves and walk in an actualization and an acknowledgement of that value. So he said, to be healthy, we need to walk in a sense of security and worth. And then he said something that I thought was really interesting. He said that every person gets their boat rocked a little bit. Every person in their life, all of you, at some point or another, have had times where you felt unsafe and had times where you felt unworthy. We've all had our security compromised. We've all had the rug pulled out from under us. We've all felt like, no, this time it's not gonna be okay. And I think more predominantly in the American culture, we've all had times where we don't feel worthy. Some of us feel that pervasively right now. For some of us, the story of our life is this low simmering sense of unworthiness and lack of value and like we're not good enough. And all we've ever done is claw to show ourselves and the people around us that we are actually good enough. Everybody struggles at times to feel secure and to feel worthy. And what he said is, when that happens, healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to get themselves back on track. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to try to grope for that security and to try to grope for that value. We've seen these unhealthy coping mechanisms, right? Someone feels unsafe, their world feels crazy, and so they become hyper-controlling of their environment all the time. They become, their house has to be clean, and their house doesn't have to be clean because they like a clean house. Their house has to be clean because they've got to exert control over something. And that's not necessarily bad, but it can become unhealthy. Where we see this most is when people exhibit unhealthy coping mechanisms as we lurch for value. This is the girl that far too easily gives herself over to whatever guy will pay attention to her. Because from that guy, she is getting her sense of worth, and that's how she's coping and lurching for that. This is the grown man that still tells you how good of an athlete he was in high school. Because all he's saying is, tell me I'm valuable. Tell me I'm worthy. This is the guy that can't help but brag about whatever it was he did. It's not because he's dumb. It's because he's incredibly insecure and he's groping for value and he doesn't feel it. So he's just looking at you going, can you just tell me I'm awesome? Can you do that, please? He's a 15-year-old kid going, please tell me I'm great. We all do it. As we grow up, we find more nuanced ways to grope for this value, but we do, and it becomes unhealthy. This is where addictions start and get carried on, right? We feel unvaluable. We feel unworthy, we feel unsafe, and so we drink, we medicate, or we find a hobby to numb it, or we refuse to sit in silence. In my research, I saw a great quote from Blaise Pascal that said, all of man's problems can be summed up in his inability to sit in a quiet room alone. Some of us hate the silence. Some of us can't go more than 10 seconds without pulling out our phone to distract ourselves from the things that we don't want to think about. Unhealthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop unhealthy coping mechanisms to lurch for the security and the value that we all need. Healthy people develop healthy coping mechanisms to bring back and restore that sense of security and worth. And when we think about healthy coping mechanisms, I think this is a good place to insert the spiritual into the conversation as we think about what are some healthy coping mechanisms with a lack of stability or a lack of value that can bring me back to a place of true health. And as I had this conversation with my therapist, I suggested these two things. I said, I think God provides for us these senses in these two ways. And he said, yeah, that's not everything. And I just want to say very clearly, I'm not covering everything that we do and how we handle mental health this morning, but this is a very good start, I think. As we think about healthy coping mechanisms and what it means to be truly healthy, I want to suggest these two things to you, that there's really two pillars of true health. There's security in God's sovereignty and worthiness in God's love. If we want to be healthy people, truly healthy the way that we were designed, we have to walk in a sense of security anchored in God's sovereignty and a sense of worthiness brought about by God's deep and compassionate love for us. That's what true health is. And so a healthy coping mechanism is to acknowledge that God is sovereign, to acknowledge that God is in control, to acknowledge that nothing happens outside of his purview and outside of his will and feel the relief of that. A good coping mechanism is to look around at the people in your life that God has placed in your life who love you and who value you and who are telling you that you are enough and to allow that to be the truth that you hear and not the truth from the detractors. I actually think that these two pillars are some of the greatest things that Christianity has to offer. I think we undervalue the sovereignty of God. One of my favorite verses, group of verses, is Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and petition and with thanksgiving, present your requests to God, and the God of peace who transcends all understanding will, listen, guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Are you anxious? Are the things keeping you up at night? Does worry characterize you? Pray those things to God. Release them to God. And he says that his peace that passes all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. And what that means is God is saying, I've got it. I'm in control. I'm God. It's going to be okay. Rest easy in my sovereignty. He does this again in Romans 8, where it says, we know that for those who love him and are called according to his purpose, that all things work together for the good of those who love him. Everything works together for the good of those who love him are called according to his purpose. Romans 8.28 tells us everything's going to work out. Even if it doesn't work out now, it will work out eventually. It's a beautiful promise from God. I saw a clip of a pastor doing the funeral for his mother that he lost far too early. And he said some amazing things. He said, you know, with God, all of our prayers are answered. I was praying so much for my mom to live, and then she died. He said it disillusioned him for a little bit. But what he realized was he was thinking about it wrong. And it dawned on him that in God, all his prayers are answered because she knew Jesus. So as he prayed for his mom to live, the truth of it is either she's going to live or she was gonna live. She was gonna be okay or she was gonna be okay. She was gonna be with family or she was gonna go be with family. God is good or God is good. This is the sovereignty that he offers us. And one of my favorite passages that I mentioned often, Revelation 21, paints this beautiful picture where it says the end of days that we will be with God and he will be with his people and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. There is a sovereignty and a peace that God promises throughout scripture. Scripture is replete with these promises. And if we want to be healthy and cling onto a sense of stability and know that everything is okay, even when we don't see how it's going to be okay, then we cling to the sovereignty of God that is laced throughout Scripture, and we know that it's going to be okay, even if it doesn't make sense to me. And I believe that a healthy person reminds themselves of the sovereignty of God and rests easy in that and not in their own control. The next thing we do is we rest in God's love. We know the Bible tells us God loves us. We know John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life. God tells us that not even a sparrow falls to the ground without his knowledge, so how much more does he care about you that the numbers of hairs on your head are numbered? He knows you that well and that intimately. He tells us that if your earthly father knows how to give you a good gift, how much better are my gifts? He tells us that we know that we are loved because while we were still sinners, he died for us. He tells us that we are able to love him because he first loved us. From God, if you listen, is a constant, pervasive, never fatiguing voice that says, you are enough. I love you. You do not have to perform for me. You don't have to be good for me. You don't have to sell for me. You don't have to execute for me. You don't have to impress me. I love you as much as I'm ever going to love you. And to be healthy is to walk in an acknowledgement of that love and not need the accolades of others and not be so desperate for the approval of this group because I'm walking with the approval of my God. And if you give me it too, that's great, but I don't need it because God gives it to me. That's what health looks like. Have you ever met somebody who is so comfortable in their own skin that you just marvel at it? To me, that's a person who walks knowing that God loves me and I'm good. That's what health is. So if we want to be a healthy person, we need to quiet the voices that are telling us we're not enough and listen to the pervasive and persistent voice of God that tells us that we are. As we think about ourselves pursuing mental and emotional health, I think the best, most practical way to do that is to pursue health. We need to identify poor coping mechanisms in our life and pursue healthy ones. If we're going to be mentally healthy, if we're in a state this morning where we feel given towards depression, if we feel given towards anxiety, if we feel given towards just unhealth, I think a good exercise is to identify the unhealthy coping mechanisms that exist in our life. And listen, we all have them. One of the things I'm more certain of than ever, especially in being in counseling, is that we are all a bundle and an alchemy of insecurities and coping mechanisms to present ourselves as enough, all of us. So the best thing we can do is try to identify where these coping mechanisms are and pursue them and pursue healthy ones. But I don't just want to talk about us, how we pursue health. I think one of the big questions the church faces and some of us in our life faces, if I have people in my life who are not healthy, how do I love them towards health? What can we do to love other people towards emotional and mental health? I think two things I would suggest to you this morning. The first would be to offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. To offer the empathetic compassion of Christ. Hebrews tells us that Christ took on flesh, that he bore our infirmities, that he was tempted in the ways that we are tempted, so that he understood our plight, so that when we pray to our Savior, we're not praying to someone who is altogether unfamiliar with the human condition. We're praying to someone who is empathetic with us and therefore compassionate towards us. Do you realize that empathy is the birthplace of compassion? That empathy begats compassion. That the thing that happened with me and that guy that called the church that day, I had zero empathy for him. Therefore, I had zero compassion. It made no sense to me how he was that broken up about that. I could not put myself in his shoes of caring that much that I would doubt the existence of God because a girl dumped me. And so I had no compassion for him. But when I had that conversation with the counselor, and I realized the nuances of what was going on in the conversation that I had with that guy, the thought occurred to me, you know what? If I didn't grow up the way that I grew up in the house that I grew up in, it's entirely possible that I would handle that situation just like he does. And that I'm not tough. I didn't just learn to suck it up. I'm just the benefit of a good environment with good coping mechanisms. And the truth of it is, if you think about me as a little kid, I said I learned to suck it up early. No, I didn't. No, I didn't. I didn't decide as a 12-year-old to get tough. No one gets tough at 12. I was in an environment where I was loved by family and by people at church. And that reminded me of my worthiness. My parents breathed scripture into me and that reminded me of God's sovereignty. And I begun to cling to those things. And I wouldn't have articulated it like this at the time, but all that happened is I had to simply develop healthy coping mechanisms for feeling unsafe and unworthy. And the guy that I was talking to on the phone that day had never had the opportunity to develop those. So the first thing we do with people who are experiencing unhealth is we offer empathy. And we acknowledge and admit that even if we don't understand, even if we've never felt that way before, if you change the alchemy of my life and you make the circumstances the same and you run me through the ringer that they went through, there's a very good chance I would come out the other side feeling and thinking and acting the same way that they do. So don't think that we're for a second better than them or more stable than them or tougher than them or stronger than them. We have a different background than they do. And when we can acknowledge that we would be the same person they are, that produces in us empathy. And out of that empathy comes compassion, where we realize some of the worst possible advice would be to suck it up or to pray it away, that we need to first be empathetic with them and understand. And empathy is also the acknowledgement that sometimes when people are dealing with a mental health issue, it's a chemical imbalance. They are sick. Looking at someone who is depressed and telling them to suck it up is like looking at someone with the flu and telling them to run a couple miles. It's useless advice. All it does is make you look dumb and then feel bad. We've got to offer empathy, which produces in us a Christ-like compassion. To help us offer empathy, I wanted to share with you some statistics that I found in the research that I've been doing. These are from the National Mental Health Institute, Institute of Mental Health. What I learned is that a quarter or 20% of U.S. citizens exhibit some symptoms of mental illness. Now, that's a wide brush. That's mild depression all the way to extreme schizophrenia, okay? But 20%, one in five of you, look down the row within two people and one of them is crazy, right? That's a lot. It affects a lot of us. Now, here's what I think is really interesting. It says that there's 22% of women and 15% of men deal with mental health issues. Now, here's what that doesn't mean, that men have it together more than women do. What it means is they're more honest than us and you're a stubborn jerk. That's what that means. You just can't admit that you're struggling. You just fold your arms and pretend like everything's okay. And it only gets worse because 26% of millennials of 18 to 25 say that they experienced some sort of mental illness or exhibit signs of that. Only 14% of ages 50 and older. Now listen, I don't think for a second that you people who are 50 and older in this room have just have life so figured out and all your coping skills so nailed that you're the healthiest bunch in the room. Listen, if you're a dude over 50 and you're like, I don't struggle with depression. Yes, you do. You're just stubborn. Listen, all of us at some point have experienced a season of melancholy. We all have. If you haven't, you're a psychopath or you're not paying attention. All of us experience anxiety in excessive ways. Everybody in this room has had a suicidal thought. Everybody. The difference with healthy and unhealthy is how we cope with those things. I also thought it was really interesting that 50% of adolescents show sign of a mental disorder. And if we understand that health is to walk in a sense of stability and worth, is it any wonder that half of our high school students have no idea how to cling on to stability and worth? We are all of us broken. We are all of us at times weak and in need of help. There is none of us in here who is singularly and individually strong and healthy. And we need to acknowledge that as we seek to offer empathy to others. The next thing we can do to love people towards health is to celebrate courageous choices. We need to start celebrating courageous choices. When somebody makes a decision to get help, when somebody makes a decision to be vulnerable and confess, we need to praise those things. We need to celebrate those things. We don't need to deride those things. I've talked a lot about counseling in this sermon. One of the things that breaks my heart is that counseling gets such a stigma that people, when you start talking about going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that we automatically think, man, only broken people do that. What's going on in your life? What can you not get together yourself? Why do you need help that you need to go talk to a professional to do that? Are you crazy? What's wrong with you? What have you failed at? How did you ruin your marriage? When did you get fired? We just assume that when people are going to see a therapist or going to see a counselor, that there's something broken in them. But here's the thing, there's something broken in all of us, so we need to stop it. Sometimes, most of the time, the unhealthy coping mechanisms that we have are so deeply embedded and ingrained in us that we can't see them. We don't know how to find them ourselves. And we need a trained professional to talk with us and help us see those and then help us see a way through them. We need trained professionals who are more than pastors. I'm very quick to go, listen, I wanna try to help you as best I can. I'm gonna pray for you. You need to talk to a therapist, not because you're crazy, but because they're good at it. The other thing I've learned is when you talk to somebody who will say, I should really go speak to a counselor about this. A lot of times they won't. And at first they won't because it's a pride thing. I don't want to do that. I don't want people to see me parking at that office. I don't want people to think that there's something wrong with me. I don't want people to think that I can't handle it or that I'm weak somehow. I don't want all the stuff that goes with seeing a counselor. So I'm not gonna go do that. And it seems like pride. But when you start to peel back the layers, what you find is that it's really fear. I'm convinced that the reason, if you're thinking about seeing a counselor, getting help, working through some unhealth in your life, I'm convinced that one of the big reasons we don't do that is because we know good and well what we're going to have to walk through when we get there. We don't want to have to look at ourselves in the mirror. It is easier to cope. It is easier to demur. It is easier to distract than it is to confront. And so we keep walking away from our unhealthy selves instead of turning and allowing someone to hold up a mirror and show us and work through it and walk through it and emerge on the other side more healthy. It's often fear that keeps us from getting help, not pride. And so I want you to know this morning that I think it takes bravery to go get help. And I actually think, and I would love for our church to start thinking about it this way, that counseling is not for the broken. It's for the brave. Counseling is not for broken people. It's for brave people. If it were for broken people, then we'd all be in it because we're all broken. But at some point or another, you have to take a step and make a decision that I want some help. I want to be healthy. I want somebody else's voice in this conversation helping me identify the unhealthy pockets in my life to restoring me to my God-given sense of security and value and love. And since I can't find my way out of this mess myself, I want to get someone else to speak into it for me. And that takes bravery and courage. The counseling is not the broken. It's for the brave. My prayer is that 2020 will be the healthiest year for you in a long, long time. For those of you who are brave enough to pursue health, I think it begins with acknowledging and identifying the unhealthy ways we bring ourselves a sense of security and worth. And doing the work to replace that coping mechanism with one that pushes us towards God's sovereignty and pushes us towards God's love. If we have people in our lives this year that we're trying to love towards mental health, we need to do it with empathy and compassion. And we need to, as a church and as a Christian subculture, destigmatize what it is to get help and admit that we all need it. And it's not for the broken, it's for the brave. I hope that some of you will make courageous choices, even this week. If you do want to talk to a counselor, email me and I'll work to find you a good one. I'm not going to send you to mine, but somebody. If there's someone in your life who is struggling, please, please offer them empathy. Please offer them compassion. Please offer them understanding. Try the best you can to put yourself in their shoes and love them from that perspective. And let's make this year a healthy year. Let's pray. Father, we do love you. We thank you so much for loving us. God, if there is anybody here who feels unworthy, who feels unvaluable, who feels unloved, God, may they just feel a pervasive sense of your love and your compassion wrapping around them today. Help them to hear the voices in their life that speak for you and tell them that they are enough. God, if we feel unsafe or insecure, I pray that you would restore that sense of security with your sovereignty. God, for those here who are struggling, who are sad, or who are anxious, or dealing with a multitude of other things, help them feel your peace today. Help them feel your hope today. Remind them that that hope, your word says, will not be put to shame. God, I pray that we would be healthy, that we would walk in a sense of security in you, of value in you, and that that would enable us to love other people well on your behalf. It's in your son's name we pray, amen.

The All right. Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. If you are going to miss that Revelation intro, that's the last time you get to hear that music, let me know and I'll send you the clip. You can use it as your alarm clock on Mondays just to really face the week. This is the last part in our series moving through the book of Revelation and it's been a good series. I think it's been good for the church. I think it's been good for our small groups. I've heard that we've had some really good, robust discussions in those, and it's been fun for me to get to tackle this book on your behalf. And sincerely, I appreciate your trust and belief in me as we've walked through this together, and I've kind of served a little bit as a guide through the book of Revelation. By way of review, as we finish up the series, I thought it would be worth it to kind of recap all that we've learned and talked about as we arrive here at the final week. So in the first week, we're setting the scene. It's Revelation chapter one. John arrives. He's given a vision while he's on the island of Patmos. An angel comes and gets him and says, write down the things that I'm going to show you. And in that first chapter, we see this remarkable reunion between John and his savior, Jesus, his best friend, Jesus, who he served and spoken about and longed for for years. And we see that the greatest promise, no matter what else we encounter in the book of Revelation, the greatest promise in the book is that one day we will meet our Savior face to face. That one day we will meet Jesus too. And after we meet Jesus, after we see his face, whatever happens after that is going to be okay. That's the greatest promise in Revelation. In week two, my dad preached and we looked at Revelation 4 and 5. Remember, we skipped the letters to the churches in 2 and 3. We're going to tackle those in a series to be named later. Revelation 4 and 5, God sits on the throne. That's the important part. God's in control. And then Jesus steps forward as the Lamb of God, worthy to open the seals and begin the tribulation process. Remember, we define the the wrath of God and how even though we kind of shy away from it in the 21st century church, it's important. It's important to lean into. It's important to acknowledge. And we actually want a God that's capable of that. And then for the next two weeks, it was kind of academic. I pulled the whiteboard up here one week. We went through the events of the tribulation, the seals and the trumpets and the bowls and God's wrath being poured out and what order that comes and the different views around that. And then we kind of looked at the figures of the tribulation, the antichrist and the false prophet and the dragon and the witnesses and the 144,000 and kind of decoded some of those things within the book. And then last week was probably my favorite week where we look at the return of Christ and what that wins us. How he conquers evil once and for all. He conquers Satan once and for all. He makes all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And we also kind of reflected on the idea that when Jesus comes, we can finally lay down our faith and our hope. Those things are no longer needed because we're looking at our Savior face to face. And so this week, we arrive at the end of the book, at the end of the series, and I almost titled this morning's message, It Begins, or The Beginning, because this is where eternity begins. This is where the temporal world stops in Revelation 22, and eternity begins, an eternity that I want us to see this morning, for which we were created. So we arrive not necessarily at the end today, but at the beginning. As we do, there's a couple more things in Revelation to look at, namely the millennial reign of Christ. The millennial reign of Christ is discussed in Revelation chapter 20. So Jesus has just come down. He stormed down on the white horse. He has the troops of heaven, the angels of heaven arrayed in white linen behind him. They conquer the armies of the antichrist, of Satan, of the false prophet. They conquer the dark kingdom. They take the beast from the sea and the beast from the earth, the antichrist and the false prophet, and Jesus binds them and throws them in the lake of fire forever. And now all that remains is to deal with Satan. How is Jesus at the end of time going to deal with Satan? We find this in Revelation chapter 20. Now just a caveat about this sermon. It was a holiday week, all right? So I wrote this basically in my head during the 24 hours I was in the car this week with a six-month-old, which means I didn't produce notes for Kyle to put in there, which means that Scott back there, who's in charge of the slides, has the easiest job ever. And Carly, who's in charge of printing your notes, had an easy job because there's nothing there. So it's entirely up to you to write down what you want to write down and to follow along as you want to follow along. I would encourage you to grab a Bible. Grab the one in the seat back in front of you and be looking at Revelation 20, 21, and 22. I'm going to read the first four or five verses from each of those chapters as we move through, and they will not appear on the screens. If you're at home and you're watching, grab a Bible so we can go through it together and interact with the text together. But we see the millennial reign in Revelation chapter 20 in the first three verses. John writes, So if you keep reading, what you find is that after Satan is bound and thrown in a pit for a thousand years, that at the end of that thousand years, he is released and allowed to tempt the people on the earth who are alive at that time. For just a little while longer, he pulls away some people from Christ. And then Christ once and for all binds him and throws him in the lake of fire with the Antichrist and the false prophet. So around this, there are a lot of questions. Namely, the biggest one to me is, why in the world would God bind Satan, put him in a pit, make him stay there for a thousand years, and then let him out to tempt people one more time, just one last hurrah from Satan, like God's doing a favor to an old buddy or something, and then throwing him in the lake of fire. Why does God do that? Listen, I don't know. To me, this is one of those mysteries of revelation. I have literally nothing for you. You can research it and read about it, and people make guesses, but in all honesty, as is often the case to me, a lot of the guesses, and in fact, for this one, all of the guesses out there really don't hold intellectual water for me. I see them. I can see how they might be thought of as reasonable, but I can also very easily, to me, poke holes in them. And so I thought it not worth sharing with you the different guesses because they're all bad ones. So I would say, I don't know. It's a mystery on this side of heaven why God chooses to order things in that way. I continue to believe that if in my elevated body, if in my new heavenly body I get at the marriage supper of the lamb, I have the mental capacity to understand this and God deigns to explain it to me and I even still care once I'm in heaven, which I definitely won't. But let's pretend that in heaven while we're amidst this perfect joy, we say, hang on a second. Why'd you do that thing with Satan where you released him one last time? If God were to explain it to us and we had the mental capacity to grasp it, I think we'd all go, oh, thanks. And then we'd go on with our joyful day. By the way, I haven't said this yet. It's important to point out. Part of the reason that heaven is so joyful is because there's no dogs or animals there. It's fantastic. No more hassles, no more cleanups, no more messes. It's really, it's a wonderful place. I know it says lion lays down with lamb. That's figurative. There's no animals in heaven. I'm certain of it. I'm sure your dogs are all there. All right. I'm sure they are. Except for my first dog, Maggie. If they have an afterlife, Maggie's in hell, that dog is. What was I preaching about? So we don't know why God chooses at the end of the millennial reign to allow Satan loose for a period of time and then throws him into the lake of fire. And I'm not going to pretend to offer you explanations because they don't make sense to me. There are also views about the millennial reign. And we're going to get in the weeds just a little bit. And if this doesn't interest you, I am sorry. But there are some people who showed up with questions this morning about the millennial reign. And so this needs to be discussed. So we will move quickly, but there's kind of three traditional views about the millennial reign. They are called amillennial, postmillennial, and premillennial, and they're questions about when does God return? When does Jesus return? Does Jesus return after the millennial reign? Does he return during the millennial reign? Does he return before the millennial reign? And so we're going to basically group them like this. There's premillennial, which says Christ's return is before the millennial reign, that Christ comes back like he does in 19. He conquers Satan. He throws them in there. It's literally a thousand years where he reigns on earth and Christian ideals flourish and Christians flourish and God's kingdom flourishes. And then at the end of those literal thousand years, Satan is released. He tempts some people and then Jesus conquers them once and for all. Amillennial and postmillennial believe, and this is where it gets tricky, that you take chapters 19 and 20 and you lay 20 over chapter 19. See, premillennials believe that first chapter 19 happens, which is the return of Christ, the big war. He comes out of heaven and he conquers the beast. And then chapter 20 happens, which is the millennial reign. So premillennialists read this literally and say that these things literally happen. Christ, after he binds the beast and throws him in the lake of fire, then he reigns for a thousand, he binds Satan, then he reigns for a thousand years, then he loses him. It's a literal thousand years. The amillennial and postmillennial view think that you take chapters 19 and 20 and you lay them over top of each other and that they are different ways of describing the same events. Do you remember in week one when I said when you're interpreting Revelation that sometimes it's linear and sometimes it isn't? And how do you know when it is and it isn't? You just study really hard and you make a good guess. So some people have studied really hard and they've made this guess, that 20 lays over 19. In which case, the millennial reign of Christ, the thousand years, is figurative language for a long time. And we are in the middle of that. The millennial reign comes between the two comings of Christ. The Christ as crucified Savior that we read about in Scripture. And then the Christ as returning conqueror that we talked about last week. That in between those two comings of Christ are the millennial reign. And it is I fall in? Probably the latter, the ah or the post, the figurative meaning of the millennial reign. But as my father is listening to this sermon, he will vehemently disagree with that. So there are, I would say there are smart people on either side, but there's not necessarily based on me and my dad being on the two different sides. You'll have to pick which one of us is dumb. But there are good arguments to be made for either side, and it's really not that important which side you choose. The important part is, in the end, Jesus wins, and he binds Satan, and then we move into an eternity that's briefly described in Revelation 21 and 22. In Revelation 21, and you can look at verses 1 through four, we have a passage that I've shared a lot from this stage, that I refer to a lot in my preaching. It's a passage that I think is maybe the single most encouraging and hope-filled passage in the Bible. It's one that I use to comfort others with. It's one that I use to comfort myself. It infuses itself into my preaching and into my thinking over and over again, so much so that I can vividly remember that in the interview process and talking with the elders, when they were asking me about my worldview and my theology and all the different things and my approach to the Bible, I referenced this passage tearfully in my interview with them because it, over the years, has come to mean so much to me. And I thought it worthwhile before we read it this morning to tell you how I encountered this passage and the hope that it can bring in the most dire of situations as we prepare ourselves to look towards eternity. About, I think it was about eight years ago, I was at Greystone Church outside of Georgia, or Atlanta, and I was the small groups pastor and a couple other things, and one of the other hats that I wore at that church was I was the care pastor. Thank you. There it is. Right. Yeah, we were short-staffed. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. That'll probably never be my title again anywhere I go, but it was my title there. And I got a call one day, and it was a couple who had just recently started coming to the church, and they had an eight-year-old son named Landon, whose name I'll never forget, who had passed away. And it was an incredibly sad circumstance. Landon had an infection. He was sick. Went to the doctor, got some antibiotics, took him, went upstairs, I think take a bath or something, and they found him dead. He had had an allergic reaction to the medicine that he took, and they didn't know it. Incredibly sad situation. So sad, in fact, that a few days after the funeral, I was driving somewhere, and I called Jen, and she said, what's wrong? And I said, I don't know. I just, I feel heavy. And Jen goes, Nate, those are emotions. And I was like, well, then you can keep these. These are terrible. I hate this. It was a hard time. And so leading up to meeting with the family and doing the funeral, I called my pastor growing up, a man named Buddy Hoffman, who's no longer with us. I wish he were so I could talk to him about being a pastor. But I called Buddy. I said, Buddy, this has happened. I'm going to have to do this funeral and meet with this family. This is way out of my depth. I don't know what to do or what to say. What do I do? And he says in his typical, very blunt, forthright, buddy nature, he said, Nathan, just don't say anything stupid. And I laughed and I said, yeah, man, that's the goal. That's what I'm trying to avoid. That's why I'm on the phone with you. And he said, well, in times like this, so often people try to say things when they shouldn't. Sometimes your presence matters way more than your words, so really lean into just being quiet and being there. And then when you share scripture, be careful what you share, because it can often ring hollow in times of deep grief. And I agreed with him because I think of when something terrible like this happens, when we lost our first child due to miscarriage and somebody would quote us Jeremiah 29 11, I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, prayers to prosper you, not to harm you, plans for a hope and a future. Listen, listen, listen, that's true and that's good, but that doesn't help my pain, right? And if part of God's plan was to take a kid from me, then I don't really want to be a part of that plan. You know what I'm saying? So those verses can ring hollow. And I didn't want to say those to this family, Romans 8, 28. You know, for we know that for those who love him, that all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. That's good and that's true. And that means that in eternity, it's gonna work out and we see it working out. That's what Revelation is about, is affirming Romans 8, 28. But in the moment, boy, that doesn't really bring a lot of comfort to a grieving family. And I said, I agree with you. There's verses that ring hollow. so what do I share? And he said, I always use Revelation 20, Revelation 21, verses one through four. This is the hope that we cling to. And this is why these verses have infused themselves into my preaching and into my thinking and into my prayers and why I still use this passage at every funeral that I do because I believe it's maybe the most hope-filled passage in all of Scripture. And it says this. John writes, I love this part. That, remember last week, I said that hope and faith were burdens and we cling to our hope and our faith. That is the hope that we cling to. This is the event that we place our faith in. That Jesus' death on the cross won us this. That one day, God will be with his people and we will be with our God and he will wipe every tear off of our face and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And if you've heard me do a funeral, you've heard me say what the former things are. In this moment, the former things are death, pain, cancer, birth defects, difficulties, abuse, estrangement, broken homes. The former things are the brokenness of other people that spills out and breaks the people around them. The brokenness is gone is this idea that hurt people hurt people because nobody's hurt, so nobody's getting hurt. The former things are all of the things that cause you stress and anxiety and pain and discomfort now. There's coming a day where those things are no longer present. Those are the former things. And it hearkens back to this promise that we see in Revelation chapter 1 that we highlighted in the first week, that one day we will be with our Savior face to face. One day we will sit in the very presence of God. He will be with us and we will be with him. And in that day when that comes, the former things, the things that cause us pain now. The things that are difficult now. The things that made this week tough. The things that have made these last two years tough. The things that you came in here worrying about now, the scars that you bear from the people who have come before you, all those things have passed away and we walk in perfect joy. This is why I love this verse because this verse acknowledges the former things and it doesn't seek to cheapen those things. It doesn't tell Sean Weldon who lost his son Landon that this thing doesn't matter, that this thing doesn't hurt. Don't worry about it. God has a plan for this thing. It says, no, no, no. This is one of the former things, man. And if you can cling to your faith and your hope through this, it will become a former thing and you'll see him again. So I find this passage to be uniquely and tremendously hope-filled. And it inaugurates the eternity that we are going to share in together. The holy city comes down. We are a part of the new Jerusalem. We are a part of the new heaven and the new earth. Some people believe God creates an entirely new heaven and new earth. Some people believe he replaces this one. I believe it doesn't make a bit of difference. But Revelation 21 inaugurates the eternity following the marriage supper of the Lamb, the greatest celebration feast of all time. And it ushers us into this beginning of life. Not the end of time, but the beginning of eternity. And this eternity is described, I think, the best in chapter 22, verses 1 through 5. In 21, there's a description of what the new heaven and the new earth is going to look like. And if you remember in week one, I read you a portion of that description where it talks about the jewels that adorn the walls and sit at the base. It says that the city is like gold and the streets are like glass. And we're gonna see a description of a crystal river flowing from the throne of God. And it describes it as this remarkably beautiful place. And that's well and good. And I don't want to cheapen or dismiss the remarkable beauty of heaven. But what is more compelling to me is the peace that we find there, is the tranquility of life there, is the provision of God there, and the perfect peace that we rest in for all of eternity. And I think that's better captured in these verses, in chapters 22, verses 1 through 5, where John writes this. Through the middle of the light that we need. His kingdom knows no night. His kingdom knows no darkness. The tree of life is on either side of the river. It provides for us in season all that we need. There is nothing left to do but to enjoy God and His perfect love and the people that we are there with forever. And what I want you to focus on this morning and what I want you to remember from this series is that this is what we are created for. You understand? What we see in Revelation 21, what's described in Revelation 22, that's what you were created for. Hear me, you were not created for this place. You were not created for this world. You were not created for your current body. You were not created for that. You were created for what is described in Revelation 21 and 22. You were created for eternity. It's why you have a soul that will outlive your body. It's why you have a soul that will pass into this next life without the broken shell that it inhabits right now. It's why your soul longs for eternity. It's why there's something inside of you that says there's gotta be more than this. It's why the people who have accomplished the most on the planet get to the end of their rope of accomplishment and say there has to be more than this. It's why nothing in your life ever fully satisfies you. It's why I believe this to be true. Perfect happiness is not possible this side of heaven. To choose one road towards happiness is to fundamentally disallow another road to happiness. And we are therefore incapable of perfect happiness on this side of heaven. And that's why we are incapable of it, to remind us that on that side of heaven, we will walk in perfect happiness for all of eternity. Because we were created for that eternity. We were designed and purposed for that. We long for it. Paul writes about this over and over again in the things that he says and in the things that he writes to the early church. Particularly in Romans 8 where he says the whole earth groans for this eternity, pressing against the shell that we are in, waiting for our perfect bodies. And I think that this is why Paul writes this in 2 Corinthians 4, verses 17 and 18. You don't have to turn there. You can just listen to me because these are famous verses. We refer to these often. These are funeral verses. These are grieving verses. But I think that Paul writes them because Paul was aware of this idea that we were not created for this place. We were created for eternity. So he writes this in chapter 4, verse 17 of 2 Corinthians. I'm going to pick it up in 16. Paul calls all of the pain that we endure in this life light momentary affliction. And just so you know, he's addressing a persecuted church. And the verses that precede this, he's talking about the harm that faces them, the death that faces them. He's talking, he's in, if you want to look historically, he's in a time period where the life expectancy had to be somewhere in the 40s or maybe as late as the 50s. He's looking at a high infant mortality rate. He's looking at people who have lots of kids and are very used to some of the kids not making it to adulthood. These people know what loss is. They know what pain is on a level that most of us in this room are not even close to being acquainted with. So before we think that Paul is being flippant with our pain that we walk through, let's be clear. No, no, no. He's being flippant with way worse pain than what we walk through. And he still calls it light and momentary affliction. And he says it is not worth comparing with the glory that we will experience on the other side of eternity. The pain that we experience in this life is not worth comparing. It's just preparing us for the weight of glory that we will experience on the other side of eternity. I've mentioned this before, but you've likely forgotten it, and it stands out to me. When Lily, my daughter, was I think about three years old, we were putting her to bed one night. And as we were trying to put her to bed, she insisted on jumping on her bed. And we told her, no, you can't do that. Stop jumping on your bed. And she tried to do it. And I had to be stern. No, stop jumping on your bed. You're not allowed to jump on your bed. She lost her mind. She was so bummed that she couldn't jump on her bed. I mean, she screamed and she cried and she kicked and she wailed and she flailed. And it was the biggest deal in the world to her. And, you know, in that moment, would it have been easier to just say, all right, listen, kid, just jump on the bed for five minutes and then go to bed, right? Of course it would have. But the Rubicon had been crossed, man. I had planted the flag and I had to defend it. You will not jump on this bed. I will cry with you all night before you jump on this bed one more time. Like it is not happening. So she's losing her mind over and I won't let her, I won't let her jump on the bed and whatever. And while it's happening, after she settles down, she goes to sleep. I think to myself, that's so dumb. She treated it like it was the biggest deal ever. She's not even going to remember it in the morning. Two days later, that thing never happened. When she's an adult, it's not even a blip on the radar screen. It's completely and totally inconsequential to who she is as a human in every way that she didn't get to jump on her bed that night. It does not matter. And then I started thinking about all the things when you become an adult that mattered so much when you were younger that when you're older, it's like, who cares? Remember how much you cared about homecoming? And then 20 years later, it's just a waste of money. It was silly. Remember all the things that mattered so much in elementary school? Then in the light of adulthood, they just, who cares? It makes me wonder how often in this life we're wailing and flailing and ticked off and upset and hurt. And God's in heaven going, you're just trying to jump on the bed, man. When you get here, it's not gonna matter. Quit getting so dang worked up. It makes me wonder how often we just wanna jump on our bed. It makes me wonder all the things that we get so worked up about that cause us so much anxiety that just spike our blood pressure. We just got done with a week-long trip driving to two different cities with a six-month-old. So I had some chest tightness this week and it got pretty stressful. And it makes me just, if I see that through the eyes of God and in light of eternity, how utterly ridiculous it was for me to waste one ounce of energy on getting frustrated at a six-month-old for crying. And when I read through the Bible, the more I walk with God, the more of Scripture that I see, the more times I expose myself to Jesus and the Gospels, the more times I read Paul, the more times I see the nature of God and begin to ask, why did he do this? And why did he direct in this way? And why doesn't he give us more of this? The more I conclude that God himself is far more concerned with eternity than we are. And that the problem is not trying to figure out all the things that are happening in this life and how to make sense of them all. The problem is not focusing enough on the next life and looking forward to that and seeing this life through the perspective of eternity the way that God does. Because when we read through scripture over and over and over again, it's very clear to me that God cares way more about what happens after Revelation 22 than he does about what's happening right now. He's just trying to get us there. So as we go through this life, I think it could be helpful to have reminders of eternity. And maybe that's what joy and pain are. I would argue this morning, if we had notes, this would be a thing that showed up on the screen that I would encourage you to write down. But I would note this morning that all joy and all pain are simply reminders that we're not yet where we belong. All joy that we experience and all pain that we experience are really simply reminders that we are not yet where we belong. Thanksgiving was this last week. If at your Thanksgiving table there was pain, because maybe someone wasn't at that table this year who was there last year. Maybe we hoped that there would be a baby or spouse or at least just a boyfriend or a girlfriend or something at the table this year and there wasn't and that caused us pain. Maybe there's strife in our family. Maybe one of our family members just isn't who they used to be. And because of myriad circumstances, when we sat around our table this week, there was pain for us. That pain is simply a reminder that we're not yet where we're supposed to be. That pain that we experience, that's a former thing. It will pass away. So we let pain remind us that I'm not intended for this place. I'm holding on for the next place. Likewise, joy is a reflection of the perfect joy that we will experience in heaven. If we sat around the Thanksgiving table this week and there was particular joy there, there was richness of friends and richness of family and richness of relationships. If there was a new seat at the table, if there was a new baby at the party, if there is a pending birth to celebrate, if there was a new relationship represented there, if there was reconciliation, if maybe this was the first time we've been together as a family since we had to start wearing the dumb masks, maybe that's what got us together and that's what brought us joy. That joy that you experienced this week is just a reflection and a smudgy window of the pure joy that's waiting on you in eternity. It's just a hint of the joy that's waiting on us in the future. And so I think we would be wise to allow all pain and all joy simply remind us that we are not yet where we are supposed to be because God did not intend us for this life. God did not design us for this life. God designed us for the next one. And in Revelation chapter 22, chapter 21 and 22, we see those things begin. That's why I actually like the following verses in 2 Corinthians. The ones that follow the light and momentary affliction and they are preparing us for this eternal grace. Because they acknowledge that we were not made for this place. I'm going to read to you just kind of a selection of them from 2 Corinthians chapter 5. Paul writes, He's talking about what we talked about, the former things, that we weren't made for this world, we were made for the next one. So if in this tent, sometimes it's uncomfortable, if in this life, sometimes we feel pain, those are groanings that are reminding us that we were made for the next life. And then he goes on down in verse six body, we are away from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage. And we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please Him. Scripture acknowledges, that. It is right and good to hope for that. It is right and good to remind ourselves that there is perfect joy where the former things have passed away waiting on us and we cling to that hope. And I said in week one that this mysterious book of Revelation really is the greatest book of hope that we have in Scripture and I hope that you've reached that conclusion on your own as well. So I would finish the series with this encouragement. Cling to your faith. Cling to the hope that this is true and that one day these things will be realized. Cling to your faith and cling to your hope and take courage, Christians, because we know how this story ends. Let's pray. Father, thank you for telling us how the story ends. Thank you for not making us wonder that. Thank you for the book of Revelation, for the vision that you gave John. Lord, I pray that you would give us a heart to understand the important things there. That you would give us a heart to respect the mysteries, to wonder in awe at all the things described. More than anything, God, I pray that we would see that you acknowledge that some things in this life are tough. Some things in this life are the former things that we're walking through right now. But that God, you offer us a hope and a future. So Lord, I pray that we would cling to that. I pray that we would be of good courage. That no matter where we are, no matter what we're doing, we would live to please you. And that nothing that could happen to us in this life could wrestle away from us the hope and the faith that we have in you. God, we look forward to the day that we can spend eternity with you when Revelation 21 and 22 come to pass. We thank you for this book. We thank you for the series. God, I ask that it would push us closer to you and that it would more deeply entrench us in the hope that we find in you. It's in your son's name I ask these things. Amen.

The All right. Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. If you are going to miss that Revelation intro, that's the last time you get to hear that music, let me know and I'll send you the clip. You can use it as your alarm clock on Mondays just to really face the week. This is the last part in our series moving through the book of Revelation and it's been a good series. I think it's been good for the church. I think it's been good for our small groups. I've heard that we've had some really good, robust discussions in those, and it's been fun for me to get to tackle this book on your behalf. And sincerely, I appreciate your trust and belief in me as we've walked through this together, and I've kind of served a little bit as a guide through the book of Revelation. By way of review, as we finish up the series, I thought it would be worth it to kind of recap all that we've learned and talked about as we arrive here at the final week. So in the first week, we're setting the scene. It's Revelation chapter one. John arrives. He's given a vision while he's on the island of Patmos. An angel comes and gets him and says, write down the things that I'm going to show you. And in that first chapter, we see this remarkable reunion between John and his savior, Jesus, his best friend, Jesus, who he served and spoken about and longed for for years. And we see that the greatest promise, no matter what else we encounter in the book of Revelation, the greatest promise in the book is that one day we will meet our Savior face to face. That one day we will meet Jesus too. And after we meet Jesus, after we see his face, whatever happens after that is going to be okay. That's the greatest promise in Revelation. In week two, my dad preached and we looked at Revelation 4 and 5. Remember, we skipped the letters to the churches in 2 and 3. We're going to tackle those in a series to be named later. Revelation 4 and 5, God sits on the throne. That's the important part. God's in control. And then Jesus steps forward as the Lamb of God, worthy to open the seals and begin the tribulation process. Remember, we define the the wrath of God and how even though we kind of shy away from it in the 21st century church, it's important. It's important to lean into. It's important to acknowledge. And we actually want a God that's capable of that. And then for the next two weeks, it was kind of academic. I pulled the whiteboard up here one week. We went through the events of the tribulation, the seals and the trumpets and the bowls and God's wrath being poured out and what order that comes and the different views around that. And then we kind of looked at the figures of the tribulation, the antichrist and the false prophet and the dragon and the witnesses and the 144,000 and kind of decoded some of those things within the book. And then last week was probably my favorite week where we look at the return of Christ and what that wins us. How he conquers evil once and for all. He conquers Satan once and for all. He makes all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And we also kind of reflected on the idea that when Jesus comes, we can finally lay down our faith and our hope. Those things are no longer needed because we're looking at our Savior face to face. And so this week, we arrive at the end of the book, at the end of the series, and I almost titled this morning's message, It Begins, or The Beginning, because this is where eternity begins. This is where the temporal world stops in Revelation 22, and eternity begins, an eternity that I want us to see this morning, for which we were created. So we arrive not necessarily at the end today, but at the beginning. As we do, there's a couple more things in Revelation to look at, namely the millennial reign of Christ. The millennial reign of Christ is discussed in Revelation chapter 20. So Jesus has just come down. He stormed down on the white horse. He has the troops of heaven, the angels of heaven arrayed in white linen behind him. They conquer the armies of the antichrist, of Satan, of the false prophet. They conquer the dark kingdom. They take the beast from the sea and the beast from the earth, the antichrist and the false prophet, and Jesus binds them and throws them in the lake of fire forever. And now all that remains is to deal with Satan. How is Jesus at the end of time going to deal with Satan? We find this in Revelation chapter 20. Now just a caveat about this sermon. It was a holiday week, all right? So I wrote this basically in my head during the 24 hours I was in the car this week with a six-month-old, which means I didn't produce notes for Kyle to put in there, which means that Scott back there, who's in charge of the slides, has the easiest job ever. And Carly, who's in charge of printing your notes, had an easy job because there's nothing there. So it's entirely up to you to write down what you want to write down and to follow along as you want to follow along. I would encourage you to grab a Bible. Grab the one in the seat back in front of you and be looking at Revelation 20, 21, and 22. I'm going to read the first four or five verses from each of those chapters as we move through, and they will not appear on the screens. If you're at home and you're watching, grab a Bible so we can go through it together and interact with the text together. But we see the millennial reign in Revelation chapter 20 in the first three verses. John writes, So if you keep reading, what you find is that after Satan is bound and thrown in a pit for a thousand years, that at the end of that thousand years, he is released and allowed to tempt the people on the earth who are alive at that time. For just a little while longer, he pulls away some people from Christ. And then Christ once and for all binds him and throws him in the lake of fire with the Antichrist and the false prophet. So around this, there are a lot of questions. Namely, the biggest one to me is, why in the world would God bind Satan, put him in a pit, make him stay there for a thousand years, and then let him out to tempt people one more time, just one last hurrah from Satan, like God's doing a favor to an old buddy or something, and then throwing him in the lake of fire. Why does God do that? Listen, I don't know. To me, this is one of those mysteries of revelation. I have literally nothing for you. You can research it and read about it, and people make guesses, but in all honesty, as is often the case to me, a lot of the guesses, and in fact, for this one, all of the guesses out there really don't hold intellectual water for me. I see them. I can see how they might be thought of as reasonable, but I can also very easily, to me, poke holes in them. And so I thought it not worth sharing with you the different guesses because they're all bad ones. So I would say, I don't know. It's a mystery on this side of heaven why God chooses to order things in that way. I continue to believe that if in my elevated body, if in my new heavenly body I get at the marriage supper of the lamb, I have the mental capacity to understand this and God deigns to explain it to me and I even still care once I'm in heaven, which I definitely won't. But let's pretend that in heaven while we're amidst this perfect joy, we say, hang on a second. Why'd you do that thing with Satan where you released him one last time? If God were to explain it to us and we had the mental capacity to grasp it, I think we'd all go, oh, thanks. And then we'd go on with our joyful day. By the way, I haven't said this yet. It's important to point out. Part of the reason that heaven is so joyful is because there's no dogs or animals there. It's fantastic. No more hassles, no more cleanups, no more messes. It's really, it's a wonderful place. I know it says lion lays down with lamb. That's figurative. There's no animals in heaven. I'm certain of it. I'm sure your dogs are all there. All right. I'm sure they are. Except for my first dog, Maggie. If they have an afterlife, Maggie's in hell, that dog is. What was I preaching about? So we don't know why God chooses at the end of the millennial reign to allow Satan loose for a period of time and then throws him into the lake of fire. And I'm not going to pretend to offer you explanations because they don't make sense to me. There are also views about the millennial reign. And we're going to get in the weeds just a little bit. And if this doesn't interest you, I am sorry. But there are some people who showed up with questions this morning about the millennial reign. And so this needs to be discussed. So we will move quickly, but there's kind of three traditional views about the millennial reign. They are called amillennial, postmillennial, and premillennial, and they're questions about when does God return? When does Jesus return? Does Jesus return after the millennial reign? Does he return during the millennial reign? Does he return before the millennial reign? And so we're going to basically group them like this. There's premillennial, which says Christ's return is before the millennial reign, that Christ comes back like he does in 19. He conquers Satan. He throws them in there. It's literally a thousand years where he reigns on earth and Christian ideals flourish and Christians flourish and God's kingdom flourishes. And then at the end of those literal thousand years, Satan is released. He tempts some people and then Jesus conquers them once and for all. Amillennial and postmillennial believe, and this is where it gets tricky, that you take chapters 19 and 20 and you lay 20 over chapter 19. See, premillennials believe that first chapter 19 happens, which is the return of Christ, the big war. He comes out of heaven and he conquers the beast. And then chapter 20 happens, which is the millennial reign. So premillennialists read this literally and say that these things literally happen. Christ, after he binds the beast and throws him in the lake of fire, then he reigns for a thousand, he binds Satan, then he reigns for a thousand years, then he loses him. It's a literal thousand years. The amillennial and postmillennial view think that you take chapters 19 and 20 and you lay them over top of each other and that they are different ways of describing the same events. Do you remember in week one when I said when you're interpreting Revelation that sometimes it's linear and sometimes it isn't? And how do you know when it is and it isn't? You just study really hard and you make a good guess. So some people have studied really hard and they've made this guess, that 20 lays over 19. In which case, the millennial reign of Christ, the thousand years, is figurative language for a long time. And we are in the middle of that. The millennial reign comes between the two comings of Christ. The Christ as crucified Savior that we read about in Scripture. And then the Christ as returning conqueror that we talked about last week. That in between those two comings of Christ are the millennial reign. And it is I fall in? Probably the latter, the ah or the post, the figurative meaning of the millennial reign. But as my father is listening to this sermon, he will vehemently disagree with that. So there are, I would say there are smart people on either side, but there's not necessarily based on me and my dad being on the two different sides. You'll have to pick which one of us is dumb. But there are good arguments to be made for either side, and it's really not that important which side you choose. The important part is, in the end, Jesus wins, and he binds Satan, and then we move into an eternity that's briefly described in Revelation 21 and 22. In Revelation 21, and you can look at verses 1 through four, we have a passage that I've shared a lot from this stage, that I refer to a lot in my preaching. It's a passage that I think is maybe the single most encouraging and hope-filled passage in the Bible. It's one that I use to comfort others with. It's one that I use to comfort myself. It infuses itself into my preaching and into my thinking over and over again, so much so that I can vividly remember that in the interview process and talking with the elders, when they were asking me about my worldview and my theology and all the different things and my approach to the Bible, I referenced this passage tearfully in my interview with them because it, over the years, has come to mean so much to me. And I thought it worthwhile before we read it this morning to tell you how I encountered this passage and the hope that it can bring in the most dire of situations as we prepare ourselves to look towards eternity. About, I think it was about eight years ago, I was at Greystone Church outside of Georgia, or Atlanta, and I was the small groups pastor and a couple other things, and one of the other hats that I wore at that church was I was the care pastor. Thank you. There it is. Right. Yeah, we were short-staffed. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. That'll probably never be my title again anywhere I go, but it was my title there. And I got a call one day, and it was a couple who had just recently started coming to the church, and they had an eight-year-old son named Landon, whose name I'll never forget, who had passed away. And it was an incredibly sad circumstance. Landon had an infection. He was sick. Went to the doctor, got some antibiotics, took him, went upstairs, I think take a bath or something, and they found him dead. He had had an allergic reaction to the medicine that he took, and they didn't know it. Incredibly sad situation. So sad, in fact, that a few days after the funeral, I was driving somewhere, and I called Jen, and she said, what's wrong? And I said, I don't know. I just, I feel heavy. And Jen goes, Nate, those are emotions. And I was like, well, then you can keep these. These are terrible. I hate this. It was a hard time. And so leading up to meeting with the family and doing the funeral, I called my pastor growing up, a man named Buddy Hoffman, who's no longer with us. I wish he were so I could talk to him about being a pastor. But I called Buddy. I said, Buddy, this has happened. I'm going to have to do this funeral and meet with this family. This is way out of my depth. I don't know what to do or what to say. What do I do? And he says in his typical, very blunt, forthright, buddy nature, he said, Nathan, just don't say anything stupid. And I laughed and I said, yeah, man, that's the goal. That's what I'm trying to avoid. That's why I'm on the phone with you. And he said, well, in times like this, so often people try to say things when they shouldn't. Sometimes your presence matters way more than your words, so really lean into just being quiet and being there. And then when you share scripture, be careful what you share, because it can often ring hollow in times of deep grief. And I agreed with him because I think of when something terrible like this happens, when we lost our first child due to miscarriage and somebody would quote us Jeremiah 29 11, I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, prayers to prosper you, not to harm you, plans for a hope and a future. Listen, listen, listen, that's true and that's good, but that doesn't help my pain, right? And if part of God's plan was to take a kid from me, then I don't really want to be a part of that plan. You know what I'm saying? So those verses can ring hollow. And I didn't want to say those to this family, Romans 8, 28. You know, for we know that for those who love him, that all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. That's good and that's true. And that means that in eternity, it's gonna work out and we see it working out. That's what Revelation is about, is affirming Romans 8, 28. But in the moment, boy, that doesn't really bring a lot of comfort to a grieving family. And I said, I agree with you. There's verses that ring hollow. so what do I share? And he said, I always use Revelation 20, Revelation 21, verses one through four. This is the hope that we cling to. And this is why these verses have infused themselves into my preaching and into my thinking and into my prayers and why I still use this passage at every funeral that I do because I believe it's maybe the most hope-filled passage in all of Scripture. And it says this. John writes, I love this part. That, remember last week, I said that hope and faith were burdens and we cling to our hope and our faith. That is the hope that we cling to. This is the event that we place our faith in. That Jesus' death on the cross won us this. That one day, God will be with his people and we will be with our God and he will wipe every tear off of our face and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And if you've heard me do a funeral, you've heard me say what the former things are. In this moment, the former things are death, pain, cancer, birth defects, difficulties, abuse, estrangement, broken homes. The former things are the brokenness of other people that spills out and breaks the people around them. The brokenness is gone is this idea that hurt people hurt people because nobody's hurt, so nobody's getting hurt. The former things are all of the things that cause you stress and anxiety and pain and discomfort now. There's coming a day where those things are no longer present. Those are the former things. And it hearkens back to this promise that we see in Revelation chapter 1 that we highlighted in the first week, that one day we will be with our Savior face to face. One day we will sit in the very presence of God. He will be with us and we will be with him. And in that day when that comes, the former things, the things that cause us pain now. The things that are difficult now. The things that made this week tough. The things that have made these last two years tough. The things that you came in here worrying about now, the scars that you bear from the people who have come before you, all those things have passed away and we walk in perfect joy. This is why I love this verse because this verse acknowledges the former things and it doesn't seek to cheapen those things. It doesn't tell Sean Weldon who lost his son Landon that this thing doesn't matter, that this thing doesn't hurt. Don't worry about it. God has a plan for this thing. It says, no, no, no. This is one of the former things, man. And if you can cling to your faith and your hope through this, it will become a former thing and you'll see him again. So I find this passage to be uniquely and tremendously hope-filled. And it inaugurates the eternity that we are going to share in together. The holy city comes down. We are a part of the new Jerusalem. We are a part of the new heaven and the new earth. Some people believe God creates an entirely new heaven and new earth. Some people believe he replaces this one. I believe it doesn't make a bit of difference. But Revelation 21 inaugurates the eternity following the marriage supper of the Lamb, the greatest celebration feast of all time. And it ushers us into this beginning of life. Not the end of time, but the beginning of eternity. And this eternity is described, I think, the best in chapter 22, verses 1 through 5. In 21, there's a description of what the new heaven and the new earth is going to look like. And if you remember in week one, I read you a portion of that description where it talks about the jewels that adorn the walls and sit at the base. It says that the city is like gold and the streets are like glass. And we're gonna see a description of a crystal river flowing from the throne of God. And it describes it as this remarkably beautiful place. And that's well and good. And I don't want to cheapen or dismiss the remarkable beauty of heaven. But what is more compelling to me is the peace that we find there, is the tranquility of life there, is the provision of God there, and the perfect peace that we rest in for all of eternity. And I think that's better captured in these verses, in chapters 22, verses 1 through 5, where John writes this. Through the middle of the light that we need. His kingdom knows no night. His kingdom knows no darkness. The tree of life is on either side of the river. It provides for us in season all that we need. There is nothing left to do but to enjoy God and His perfect love and the people that we are there with forever. And what I want you to focus on this morning and what I want you to remember from this series is that this is what we are created for. You understand? What we see in Revelation 21, what's described in Revelation 22, that's what you were created for. Hear me, you were not created for this place. You were not created for this world. You were not created for your current body. You were not created for that. You were created for what is described in Revelation 21 and 22. You were created for eternity. It's why you have a soul that will outlive your body. It's why you have a soul that will pass into this next life without the broken shell that it inhabits right now. It's why your soul longs for eternity. It's why there's something inside of you that says there's gotta be more than this. It's why the people who have accomplished the most on the planet get to the end of their rope of accomplishment and say there has to be more than this. It's why nothing in your life ever fully satisfies you. It's why I believe this to be true. Perfect happiness is not possible this side of heaven. To choose one road towards happiness is to fundamentally disallow another road to happiness. And we are therefore incapable of perfect happiness on this side of heaven. And that's why we are incapable of it, to remind us that on that side of heaven, we will walk in perfect happiness for all of eternity. Because we were created for that eternity. We were designed and purposed for that. We long for it. Paul writes about this over and over again in the things that he says and in the things that he writes to the early church. Particularly in Romans 8 where he says the whole earth groans for this eternity, pressing against the shell that we are in, waiting for our perfect bodies. And I think that this is why Paul writes this in 2 Corinthians 4, verses 17 and 18. You don't have to turn there. You can just listen to me because these are famous verses. We refer to these often. These are funeral verses. These are grieving verses. But I think that Paul writes them because Paul was aware of this idea that we were not created for this place. We were created for eternity. So he writes this in chapter 4, verse 17 of 2 Corinthians. I'm going to pick it up in 16. Paul calls all of the pain that we endure in this life light momentary affliction. And just so you know, he's addressing a persecuted church. And the verses that precede this, he's talking about the harm that faces them, the death that faces them. He's talking, he's in, if you want to look historically, he's in a time period where the life expectancy had to be somewhere in the 40s or maybe as late as the 50s. He's looking at a high infant mortality rate. He's looking at people who have lots of kids and are very used to some of the kids not making it to adulthood. These people know what loss is. They know what pain is on a level that most of us in this room are not even close to being acquainted with. So before we think that Paul is being flippant with our pain that we walk through, let's be clear. No, no, no. He's being flippant with way worse pain than what we walk through. And he still calls it light and momentary affliction. And he says it is not worth comparing with the glory that we will experience on the other side of eternity. The pain that we experience in this life is not worth comparing. It's just preparing us for the weight of glory that we will experience on the other side of eternity. I've mentioned this before, but you've likely forgotten it, and it stands out to me. When Lily, my daughter, was I think about three years old, we were putting her to bed one night. And as we were trying to put her to bed, she insisted on jumping on her bed. And we told her, no, you can't do that. Stop jumping on your bed. And she tried to do it. And I had to be stern. No, stop jumping on your bed. You're not allowed to jump on your bed. She lost her mind. She was so bummed that she couldn't jump on her bed. I mean, she screamed and she cried and she kicked and she wailed and she flailed. And it was the biggest deal in the world to her. And, you know, in that moment, would it have been easier to just say, all right, listen, kid, just jump on the bed for five minutes and then go to bed, right? Of course it would have. But the Rubicon had been crossed, man. I had planted the flag and I had to defend it. You will not jump on this bed. I will cry with you all night before you jump on this bed one more time. Like it is not happening. So she's losing her mind over and I won't let her, I won't let her jump on the bed and whatever. And while it's happening, after she settles down, she goes to sleep. I think to myself, that's so dumb. She treated it like it was the biggest deal ever. She's not even going to remember it in the morning. Two days later, that thing never happened. When she's an adult, it's not even a blip on the radar screen. It's completely and totally inconsequential to who she is as a human in every way that she didn't get to jump on her bed that night. It does not matter. And then I started thinking about all the things when you become an adult that mattered so much when you were younger that when you're older, it's like, who cares? Remember how much you cared about homecoming? And then 20 years later, it's just a waste of money. It was silly. Remember all the things that mattered so much in elementary school? Then in the light of adulthood, they just, who cares? It makes me wonder how often in this life we're wailing and flailing and ticked off and upset and hurt. And God's in heaven going, you're just trying to jump on the bed, man. When you get here, it's not gonna matter. Quit getting so dang worked up. It makes me wonder how often we just wanna jump on our bed. It makes me wonder all the things that we get so worked up about that cause us so much anxiety that just spike our blood pressure. We just got done with a week-long trip driving to two different cities with a six-month-old. So I had some chest tightness this week and it got pretty stressful. And it makes me just, if I see that through the eyes of God and in light of eternity, how utterly ridiculous it was for me to waste one ounce of energy on getting frustrated at a six-month-old for crying. And when I read through the Bible, the more I walk with God, the more of Scripture that I see, the more times I expose myself to Jesus and the Gospels, the more times I read Paul, the more times I see the nature of God and begin to ask, why did he do this? And why did he direct in this way? And why doesn't he give us more of this? The more I conclude that God himself is far more concerned with eternity than we are. And that the problem is not trying to figure out all the things that are happening in this life and how to make sense of them all. The problem is not focusing enough on the next life and looking forward to that and seeing this life through the perspective of eternity the way that God does. Because when we read through scripture over and over and over again, it's very clear to me that God cares way more about what happens after Revelation 22 than he does about what's happening right now. He's just trying to get us there. So as we go through this life, I think it could be helpful to have reminders of eternity. And maybe that's what joy and pain are. I would argue this morning, if we had notes, this would be a thing that showed up on the screen that I would encourage you to write down. But I would note this morning that all joy and all pain are simply reminders that we're not yet where we belong. All joy that we experience and all pain that we experience are really simply reminders that we are not yet where we belong. Thanksgiving was this last week. If at your Thanksgiving table there was pain, because maybe someone wasn't at that table this year who was there last year. Maybe we hoped that there would be a baby or spouse or at least just a boyfriend or a girlfriend or something at the table this year and there wasn't and that caused us pain. Maybe there's strife in our family. Maybe one of our family members just isn't who they used to be. And because of myriad circumstances, when we sat around our table this week, there was pain for us. That pain is simply a reminder that we're not yet where we're supposed to be. That pain that we experience, that's a former thing. It will pass away. So we let pain remind us that I'm not intended for this place. I'm holding on for the next place. Likewise, joy is a reflection of the perfect joy that we will experience in heaven. If we sat around the Thanksgiving table this week and there was particular joy there, there was richness of friends and richness of family and richness of relationships. If there was a new seat at the table, if there was a new baby at the party, if there is a pending birth to celebrate, if there was a new relationship represented there, if there was reconciliation, if maybe this was the first time we've been together as a family since we had to start wearing the dumb masks, maybe that's what got us together and that's what brought us joy. That joy that you experienced this week is just a reflection and a smudgy window of the pure joy that's waiting on you in eternity. It's just a hint of the joy that's waiting on us in the future. And so I think we would be wise to allow all pain and all joy simply remind us that we are not yet where we are supposed to be because God did not intend us for this life. God did not design us for this life. God designed us for the next one. And in Revelation chapter 22, chapter 21 and 22, we see those things begin. That's why I actually like the following verses in 2 Corinthians. The ones that follow the light and momentary affliction and they are preparing us for this eternal grace. Because they acknowledge that we were not made for this place. I'm going to read to you just kind of a selection of them from 2 Corinthians chapter 5. Paul writes, He's talking about what we talked about, the former things, that we weren't made for this world, we were made for the next one. So if in this tent, sometimes it's uncomfortable, if in this life, sometimes we feel pain, those are groanings that are reminding us that we were made for the next life. And then he goes on down in verse six body, we are away from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage. And we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please Him. Scripture acknowledges, that. It is right and good to hope for that. It is right and good to remind ourselves that there is perfect joy where the former things have passed away waiting on us and we cling to that hope. And I said in week one that this mysterious book of Revelation really is the greatest book of hope that we have in Scripture and I hope that you've reached that conclusion on your own as well. So I would finish the series with this encouragement. Cling to your faith. Cling to the hope that this is true and that one day these things will be realized. Cling to your faith and cling to your hope and take courage, Christians, because we know how this story ends. Let's pray. Father, thank you for telling us how the story ends. Thank you for not making us wonder that. Thank you for the book of Revelation, for the vision that you gave John. Lord, I pray that you would give us a heart to understand the important things there. That you would give us a heart to respect the mysteries, to wonder in awe at all the things described. More than anything, God, I pray that we would see that you acknowledge that some things in this life are tough. Some things in this life are the former things that we're walking through right now. But that God, you offer us a hope and a future. So Lord, I pray that we would cling to that. I pray that we would be of good courage. That no matter where we are, no matter what we're doing, we would live to please you. And that nothing that could happen to us in this life could wrestle away from us the hope and the faith that we have in you. God, we look forward to the day that we can spend eternity with you when Revelation 21 and 22 come to pass. We thank you for this book. We thank you for the series. God, I ask that it would push us closer to you and that it would more deeply entrench us in the hope that we find in you. It's in your son's name I ask these things. Amen.

The All right. Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. If you are going to miss that Revelation intro, that's the last time you get to hear that music, let me know and I'll send you the clip. You can use it as your alarm clock on Mondays just to really face the week. This is the last part in our series moving through the book of Revelation and it's been a good series. I think it's been good for the church. I think it's been good for our small groups. I've heard that we've had some really good, robust discussions in those, and it's been fun for me to get to tackle this book on your behalf. And sincerely, I appreciate your trust and belief in me as we've walked through this together, and I've kind of served a little bit as a guide through the book of Revelation. By way of review, as we finish up the series, I thought it would be worth it to kind of recap all that we've learned and talked about as we arrive here at the final week. So in the first week, we're setting the scene. It's Revelation chapter one. John arrives. He's given a vision while he's on the island of Patmos. An angel comes and gets him and says, write down the things that I'm going to show you. And in that first chapter, we see this remarkable reunion between John and his savior, Jesus, his best friend, Jesus, who he served and spoken about and longed for for years. And we see that the greatest promise, no matter what else we encounter in the book of Revelation, the greatest promise in the book is that one day we will meet our Savior face to face. That one day we will meet Jesus too. And after we meet Jesus, after we see his face, whatever happens after that is going to be okay. That's the greatest promise in Revelation. In week two, my dad preached and we looked at Revelation 4 and 5. Remember, we skipped the letters to the churches in 2 and 3. We're going to tackle those in a series to be named later. Revelation 4 and 5, God sits on the throne. That's the important part. God's in control. And then Jesus steps forward as the Lamb of God, worthy to open the seals and begin the tribulation process. Remember, we define the the wrath of God and how even though we kind of shy away from it in the 21st century church, it's important. It's important to lean into. It's important to acknowledge. And we actually want a God that's capable of that. And then for the next two weeks, it was kind of academic. I pulled the whiteboard up here one week. We went through the events of the tribulation, the seals and the trumpets and the bowls and God's wrath being poured out and what order that comes and the different views around that. And then we kind of looked at the figures of the tribulation, the antichrist and the false prophet and the dragon and the witnesses and the 144,000 and kind of decoded some of those things within the book. And then last week was probably my favorite week where we look at the return of Christ and what that wins us. How he conquers evil once and for all. He conquers Satan once and for all. He makes all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And we also kind of reflected on the idea that when Jesus comes, we can finally lay down our faith and our hope. Those things are no longer needed because we're looking at our Savior face to face. And so this week, we arrive at the end of the book, at the end of the series, and I almost titled this morning's message, It Begins, or The Beginning, because this is where eternity begins. This is where the temporal world stops in Revelation 22, and eternity begins, an eternity that I want us to see this morning, for which we were created. So we arrive not necessarily at the end today, but at the beginning. As we do, there's a couple more things in Revelation to look at, namely the millennial reign of Christ. The millennial reign of Christ is discussed in Revelation chapter 20. So Jesus has just come down. He stormed down on the white horse. He has the troops of heaven, the angels of heaven arrayed in white linen behind him. They conquer the armies of the antichrist, of Satan, of the false prophet. They conquer the dark kingdom. They take the beast from the sea and the beast from the earth, the antichrist and the false prophet, and Jesus binds them and throws them in the lake of fire forever. And now all that remains is to deal with Satan. How is Jesus at the end of time going to deal with Satan? We find this in Revelation chapter 20. Now just a caveat about this sermon. It was a holiday week, all right? So I wrote this basically in my head during the 24 hours I was in the car this week with a six-month-old, which means I didn't produce notes for Kyle to put in there, which means that Scott back there, who's in charge of the slides, has the easiest job ever. And Carly, who's in charge of printing your notes, had an easy job because there's nothing there. So it's entirely up to you to write down what you want to write down and to follow along as you want to follow along. I would encourage you to grab a Bible. Grab the one in the seat back in front of you and be looking at Revelation 20, 21, and 22. I'm going to read the first four or five verses from each of those chapters as we move through, and they will not appear on the screens. If you're at home and you're watching, grab a Bible so we can go through it together and interact with the text together. But we see the millennial reign in Revelation chapter 20 in the first three verses. John writes, So if you keep reading, what you find is that after Satan is bound and thrown in a pit for a thousand years, that at the end of that thousand years, he is released and allowed to tempt the people on the earth who are alive at that time. For just a little while longer, he pulls away some people from Christ. And then Christ once and for all binds him and throws him in the lake of fire with the Antichrist and the false prophet. So around this, there are a lot of questions. Namely, the biggest one to me is, why in the world would God bind Satan, put him in a pit, make him stay there for a thousand years, and then let him out to tempt people one more time, just one last hurrah from Satan, like God's doing a favor to an old buddy or something, and then throwing him in the lake of fire. Why does God do that? Listen, I don't know. To me, this is one of those mysteries of revelation. I have literally nothing for you. You can research it and read about it, and people make guesses, but in all honesty, as is often the case to me, a lot of the guesses, and in fact, for this one, all of the guesses out there really don't hold intellectual water for me. I see them. I can see how they might be thought of as reasonable, but I can also very easily, to me, poke holes in them. And so I thought it not worth sharing with you the different guesses because they're all bad ones. So I would say, I don't know. It's a mystery on this side of heaven why God chooses to order things in that way. I continue to believe that if in my elevated body, if in my new heavenly body I get at the marriage supper of the lamb, I have the mental capacity to understand this and God deigns to explain it to me and I even still care once I'm in heaven, which I definitely won't. But let's pretend that in heaven while we're amidst this perfect joy, we say, hang on a second. Why'd you do that thing with Satan where you released him one last time? If God were to explain it to us and we had the mental capacity to grasp it, I think we'd all go, oh, thanks. And then we'd go on with our joyful day. By the way, I haven't said this yet. It's important to point out. Part of the reason that heaven is so joyful is because there's no dogs or animals there. It's fantastic. No more hassles, no more cleanups, no more messes. It's really, it's a wonderful place. I know it says lion lays down with lamb. That's figurative. There's no animals in heaven. I'm certain of it. I'm sure your dogs are all there. All right. I'm sure they are. Except for my first dog, Maggie. If they have an afterlife, Maggie's in hell, that dog is. What was I preaching about? So we don't know why God chooses at the end of the millennial reign to allow Satan loose for a period of time and then throws him into the lake of fire. And I'm not going to pretend to offer you explanations because they don't make sense to me. There are also views about the millennial reign. And we're going to get in the weeds just a little bit. And if this doesn't interest you, I am sorry. But there are some people who showed up with questions this morning about the millennial reign. And so this needs to be discussed. So we will move quickly, but there's kind of three traditional views about the millennial reign. They are called amillennial, postmillennial, and premillennial, and they're questions about when does God return? When does Jesus return? Does Jesus return after the millennial reign? Does he return during the millennial reign? Does he return before the millennial reign? And so we're going to basically group them like this. There's premillennial, which says Christ's return is before the millennial reign, that Christ comes back like he does in 19. He conquers Satan. He throws them in there. It's literally a thousand years where he reigns on earth and Christian ideals flourish and Christians flourish and God's kingdom flourishes. And then at the end of those literal thousand years, Satan is released. He tempts some people and then Jesus conquers them once and for all. Amillennial and postmillennial believe, and this is where it gets tricky, that you take chapters 19 and 20 and you lay 20 over chapter 19. See, premillennials believe that first chapter 19 happens, which is the return of Christ, the big war. He comes out of heaven and he conquers the beast. And then chapter 20 happens, which is the millennial reign. So premillennialists read this literally and say that these things literally happen. Christ, after he binds the beast and throws him in the lake of fire, then he reigns for a thousand, he binds Satan, then he reigns for a thousand years, then he loses him. It's a literal thousand years. The amillennial and postmillennial view think that you take chapters 19 and 20 and you lay them over top of each other and that they are different ways of describing the same events. Do you remember in week one when I said when you're interpreting Revelation that sometimes it's linear and sometimes it isn't? And how do you know when it is and it isn't? You just study really hard and you make a good guess. So some people have studied really hard and they've made this guess, that 20 lays over 19. In which case, the millennial reign of Christ, the thousand years, is figurative language for a long time. And we are in the middle of that. The millennial reign comes between the two comings of Christ. The Christ as crucified Savior that we read about in Scripture. And then the Christ as returning conqueror that we talked about last week. That in between those two comings of Christ are the millennial reign. And it is I fall in? Probably the latter, the ah or the post, the figurative meaning of the millennial reign. But as my father is listening to this sermon, he will vehemently disagree with that. So there are, I would say there are smart people on either side, but there's not necessarily based on me and my dad being on the two different sides. You'll have to pick which one of us is dumb. But there are good arguments to be made for either side, and it's really not that important which side you choose. The important part is, in the end, Jesus wins, and he binds Satan, and then we move into an eternity that's briefly described in Revelation 21 and 22. In Revelation 21, and you can look at verses 1 through four, we have a passage that I've shared a lot from this stage, that I refer to a lot in my preaching. It's a passage that I think is maybe the single most encouraging and hope-filled passage in the Bible. It's one that I use to comfort others with. It's one that I use to comfort myself. It infuses itself into my preaching and into my thinking over and over again, so much so that I can vividly remember that in the interview process and talking with the elders, when they were asking me about my worldview and my theology and all the different things and my approach to the Bible, I referenced this passage tearfully in my interview with them because it, over the years, has come to mean so much to me. And I thought it worthwhile before we read it this morning to tell you how I encountered this passage and the hope that it can bring in the most dire of situations as we prepare ourselves to look towards eternity. About, I think it was about eight years ago, I was at Greystone Church outside of Georgia, or Atlanta, and I was the small groups pastor and a couple other things, and one of the other hats that I wore at that church was I was the care pastor. Thank you. There it is. Right. Yeah, we were short-staffed. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. That'll probably never be my title again anywhere I go, but it was my title there. And I got a call one day, and it was a couple who had just recently started coming to the church, and they had an eight-year-old son named Landon, whose name I'll never forget, who had passed away. And it was an incredibly sad circumstance. Landon had an infection. He was sick. Went to the doctor, got some antibiotics, took him, went upstairs, I think take a bath or something, and they found him dead. He had had an allergic reaction to the medicine that he took, and they didn't know it. Incredibly sad situation. So sad, in fact, that a few days after the funeral, I was driving somewhere, and I called Jen, and she said, what's wrong? And I said, I don't know. I just, I feel heavy. And Jen goes, Nate, those are emotions. And I was like, well, then you can keep these. These are terrible. I hate this. It was a hard time. And so leading up to meeting with the family and doing the funeral, I called my pastor growing up, a man named Buddy Hoffman, who's no longer with us. I wish he were so I could talk to him about being a pastor. But I called Buddy. I said, Buddy, this has happened. I'm going to have to do this funeral and meet with this family. This is way out of my depth. I don't know what to do or what to say. What do I do? And he says in his typical, very blunt, forthright, buddy nature, he said, Nathan, just don't say anything stupid. And I laughed and I said, yeah, man, that's the goal. That's what I'm trying to avoid. That's why I'm on the phone with you. And he said, well, in times like this, so often people try to say things when they shouldn't. Sometimes your presence matters way more than your words, so really lean into just being quiet and being there. And then when you share scripture, be careful what you share, because it can often ring hollow in times of deep grief. And I agreed with him because I think of when something terrible like this happens, when we lost our first child due to miscarriage and somebody would quote us Jeremiah 29 11, I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, prayers to prosper you, not to harm you, plans for a hope and a future. Listen, listen, listen, that's true and that's good, but that doesn't help my pain, right? And if part of God's plan was to take a kid from me, then I don't really want to be a part of that plan. You know what I'm saying? So those verses can ring hollow. And I didn't want to say those to this family, Romans 8, 28. You know, for we know that for those who love him, that all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. That's good and that's true. And that means that in eternity, it's gonna work out and we see it working out. That's what Revelation is about, is affirming Romans 8, 28. But in the moment, boy, that doesn't really bring a lot of comfort to a grieving family. And I said, I agree with you. There's verses that ring hollow. so what do I share? And he said, I always use Revelation 20, Revelation 21, verses one through four. This is the hope that we cling to. And this is why these verses have infused themselves into my preaching and into my thinking and into my prayers and why I still use this passage at every funeral that I do because I believe it's maybe the most hope-filled passage in all of Scripture. And it says this. John writes, I love this part. That, remember last week, I said that hope and faith were burdens and we cling to our hope and our faith. That is the hope that we cling to. This is the event that we place our faith in. That Jesus' death on the cross won us this. That one day, God will be with his people and we will be with our God and he will wipe every tear off of our face and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And if you've heard me do a funeral, you've heard me say what the former things are. In this moment, the former things are death, pain, cancer, birth defects, difficulties, abuse, estrangement, broken homes. The former things are the brokenness of other people that spills out and breaks the people around them. The brokenness is gone is this idea that hurt people hurt people because nobody's hurt, so nobody's getting hurt. The former things are all of the things that cause you stress and anxiety and pain and discomfort now. There's coming a day where those things are no longer present. Those are the former things. And it hearkens back to this promise that we see in Revelation chapter 1 that we highlighted in the first week, that one day we will be with our Savior face to face. One day we will sit in the very presence of God. He will be with us and we will be with him. And in that day when that comes, the former things, the things that cause us pain now. The things that are difficult now. The things that made this week tough. The things that have made these last two years tough. The things that you came in here worrying about now, the scars that you bear from the people who have come before you, all those things have passed away and we walk in perfect joy. This is why I love this verse because this verse acknowledges the former things and it doesn't seek to cheapen those things. It doesn't tell Sean Weldon who lost his son Landon that this thing doesn't matter, that this thing doesn't hurt. Don't worry about it. God has a plan for this thing. It says, no, no, no. This is one of the former things, man. And if you can cling to your faith and your hope through this, it will become a former thing and you'll see him again. So I find this passage to be uniquely and tremendously hope-filled. And it inaugurates the eternity that we are going to share in together. The holy city comes down. We are a part of the new Jerusalem. We are a part of the new heaven and the new earth. Some people believe God creates an entirely new heaven and new earth. Some people believe he replaces this one. I believe it doesn't make a bit of difference. But Revelation 21 inaugurates the eternity following the marriage supper of the Lamb, the greatest celebration feast of all time. And it ushers us into this beginning of life. Not the end of time, but the beginning of eternity. And this eternity is described, I think, the best in chapter 22, verses 1 through 5. In 21, there's a description of what the new heaven and the new earth is going to look like. And if you remember in week one, I read you a portion of that description where it talks about the jewels that adorn the walls and sit at the base. It says that the city is like gold and the streets are like glass. And we're gonna see a description of a crystal river flowing from the throne of God. And it describes it as this remarkably beautiful place. And that's well and good. And I don't want to cheapen or dismiss the remarkable beauty of heaven. But what is more compelling to me is the peace that we find there, is the tranquility of life there, is the provision of God there, and the perfect peace that we rest in for all of eternity. And I think that's better captured in these verses, in chapters 22, verses 1 through 5, where John writes this. Through the middle of the light that we need. His kingdom knows no night. His kingdom knows no darkness. The tree of life is on either side of the river. It provides for us in season all that we need. There is nothing left to do but to enjoy God and His perfect love and the people that we are there with forever. And what I want you to focus on this morning and what I want you to remember from this series is that this is what we are created for. You understand? What we see in Revelation 21, what's described in Revelation 22, that's what you were created for. Hear me, you were not created for this place. You were not created for this world. You were not created for your current body. You were not created for that. You were created for what is described in Revelation 21 and 22. You were created for eternity. It's why you have a soul that will outlive your body. It's why you have a soul that will pass into this next life without the broken shell that it inhabits right now. It's why your soul longs for eternity. It's why there's something inside of you that says there's gotta be more than this. It's why the people who have accomplished the most on the planet get to the end of their rope of accomplishment and say there has to be more than this. It's why nothing in your life ever fully satisfies you. It's why I believe this to be true. Perfect happiness is not possible this side of heaven. To choose one road towards happiness is to fundamentally disallow another road to happiness. And we are therefore incapable of perfect happiness on this side of heaven. And that's why we are incapable of it, to remind us that on that side of heaven, we will walk in perfect happiness for all of eternity. Because we were created for that eternity. We were designed and purposed for that. We long for it. Paul writes about this over and over again in the things that he says and in the things that he writes to the early church. Particularly in Romans 8 where he says the whole earth groans for this eternity, pressing against the shell that we are in, waiting for our perfect bodies. And I think that this is why Paul writes this in 2 Corinthians 4, verses 17 and 18. You don't have to turn there. You can just listen to me because these are famous verses. We refer to these often. These are funeral verses. These are grieving verses. But I think that Paul writes them because Paul was aware of this idea that we were not created for this place. We were created for eternity. So he writes this in chapter 4, verse 17 of 2 Corinthians. I'm going to pick it up in 16. Paul calls all of the pain that we endure in this life light momentary affliction. And just so you know, he's addressing a persecuted church. And the verses that precede this, he's talking about the harm that faces them, the death that faces them. He's talking, he's in, if you want to look historically, he's in a time period where the life expectancy had to be somewhere in the 40s or maybe as late as the 50s. He's looking at a high infant mortality rate. He's looking at people who have lots of kids and are very used to some of the kids not making it to adulthood. These people know what loss is. They know what pain is on a level that most of us in this room are not even close to being acquainted with. So before we think that Paul is being flippant with our pain that we walk through, let's be clear. No, no, no. He's being flippant with way worse pain than what we walk through. And he still calls it light and momentary affliction. And he says it is not worth comparing with the glory that we will experience on the other side of eternity. The pain that we experience in this life is not worth comparing. It's just preparing us for the weight of glory that we will experience on the other side of eternity. I've mentioned this before, but you've likely forgotten it, and it stands out to me. When Lily, my daughter, was I think about three years old, we were putting her to bed one night. And as we were trying to put her to bed, she insisted on jumping on her bed. And we told her, no, you can't do that. Stop jumping on your bed. And she tried to do it. And I had to be stern. No, stop jumping on your bed. You're not allowed to jump on your bed. She lost her mind. She was so bummed that she couldn't jump on her bed. I mean, she screamed and she cried and she kicked and she wailed and she flailed. And it was the biggest deal in the world to her. And, you know, in that moment, would it have been easier to just say, all right, listen, kid, just jump on the bed for five minutes and then go to bed, right? Of course it would have. But the Rubicon had been crossed, man. I had planted the flag and I had to defend it. You will not jump on this bed. I will cry with you all night before you jump on this bed one more time. Like it is not happening. So she's losing her mind over and I won't let her, I won't let her jump on the bed and whatever. And while it's happening, after she settles down, she goes to sleep. I think to myself, that's so dumb. She treated it like it was the biggest deal ever. She's not even going to remember it in the morning. Two days later, that thing never happened. When she's an adult, it's not even a blip on the radar screen. It's completely and totally inconsequential to who she is as a human in every way that she didn't get to jump on her bed that night. It does not matter. And then I started thinking about all the things when you become an adult that mattered so much when you were younger that when you're older, it's like, who cares? Remember how much you cared about homecoming? And then 20 years later, it's just a waste of money. It was silly. Remember all the things that mattered so much in elementary school? Then in the light of adulthood, they just, who cares? It makes me wonder how often in this life we're wailing and flailing and ticked off and upset and hurt. And God's in heaven going, you're just trying to jump on the bed, man. When you get here, it's not gonna matter. Quit getting so dang worked up. It makes me wonder how often we just wanna jump on our bed. It makes me wonder all the things that we get so worked up about that cause us so much anxiety that just spike our blood pressure. We just got done with a week-long trip driving to two different cities with a six-month-old. So I had some chest tightness this week and it got pretty stressful. And it makes me just, if I see that through the eyes of God and in light of eternity, how utterly ridiculous it was for me to waste one ounce of energy on getting frustrated at a six-month-old for crying. And when I read through the Bible, the more I walk with God, the more of Scripture that I see, the more times I expose myself to Jesus and the Gospels, the more times I read Paul, the more times I see the nature of God and begin to ask, why did he do this? And why did he direct in this way? And why doesn't he give us more of this? The more I conclude that God himself is far more concerned with eternity than we are. And that the problem is not trying to figure out all the things that are happening in this life and how to make sense of them all. The problem is not focusing enough on the next life and looking forward to that and seeing this life through the perspective of eternity the way that God does. Because when we read through scripture over and over and over again, it's very clear to me that God cares way more about what happens after Revelation 22 than he does about what's happening right now. He's just trying to get us there. So as we go through this life, I think it could be helpful to have reminders of eternity. And maybe that's what joy and pain are. I would argue this morning, if we had notes, this would be a thing that showed up on the screen that I would encourage you to write down. But I would note this morning that all joy and all pain are simply reminders that we're not yet where we belong. All joy that we experience and all pain that we experience are really simply reminders that we are not yet where we belong. Thanksgiving was this last week. If at your Thanksgiving table there was pain, because maybe someone wasn't at that table this year who was there last year. Maybe we hoped that there would be a baby or spouse or at least just a boyfriend or a girlfriend or something at the table this year and there wasn't and that caused us pain. Maybe there's strife in our family. Maybe one of our family members just isn't who they used to be. And because of myriad circumstances, when we sat around our table this week, there was pain for us. That pain is simply a reminder that we're not yet where we're supposed to be. That pain that we experience, that's a former thing. It will pass away. So we let pain remind us that I'm not intended for this place. I'm holding on for the next place. Likewise, joy is a reflection of the perfect joy that we will experience in heaven. If we sat around the Thanksgiving table this week and there was particular joy there, there was richness of friends and richness of family and richness of relationships. If there was a new seat at the table, if there was a new baby at the party, if there is a pending birth to celebrate, if there was a new relationship represented there, if there was reconciliation, if maybe this was the first time we've been together as a family since we had to start wearing the dumb masks, maybe that's what got us together and that's what brought us joy. That joy that you experienced this week is just a reflection and a smudgy window of the pure joy that's waiting on you in eternity. It's just a hint of the joy that's waiting on us in the future. And so I think we would be wise to allow all pain and all joy simply remind us that we are not yet where we are supposed to be because God did not intend us for this life. God did not design us for this life. God designed us for the next one. And in Revelation chapter 22, chapter 21 and 22, we see those things begin. That's why I actually like the following verses in 2 Corinthians. The ones that follow the light and momentary affliction and they are preparing us for this eternal grace. Because they acknowledge that we were not made for this place. I'm going to read to you just kind of a selection of them from 2 Corinthians chapter 5. Paul writes, He's talking about what we talked about, the former things, that we weren't made for this world, we were made for the next one. So if in this tent, sometimes it's uncomfortable, if in this life, sometimes we feel pain, those are groanings that are reminding us that we were made for the next life. And then he goes on down in verse six body, we are away from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage. And we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please Him. Scripture acknowledges, that. It is right and good to hope for that. It is right and good to remind ourselves that there is perfect joy where the former things have passed away waiting on us and we cling to that hope. And I said in week one that this mysterious book of Revelation really is the greatest book of hope that we have in Scripture and I hope that you've reached that conclusion on your own as well. So I would finish the series with this encouragement. Cling to your faith. Cling to the hope that this is true and that one day these things will be realized. Cling to your faith and cling to your hope and take courage, Christians, because we know how this story ends. Let's pray. Father, thank you for telling us how the story ends. Thank you for not making us wonder that. Thank you for the book of Revelation, for the vision that you gave John. Lord, I pray that you would give us a heart to understand the important things there. That you would give us a heart to respect the mysteries, to wonder in awe at all the things described. More than anything, God, I pray that we would see that you acknowledge that some things in this life are tough. Some things in this life are the former things that we're walking through right now. But that God, you offer us a hope and a future. So Lord, I pray that we would cling to that. I pray that we would be of good courage. That no matter where we are, no matter what we're doing, we would live to please you. And that nothing that could happen to us in this life could wrestle away from us the hope and the faith that we have in you. God, we look forward to the day that we can spend eternity with you when Revelation 21 and 22 come to pass. We thank you for this book. We thank you for the series. God, I ask that it would push us closer to you and that it would more deeply entrench us in the hope that we find in you. It's in your son's name I ask these things. Amen.

The All right. Well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. If you are going to miss that Revelation intro, that's the last time you get to hear that music, let me know and I'll send you the clip. You can use it as your alarm clock on Mondays just to really face the week. This is the last part in our series moving through the book of Revelation and it's been a good series. I think it's been good for the church. I think it's been good for our small groups. I've heard that we've had some really good, robust discussions in those, and it's been fun for me to get to tackle this book on your behalf. And sincerely, I appreciate your trust and belief in me as we've walked through this together, and I've kind of served a little bit as a guide through the book of Revelation. By way of review, as we finish up the series, I thought it would be worth it to kind of recap all that we've learned and talked about as we arrive here at the final week. So in the first week, we're setting the scene. It's Revelation chapter one. John arrives. He's given a vision while he's on the island of Patmos. An angel comes and gets him and says, write down the things that I'm going to show you. And in that first chapter, we see this remarkable reunion between John and his savior, Jesus, his best friend, Jesus, who he served and spoken about and longed for for years. And we see that the greatest promise, no matter what else we encounter in the book of Revelation, the greatest promise in the book is that one day we will meet our Savior face to face. That one day we will meet Jesus too. And after we meet Jesus, after we see his face, whatever happens after that is going to be okay. That's the greatest promise in Revelation. In week two, my dad preached and we looked at Revelation 4 and 5. Remember, we skipped the letters to the churches in 2 and 3. We're going to tackle those in a series to be named later. Revelation 4 and 5, God sits on the throne. That's the important part. God's in control. And then Jesus steps forward as the Lamb of God, worthy to open the seals and begin the tribulation process. Remember, we define the the wrath of God and how even though we kind of shy away from it in the 21st century church, it's important. It's important to lean into. It's important to acknowledge. And we actually want a God that's capable of that. And then for the next two weeks, it was kind of academic. I pulled the whiteboard up here one week. We went through the events of the tribulation, the seals and the trumpets and the bowls and God's wrath being poured out and what order that comes and the different views around that. And then we kind of looked at the figures of the tribulation, the antichrist and the false prophet and the dragon and the witnesses and the 144,000 and kind of decoded some of those things within the book. And then last week was probably my favorite week where we look at the return of Christ and what that wins us. How he conquers evil once and for all. He conquers Satan once and for all. He makes all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And we also kind of reflected on the idea that when Jesus comes, we can finally lay down our faith and our hope. Those things are no longer needed because we're looking at our Savior face to face. And so this week, we arrive at the end of the book, at the end of the series, and I almost titled this morning's message, It Begins, or The Beginning, because this is where eternity begins. This is where the temporal world stops in Revelation 22, and eternity begins, an eternity that I want us to see this morning, for which we were created. So we arrive not necessarily at the end today, but at the beginning. As we do, there's a couple more things in Revelation to look at, namely the millennial reign of Christ. The millennial reign of Christ is discussed in Revelation chapter 20. So Jesus has just come down. He stormed down on the white horse. He has the troops of heaven, the angels of heaven arrayed in white linen behind him. They conquer the armies of the antichrist, of Satan, of the false prophet. They conquer the dark kingdom. They take the beast from the sea and the beast from the earth, the antichrist and the false prophet, and Jesus binds them and throws them in the lake of fire forever. And now all that remains is to deal with Satan. How is Jesus at the end of time going to deal with Satan? We find this in Revelation chapter 20. Now just a caveat about this sermon. It was a holiday week, all right? So I wrote this basically in my head during the 24 hours I was in the car this week with a six-month-old, which means I didn't produce notes for Kyle to put in there, which means that Scott back there, who's in charge of the slides, has the easiest job ever. And Carly, who's in charge of printing your notes, had an easy job because there's nothing there. So it's entirely up to you to write down what you want to write down and to follow along as you want to follow along. I would encourage you to grab a Bible. Grab the one in the seat back in front of you and be looking at Revelation 20, 21, and 22. I'm going to read the first four or five verses from each of those chapters as we move through, and they will not appear on the screens. If you're at home and you're watching, grab a Bible so we can go through it together and interact with the text together. But we see the millennial reign in Revelation chapter 20 in the first three verses. John writes, So if you keep reading, what you find is that after Satan is bound and thrown in a pit for a thousand years, that at the end of that thousand years, he is released and allowed to tempt the people on the earth who are alive at that time. For just a little while longer, he pulls away some people from Christ. And then Christ once and for all binds him and throws him in the lake of fire with the Antichrist and the false prophet. So around this, there are a lot of questions. Namely, the biggest one to me is, why in the world would God bind Satan, put him in a pit, make him stay there for a thousand years, and then let him out to tempt people one more time, just one last hurrah from Satan, like God's doing a favor to an old buddy or something, and then throwing him in the lake of fire. Why does God do that? Listen, I don't know. To me, this is one of those mysteries of revelation. I have literally nothing for you. You can research it and read about it, and people make guesses, but in all honesty, as is often the case to me, a lot of the guesses, and in fact, for this one, all of the guesses out there really don't hold intellectual water for me. I see them. I can see how they might be thought of as reasonable, but I can also very easily, to me, poke holes in them. And so I thought it not worth sharing with you the different guesses because they're all bad ones. So I would say, I don't know. It's a mystery on this side of heaven why God chooses to order things in that way. I continue to believe that if in my elevated body, if in my new heavenly body I get at the marriage supper of the lamb, I have the mental capacity to understand this and God deigns to explain it to me and I even still care once I'm in heaven, which I definitely won't. But let's pretend that in heaven while we're amidst this perfect joy, we say, hang on a second. Why'd you do that thing with Satan where you released him one last time? If God were to explain it to us and we had the mental capacity to grasp it, I think we'd all go, oh, thanks. And then we'd go on with our joyful day. By the way, I haven't said this yet. It's important to point out. Part of the reason that heaven is so joyful is because there's no dogs or animals there. It's fantastic. No more hassles, no more cleanups, no more messes. It's really, it's a wonderful place. I know it says lion lays down with lamb. That's figurative. There's no animals in heaven. I'm certain of it. I'm sure your dogs are all there. All right. I'm sure they are. Except for my first dog, Maggie. If they have an afterlife, Maggie's in hell, that dog is. What was I preaching about? So we don't know why God chooses at the end of the millennial reign to allow Satan loose for a period of time and then throws him into the lake of fire. And I'm not going to pretend to offer you explanations because they don't make sense to me. There are also views about the millennial reign. And we're going to get in the weeds just a little bit. And if this doesn't interest you, I am sorry. But there are some people who showed up with questions this morning about the millennial reign. And so this needs to be discussed. So we will move quickly, but there's kind of three traditional views about the millennial reign. They are called amillennial, postmillennial, and premillennial, and they're questions about when does God return? When does Jesus return? Does Jesus return after the millennial reign? Does he return during the millennial reign? Does he return before the millennial reign? And so we're going to basically group them like this. There's premillennial, which says Christ's return is before the millennial reign, that Christ comes back like he does in 19. He conquers Satan. He throws them in there. It's literally a thousand years where he reigns on earth and Christian ideals flourish and Christians flourish and God's kingdom flourishes. And then at the end of those literal thousand years, Satan is released. He tempts some people and then Jesus conquers them once and for all. Amillennial and postmillennial believe, and this is where it gets tricky, that you take chapters 19 and 20 and you lay 20 over chapter 19. See, premillennials believe that first chapter 19 happens, which is the return of Christ, the big war. He comes out of heaven and he conquers the beast. And then chapter 20 happens, which is the millennial reign. So premillennialists read this literally and say that these things literally happen. Christ, after he binds the beast and throws him in the lake of fire, then he reigns for a thousand, he binds Satan, then he reigns for a thousand years, then he loses him. It's a literal thousand years. The amillennial and postmillennial view think that you take chapters 19 and 20 and you lay them over top of each other and that they are different ways of describing the same events. Do you remember in week one when I said when you're interpreting Revelation that sometimes it's linear and sometimes it isn't? And how do you know when it is and it isn't? You just study really hard and you make a good guess. So some people have studied really hard and they've made this guess, that 20 lays over 19. In which case, the millennial reign of Christ, the thousand years, is figurative language for a long time. And we are in the middle of that. The millennial reign comes between the two comings of Christ. The Christ as crucified Savior that we read about in Scripture. And then the Christ as returning conqueror that we talked about last week. That in between those two comings of Christ are the millennial reign. And it is I fall in? Probably the latter, the ah or the post, the figurative meaning of the millennial reign. But as my father is listening to this sermon, he will vehemently disagree with that. So there are, I would say there are smart people on either side, but there's not necessarily based on me and my dad being on the two different sides. You'll have to pick which one of us is dumb. But there are good arguments to be made for either side, and it's really not that important which side you choose. The important part is, in the end, Jesus wins, and he binds Satan, and then we move into an eternity that's briefly described in Revelation 21 and 22. In Revelation 21, and you can look at verses 1 through four, we have a passage that I've shared a lot from this stage, that I refer to a lot in my preaching. It's a passage that I think is maybe the single most encouraging and hope-filled passage in the Bible. It's one that I use to comfort others with. It's one that I use to comfort myself. It infuses itself into my preaching and into my thinking over and over again, so much so that I can vividly remember that in the interview process and talking with the elders, when they were asking me about my worldview and my theology and all the different things and my approach to the Bible, I referenced this passage tearfully in my interview with them because it, over the years, has come to mean so much to me. And I thought it worthwhile before we read it this morning to tell you how I encountered this passage and the hope that it can bring in the most dire of situations as we prepare ourselves to look towards eternity. About, I think it was about eight years ago, I was at Greystone Church outside of Georgia, or Atlanta, and I was the small groups pastor and a couple other things, and one of the other hats that I wore at that church was I was the care pastor. Thank you. There it is. Right. Yeah, we were short-staffed. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. That'll probably never be my title again anywhere I go, but it was my title there. And I got a call one day, and it was a couple who had just recently started coming to the church, and they had an eight-year-old son named Landon, whose name I'll never forget, who had passed away. And it was an incredibly sad circumstance. Landon had an infection. He was sick. Went to the doctor, got some antibiotics, took him, went upstairs, I think take a bath or something, and they found him dead. He had had an allergic reaction to the medicine that he took, and they didn't know it. Incredibly sad situation. So sad, in fact, that a few days after the funeral, I was driving somewhere, and I called Jen, and she said, what's wrong? And I said, I don't know. I just, I feel heavy. And Jen goes, Nate, those are emotions. And I was like, well, then you can keep these. These are terrible. I hate this. It was a hard time. And so leading up to meeting with the family and doing the funeral, I called my pastor growing up, a man named Buddy Hoffman, who's no longer with us. I wish he were so I could talk to him about being a pastor. But I called Buddy. I said, Buddy, this has happened. I'm going to have to do this funeral and meet with this family. This is way out of my depth. I don't know what to do or what to say. What do I do? And he says in his typical, very blunt, forthright, buddy nature, he said, Nathan, just don't say anything stupid. And I laughed and I said, yeah, man, that's the goal. That's what I'm trying to avoid. That's why I'm on the phone with you. And he said, well, in times like this, so often people try to say things when they shouldn't. Sometimes your presence matters way more than your words, so really lean into just being quiet and being there. And then when you share scripture, be careful what you share, because it can often ring hollow in times of deep grief. And I agreed with him because I think of when something terrible like this happens, when we lost our first child due to miscarriage and somebody would quote us Jeremiah 29 11, I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, prayers to prosper you, not to harm you, plans for a hope and a future. Listen, listen, listen, that's true and that's good, but that doesn't help my pain, right? And if part of God's plan was to take a kid from me, then I don't really want to be a part of that plan. You know what I'm saying? So those verses can ring hollow. And I didn't want to say those to this family, Romans 8, 28. You know, for we know that for those who love him, that all things work together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose. That's good and that's true. And that means that in eternity, it's gonna work out and we see it working out. That's what Revelation is about, is affirming Romans 8, 28. But in the moment, boy, that doesn't really bring a lot of comfort to a grieving family. And I said, I agree with you. There's verses that ring hollow. so what do I share? And he said, I always use Revelation 20, Revelation 21, verses one through four. This is the hope that we cling to. And this is why these verses have infused themselves into my preaching and into my thinking and into my prayers and why I still use this passage at every funeral that I do because I believe it's maybe the most hope-filled passage in all of Scripture. And it says this. John writes, I love this part. That, remember last week, I said that hope and faith were burdens and we cling to our hope and our faith. That is the hope that we cling to. This is the event that we place our faith in. That Jesus' death on the cross won us this. That one day, God will be with his people and we will be with our God and he will wipe every tear off of our face and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And if you've heard me do a funeral, you've heard me say what the former things are. In this moment, the former things are death, pain, cancer, birth defects, difficulties, abuse, estrangement, broken homes. The former things are the brokenness of other people that spills out and breaks the people around them. The brokenness is gone is this idea that hurt people hurt people because nobody's hurt, so nobody's getting hurt. The former things are all of the things that cause you stress and anxiety and pain and discomfort now. There's coming a day where those things are no longer present. Those are the former things. And it hearkens back to this promise that we see in Revelation chapter 1 that we highlighted in the first week, that one day we will be with our Savior face to face. One day we will sit in the very presence of God. He will be with us and we will be with him. And in that day when that comes, the former things, the things that cause us pain now. The things that are difficult now. The things that made this week tough. The things that have made these last two years tough. The things that you came in here worrying about now, the scars that you bear from the people who have come before you, all those things have passed away and we walk in perfect joy. This is why I love this verse because this verse acknowledges the former things and it doesn't seek to cheapen those things. It doesn't tell Sean Weldon who lost his son Landon that this thing doesn't matter, that this thing doesn't hurt. Don't worry about it. God has a plan for this thing. It says, no, no, no. This is one of the former things, man. And if you can cling to your faith and your hope through this, it will become a former thing and you'll see him again. So I find this passage to be uniquely and tremendously hope-filled. And it inaugurates the eternity that we are going to share in together. The holy city comes down. We are a part of the new Jerusalem. We are a part of the new heaven and the new earth. Some people believe God creates an entirely new heaven and new earth. Some people believe he replaces this one. I believe it doesn't make a bit of difference. But Revelation 21 inaugurates the eternity following the marriage supper of the Lamb, the greatest celebration feast of all time. And it ushers us into this beginning of life. Not the end of time, but the beginning of eternity. And this eternity is described, I think, the best in chapter 22, verses 1 through 5. In 21, there's a description of what the new heaven and the new earth is going to look like. And if you remember in week one, I read you a portion of that description where it talks about the jewels that adorn the walls and sit at the base. It says that the city is like gold and the streets are like glass. And we're gonna see a description of a crystal river flowing from the throne of God. And it describes it as this remarkably beautiful place. And that's well and good. And I don't want to cheapen or dismiss the remarkable beauty of heaven. But what is more compelling to me is the peace that we find there, is the tranquility of life there, is the provision of God there, and the perfect peace that we rest in for all of eternity. And I think that's better captured in these verses, in chapters 22, verses 1 through 5, where John writes this. Through the middle of the light that we need. His kingdom knows no night. His kingdom knows no darkness. The tree of life is on either side of the river. It provides for us in season all that we need. There is nothing left to do but to enjoy God and His perfect love and the people that we are there with forever. And what I want you to focus on this morning and what I want you to remember from this series is that this is what we are created for. You understand? What we see in Revelation 21, what's described in Revelation 22, that's what you were created for. Hear me, you were not created for this place. You were not created for this world. You were not created for your current body. You were not created for that. You were created for what is described in Revelation 21 and 22. You were created for eternity. It's why you have a soul that will outlive your body. It's why you have a soul that will pass into this next life without the broken shell that it inhabits right now. It's why your soul longs for eternity. It's why there's something inside of you that says there's gotta be more than this. It's why the people who have accomplished the most on the planet get to the end of their rope of accomplishment and say there has to be more than this. It's why nothing in your life ever fully satisfies you. It's why I believe this to be true. Perfect happiness is not possible this side of heaven. To choose one road towards happiness is to fundamentally disallow another road to happiness. And we are therefore incapable of perfect happiness on this side of heaven. And that's why we are incapable of it, to remind us that on that side of heaven, we will walk in perfect happiness for all of eternity. Because we were created for that eternity. We were designed and purposed for that. We long for it. Paul writes about this over and over again in the things that he says and in the things that he writes to the early church. Particularly in Romans 8 where he says the whole earth groans for this eternity, pressing against the shell that we are in, waiting for our perfect bodies. And I think that this is why Paul writes this in 2 Corinthians 4, verses 17 and 18. You don't have to turn there. You can just listen to me because these are famous verses. We refer to these often. These are funeral verses. These are grieving verses. But I think that Paul writes them because Paul was aware of this idea that we were not created for this place. We were created for eternity. So he writes this in chapter 4, verse 17 of 2 Corinthians. I'm going to pick it up in 16. Paul calls all of the pain that we endure in this life light momentary affliction. And just so you know, he's addressing a persecuted church. And the verses that precede this, he's talking about the harm that faces them, the death that faces them. He's talking, he's in, if you want to look historically, he's in a time period where the life expectancy had to be somewhere in the 40s or maybe as late as the 50s. He's looking at a high infant mortality rate. He's looking at people who have lots of kids and are very used to some of the kids not making it to adulthood. These people know what loss is. They know what pain is on a level that most of us in this room are not even close to being acquainted with. So before we think that Paul is being flippant with our pain that we walk through, let's be clear. No, no, no. He's being flippant with way worse pain than what we walk through. And he still calls it light and momentary affliction. And he says it is not worth comparing with the glory that we will experience on the other side of eternity. The pain that we experience in this life is not worth comparing. It's just preparing us for the weight of glory that we will experience on the other side of eternity. I've mentioned this before, but you've likely forgotten it, and it stands out to me. When Lily, my daughter, was I think about three years old, we were putting her to bed one night. And as we were trying to put her to bed, she insisted on jumping on her bed. And we told her, no, you can't do that. Stop jumping on your bed. And she tried to do it. And I had to be stern. No, stop jumping on your bed. You're not allowed to jump on your bed. She lost her mind. She was so bummed that she couldn't jump on her bed. I mean, she screamed and she cried and she kicked and she wailed and she flailed. And it was the biggest deal in the world to her. And, you know, in that moment, would it have been easier to just say, all right, listen, kid, just jump on the bed for five minutes and then go to bed, right? Of course it would have. But the Rubicon had been crossed, man. I had planted the flag and I had to defend it. You will not jump on this bed. I will cry with you all night before you jump on this bed one more time. Like it is not happening. So she's losing her mind over and I won't let her, I won't let her jump on the bed and whatever. And while it's happening, after she settles down, she goes to sleep. I think to myself, that's so dumb. She treated it like it was the biggest deal ever. She's not even going to remember it in the morning. Two days later, that thing never happened. When she's an adult, it's not even a blip on the radar screen. It's completely and totally inconsequential to who she is as a human in every way that she didn't get to jump on her bed that night. It does not matter. And then I started thinking about all the things when you become an adult that mattered so much when you were younger that when you're older, it's like, who cares? Remember how much you cared about homecoming? And then 20 years later, it's just a waste of money. It was silly. Remember all the things that mattered so much in elementary school? Then in the light of adulthood, they just, who cares? It makes me wonder how often in this life we're wailing and flailing and ticked off and upset and hurt. And God's in heaven going, you're just trying to jump on the bed, man. When you get here, it's not gonna matter. Quit getting so dang worked up. It makes me wonder how often we just wanna jump on our bed. It makes me wonder all the things that we get so worked up about that cause us so much anxiety that just spike our blood pressure. We just got done with a week-long trip driving to two different cities with a six-month-old. So I had some chest tightness this week and it got pretty stressful. And it makes me just, if I see that through the eyes of God and in light of eternity, how utterly ridiculous it was for me to waste one ounce of energy on getting frustrated at a six-month-old for crying. And when I read through the Bible, the more I walk with God, the more of Scripture that I see, the more times I expose myself to Jesus and the Gospels, the more times I read Paul, the more times I see the nature of God and begin to ask, why did he do this? And why did he direct in this way? And why doesn't he give us more of this? The more I conclude that God himself is far more concerned with eternity than we are. And that the problem is not trying to figure out all the things that are happening in this life and how to make sense of them all. The problem is not focusing enough on the next life and looking forward to that and seeing this life through the perspective of eternity the way that God does. Because when we read through scripture over and over and over again, it's very clear to me that God cares way more about what happens after Revelation 22 than he does about what's happening right now. He's just trying to get us there. So as we go through this life, I think it could be helpful to have reminders of eternity. And maybe that's what joy and pain are. I would argue this morning, if we had notes, this would be a thing that showed up on the screen that I would encourage you to write down. But I would note this morning that all joy and all pain are simply reminders that we're not yet where we belong. All joy that we experience and all pain that we experience are really simply reminders that we are not yet where we belong. Thanksgiving was this last week. If at your Thanksgiving table there was pain, because maybe someone wasn't at that table this year who was there last year. Maybe we hoped that there would be a baby or spouse or at least just a boyfriend or a girlfriend or something at the table this year and there wasn't and that caused us pain. Maybe there's strife in our family. Maybe one of our family members just isn't who they used to be. And because of myriad circumstances, when we sat around our table this week, there was pain for us. That pain is simply a reminder that we're not yet where we're supposed to be. That pain that we experience, that's a former thing. It will pass away. So we let pain remind us that I'm not intended for this place. I'm holding on for the next place. Likewise, joy is a reflection of the perfect joy that we will experience in heaven. If we sat around the Thanksgiving table this week and there was particular joy there, there was richness of friends and richness of family and richness of relationships. If there was a new seat at the table, if there was a new baby at the party, if there is a pending birth to celebrate, if there was a new relationship represented there, if there was reconciliation, if maybe this was the first time we've been together as a family since we had to start wearing the dumb masks, maybe that's what got us together and that's what brought us joy. That joy that you experienced this week is just a reflection and a smudgy window of the pure joy that's waiting on you in eternity. It's just a hint of the joy that's waiting on us in the future. And so I think we would be wise to allow all pain and all joy simply remind us that we are not yet where we are supposed to be because God did not intend us for this life. God did not design us for this life. God designed us for the next one. And in Revelation chapter 22, chapter 21 and 22, we see those things begin. That's why I actually like the following verses in 2 Corinthians. The ones that follow the light and momentary affliction and they are preparing us for this eternal grace. Because they acknowledge that we were not made for this place. I'm going to read to you just kind of a selection of them from 2 Corinthians chapter 5. Paul writes, He's talking about what we talked about, the former things, that we weren't made for this world, we were made for the next one. So if in this tent, sometimes it's uncomfortable, if in this life, sometimes we feel pain, those are groanings that are reminding us that we were made for the next life. And then he goes on down in verse six body, we are away from the Lord. For we walk by faith, not by sight. Yes, we are of good courage. And we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please Him. Scripture acknowledges, that. It is right and good to hope for that. It is right and good to remind ourselves that there is perfect joy where the former things have passed away waiting on us and we cling to that hope. And I said in week one that this mysterious book of Revelation really is the greatest book of hope that we have in Scripture and I hope that you've reached that conclusion on your own as well. So I would finish the series with this encouragement. Cling to your faith. Cling to the hope that this is true and that one day these things will be realized. Cling to your faith and cling to your hope and take courage, Christians, because we know how this story ends. Let's pray. Father, thank you for telling us how the story ends. Thank you for not making us wonder that. Thank you for the book of Revelation, for the vision that you gave John. Lord, I pray that you would give us a heart to understand the important things there. That you would give us a heart to respect the mysteries, to wonder in awe at all the things described. More than anything, God, I pray that we would see that you acknowledge that some things in this life are tough. Some things in this life are the former things that we're walking through right now. But that God, you offer us a hope and a future. So Lord, I pray that we would cling to that. I pray that we would be of good courage. That no matter where we are, no matter what we're doing, we would live to please you. And that nothing that could happen to us in this life could wrestle away from us the hope and the faith that we have in you. God, we look forward to the day that we can spend eternity with you when Revelation 21 and 22 come to pass. We thank you for this book. We thank you for the series. God, I ask that it would push us closer to you and that it would more deeply entrench us in the hope that we find in you. It's in your son's name I ask these things. Amen.

Amen. Good morning, Grace. Good morning online. Thank you, Steve. That was wonderful. It's good to see everybody. We've got some new folks venturing in this week, Braving the Elements. My name is Nate, for those of you that I haven't gotten to meet yet or for those watching online. This is the last part in our series called A Time of Kings. And as we think about questions like that, I really believe that there's one loud message that should come from the book of Kings. And I want us to see that this morning. And as I think about Kings, and remember I call it a book because originally it was written as one big long book. So as I think about the book of Kings, I really have realized as we've studied it together that this is a tragic book. This book is really sad. It's really sad because of the hope with which it starts and the devastation with which it ends. If you think back to the very beginning of the book of Kings, if you have a Bible at home, you can flip it there. If you have a Bible with you, you can look at 2 Kings 25. That's where we're going land today, and then we're going to jump to, I think, Samuel, and then Revelation, and John. So, you know, we'll be all over the place this morning. But if you think about the way that Kings begins, it's like the climax of hope. David is the king. You'll remember in the very first week of this series, if you've been watching along or listening along, that David is the king, that the nation of Israel clamored for a king, and Samuel the prophet said, you don't need one, God is your king. And they said, we really want a king. We think that a king is going to bring about all the promises that God made to us, because they are God's chosen people. They live in an awareness of the promises that they have received, that the land of Canaan, that Israel is going to be theirs, that they're going to have a multitude of descendants, and that one of their descendants is going to bless the whole earth. And so they cling to these promises. And they don't see them coming to fruition in the time of judges. It was a dark time in the nation of Israel. And they said, you know what? If we have a king, that person can lead us into prominence and be God's chosen person. And so they elected Saul. He made the most sense. He was head and shoulders above everybody else. He was really good looking. When you looked at him, you thought, that guy should be king. If you need a good picture of who Saul was, he looked a lot like me. But that didn't work out. And David is God's chosen man to be king, and he was a great king. He established Israel into international prominence. He, in him, was this man who walked closely with God, who wrote the Psalms, who led well, who conquered enemies, who won victories, and certainly this king is the king that's going to lead us in the prominence that we have been promised. And David asks the father, can I build your temple? I want to build your home. He goes to God and he says, I want to build your home where your presence can reside with us. Because all the way back in the desert, when Moses was in charge, 450 years prior, God gave him instructions about setting up a tabernacle that could move with them. That's where they put the Ark of the Covenant. That's where they had the Holy of Holies. That's where the presence of God rested among his people. And it was time to build God a permanent home. And David said, let me do this. And God says, I can't let you do that. There's too much blood on your hands, but I'm going to make you a promise. And we're going to look at that promise in a minute. He said, among those promises, your son is going to build my house. And so the book of Kings picks up with the end of the incredible reign of David that has launched Israel into international importance. This high watermark in the kingdom. And then he has assembled all the goods and materials so that as soon as his son Solomon takes over, he can build the temple. And he does. And much of the beginning of Kings is dedicated to the dedication and construction of this temple. And there's a beautiful prayer that Solomon prays for the people then and for you and I. It's really wonderful. You should go read it. It's this high watermark in the history of Israel. It's the culmination of 450 years of hope. And you have to think, man, look at us. These kings are bringing about the desired results. They're pushing us into prominence and they're bringing about the promises of God. This king thing is really working out. Hope is high. Then Solomon's son is terrible. They descend into civil war, and the northern tribes never get a good king. The southern tribe gets some that they get to hope in. And in the northern tribes, when it looks like hope is lost and they have evil kings like Ahab, they're putting their hope in kings, and it's not going to be Ahab. He's not going to bring about the future that God desires for us. But God does bring some strong prophets into the reign of Ahab. He brings Elijah, who wins the victory on Mount Carmel, against the 450 prophets of Baal. And you read that and you go, okay, now, now God's promises are going to come true. Now we're going to have the king that we are waiting for that's going to set everything right. It seems like the tide has turned and the hearts of God's people are going to be turned towards him, but they're not. And then God sends Elisha to secede Elijah, and he does twice the miracles that Elijah does. And it's this glimmer of hope that maybe the hearts of God's people will be turned to him, but they're not. And then God sends sporadically these good kings, Hezekiah, who defeated the armies of Sennacherib through prayer, by taking the threatening letter and laying it down before the Lord in the temple and saying, God, please protect your people. And God does because of Hezekiah's faithfulness. And you think, maybe this is a good king. Now, as you're reading the narrative and you're following along and it's just bad news, bad news, bad news, this is when there's going to be good news. And by the end of his life, he's no good anymore. We wait for some generations and Josiah, this glimmer of hope that we talked about last week, comes along. And he eradicates all of the idols and he turns the hearts of the people towards the Lord. But God says, you know, it's too late. My people are already turned away from me. I'm going to take the kingdom from you in four kings. And sure enough, he does. Jehoahaz and Jehoakim and Jehoachin and then Zedekiah and then it's done. Four generations. And the very end of Kings, this book that began with so much hope, a king is going to come and he's going to set everything right and the world for God's people is going to look exactly as God intended it to look. The book of Kings ends like this in chapter 25. I'm going to read you a summary of what's happening in verse 8. This is pretty much what they're looking at. That's the scene as we finish this hopeful book. We watch king after king come in. Maybe he's the one. Maybe the prophet's the one. Maybe the tide is going to turn. And we're waiting for the hero. We're waiting for the uptick. We're waiting for the climax. There's going to be a resolution to this. And at the end of the story, King Nebuchadnezzar sends in his army. They burn down God's temple, Solomon's temple that he built. They burn it down. They burn down the palace. They burn down the homes of all the prominent people in Jerusalem. And they tear down the walls. It's left in shambles. It is an ash heap of a city, and they take all the richest and wealthiest and most capable with them, only leaving behind the most impoverished and the most destitute. That's the picture of God's chosen people at the end of the book of Kings. It's utter devastation. It's utter and complete devastation. And you're reading this book and you're waiting for someone to come along. You expect to turn the page and then it's like, but then this happened and it's not. It's just somebody else telling the story, telling the same stories in Chronicles. There's no page turn here. You're expecting the hero to come. You're expecting the king to come, the right one to come along and restore everything, and it doesn't happen. As I'm studying in my office this week, I'm going, man, this really stinks that the book of Kings ends this way. Really find another story to just talk about and maybe we'll just let them discover this on their own, their own leisure. But it dawned on me that the devastation in Kings is very purposeful. This is really the point of the book. It's meant to end this way when we place our hope in earthly kings. The devastation is designed to display the reality that an earthly king will never be enough. The devastation in kings is designed to display the reality that an earthly king will never be enough. They kept waiting on an earthly leader. They kept waiting on someone to come and sit on the physical throne and usher them into prominence and make them a great nation, and it just wasn't going to happen, and God was letting them slowly, painfully realize the thing you're hoping in to fix your lives is not the thing that's going to do it. Boy, that's a whole sermon in and of itself, isn't there? How many slow, painful lessons have we learned putting our hope in the wrong thing? But it's meant to show his people an earthly king will never be enough. And if you're paying attention to the Old Testament, if you're paying attention to the things that God is saying to his people, even in the time of kings, when their hope is placed in an earthly king, if you're listening to what he's saying to his people, you will hear that he is telling them you are looking for the wrong kind of king. I referred earlier to 2 Samuel 7. This is where God made David a promise. It's referred to as the Davidic covenant. It's where he doubles down, he triples down, he reminds the people of his promise to them. And he promises that he's going to send a king to sit on David's throne. And these are the words of God. Look at what he says in verse 14. He says, So he's talking about Jesus here. He's going to be a son for me. He is going to pay a penalty for you. And then when he does that, he's going to sit on the throne forever. This is kingdom language. This is king language in the middle of the time of kings that they're not listening to. And then God sends prophet after prophet that we have in the major and the minor prophets in the rest of the Old Testament to tell them of their coming king, of the coming Messiah, most pointedly in the book of Isaiah. When Isaiah tells God's people, Isaiah is a prophet during the reign of Hezekiah, one of the good kings during this time. And he says that God is going to send someone and that by his stripes we will be healed and that he will be Emmanuel, God with us, and that he will be the King of kings and the Lord of lords. What God is trying to communicate to them that they can't seem to capture is that what they really need is a divine king. What they need is Jesus. What they're waiting on is the Messiah. They continue to look to an earthly king to make their problems right, to make things go away, to confirm and restore the promises of God. And what God is trying to tell them all along, through his promise to David, through the voice of his prophets, is, hey guys, you're looking for the wrong king. You're not paying attention to the right things. You don't need another earthly king. You need a divine king. You need Jesus. And this language isn't just in the Old Testament. We see king language throughout the Bible. You'll remember, if you were here in the spring of 2019, we went through the book of John for I think 12 or 14 weeks. And one of the themes we see is the people of Israel when they meet Jesus continually clamoring to make him king. He had to disappear from their midst so that they wouldn't start a revolution too early. He had to heal people and say, but don't tell anybody because he didn't want word to get out that the Messiah was here. He didn't want to foment revolution. This is why he did his ministry in the far-flung corners of northern Israel rather than coming down south to the capital of Jerusalem until later in his life because he knew that it would set into motion a series of events that he could not reverse because they were clamoring to make him king. They were clamoring so badly to make him king that at the end of his life when he was on trial with Pilate, the Roman governor, Pilate, he was accused by the people who were trying to kill him of being someone who was leading a revolution, who claimed to be the king of the Jews. And he's trying to overthrow Roman rule. And Pilate, you should care about this deeply. And so Pilate asked him, they say you're a king. Is that what you? And Jesus says, yeah, but not of this. You can have this. This is too small for me. I don't want this kingdom. I have a kingdom, but it's not here. If it were here, my angels would come and defend me, but they're not, because my kingdom is eternal. My kingdom is divine. My kingdom is universal. And with his death, he bought our citizenship into that kingdom. And then, as the narrative of the Bible continues to press forward, and we continue to wait for our king, along with the children of Israel, when is our king going to return and set things right? When is he going to restore things to the way that he intended them to be? And we fast forward to the book of Revelation, where we see more king language. In Revelation chapter 6, we have the cries of the martyrs. It's are the exact cries of the hearts of the saints in 2 Kings 25. And God's chosen people are in the middle of total devastation. Their hearts cry out, God, when will you make this right? How are you letting this happen? Why are you letting King Nebuchadnezzar do this? This is evil, God. This is not your plan. This is not your promise. Why is it going this way? Why are you allowing this devastation? It's the same cry that was in the hearts of the martyrs in Revelation 6. God, how long will you let this happen before you avenge what they've done to us? How long will you watch devastation occur in your creation? It's the same thing. It's the same cry of the hearts of the people who had to witness the terror of slavery, who had to endure the persecution of Nero, or the persecution that continues to happen in closed-off countries to this day. It's the same devastation that cries out to God in our own lives when we have a diagnosis or we have a loss or we exist in the rubble of a relationship. And we say, God, this doesn't feel right. How much longer will you let this happen? We need our king to make it right. And in Revelation 19, we get it. It's the most hopeful chapter in all the Bible when we see the king that we've always wanted, that we've always hoped for, that the nation of Israel longed for without realizing it. I love this passage. I always get emotional when I read this passage. Revelation 19, beginning in verse 11. This is the appearance of Christ as king as we finish the Bible. The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True. and fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty on his robe and on his thigh. His name is written King of Kings and Lord of Lords. That's Jesus. And when he comes to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, when he comes to fix the devastation, when he comes to restore his creation and claim his throne, he is no longer coming as the Lamb of God. He is coming as the Lion of Judah. And he's going to answer those cries of our heart. And he's going to respond to the devastation. And he's going to speak right to the hearts of the people in Israel, watching their loved ones be carried away as slaves. As the palace burns and the walls lay in rubble, he is going to speak directly to their hearts as he establishes his divine eternal kingdom. And so what I want us to see as we think about the book of Kings and the lessons that we learn from it is that the entire book is meant to end in devastation and allow that devastation to point God's people for their need for Jesus so that they can see that Jesus is the hope of God's people in the midst of devastation. Kings ends that way on purpose. It's not a mistake by God. It's not like God was watching history and go, well, that didn't work out as expected. I was really hoping one of these kings would be the guy. He knew that it would end bad. He told Samuel when they were clamoring for a king, he says, you give them one, but it's not going to end well. And it didn't. He knew this was going to happen, but he let it happen so that his people would see their need for a divine king, and that devastation would point them to Christ. Jesus was their hope in the midst of devastation. And in the same way, our lesson from Kings is that Jesus is our hope in the midst of our devastation too. When things aren't going right, when we identify with the martyrs crying out to God, how much longer are you going to let this happen? You've made me some promises, God. You've said that everything I pray will be yes in your name. You said that if I ask for things that you will give them to me. You've said in Romans 28 that one day everything's going to work out for the good of those who love you and are called according to your purpose. When's that coming, God? Because this stinks. That frustration and devastation is meant to point you to Christ and remind you that we all collectively are waiting for Revelation 19. We all collectively are waiting for the return of our King who will make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, who will sit on the throne of David forever, who will restore his creation to exactly what it is meant to restore, who will bring about the reality of Revelation 20 where it says God will be with his people and his people will be with their God and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things. All the things that caused devastation, all the things that caused us to cry out with the martyrs, those things have passed away because Jesus has won a victory over them. And for all of eternity, we exist in a perfect kingdom with our perfect king. Kings is designed to help us anticipate that future and cling to that hope. And when we experience devastation in our own life, that is there to point us to our need for Jesus. Sometimes it's a simple devastation of our souls. We come to the end of ourselves, and we realize that our way is not working. We realize that there is something about this life that is making me unhappy. There is something that is missing. There is something that I need. That devastation is designed to point us to our need for Christ. If you're here this morning or you're watching online and you're experiencing that devastation of your soul, you need Jesus. You don't need another earthly king. You don't need another earthly fix. You don't need to read another book or a new regimen of discipline. You need Jesus. The devastation of our relationships points us to our need for Jesus. When people disappoint us, it points us to a person who won't. When we lose someone that we love so much and we cry out and we say, God, this isn't fair. Why'd you take them? It was too early. Our King has died for us and conquered that death to assure us that we will see that person again one day. So we turn our eyes with hope to Revelation 19 when faithful and true comes out of the sky. When Jesus comes as the Lion of Judah to restore his kingdom and restore order to the way that it should be. And the devastation of finances and the devastation of just life events and the devastation of disappointment, big and little. Little disappointments are meant to turn our eyes to Jesus and say, yeah, this place isn't perfect. We need you to come make it perfect, God. We usher in, we pray for your return. Come soon, Lord Jesus. Big devastation, huge things from which we don't know if we will recover are intentionally designed to point our eyes towards Christ and say, yes, Jesus, this stinks. We are waiting for you. We are yearning for you. We are inviting you in. Come soon, Lord Jesus. The devastation in Kings is intentionally left in the Bible and is allowed intentionally to occur so that it will forever point God's people to Jesus in the midst of their devastation. If we remember nothing else from the book of Kings, remember that the whole book is designed to point us there. And remember that if you are experiencing some form of devastation or disappointment or disillusionment in your life, that the point of that, just like the point of it happening in Kings, is that you would point your eyes towards Christ and eagerly anticipate the return of your King, who is going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. Let's pray. Lord, we love you. We are grateful for you. Jesus, we need you. Come soon to get us. God, you have watched from your throne all kinds of devastation. You have watched all sorts of divisiveness and violence. You have watched evil. And you are as fed up with it as we are. God, now in our time, it's hard to turn on the news or pick up your phone and not see something that disappoints us, something that breaks our heart, something that seems evil. God, you see it too. We need our king. Would you send him soon to rescue us? And God, while we wait, would you set our eyes on him? Would you set our gaze on you? Would you fill us with your spirit and give us the peace of hope? May we be a people who continually turn our eyes towards you. It's in our king's name that we pray. Amen.

Amen. Good morning, Grace. Good morning online. Thank you, Steve. That was wonderful. It's good to see everybody. We've got some new folks venturing in this week, Braving the Elements. My name is Nate, for those of you that I haven't gotten to meet yet or for those watching online. This is the last part in our series called A Time of Kings. And as we think about questions like that, I really believe that there's one loud message that should come from the book of Kings. And I want us to see that this morning. And as I think about Kings, and remember I call it a book because originally it was written as one big long book. So as I think about the book of Kings, I really have realized as we've studied it together that this is a tragic book. This book is really sad. It's really sad because of the hope with which it starts and the devastation with which it ends. If you think back to the very beginning of the book of Kings, if you have a Bible at home, you can flip it there. If you have a Bible with you, you can look at 2 Kings 25. That's where we're going land today, and then we're going to jump to, I think, Samuel, and then Revelation, and John. So, you know, we'll be all over the place this morning. But if you think about the way that Kings begins, it's like the climax of hope. David is the king. You'll remember in the very first week of this series, if you've been watching along or listening along, that David is the king, that the nation of Israel clamored for a king, and Samuel the prophet said, you don't need one, God is your king. And they said, we really want a king. We think that a king is going to bring about all the promises that God made to us, because they are God's chosen people. They live in an awareness of the promises that they have received, that the land of Canaan, that Israel is going to be theirs, that they're going to have a multitude of descendants, and that one of their descendants is going to bless the whole earth. And so they cling to these promises. And they don't see them coming to fruition in the time of judges. It was a dark time in the nation of Israel. And they said, you know what? If we have a king, that person can lead us into prominence and be God's chosen person. And so they elected Saul. He made the most sense. He was head and shoulders above everybody else. He was really good looking. When you looked at him, you thought, that guy should be king. If you need a good picture of who Saul was, he looked a lot like me. But that didn't work out. And David is God's chosen man to be king, and he was a great king. He established Israel into international prominence. He, in him, was this man who walked closely with God, who wrote the Psalms, who led well, who conquered enemies, who won victories, and certainly this king is the king that's going to lead us in the prominence that we have been promised. And David asks the father, can I build your temple? I want to build your home. He goes to God and he says, I want to build your home where your presence can reside with us. Because all the way back in the desert, when Moses was in charge, 450 years prior, God gave him instructions about setting up a tabernacle that could move with them. That's where they put the Ark of the Covenant. That's where they had the Holy of Holies. That's where the presence of God rested among his people. And it was time to build God a permanent home. And David said, let me do this. And God says, I can't let you do that. There's too much blood on your hands, but I'm going to make you a promise. And we're going to look at that promise in a minute. He said, among those promises, your son is going to build my house. And so the book of Kings picks up with the end of the incredible reign of David that has launched Israel into international importance. This high watermark in the kingdom. And then he has assembled all the goods and materials so that as soon as his son Solomon takes over, he can build the temple. And he does. And much of the beginning of Kings is dedicated to the dedication and construction of this temple. And there's a beautiful prayer that Solomon prays for the people then and for you and I. It's really wonderful. You should go read it. It's this high watermark in the history of Israel. It's the culmination of 450 years of hope. And you have to think, man, look at us. These kings are bringing about the desired results. They're pushing us into prominence and they're bringing about the promises of God. This king thing is really working out. Hope is high. Then Solomon's son is terrible. They descend into civil war, and the northern tribes never get a good king. The southern tribe gets some that they get to hope in. And in the northern tribes, when it looks like hope is lost and they have evil kings like Ahab, they're putting their hope in kings, and it's not going to be Ahab. He's not going to bring about the future that God desires for us. But God does bring some strong prophets into the reign of Ahab. He brings Elijah, who wins the victory on Mount Carmel, against the 450 prophets of Baal. And you read that and you go, okay, now, now God's promises are going to come true. Now we're going to have the king that we are waiting for that's going to set everything right. It seems like the tide has turned and the hearts of God's people are going to be turned towards him, but they're not. And then God sends Elisha to secede Elijah, and he does twice the miracles that Elijah does. And it's this glimmer of hope that maybe the hearts of God's people will be turned to him, but they're not. And then God sends sporadically these good kings, Hezekiah, who defeated the armies of Sennacherib through prayer, by taking the threatening letter and laying it down before the Lord in the temple and saying, God, please protect your people. And God does because of Hezekiah's faithfulness. And you think, maybe this is a good king. Now, as you're reading the narrative and you're following along and it's just bad news, bad news, bad news, this is when there's going to be good news. And by the end of his life, he's no good anymore. We wait for some generations and Josiah, this glimmer of hope that we talked about last week, comes along. And he eradicates all of the idols and he turns the hearts of the people towards the Lord. But God says, you know, it's too late. My people are already turned away from me. I'm going to take the kingdom from you in four kings. And sure enough, he does. Jehoahaz and Jehoakim and Jehoachin and then Zedekiah and then it's done. Four generations. And the very end of Kings, this book that began with so much hope, a king is going to come and he's going to set everything right and the world for God's people is going to look exactly as God intended it to look. The book of Kings ends like this in chapter 25. I'm going to read you a summary of what's happening in verse 8. This is pretty much what they're looking at. That's the scene as we finish this hopeful book. We watch king after king come in. Maybe he's the one. Maybe the prophet's the one. Maybe the tide is going to turn. And we're waiting for the hero. We're waiting for the uptick. We're waiting for the climax. There's going to be a resolution to this. And at the end of the story, King Nebuchadnezzar sends in his army. They burn down God's temple, Solomon's temple that he built. They burn it down. They burn down the palace. They burn down the homes of all the prominent people in Jerusalem. And they tear down the walls. It's left in shambles. It is an ash heap of a city, and they take all the richest and wealthiest and most capable with them, only leaving behind the most impoverished and the most destitute. That's the picture of God's chosen people at the end of the book of Kings. It's utter devastation. It's utter and complete devastation. And you're reading this book and you're waiting for someone to come along. You expect to turn the page and then it's like, but then this happened and it's not. It's just somebody else telling the story, telling the same stories in Chronicles. There's no page turn here. You're expecting the hero to come. You're expecting the king to come, the right one to come along and restore everything, and it doesn't happen. As I'm studying in my office this week, I'm going, man, this really stinks that the book of Kings ends this way. Really find another story to just talk about and maybe we'll just let them discover this on their own, their own leisure. But it dawned on me that the devastation in Kings is very purposeful. This is really the point of the book. It's meant to end this way when we place our hope in earthly kings. The devastation is designed to display the reality that an earthly king will never be enough. The devastation in kings is designed to display the reality that an earthly king will never be enough. They kept waiting on an earthly leader. They kept waiting on someone to come and sit on the physical throne and usher them into prominence and make them a great nation, and it just wasn't going to happen, and God was letting them slowly, painfully realize the thing you're hoping in to fix your lives is not the thing that's going to do it. Boy, that's a whole sermon in and of itself, isn't there? How many slow, painful lessons have we learned putting our hope in the wrong thing? But it's meant to show his people an earthly king will never be enough. And if you're paying attention to the Old Testament, if you're paying attention to the things that God is saying to his people, even in the time of kings, when their hope is placed in an earthly king, if you're listening to what he's saying to his people, you will hear that he is telling them you are looking for the wrong kind of king. I referred earlier to 2 Samuel 7. This is where God made David a promise. It's referred to as the Davidic covenant. It's where he doubles down, he triples down, he reminds the people of his promise to them. And he promises that he's going to send a king to sit on David's throne. And these are the words of God. Look at what he says in verse 14. He says, So he's talking about Jesus here. He's going to be a son for me. He is going to pay a penalty for you. And then when he does that, he's going to sit on the throne forever. This is kingdom language. This is king language in the middle of the time of kings that they're not listening to. And then God sends prophet after prophet that we have in the major and the minor prophets in the rest of the Old Testament to tell them of their coming king, of the coming Messiah, most pointedly in the book of Isaiah. When Isaiah tells God's people, Isaiah is a prophet during the reign of Hezekiah, one of the good kings during this time. And he says that God is going to send someone and that by his stripes we will be healed and that he will be Emmanuel, God with us, and that he will be the King of kings and the Lord of lords. What God is trying to communicate to them that they can't seem to capture is that what they really need is a divine king. What they need is Jesus. What they're waiting on is the Messiah. They continue to look to an earthly king to make their problems right, to make things go away, to confirm and restore the promises of God. And what God is trying to tell them all along, through his promise to David, through the voice of his prophets, is, hey guys, you're looking for the wrong king. You're not paying attention to the right things. You don't need another earthly king. You need a divine king. You need Jesus. And this language isn't just in the Old Testament. We see king language throughout the Bible. You'll remember, if you were here in the spring of 2019, we went through the book of John for I think 12 or 14 weeks. And one of the themes we see is the people of Israel when they meet Jesus continually clamoring to make him king. He had to disappear from their midst so that they wouldn't start a revolution too early. He had to heal people and say, but don't tell anybody because he didn't want word to get out that the Messiah was here. He didn't want to foment revolution. This is why he did his ministry in the far-flung corners of northern Israel rather than coming down south to the capital of Jerusalem until later in his life because he knew that it would set into motion a series of events that he could not reverse because they were clamoring to make him king. They were clamoring so badly to make him king that at the end of his life when he was on trial with Pilate, the Roman governor, Pilate, he was accused by the people who were trying to kill him of being someone who was leading a revolution, who claimed to be the king of the Jews. And he's trying to overthrow Roman rule. And Pilate, you should care about this deeply. And so Pilate asked him, they say you're a king. Is that what you? And Jesus says, yeah, but not of this. You can have this. This is too small for me. I don't want this kingdom. I have a kingdom, but it's not here. If it were here, my angels would come and defend me, but they're not, because my kingdom is eternal. My kingdom is divine. My kingdom is universal. And with his death, he bought our citizenship into that kingdom. And then, as the narrative of the Bible continues to press forward, and we continue to wait for our king, along with the children of Israel, when is our king going to return and set things right? When is he going to restore things to the way that he intended them to be? And we fast forward to the book of Revelation, where we see more king language. In Revelation chapter 6, we have the cries of the martyrs. It's are the exact cries of the hearts of the saints in 2 Kings 25. And God's chosen people are in the middle of total devastation. Their hearts cry out, God, when will you make this right? How are you letting this happen? Why are you letting King Nebuchadnezzar do this? This is evil, God. This is not your plan. This is not your promise. Why is it going this way? Why are you allowing this devastation? It's the same cry that was in the hearts of the martyrs in Revelation 6. God, how long will you let this happen before you avenge what they've done to us? How long will you watch devastation occur in your creation? It's the same thing. It's the same cry of the hearts of the people who had to witness the terror of slavery, who had to endure the persecution of Nero, or the persecution that continues to happen in closed-off countries to this day. It's the same devastation that cries out to God in our own lives when we have a diagnosis or we have a loss or we exist in the rubble of a relationship. And we say, God, this doesn't feel right. How much longer will you let this happen? We need our king to make it right. And in Revelation 19, we get it. It's the most hopeful chapter in all the Bible when we see the king that we've always wanted, that we've always hoped for, that the nation of Israel longed for without realizing it. I love this passage. I always get emotional when I read this passage. Revelation 19, beginning in verse 11. This is the appearance of Christ as king as we finish the Bible. The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True. and fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty on his robe and on his thigh. His name is written King of Kings and Lord of Lords. That's Jesus. And when he comes to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, when he comes to fix the devastation, when he comes to restore his creation and claim his throne, he is no longer coming as the Lamb of God. He is coming as the Lion of Judah. And he's going to answer those cries of our heart. And he's going to respond to the devastation. And he's going to speak right to the hearts of the people in Israel, watching their loved ones be carried away as slaves. As the palace burns and the walls lay in rubble, he is going to speak directly to their hearts as he establishes his divine eternal kingdom. And so what I want us to see as we think about the book of Kings and the lessons that we learn from it is that the entire book is meant to end in devastation and allow that devastation to point God's people for their need for Jesus so that they can see that Jesus is the hope of God's people in the midst of devastation. Kings ends that way on purpose. It's not a mistake by God. It's not like God was watching history and go, well, that didn't work out as expected. I was really hoping one of these kings would be the guy. He knew that it would end bad. He told Samuel when they were clamoring for a king, he says, you give them one, but it's not going to end well. And it didn't. He knew this was going to happen, but he let it happen so that his people would see their need for a divine king, and that devastation would point them to Christ. Jesus was their hope in the midst of devastation. And in the same way, our lesson from Kings is that Jesus is our hope in the midst of our devastation too. When things aren't going right, when we identify with the martyrs crying out to God, how much longer are you going to let this happen? You've made me some promises, God. You've said that everything I pray will be yes in your name. You said that if I ask for things that you will give them to me. You've said in Romans 28 that one day everything's going to work out for the good of those who love you and are called according to your purpose. When's that coming, God? Because this stinks. That frustration and devastation is meant to point you to Christ and remind you that we all collectively are waiting for Revelation 19. We all collectively are waiting for the return of our King who will make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, who will sit on the throne of David forever, who will restore his creation to exactly what it is meant to restore, who will bring about the reality of Revelation 20 where it says God will be with his people and his people will be with their God and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things. All the things that caused devastation, all the things that caused us to cry out with the martyrs, those things have passed away because Jesus has won a victory over them. And for all of eternity, we exist in a perfect kingdom with our perfect king. Kings is designed to help us anticipate that future and cling to that hope. And when we experience devastation in our own life, that is there to point us to our need for Jesus. Sometimes it's a simple devastation of our souls. We come to the end of ourselves, and we realize that our way is not working. We realize that there is something about this life that is making me unhappy. There is something that is missing. There is something that I need. That devastation is designed to point us to our need for Christ. If you're here this morning or you're watching online and you're experiencing that devastation of your soul, you need Jesus. You don't need another earthly king. You don't need another earthly fix. You don't need to read another book or a new regimen of discipline. You need Jesus. The devastation of our relationships points us to our need for Jesus. When people disappoint us, it points us to a person who won't. When we lose someone that we love so much and we cry out and we say, God, this isn't fair. Why'd you take them? It was too early. Our King has died for us and conquered that death to assure us that we will see that person again one day. So we turn our eyes with hope to Revelation 19 when faithful and true comes out of the sky. When Jesus comes as the Lion of Judah to restore his kingdom and restore order to the way that it should be. And the devastation of finances and the devastation of just life events and the devastation of disappointment, big and little. Little disappointments are meant to turn our eyes to Jesus and say, yeah, this place isn't perfect. We need you to come make it perfect, God. We usher in, we pray for your return. Come soon, Lord Jesus. Big devastation, huge things from which we don't know if we will recover are intentionally designed to point our eyes towards Christ and say, yes, Jesus, this stinks. We are waiting for you. We are yearning for you. We are inviting you in. Come soon, Lord Jesus. The devastation in Kings is intentionally left in the Bible and is allowed intentionally to occur so that it will forever point God's people to Jesus in the midst of their devastation. If we remember nothing else from the book of Kings, remember that the whole book is designed to point us there. And remember that if you are experiencing some form of devastation or disappointment or disillusionment in your life, that the point of that, just like the point of it happening in Kings, is that you would point your eyes towards Christ and eagerly anticipate the return of your King, who is going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. Let's pray. Lord, we love you. We are grateful for you. Jesus, we need you. Come soon to get us. God, you have watched from your throne all kinds of devastation. You have watched all sorts of divisiveness and violence. You have watched evil. And you are as fed up with it as we are. God, now in our time, it's hard to turn on the news or pick up your phone and not see something that disappoints us, something that breaks our heart, something that seems evil. God, you see it too. We need our king. Would you send him soon to rescue us? And God, while we wait, would you set our eyes on him? Would you set our gaze on you? Would you fill us with your spirit and give us the peace of hope? May we be a people who continually turn our eyes towards you. It's in our king's name that we pray. Amen.

Amen. Good morning, Grace. Good morning online. Thank you, Steve. That was wonderful. It's good to see everybody. We've got some new folks venturing in this week, Braving the Elements. My name is Nate, for those of you that I haven't gotten to meet yet or for those watching online. This is the last part in our series called A Time of Kings. And as we think about questions like that, I really believe that there's one loud message that should come from the book of Kings. And I want us to see that this morning. And as I think about Kings, and remember I call it a book because originally it was written as one big long book. So as I think about the book of Kings, I really have realized as we've studied it together that this is a tragic book. This book is really sad. It's really sad because of the hope with which it starts and the devastation with which it ends. If you think back to the very beginning of the book of Kings, if you have a Bible at home, you can flip it there. If you have a Bible with you, you can look at 2 Kings 25. That's where we're going land today, and then we're going to jump to, I think, Samuel, and then Revelation, and John. So, you know, we'll be all over the place this morning. But if you think about the way that Kings begins, it's like the climax of hope. David is the king. You'll remember in the very first week of this series, if you've been watching along or listening along, that David is the king, that the nation of Israel clamored for a king, and Samuel the prophet said, you don't need one, God is your king. And they said, we really want a king. We think that a king is going to bring about all the promises that God made to us, because they are God's chosen people. They live in an awareness of the promises that they have received, that the land of Canaan, that Israel is going to be theirs, that they're going to have a multitude of descendants, and that one of their descendants is going to bless the whole earth. And so they cling to these promises. And they don't see them coming to fruition in the time of judges. It was a dark time in the nation of Israel. And they said, you know what? If we have a king, that person can lead us into prominence and be God's chosen person. And so they elected Saul. He made the most sense. He was head and shoulders above everybody else. He was really good looking. When you looked at him, you thought, that guy should be king. If you need a good picture of who Saul was, he looked a lot like me. But that didn't work out. And David is God's chosen man to be king, and he was a great king. He established Israel into international prominence. He, in him, was this man who walked closely with God, who wrote the Psalms, who led well, who conquered enemies, who won victories, and certainly this king is the king that's going to lead us in the prominence that we have been promised. And David asks the father, can I build your temple? I want to build your home. He goes to God and he says, I want to build your home where your presence can reside with us. Because all the way back in the desert, when Moses was in charge, 450 years prior, God gave him instructions about setting up a tabernacle that could move with them. That's where they put the Ark of the Covenant. That's where they had the Holy of Holies. That's where the presence of God rested among his people. And it was time to build God a permanent home. And David said, let me do this. And God says, I can't let you do that. There's too much blood on your hands, but I'm going to make you a promise. And we're going to look at that promise in a minute. He said, among those promises, your son is going to build my house. And so the book of Kings picks up with the end of the incredible reign of David that has launched Israel into international importance. This high watermark in the kingdom. And then he has assembled all the goods and materials so that as soon as his son Solomon takes over, he can build the temple. And he does. And much of the beginning of Kings is dedicated to the dedication and construction of this temple. And there's a beautiful prayer that Solomon prays for the people then and for you and I. It's really wonderful. You should go read it. It's this high watermark in the history of Israel. It's the culmination of 450 years of hope. And you have to think, man, look at us. These kings are bringing about the desired results. They're pushing us into prominence and they're bringing about the promises of God. This king thing is really working out. Hope is high. Then Solomon's son is terrible. They descend into civil war, and the northern tribes never get a good king. The southern tribe gets some that they get to hope in. And in the northern tribes, when it looks like hope is lost and they have evil kings like Ahab, they're putting their hope in kings, and it's not going to be Ahab. He's not going to bring about the future that God desires for us. But God does bring some strong prophets into the reign of Ahab. He brings Elijah, who wins the victory on Mount Carmel, against the 450 prophets of Baal. And you read that and you go, okay, now, now God's promises are going to come true. Now we're going to have the king that we are waiting for that's going to set everything right. It seems like the tide has turned and the hearts of God's people are going to be turned towards him, but they're not. And then God sends Elisha to secede Elijah, and he does twice the miracles that Elijah does. And it's this glimmer of hope that maybe the hearts of God's people will be turned to him, but they're not. And then God sends sporadically these good kings, Hezekiah, who defeated the armies of Sennacherib through prayer, by taking the threatening letter and laying it down before the Lord in the temple and saying, God, please protect your people. And God does because of Hezekiah's faithfulness. And you think, maybe this is a good king. Now, as you're reading the narrative and you're following along and it's just bad news, bad news, bad news, this is when there's going to be good news. And by the end of his life, he's no good anymore. We wait for some generations and Josiah, this glimmer of hope that we talked about last week, comes along. And he eradicates all of the idols and he turns the hearts of the people towards the Lord. But God says, you know, it's too late. My people are already turned away from me. I'm going to take the kingdom from you in four kings. And sure enough, he does. Jehoahaz and Jehoakim and Jehoachin and then Zedekiah and then it's done. Four generations. And the very end of Kings, this book that began with so much hope, a king is going to come and he's going to set everything right and the world for God's people is going to look exactly as God intended it to look. The book of Kings ends like this in chapter 25. I'm going to read you a summary of what's happening in verse 8. This is pretty much what they're looking at. That's the scene as we finish this hopeful book. We watch king after king come in. Maybe he's the one. Maybe the prophet's the one. Maybe the tide is going to turn. And we're waiting for the hero. We're waiting for the uptick. We're waiting for the climax. There's going to be a resolution to this. And at the end of the story, King Nebuchadnezzar sends in his army. They burn down God's temple, Solomon's temple that he built. They burn it down. They burn down the palace. They burn down the homes of all the prominent people in Jerusalem. And they tear down the walls. It's left in shambles. It is an ash heap of a city, and they take all the richest and wealthiest and most capable with them, only leaving behind the most impoverished and the most destitute. That's the picture of God's chosen people at the end of the book of Kings. It's utter devastation. It's utter and complete devastation. And you're reading this book and you're waiting for someone to come along. You expect to turn the page and then it's like, but then this happened and it's not. It's just somebody else telling the story, telling the same stories in Chronicles. There's no page turn here. You're expecting the hero to come. You're expecting the king to come, the right one to come along and restore everything, and it doesn't happen. As I'm studying in my office this week, I'm going, man, this really stinks that the book of Kings ends this way. Really find another story to just talk about and maybe we'll just let them discover this on their own, their own leisure. But it dawned on me that the devastation in Kings is very purposeful. This is really the point of the book. It's meant to end this way when we place our hope in earthly kings. The devastation is designed to display the reality that an earthly king will never be enough. The devastation in kings is designed to display the reality that an earthly king will never be enough. They kept waiting on an earthly leader. They kept waiting on someone to come and sit on the physical throne and usher them into prominence and make them a great nation, and it just wasn't going to happen, and God was letting them slowly, painfully realize the thing you're hoping in to fix your lives is not the thing that's going to do it. Boy, that's a whole sermon in and of itself, isn't there? How many slow, painful lessons have we learned putting our hope in the wrong thing? But it's meant to show his people an earthly king will never be enough. And if you're paying attention to the Old Testament, if you're paying attention to the things that God is saying to his people, even in the time of kings, when their hope is placed in an earthly king, if you're listening to what he's saying to his people, you will hear that he is telling them you are looking for the wrong kind of king. I referred earlier to 2 Samuel 7. This is where God made David a promise. It's referred to as the Davidic covenant. It's where he doubles down, he triples down, he reminds the people of his promise to them. And he promises that he's going to send a king to sit on David's throne. And these are the words of God. Look at what he says in verse 14. He says, So he's talking about Jesus here. He's going to be a son for me. He is going to pay a penalty for you. And then when he does that, he's going to sit on the throne forever. This is kingdom language. This is king language in the middle of the time of kings that they're not listening to. And then God sends prophet after prophet that we have in the major and the minor prophets in the rest of the Old Testament to tell them of their coming king, of the coming Messiah, most pointedly in the book of Isaiah. When Isaiah tells God's people, Isaiah is a prophet during the reign of Hezekiah, one of the good kings during this time. And he says that God is going to send someone and that by his stripes we will be healed and that he will be Emmanuel, God with us, and that he will be the King of kings and the Lord of lords. What God is trying to communicate to them that they can't seem to capture is that what they really need is a divine king. What they need is Jesus. What they're waiting on is the Messiah. They continue to look to an earthly king to make their problems right, to make things go away, to confirm and restore the promises of God. And what God is trying to tell them all along, through his promise to David, through the voice of his prophets, is, hey guys, you're looking for the wrong king. You're not paying attention to the right things. You don't need another earthly king. You need a divine king. You need Jesus. And this language isn't just in the Old Testament. We see king language throughout the Bible. You'll remember, if you were here in the spring of 2019, we went through the book of John for I think 12 or 14 weeks. And one of the themes we see is the people of Israel when they meet Jesus continually clamoring to make him king. He had to disappear from their midst so that they wouldn't start a revolution too early. He had to heal people and say, but don't tell anybody because he didn't want word to get out that the Messiah was here. He didn't want to foment revolution. This is why he did his ministry in the far-flung corners of northern Israel rather than coming down south to the capital of Jerusalem until later in his life because he knew that it would set into motion a series of events that he could not reverse because they were clamoring to make him king. They were clamoring so badly to make him king that at the end of his life when he was on trial with Pilate, the Roman governor, Pilate, he was accused by the people who were trying to kill him of being someone who was leading a revolution, who claimed to be the king of the Jews. And he's trying to overthrow Roman rule. And Pilate, you should care about this deeply. And so Pilate asked him, they say you're a king. Is that what you? And Jesus says, yeah, but not of this. You can have this. This is too small for me. I don't want this kingdom. I have a kingdom, but it's not here. If it were here, my angels would come and defend me, but they're not, because my kingdom is eternal. My kingdom is divine. My kingdom is universal. And with his death, he bought our citizenship into that kingdom. And then, as the narrative of the Bible continues to press forward, and we continue to wait for our king, along with the children of Israel, when is our king going to return and set things right? When is he going to restore things to the way that he intended them to be? And we fast forward to the book of Revelation, where we see more king language. In Revelation chapter 6, we have the cries of the martyrs. It's are the exact cries of the hearts of the saints in 2 Kings 25. And God's chosen people are in the middle of total devastation. Their hearts cry out, God, when will you make this right? How are you letting this happen? Why are you letting King Nebuchadnezzar do this? This is evil, God. This is not your plan. This is not your promise. Why is it going this way? Why are you allowing this devastation? It's the same cry that was in the hearts of the martyrs in Revelation 6. God, how long will you let this happen before you avenge what they've done to us? How long will you watch devastation occur in your creation? It's the same thing. It's the same cry of the hearts of the people who had to witness the terror of slavery, who had to endure the persecution of Nero, or the persecution that continues to happen in closed-off countries to this day. It's the same devastation that cries out to God in our own lives when we have a diagnosis or we have a loss or we exist in the rubble of a relationship. And we say, God, this doesn't feel right. How much longer will you let this happen? We need our king to make it right. And in Revelation 19, we get it. It's the most hopeful chapter in all the Bible when we see the king that we've always wanted, that we've always hoped for, that the nation of Israel longed for without realizing it. I love this passage. I always get emotional when I read this passage. Revelation 19, beginning in verse 11. This is the appearance of Christ as king as we finish the Bible. The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True. and fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty on his robe and on his thigh. His name is written King of Kings and Lord of Lords. That's Jesus. And when he comes to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, when he comes to fix the devastation, when he comes to restore his creation and claim his throne, he is no longer coming as the Lamb of God. He is coming as the Lion of Judah. And he's going to answer those cries of our heart. And he's going to respond to the devastation. And he's going to speak right to the hearts of the people in Israel, watching their loved ones be carried away as slaves. As the palace burns and the walls lay in rubble, he is going to speak directly to their hearts as he establishes his divine eternal kingdom. And so what I want us to see as we think about the book of Kings and the lessons that we learn from it is that the entire book is meant to end in devastation and allow that devastation to point God's people for their need for Jesus so that they can see that Jesus is the hope of God's people in the midst of devastation. Kings ends that way on purpose. It's not a mistake by God. It's not like God was watching history and go, well, that didn't work out as expected. I was really hoping one of these kings would be the guy. He knew that it would end bad. He told Samuel when they were clamoring for a king, he says, you give them one, but it's not going to end well. And it didn't. He knew this was going to happen, but he let it happen so that his people would see their need for a divine king, and that devastation would point them to Christ. Jesus was their hope in the midst of devastation. And in the same way, our lesson from Kings is that Jesus is our hope in the midst of our devastation too. When things aren't going right, when we identify with the martyrs crying out to God, how much longer are you going to let this happen? You've made me some promises, God. You've said that everything I pray will be yes in your name. You said that if I ask for things that you will give them to me. You've said in Romans 28 that one day everything's going to work out for the good of those who love you and are called according to your purpose. When's that coming, God? Because this stinks. That frustration and devastation is meant to point you to Christ and remind you that we all collectively are waiting for Revelation 19. We all collectively are waiting for the return of our King who will make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, who will sit on the throne of David forever, who will restore his creation to exactly what it is meant to restore, who will bring about the reality of Revelation 20 where it says God will be with his people and his people will be with their God and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things. All the things that caused devastation, all the things that caused us to cry out with the martyrs, those things have passed away because Jesus has won a victory over them. And for all of eternity, we exist in a perfect kingdom with our perfect king. Kings is designed to help us anticipate that future and cling to that hope. And when we experience devastation in our own life, that is there to point us to our need for Jesus. Sometimes it's a simple devastation of our souls. We come to the end of ourselves, and we realize that our way is not working. We realize that there is something about this life that is making me unhappy. There is something that is missing. There is something that I need. That devastation is designed to point us to our need for Christ. If you're here this morning or you're watching online and you're experiencing that devastation of your soul, you need Jesus. You don't need another earthly king. You don't need another earthly fix. You don't need to read another book or a new regimen of discipline. You need Jesus. The devastation of our relationships points us to our need for Jesus. When people disappoint us, it points us to a person who won't. When we lose someone that we love so much and we cry out and we say, God, this isn't fair. Why'd you take them? It was too early. Our King has died for us and conquered that death to assure us that we will see that person again one day. So we turn our eyes with hope to Revelation 19 when faithful and true comes out of the sky. When Jesus comes as the Lion of Judah to restore his kingdom and restore order to the way that it should be. And the devastation of finances and the devastation of just life events and the devastation of disappointment, big and little. Little disappointments are meant to turn our eyes to Jesus and say, yeah, this place isn't perfect. We need you to come make it perfect, God. We usher in, we pray for your return. Come soon, Lord Jesus. Big devastation, huge things from which we don't know if we will recover are intentionally designed to point our eyes towards Christ and say, yes, Jesus, this stinks. We are waiting for you. We are yearning for you. We are inviting you in. Come soon, Lord Jesus. The devastation in Kings is intentionally left in the Bible and is allowed intentionally to occur so that it will forever point God's people to Jesus in the midst of their devastation. If we remember nothing else from the book of Kings, remember that the whole book is designed to point us there. And remember that if you are experiencing some form of devastation or disappointment or disillusionment in your life, that the point of that, just like the point of it happening in Kings, is that you would point your eyes towards Christ and eagerly anticipate the return of your King, who is going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. Let's pray. Lord, we love you. We are grateful for you. Jesus, we need you. Come soon to get us. God, you have watched from your throne all kinds of devastation. You have watched all sorts of divisiveness and violence. You have watched evil. And you are as fed up with it as we are. God, now in our time, it's hard to turn on the news or pick up your phone and not see something that disappoints us, something that breaks our heart, something that seems evil. God, you see it too. We need our king. Would you send him soon to rescue us? And God, while we wait, would you set our eyes on him? Would you set our gaze on you? Would you fill us with your spirit and give us the peace of hope? May we be a people who continually turn our eyes towards you. It's in our king's name that we pray. Amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would be shocked because it's Memorial Day and no one visits a church on Memorial Day. But if you are doing that, I'd love to meet you in the lobby after the service. And as I always say on holiday Sundays, if you are here in church on a holiday Sunday, God does love you more than vacationing Christians. It is objectively true if you're watching online. Thanks so much for doing that. Try to be here next year. And here's what, Memorial Day is a special day for me. I'm not going to get into it because we have a lot of ground to cover and what I want to talk about this morning because I thought Memorial Day would be a great day to talk about pain and suffering and why bad things happen to good people feels right but I I just I love I love you guys I love my church I love how we worship and here's how I know that the good Christians came today. Because this is just a little bit behind the scenes, how the sausage is made. Sometimes Gibby and I, Gibson, Aaron Gibson, our worship pastor, will talk. And I'll just kind of say like, hey, be careful about laying out and letting the congregation sing. Because there's not many people here or the vibe is weird or there's not good energy and that might fall flat and then that'll be terrible. So let's relax on that. And he's like, yeah, you're right. And so for him to be able, and I'm being honest, for him to be able in worship to lay out on Memorial Day and say, just you sing, and for me to be here and hear my church praising our God on Memorial Day, we got the worshipers here today. So that was good. That was good. And I enjoyed that very much. Before I just barrel into the sermon, we should acknowledge what today is. We live in a country where we can do this freely, where the barrier to entry to church is extremely low because we have religious freedoms that have been fought for and have been died for. And we celebrate those today, not just our religious freedoms, but our freedom of speech and all the other things. And it is worth it and appropriate and good to take a minute today and acknowledge the freedom that we have, the morning that we can enjoy, and the lives that have been lost for that sake, to earn us this freedom. So it's worth acknowledging here at the head that we don't sit here for lack of sacrifice. And we honor those sacrifices today. This morning is our last morning in our series called FAQs. Next week, I'm excited. We're going to launch a, we're going to launch a, it's actually, so you guys may hear this and groan. Okay, so please don't do that because I think it's actually going to be really good and we're going to enjoy it. We're going to do a 14-week series in Moses. Bill, Bill Reed, a long time, a resting elder. I said that. He goes, what? Like, it made a faith. Yes, Bill, 14 weeks, baby. Buckle up. We're going to be in Exodus going through the life of Moses. There's so much to learn about the life of Moses and from his life. And I'm excited to begin that journey with you guys. But this week we're wrapping up our series FAQ, which as you've been told, we kind of solicited some questions from small groups and from different people in the church. And I've interacted with ideas that as a pastor, I get these questions a lot. And the most common question to come up when you solicit these things from people, what do you have questions about? What questions about your faith exist? Every time something like this is done, at least in my experience, the most common question to come up is the question of suffering, which is generally phrased, why do bad things happen to good people? And implicit in that question is, why does a God who says he loves us let my dad die, right? That's what we're asking. Why does a God who says he loves us allow these terrible things to happen? Why are school shootings a thing? Why is genocide a thing? Why was the Holocaust or slavery a thing? That's what we're asking. And that comes up all the time. And I don't know about you, but the way that I've experienced my understanding of a theology of suffering over my years as a believer is in my early years, I'm kind of handed an apparatus or a way to understand suffering that helps me process it when it happens to other people. And so that's sufficient for me then. But then my life, then I encounter profound suffering. I'm like, whoa, what I was handed is not adequate to explain this to me and help me reconcile it and be okay with it. And then down the road, there's something else that happens. And now you have to explain suffering to someone else. And, and what you've been handed is not adequate to explain it to them. And so you realize there's some deficiency in how you understand suffering and the theology of suffering. And here's why this is really important, because when we misunderstand the theology of suffering, this more often, I think, than almost anything else within the Christian realm causes people to actually walk away from their faith because the way that they understand suffering isn't robust enough to be adequate for the experiences that they're having in their life. And so they allow suffering to actually move them away from God rather than run to God. So it becomes very important to develop a robust theology of suffering for the sake of maintaining our faith and fidelity to God. So it's important that we talk about it this morning. And typically, when we think about suffering and this challenging theology of suffering, we go to circumstances like one that I've, that shaped my way of thinking about suffering, which is when my, one of my best friends, a guy named Chris Gerlach was 30 years old. Gerlach and I were roommates in college. We used to keep each other up at night, each other the Tsar of Dumb and you're the King of Stupid and you are the Emperor of Moronity and things like that. That's the kind of friendship that we had. Gerlach was a great man. And at 30, as a pastor, with three kids under five, He was in good health playing frisbee, playing ultimate frisbee. He threw a touchdown pass 40 yards. They caught it, celebrated, turned around to celebrate with Gerlach and he was dead on the field. Widowmaker heart attack. I watched at the graveside his five-year-old knock on his coffin and ask his mom, my wife's college roommate, Carla, when is daddy going to wake up? That's when you go back to scripture and you go, God, why would you let that happen? Right? And I'm not so naive as to think that you don't all have very similar stories of a time in your life when you say, God, why would you let this thing happen? And so here's what I'm going to say about this, because this is, that kind of suffering is actually not the suffering that I want to talk about today. Because I've done that before. And if you've been here for a long time, you've heard me tell that story before. And we've talked about it. And I've done three or four sermons about that level of suffering that just mystifies you and makes you go, my goodness, God, how could you allow this? And so as I approached it today, I thought, I don't want to do that sermon again. I don't think it serves the church to do that sermon again. I think there's actually another thing about suffering that we need to think about. But before I just jumped into what I want us to think about today, I didn't want to breeze past that kind of suffering that is so mystifying and so grief-inducing that it causes you to question your faith. And so on that, I've done three or four sermons. And if you're interested in them, email me and I will send you the link and say, this is where I talked about this. Because it's important to address that kind of profound grief. But here's the very quick version of how that sermon goes, okay? I'm going to give you the cliff notes. I'm going to move very fast. I'm going to answer this question, how do we address profound grief? And then I want to move into actually what I want to talk to you about reframing the way we think about suffering today. The answer to the question in very profound grief is John 11, 35, which is simply this, shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. That's the answer to profound suffering, okay? The situation here, when this verse comes up, Jesus' purported best friends, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus had sent word to Jesus that Lazarus was dying. Could you please come heal him? And Jesus says, okay. And then he waits two days and then he goes to Bethany where they lived. And as he's on the way to Bethany, Lazarus dies and outside their their home, Mary meets Jesus on the street. And she's weeping and she says, why did you do this? Why did you let my brother die? Why are you allowing me to be in this kind of pain? It's the question we ask when we suffer. God, why'd you do this? And Jesus' response in that suffering is, he wept. He wept. Now, here's why this is important. Years ago, I listened to one of the most impactful sermons I've ever heard in my life by a pastor from California named Rick Warren. Many of you have probably heard of him. He had a, I believe, a 27 or 29-year-old son that took his own life because he dealt with mental health issues. And when that happened, he stepped out of the pulpit for a few months. And when he came back, he preached a sermon series that I would highly recommend you Google called How I Got Through What I Went Through. And in that opening sermon, he pointed to Jesus wept. And he said this, I'll never forget this. We pastors put phrases up on the screen and you write down and fill in the blanks. And here's what I know. You don't remember that crap. You don't know what I said. It doesn't matter. But every now and again, something happens that you remember. And this is one that I remember. And he said, we serve a God that offers us his presence because explanations don't help. He offers us his presence and he offers us his hope because what we need in moments of profound grief is not explanations. We need him. And so Jesus weeping in John 11 is a depiction of the fact that we have a God that in moments of profound grief offers us his empathy. And he offers us his tears. And he offers us his presence. So that is the Cliff Notes version of that sermon. If I were going to preach that sermon, I would just add in some other illustrations and some other points and make it last 30 minutes, but I would just say that. That's the answer to grief, is that our God doesn't offer us explanations because we can't really handle them and we can't really understand them, but he offers us his presence. And that's unique in the pantheon of gods that the world would offer to us. So with that being said, if we can together as a room set that aside and go, okay, there's some grief that requires profound empathy from God. And it might not have a purpose and it might not be on, it might not be God's plan. It might just happen. And we have to process that and deal with that. And that's one of the things that I think for sure is that no one dodges the raindrops of tragedy in their life. Everyone deals with profound grief. And the reality of the world is, according to Romans 8, that all of creation yearns for the return of the king to set right this creation. And then the verse that I point out all the time in Revelation, at the end of days, there'll be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And so sometimes we just accept that profound grief is part of those former things that we will not have to deal with in eternity. And so we set those aside and God is present with us in that suffering. But there are other kinds of suffering that don't fit in that box and that we don't talk about enough. And so this morning, what I want to invite you to do is instead of thinking about all of suffering and all sadness and all grief in that box, can we create another larger box for other kinds of suffering? And I believe that it's Hebrews 12 that actually creates this box for us and this other way to think about why sometimes suffering happens in our lives. I want to read to you Hebrews chapter 12, verses 4 through 12. It's a lot, but it's important, so we're going to process it together. Here's what it says. In your struggle against sin, you have not resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And you have completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son or his child. It says, my son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline. And do not lose heart when he rebukes you. Because the Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Here's the encouragement. Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined and everyone undergoes discipline, then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the father of spirits and live? They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best, but God disciplines us for our good in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Therefore, and I'm coming back to this verse because this is a good one. Strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees, he says. So here's what this passage allows us to understand and begin to frame up about the occurrences of suffering and hardship in our life. In some suffering, like we just talked about, there is empathy. But in most suffering, there is purpose. So in some suffering, it's so gut-wrenching and heartbreaking that I would never look at Carla Gerlach and tell her after her child knocked on the coffin and say, when is dad going to wake up? I would never whisper in her ear, hey, God has a purpose for this and you're going to be better for it. I would never do that. That would be clumsy and stupid. And if you ever say that to someone who's just lost a loved one, you should be slapped in the face right away or chopped in the throat. Just something. Maybe backhanded, old school style. That'd be great with a glove. That's a clumsy, stupid thing to say. Please don't say that to people. So sometimes profound suffering, there is empathy. Jesus weeps. But what I would posit to you, for you to assess on your own, is whether or not most suffering is actually allowed by God and is purposeful. In some suffering, there is empathy. But in most suffering, there is purpose. And so what we want to focus on today is the suffering that God allows for that purpose. And what I want to encourage you to think about is some times in your life when you've suffered, some times in your life when you've hurt, or maybe what you're walking through right now that is difficult, a difficult relationship, job, friendship, situation with your children, maybe your marriage is hard, maybe work is tough right now. Every one of us has a pain point in our life, something that's causing us to suffer. And so what I want to encourage you to do this morning is to consider those things and to ask the question, is it possible that what I don't need in this situation is empathy? What I actually need is to believe in the purpose that God has in allowing this to occur in my life. With that in mind, I want to revisit verses six and seven because I think there's a profound truth there. Verse six says, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Seven, endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? And then if you go on an eight, it says if you're not disciplined, you're actually being neglected. You don't belong to him. And as I read that, and as I was preparing this sermon, in my house that week, my daughter Lily and I had a tough day. I don't know if you know this, but my children as pastor's children are not perfect. And if you'd like to judge me for that, up yours, because neither are your kids, okay? So let's just cover that right there. And Lily and I are very similar. And we had a day where we butted heads. And there were big emotions. And she's nine, she's allowed big emotions. We have to learn to process those. And she says some things to me that would, frankly, have gotten my butt beat when I was a kid. That would have been a big, regretful decision. And so later, I came back to her when things were calm. I said, hey, I love you. And here's a phrase that I use with her a lot. I love you too much to allow you to act like that. I love you too much to allow you to say things like that. I love you too much to allow you to think that that is an okay way to respond in situations like that. Because I love you that much, there will be consequences for your actions. You will feel pain, which usually comes in the form of screen time. Or mommy's not going to sing songs to you tonight. That's the worst. That's a big one. But I have to tell my daughter who I love. And I have to tell my son who I love. And my parents had to tell me this. I love you too much to not do everything in my power to fashion you into who God created you to be. That's my job. And I love you too much to not do that. Now in the moment, this for her is painful. But let's put on our big boy and our big girl pants and ask the question, is it possible that sometimes God allows pain in our lives that hurts very much, that is very inconvenient and uncomfortable, because he loves us too much to not fashion us into the people that he created us to be. Is it not possible that some pain and some suffering, and I would posit most pain and suffering, is actually good? Is this not possible, this idea that some pain is from God? We don't talk about this a lot. I don't preach about this a lot. Pastors don't like to bring this up. But is it possible that some pain and grief, that where your mind goes as you identify the suffering in your life and the things that are hard in your life? Is it not possible that God is using those things to fashion you into the person he wants you to be because he loves you too much to not work on you in that way? Is it possible that your suffering is actually a result of your father's love? The idea for this sermon actually came from my trip to Istanbul in March. And I don't mean to keep bringing it up, but clearly, I can't just preach out of that trip forever. You guys will get tired of it. But clearly, it was an impactful trip for me. And this is actually the sermon that I'm giving you today. It's a truncated version of my friend's slide deck. It's a 90-minute presentation called Sonship and Suffering based in Hebrews chapter 12. So I'm giving you the 25-minute version of it because I took five minutes to talk about other suffering. You don't even have to sit through the 90 minutes, okay? I'm saving you from that suffering. So you should be grateful. And he preached this. He taught this to a room of Iranian pastors who suffer for their faith. And let's just be very clear about this, okay? I'm not going to belabor this point because if you can't agree with me on it, you're an unreasonable person. Iranian Christians suffer more than American ones, okay? And he preached it to them. And I asked him, where do you get off preaching this to Iranian pastors risking their families for their faith from the comfort of Chapel Hill? I didn't phrase it like that. It was nicer, but that was the question. And he said, it's in the Bible. I'm a general. I have to deploy the troops, and this is what's required. And that was moving. But if it's true in that room, it's true here. And here's the other thing that he helped me understand about the Lord's discipline. And this is really important. Do you realize that not all discipline is punitive? Not all discipline is punitive. We submit ourselves to discipline all through life that is uncomfortable at the time because we believe what it will bring about. So not, not all discipline is punitive. And it kind of, this bomb went off in my head where I was like, oh, so God could be allowing me to suffer, not because I did anything wrong or anything bad or because he's disappointed in me. He just sees this needs to happen. And so he's allowing this hardship to happen in my life to bring about a greater good later, not all discipline is punitive. And I immediately went back to the season in my life that I've talked about a few times when I was an assistant football coach for a small private school. And the head coach was a man that I loved named Robert McCready, Coach McCready. Coach McCready was a recon Marine in Vietnam, baby. He crawled around shirtless in tunnels, rooting out the Viet Cong. He was a tough son of a gun. And he ran tailback for Auburn in the 60s. And we would have summer workouts, optional for the team. Optional because you don't have to come, but if you don't come, you will never play. So optional, right? We'd have summer workouts. And the first thing he would do in these summer workouts is he would line the team all up and he would tell them to get on the ground and do stretches and do pushups and do sit-ups. He would lay them on the grass. And the grass in the South, you know, is covered with dew. And he called these exercise dew soakers. That's what he called them. I'm going to roll them around and get them to soak up the dew in their shorts and in their shirts so that we can have a dry field to practice on. And the dew is going to make them uncomfortable and teach them to be tough. So suck it up. These are dew soakers. Now listen. Had any of those kids done anything wrong? No. Did any of those kids do anything to deserve having to soak up the dew? Yeah, they showed up. That's discipline. It's uncomfortable. It's painful at the time. But it was to bring about a result later. By the way, we won back-to-back-to-back championships. So, you know, do some do-soakers. Pretty good. We have a way of thinking about discipline and even assigning it to God. Is it possible that God's allowing pain in our life that somehow that's punitive pain? That's not how we think about discipline in other areas of our life. It's just something that we need. And here's the better way to think about it. And Hebrews 12 actually frames it up for us. Hebrews 12, verse 11. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. And so what he explains is, yeah, there's times in our life where we go through painful experiences. And no discipline at the time is pleasant. Soaking the dew with your shorts and letting it get on your underwear and make you uncomfortable while you run around for two and a half hours is unpleasant. But it brought about a result that they were all committed to. This is how the Lord's discipline and pain works in our life. One of the most difficult seasons that I've ever been through in my life was from about fourth grade to somewhere in sixth grade when I was bullied pretty badly by kids in my neighborhood. I know that you look at me and you're like, but Nate, you're so cool and charismatic and awesome. How could that possibly happen? It's a crazy time. But I had these older kids that lived in my neighborhood. And a good instance is there was one day where they had found these industrial-sized rubber bands. And they snipped them so they were just long. And they hid in the bushes. They got off the bus before I did. So they hid in the bushes at the bus stop and they waited for me to get off the bus. And they chased me home home popping me with these rubber bands in my ears and my neck and in my legs and making me cry. And I can sense that some of you are taking joy in this story. Alright? I'm going to preach about repentance next week. You need to deal with that. But they sent me home making me cry and they called me names. And it was a really hard season. It really was a season of profound bullying. And I honestly, as I think about it now, I have this vivid memory of sitting on the couch with my mom, with her holding me as I'm crying because I've just been bullied again. And she's crying. And she said, I wish I could be bullied for you, which is the instinct of every parent. Of course, of course. John fell down yesterday and scraped his knee. And my first thought was, I wish I could fall for you, buddy. That's the instinct. And so as painful as it was for me, I think there's an argument to be made that it would be more painful for my mom. But that was a season of hardship. But let me tell you something. I was talking with a friend this week. And I told him that being a pastor is weird. And I'm not trying to elicit your sympathy here. This is for a point, okay? And I think it illustrates it well. I don't mean to talk about myself in this way. But I said, being a pastor is weird. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about this or not, but when you're a pastor, everyone that you meet in your whole life instantly has an expectation of your behavior. It's just true. Everyone I ever meet, as soon as they learn my profession, they have a backlog of things that they think I should live up to. We may agree about those ideas, we may not, but that's what they think. Because I was bullied and given a thick skin and able to learn important lessons about not letting the opinions of others impact how I think about myself or how I feel, I am able with that reality to say this. This might sound harsh to you. And I don't mean it to be. It's just the truth. I have developed, between me and God and people that I love, standards for myself and my behavior. And I see that it is my responsibility to live up to God's expectations of me and live up to my expectations of myself for my behavior. And if my expectations for myself align with yours, wonderful. If they don't, there's other churches. Take off. Doesn't matter. Not going to affect me. Why can I do that? Because God allowed me to be bullied from fourth to sixth grade and insisted that I develop a tough skin because I believe that he saw down the road what he was going to ask me to do, what my assignment was going to be. At the time, the discipline was painful, but I believe wholeheartedly that it had a greater purpose. And I can tell you earnestly that I'm grateful for those years in my life because of who they fashioned me into to prepare me for the road that God was going to have me walk later. Yeah? I don't know what you're dealing with. a fruit down the years that you can't see. But I do know that it's possible. And I know that if every time we endure hardship and pain, we put it in that first box of just pain that deserves empathy. And this is terrible and woe is me and sometimes life is hard. That we miss the larger box of the rest of our pain that is imbued with purpose and allowed by God because he loves us too much not fashion us. Into the people that he created us to be. And so I very simply. Want to invite you this morning. As you go through grief and stress. And suffering and trials. To regard those things. As something that quite possibly. God has allowed in your life because he loves you too much to not fashion you into the person he's created you to be. And the final encouragement with that in mind, and is it possible that God's allowed pain in my life because it's going to bring about a greater good? The final encouragement I have for you is this, Hebrews 12, 12. I told you we were coming back to it. You probably forgot, but I didn't. Verse 12, therefore strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees, which allows me to put on the screen. My favorite thing I've ever put on the screen at grace, suck it up, buttercup deal with it. It might be good. Strengthen your feeble arms and your weak knees. Bear up under it. God might have a purpose for this. And it's quite possible that you can get decades down the road and be very grateful for the pain that you're complaining about right now. So let's think about suffering that way too. It's not all terrible and purposeless and awful. Some of it God means for us. And I believe it's possible that the pain you're enduring right now will be something that you see with gratitude and retrospect. So suck it up. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the times in our life that are hard, that we don't understand. Thank you for the way that you fashion us, for the fact that you love us too much to abscond on your duty as a father and leave us to our own devices. Thank you for your discipline. Father, I pray that for those of us who are hurting, for those of us who are going through a hard time, God, if that is a season that evokes and warrants your empathy and your weeping, would we rest in that? But Father, if it's possible that it's a season that's simply you loving us by allowing us discomfort now for a greater glory and good later, God, I pray that we would invite that and allow that and appreciate that. Father, I lift up grace to you. Lift up these people in our church. I'm so grateful for it. I'm so grateful for them. I'm so grateful for you. Let us have a good time celebrating with our families today and tomorrow. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I haven't gotten the chance to meet you, I would be shocked because it's Memorial Day and no one visits a church on Memorial Day. But if you are doing that, I'd love to meet you in the lobby after the service. And as I always say on holiday Sundays, if you are here in church on a holiday Sunday, God does love you more than vacationing Christians. It is objectively true if you're watching online. Thanks so much for doing that. Try to be here next year. And here's what, Memorial Day is a special day for me. I'm not going to get into it because we have a lot of ground to cover and what I want to talk about this morning because I thought Memorial Day would be a great day to talk about pain and suffering and why bad things happen to good people feels right but I I just I love I love you guys I love my church I love how we worship and here's how I know that the good Christians came today. Because this is just a little bit behind the scenes, how the sausage is made. Sometimes Gibby and I, Gibson, Aaron Gibson, our worship pastor, will talk. And I'll just kind of say like, hey, be careful about laying out and letting the congregation sing. Because there's not many people here or the vibe is weird or there's not good energy and that might fall flat and then that'll be terrible. So let's relax on that. And he's like, yeah, you're right. And so for him to be able, and I'm being honest, for him to be able in worship to lay out on Memorial Day and say, just you sing, and for me to be here and hear my church praising our God on Memorial Day, we got the worshipers here today. So that was good. That was good. And I enjoyed that very much. Before I just barrel into the sermon, we should acknowledge what today is. We live in a country where we can do this freely, where the barrier to entry to church is extremely low because we have religious freedoms that have been fought for and have been died for. And we celebrate those today, not just our religious freedoms, but our freedom of speech and all the other things. And it is worth it and appropriate and good to take a minute today and acknowledge the freedom that we have, the morning that we can enjoy, and the lives that have been lost for that sake, to earn us this freedom. So it's worth acknowledging here at the head that we don't sit here for lack of sacrifice. And we honor those sacrifices today. This morning is our last morning in our series called FAQs. Next week, I'm excited. We're going to launch a, we're going to launch a, it's actually, so you guys may hear this and groan. Okay, so please don't do that because I think it's actually going to be really good and we're going to enjoy it. We're going to do a 14-week series in Moses. Bill, Bill Reed, a long time, a resting elder. I said that. He goes, what? Like, it made a faith. Yes, Bill, 14 weeks, baby. Buckle up. We're going to be in Exodus going through the life of Moses. There's so much to learn about the life of Moses and from his life. And I'm excited to begin that journey with you guys. But this week we're wrapping up our series FAQ, which as you've been told, we kind of solicited some questions from small groups and from different people in the church. And I've interacted with ideas that as a pastor, I get these questions a lot. And the most common question to come up when you solicit these things from people, what do you have questions about? What questions about your faith exist? Every time something like this is done, at least in my experience, the most common question to come up is the question of suffering, which is generally phrased, why do bad things happen to good people? And implicit in that question is, why does a God who says he loves us let my dad die, right? That's what we're asking. Why does a God who says he loves us allow these terrible things to happen? Why are school shootings a thing? Why is genocide a thing? Why was the Holocaust or slavery a thing? That's what we're asking. And that comes up all the time. And I don't know about you, but the way that I've experienced my understanding of a theology of suffering over my years as a believer is in my early years, I'm kind of handed an apparatus or a way to understand suffering that helps me process it when it happens to other people. And so that's sufficient for me then. But then my life, then I encounter profound suffering. I'm like, whoa, what I was handed is not adequate to explain this to me and help me reconcile it and be okay with it. And then down the road, there's something else that happens. And now you have to explain suffering to someone else. And, and what you've been handed is not adequate to explain it to them. And so you realize there's some deficiency in how you understand suffering and the theology of suffering. And here's why this is really important, because when we misunderstand the theology of suffering, this more often, I think, than almost anything else within the Christian realm causes people to actually walk away from their faith because the way that they understand suffering isn't robust enough to be adequate for the experiences that they're having in their life. And so they allow suffering to actually move them away from God rather than run to God. So it becomes very important to develop a robust theology of suffering for the sake of maintaining our faith and fidelity to God. So it's important that we talk about it this morning. And typically, when we think about suffering and this challenging theology of suffering, we go to circumstances like one that I've, that shaped my way of thinking about suffering, which is when my, one of my best friends, a guy named Chris Gerlach was 30 years old. Gerlach and I were roommates in college. We used to keep each other up at night, each other the Tsar of Dumb and you're the King of Stupid and you are the Emperor of Moronity and things like that. That's the kind of friendship that we had. Gerlach was a great man. And at 30, as a pastor, with three kids under five, He was in good health playing frisbee, playing ultimate frisbee. He threw a touchdown pass 40 yards. They caught it, celebrated, turned around to celebrate with Gerlach and he was dead on the field. Widowmaker heart attack. I watched at the graveside his five-year-old knock on his coffin and ask his mom, my wife's college roommate, Carla, when is daddy going to wake up? That's when you go back to scripture and you go, God, why would you let that happen? Right? And I'm not so naive as to think that you don't all have very similar stories of a time in your life when you say, God, why would you let this thing happen? And so here's what I'm going to say about this, because this is, that kind of suffering is actually not the suffering that I want to talk about today. Because I've done that before. And if you've been here for a long time, you've heard me tell that story before. And we've talked about it. And I've done three or four sermons about that level of suffering that just mystifies you and makes you go, my goodness, God, how could you allow this? And so as I approached it today, I thought, I don't want to do that sermon again. I don't think it serves the church to do that sermon again. I think there's actually another thing about suffering that we need to think about. But before I just jumped into what I want us to think about today, I didn't want to breeze past that kind of suffering that is so mystifying and so grief-inducing that it causes you to question your faith. And so on that, I've done three or four sermons. And if you're interested in them, email me and I will send you the link and say, this is where I talked about this. Because it's important to address that kind of profound grief. But here's the very quick version of how that sermon goes, okay? I'm going to give you the cliff notes. I'm going to move very fast. I'm going to answer this question, how do we address profound grief? And then I want to move into actually what I want to talk to you about reframing the way we think about suffering today. The answer to the question in very profound grief is John 11, 35, which is simply this, shortest verse in the Bible, Jesus wept. That's the answer to profound suffering, okay? The situation here, when this verse comes up, Jesus' purported best friends, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus had sent word to Jesus that Lazarus was dying. Could you please come heal him? And Jesus says, okay. And then he waits two days and then he goes to Bethany where they lived. And as he's on the way to Bethany, Lazarus dies and outside their their home, Mary meets Jesus on the street. And she's weeping and she says, why did you do this? Why did you let my brother die? Why are you allowing me to be in this kind of pain? It's the question we ask when we suffer. God, why'd you do this? And Jesus' response in that suffering is, he wept. He wept. Now, here's why this is important. Years ago, I listened to one of the most impactful sermons I've ever heard in my life by a pastor from California named Rick Warren. Many of you have probably heard of him. He had a, I believe, a 27 or 29-year-old son that took his own life because he dealt with mental health issues. And when that happened, he stepped out of the pulpit for a few months. And when he came back, he preached a sermon series that I would highly recommend you Google called How I Got Through What I Went Through. And in that opening sermon, he pointed to Jesus wept. And he said this, I'll never forget this. We pastors put phrases up on the screen and you write down and fill in the blanks. And here's what I know. You don't remember that crap. You don't know what I said. It doesn't matter. But every now and again, something happens that you remember. And this is one that I remember. And he said, we serve a God that offers us his presence because explanations don't help. He offers us his presence and he offers us his hope because what we need in moments of profound grief is not explanations. We need him. And so Jesus weeping in John 11 is a depiction of the fact that we have a God that in moments of profound grief offers us his empathy. And he offers us his tears. And he offers us his presence. So that is the Cliff Notes version of that sermon. If I were going to preach that sermon, I would just add in some other illustrations and some other points and make it last 30 minutes, but I would just say that. That's the answer to grief, is that our God doesn't offer us explanations because we can't really handle them and we can't really understand them, but he offers us his presence. And that's unique in the pantheon of gods that the world would offer to us. So with that being said, if we can together as a room set that aside and go, okay, there's some grief that requires profound empathy from God. And it might not have a purpose and it might not be on, it might not be God's plan. It might just happen. And we have to process that and deal with that. And that's one of the things that I think for sure is that no one dodges the raindrops of tragedy in their life. Everyone deals with profound grief. And the reality of the world is, according to Romans 8, that all of creation yearns for the return of the king to set right this creation. And then the verse that I point out all the time in Revelation, at the end of days, there'll be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. And so sometimes we just accept that profound grief is part of those former things that we will not have to deal with in eternity. And so we set those aside and God is present with us in that suffering. But there are other kinds of suffering that don't fit in that box and that we don't talk about enough. And so this morning, what I want to invite you to do is instead of thinking about all of suffering and all sadness and all grief in that box, can we create another larger box for other kinds of suffering? And I believe that it's Hebrews 12 that actually creates this box for us and this other way to think about why sometimes suffering happens in our lives. I want to read to you Hebrews chapter 12, verses 4 through 12. It's a lot, but it's important, so we're going to process it together. Here's what it says. In your struggle against sin, you have not resisted to the point of shedding your blood. And you have completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son or his child. It says, my son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline. And do not lose heart when he rebukes you. Because the Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Here's the encouragement. Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined and everyone undergoes discipline, then you are not legitimate, not true sons and daughters at all. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the father of spirits and live? They disciplined us for a little while as they thought best, but God disciplines us for our good in order that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Therefore, and I'm coming back to this verse because this is a good one. Strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees, he says. So here's what this passage allows us to understand and begin to frame up about the occurrences of suffering and hardship in our life. In some suffering, like we just talked about, there is empathy. But in most suffering, there is purpose. So in some suffering, it's so gut-wrenching and heartbreaking that I would never look at Carla Gerlach and tell her after her child knocked on the coffin and say, when is dad going to wake up? I would never whisper in her ear, hey, God has a purpose for this and you're going to be better for it. I would never do that. That would be clumsy and stupid. And if you ever say that to someone who's just lost a loved one, you should be slapped in the face right away or chopped in the throat. Just something. Maybe backhanded, old school style. That'd be great with a glove. That's a clumsy, stupid thing to say. Please don't say that to people. So sometimes profound suffering, there is empathy. Jesus weeps. But what I would posit to you, for you to assess on your own, is whether or not most suffering is actually allowed by God and is purposeful. In some suffering, there is empathy. But in most suffering, there is purpose. And so what we want to focus on today is the suffering that God allows for that purpose. And what I want to encourage you to think about is some times in your life when you've suffered, some times in your life when you've hurt, or maybe what you're walking through right now that is difficult, a difficult relationship, job, friendship, situation with your children, maybe your marriage is hard, maybe work is tough right now. Every one of us has a pain point in our life, something that's causing us to suffer. And so what I want to encourage you to do this morning is to consider those things and to ask the question, is it possible that what I don't need in this situation is empathy? What I actually need is to believe in the purpose that God has in allowing this to occur in my life. With that in mind, I want to revisit verses six and seven because I think there's a profound truth there. Verse six says, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son. Seven, endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? And then if you go on an eight, it says if you're not disciplined, you're actually being neglected. You don't belong to him. And as I read that, and as I was preparing this sermon, in my house that week, my daughter Lily and I had a tough day. I don't know if you know this, but my children as pastor's children are not perfect. And if you'd like to judge me for that, up yours, because neither are your kids, okay? So let's just cover that right there. And Lily and I are very similar. And we had a day where we butted heads. And there were big emotions. And she's nine, she's allowed big emotions. We have to learn to process those. And she says some things to me that would, frankly, have gotten my butt beat when I was a kid. That would have been a big, regretful decision. And so later, I came back to her when things were calm. I said, hey, I love you. And here's a phrase that I use with her a lot. I love you too much to allow you to act like that. I love you too much to allow you to say things like that. I love you too much to allow you to think that that is an okay way to respond in situations like that. Because I love you that much, there will be consequences for your actions. You will feel pain, which usually comes in the form of screen time. Or mommy's not going to sing songs to you tonight. That's the worst. That's a big one. But I have to tell my daughter who I love. And I have to tell my son who I love. And my parents had to tell me this. I love you too much to not do everything in my power to fashion you into who God created you to be. That's my job. And I love you too much to not do that. Now in the moment, this for her is painful. But let's put on our big boy and our big girl pants and ask the question, is it possible that sometimes God allows pain in our lives that hurts very much, that is very inconvenient and uncomfortable, because he loves us too much to not fashion us into the people that he created us to be. Is it not possible that some pain and some suffering, and I would posit most pain and suffering, is actually good? Is this not possible, this idea that some pain is from God? We don't talk about this a lot. I don't preach about this a lot. Pastors don't like to bring this up. But is it possible that some pain and grief, that where your mind goes as you identify the suffering in your life and the things that are hard in your life? Is it not possible that God is using those things to fashion you into the person he wants you to be because he loves you too much to not work on you in that way? Is it possible that your suffering is actually a result of your father's love? The idea for this sermon actually came from my trip to Istanbul in March. And I don't mean to keep bringing it up, but clearly, I can't just preach out of that trip forever. You guys will get tired of it. But clearly, it was an impactful trip for me. And this is actually the sermon that I'm giving you today. It's a truncated version of my friend's slide deck. It's a 90-minute presentation called Sonship and Suffering based in Hebrews chapter 12. So I'm giving you the 25-minute version of it because I took five minutes to talk about other suffering. You don't even have to sit through the 90 minutes, okay? I'm saving you from that suffering. So you should be grateful. And he preached this. He taught this to a room of Iranian pastors who suffer for their faith. And let's just be very clear about this, okay? I'm not going to belabor this point because if you can't agree with me on it, you're an unreasonable person. Iranian Christians suffer more than American ones, okay? And he preached it to them. And I asked him, where do you get off preaching this to Iranian pastors risking their families for their faith from the comfort of Chapel Hill? I didn't phrase it like that. It was nicer, but that was the question. And he said, it's in the Bible. I'm a general. I have to deploy the troops, and this is what's required. And that was moving. But if it's true in that room, it's true here. And here's the other thing that he helped me understand about the Lord's discipline. And this is really important. Do you realize that not all discipline is punitive? Not all discipline is punitive. We submit ourselves to discipline all through life that is uncomfortable at the time because we believe what it will bring about. So not, not all discipline is punitive. And it kind of, this bomb went off in my head where I was like, oh, so God could be allowing me to suffer, not because I did anything wrong or anything bad or because he's disappointed in me. He just sees this needs to happen. And so he's allowing this hardship to happen in my life to bring about a greater good later, not all discipline is punitive. And I immediately went back to the season in my life that I've talked about a few times when I was an assistant football coach for a small private school. And the head coach was a man that I loved named Robert McCready, Coach McCready. Coach McCready was a recon Marine in Vietnam, baby. He crawled around shirtless in tunnels, rooting out the Viet Cong. He was a tough son of a gun. And he ran tailback for Auburn in the 60s. And we would have summer workouts, optional for the team. Optional because you don't have to come, but if you don't come, you will never play. So optional, right? We'd have summer workouts. And the first thing he would do in these summer workouts is he would line the team all up and he would tell them to get on the ground and do stretches and do pushups and do sit-ups. He would lay them on the grass. And the grass in the South, you know, is covered with dew. And he called these exercise dew soakers. That's what he called them. I'm going to roll them around and get them to soak up the dew in their shorts and in their shirts so that we can have a dry field to practice on. And the dew is going to make them uncomfortable and teach them to be tough. So suck it up. These are dew soakers. Now listen. Had any of those kids done anything wrong? No. Did any of those kids do anything to deserve having to soak up the dew? Yeah, they showed up. That's discipline. It's uncomfortable. It's painful at the time. But it was to bring about a result later. By the way, we won back-to-back-to-back championships. So, you know, do some do-soakers. Pretty good. We have a way of thinking about discipline and even assigning it to God. Is it possible that God's allowing pain in our life that somehow that's punitive pain? That's not how we think about discipline in other areas of our life. It's just something that we need. And here's the better way to think about it. And Hebrews 12 actually frames it up for us. Hebrews 12, verse 11. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. And so what he explains is, yeah, there's times in our life where we go through painful experiences. And no discipline at the time is pleasant. Soaking the dew with your shorts and letting it get on your underwear and make you uncomfortable while you run around for two and a half hours is unpleasant. But it brought about a result that they were all committed to. This is how the Lord's discipline and pain works in our life. One of the most difficult seasons that I've ever been through in my life was from about fourth grade to somewhere in sixth grade when I was bullied pretty badly by kids in my neighborhood. I know that you look at me and you're like, but Nate, you're so cool and charismatic and awesome. How could that possibly happen? It's a crazy time. But I had these older kids that lived in my neighborhood. And a good instance is there was one day where they had found these industrial-sized rubber bands. And they snipped them so they were just long. And they hid in the bushes. They got off the bus before I did. So they hid in the bushes at the bus stop and they waited for me to get off the bus. And they chased me home home popping me with these rubber bands in my ears and my neck and in my legs and making me cry. And I can sense that some of you are taking joy in this story. Alright? I'm going to preach about repentance next week. You need to deal with that. But they sent me home making me cry and they called me names. And it was a really hard season. It really was a season of profound bullying. And I honestly, as I think about it now, I have this vivid memory of sitting on the couch with my mom, with her holding me as I'm crying because I've just been bullied again. And she's crying. And she said, I wish I could be bullied for you, which is the instinct of every parent. Of course, of course. John fell down yesterday and scraped his knee. And my first thought was, I wish I could fall for you, buddy. That's the instinct. And so as painful as it was for me, I think there's an argument to be made that it would be more painful for my mom. But that was a season of hardship. But let me tell you something. I was talking with a friend this week. And I told him that being a pastor is weird. And I'm not trying to elicit your sympathy here. This is for a point, okay? And I think it illustrates it well. I don't mean to talk about myself in this way. But I said, being a pastor is weird. Because I don't know if you've ever thought about this or not, but when you're a pastor, everyone that you meet in your whole life instantly has an expectation of your behavior. It's just true. Everyone I ever meet, as soon as they learn my profession, they have a backlog of things that they think I should live up to. We may agree about those ideas, we may not, but that's what they think. Because I was bullied and given a thick skin and able to learn important lessons about not letting the opinions of others impact how I think about myself or how I feel, I am able with that reality to say this. This might sound harsh to you. And I don't mean it to be. It's just the truth. I have developed, between me and God and people that I love, standards for myself and my behavior. And I see that it is my responsibility to live up to God's expectations of me and live up to my expectations of myself for my behavior. And if my expectations for myself align with yours, wonderful. If they don't, there's other churches. Take off. Doesn't matter. Not going to affect me. Why can I do that? Because God allowed me to be bullied from fourth to sixth grade and insisted that I develop a tough skin because I believe that he saw down the road what he was going to ask me to do, what my assignment was going to be. At the time, the discipline was painful, but I believe wholeheartedly that it had a greater purpose. And I can tell you earnestly that I'm grateful for those years in my life because of who they fashioned me into to prepare me for the road that God was going to have me walk later. Yeah? I don't know what you're dealing with. a fruit down the years that you can't see. But I do know that it's possible. And I know that if every time we endure hardship and pain, we put it in that first box of just pain that deserves empathy. And this is terrible and woe is me and sometimes life is hard. That we miss the larger box of the rest of our pain that is imbued with purpose and allowed by God because he loves us too much not fashion us. Into the people that he created us to be. And so I very simply. Want to invite you this morning. As you go through grief and stress. And suffering and trials. To regard those things. As something that quite possibly. God has allowed in your life because he loves you too much to not fashion you into the person he's created you to be. And the final encouragement with that in mind, and is it possible that God's allowed pain in my life because it's going to bring about a greater good? The final encouragement I have for you is this, Hebrews 12, 12. I told you we were coming back to it. You probably forgot, but I didn't. Verse 12, therefore strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees, which allows me to put on the screen. My favorite thing I've ever put on the screen at grace, suck it up, buttercup deal with it. It might be good. Strengthen your feeble arms and your weak knees. Bear up under it. God might have a purpose for this. And it's quite possible that you can get decades down the road and be very grateful for the pain that you're complaining about right now. So let's think about suffering that way too. It's not all terrible and purposeless and awful. Some of it God means for us. And I believe it's possible that the pain you're enduring right now will be something that you see with gratitude and retrospect. So suck it up. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the times in our life that are hard, that we don't understand. Thank you for the way that you fashion us, for the fact that you love us too much to abscond on your duty as a father and leave us to our own devices. Thank you for your discipline. Father, I pray that for those of us who are hurting, for those of us who are going through a hard time, God, if that is a season that evokes and warrants your empathy and your weeping, would we rest in that? But Father, if it's possible that it's a season that's simply you loving us by allowing us discomfort now for a greater glory and good later, God, I pray that we would invite that and allow that and appreciate that. Father, I lift up grace to you. Lift up these people in our church. I'm so grateful for it. I'm so grateful for them. I'm so grateful for you. Let us have a good time celebrating with our families today and tomorrow. In Jesus' name, amen.