Romans

Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be with you in this way. I am excited for the fifth part in our series called Things You Should Know, where we're looking through things in Scripture or that come up in church or in Christendom that we are familiar with, we've heard of before, but maybe we don't know how to explain or maybe it hasn't been discussed or maybe we're just too far down the rabbit hole of faith to raise our hand and ask about these things to get some clarity. And so what we wanted to do, so that you didn't have to ask those embarrassing questions in small groups, is take five weeks here at the beginning of the year and talk through some of these topics that we may have questions about, because we don't really discuss them all the time. This morning, I wanted us to look at grace and mercy. Grace and mercy are two things that we see come up in Scripture a lot. We're going to look at Scripture in a little bit to see how replete it is with references to God's grace and God's mercy. And we sing songs about them. We certainly know about them. We've heard about them. The name of the church is Grace, for crying out loud. But I wonder how many of us would be confident in whatever your working definition of grace is. I wonder how many of us would be confident understanding mercy or explaining it to our kids if they heard those words and said, hey, what does that mean? How many of you would feel comfortable going, I got this, I'm going to knock this out of the park? If I asked those of us listening and watching, hey, could you explain grace and mercy to the church? Could I get you to come in one Sunday morning, I'm just going to bring you up on stage, and you tell the good people of grace what the name of the church really means. Now, I have no doubt in our church, we would do a good job. There would be, I think, a myriad answers across a wide range of definitions using a lot of unnecessary words that would be mostly right. But I think it's worth it as a church to take some time and define these words in a simple way and understand what grace and mercy really are. Because when we understand God's grace and God's mercy towards us, I think that we can't help but want to respond in exuberant praise. I think when we really understand what's going on with grace and mercy, when we really properly understand those two characteristics of God, that it inspires within us a response of gratitude, and that gratitude manifests joy, and it ought to make us want to leap out of our skin and praise our good God. Which is why we've positioned the sermon at the beginning of the service this week, and we're going to transition right into worship as I wrap up the sermon. Because I wanted to give you guys a chance to respond to the reality of God's grace and mercy. So with that in mind, and I would also say, for those of you who are listening to this or me, not on Sunday morning, if you're catching up later in the day, if you're listening on a podcast in the car or on a walk or something like that, as you listen to my voice right now, I would encourage you, plan to listen to some praise and worship music on your own at the end of this sermon. Just go ahead and budget some time in your head to listen to two or three songs or just have it playing in the car and allow yourself to respond to what's shared here this morning. But with that preamble, I wanted to jump right in to defining these words for us so we have a working definition here at Grace. So mercy, the way I understand it, is simply when we do not get what we deserve. Mercy is when we do not get something that we deserve. When our actions or our attitude or our behavior warrants punishment, something punitive, or just some natural consequences, and we don't receive those consequences, we don't receive the punishment that we deserve, when we've earned some trouble and we don't get into that trouble, that's mercy. So mercy is simply when we don't get something that we do deserve. Think of it this way. Pretend you've got a 16-year-old son. He's just got a new car. He's got the keys. And part of the deal with having the freedom to drive is that there's a curfew. And his very first time out, he goes out with his buddies and he breaks a curfew. And he understands that you guys have set up these rules that if you go and you break curfew, when you come back, we're going to take your car keys for a week. That's the deal. All right? So he gets back, he's broken curfew, and what he deserves is for you to take his car keys. And instead you say, you know what? I hope that you remember this. I want to forgive you. I'm not going to hold this against you. Go into bed. I'm not going to take your car keys. Right? That's mercy. He does not get a punishment that he does deserve. He doesn't get the consequences that his behaviors warrant. You just showed your son mercy. That's what that is. So mercy is when we do not get something that we do deserve. Grace, conversely, is when we do get something that we don't deserve. Grace is when we get a special favor or a blessing that we did not earn, that our behavior does not warrant. So we go back to the 16-year-old kid. You've forgiven him and you've sent him to his room, go to bed. I'm not going to take your keys. You can continue to have that freedom. You deserve that punishment, but I'm not going to give it to you. But grace is this. Maybe part of the agreement with your son is if he's going to have the freedom of driving, then he has to be responsible and earn his own gas money, which is a pretty fair driving arrangement across, I think, all families. That's a pretty typical arrangement. You're going to have a car, you've got to pay for your gas money. And because you love him, and because you want him to be blessed, and because it seems like he felt particularly bad about breaking curfew, not only do you send him to bed without taking his keys, but then after he's gone, you take his car and you sneak over to the gas station and you fill that thing all the way up for him. And you leave it there as a surprise the next morning. That's grace. Grace is the full gas tank that he doesn't deserve. He just broke the rules, man. He doesn't deserve that at all. He doesn't deserve any special favors. But because you love him, because you're a good parent, you fill up his gas tank. That's grace, right? And it's important that we understand these concepts because they are all over Scripture. Scripture shows us over and over again that God shows us mercy and that God shows us grace. I went through this week and just kind of looked at some of the passages, and I wanted you to see a few of them. So I'm going to read them kind of machine gun style real quick here. There's going to be three in a row for mercy, and then we're going to talk about these. But just look what Scripture has to say about mercy. I love this one in James. This is just a snippet of the verse, but it's a simple phrase. James writes that mercy triumphs over judgment. And then on in Lamentations, back in the Old Testament, the scriptures say, And then finally, Paul writes in Ephesians, What we see in those verses very clearly is that God's mercy is the forgiveness of our sins. God's mercy to us is forgiving our sins, is not giving us the just punishment that we deserve for our sins. I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but when we sin, it is offensive to Creator God. When we sin, we take up arms in a violent insurrection against God's domain in the universe. Last week, we talked about Satan, and we talked about his fundamental sin that is all of our fundamental sins, which is to look at God and to say, you're supposed to be up there. You're supposed to be the authority figure, but I don't want that to be true in my life, so I'm going to be my own authority figure. When we sin, when we choose something that is outside of God's will, what we're saying to God is, I don't accept your authority in my life. You're not the boss of me. I'm the boss of me. You don't make my decisions. I make my decisions. You see, when we sin, it is an active rebellion against the way that God created us. God is the creator. We are the created. I'm firmly convinced, and I've said it before, that that's why Genesis starts the way it does. The very first words in the Bible are, in the beginning, God created. It establishes that relationship, creator, creation. In charge, subservient. And when we sin, we go, I don't like that you're in charge. I want to be in charge. And we rebel against God. And God sent his son in light of that rebellion to make a path back to him so that we could spend eternity with him. And God says, when we sin, listen, you can't spend eternity with me anymore. You can't do it. You're imperfect. You've offended me. You violated the terms of the agreement. I am taking your keys. And then God sends his son to make a way for us to go to heaven anyways, for us to spend eternity with him anyways. And what do we do? We trample on that. We sin again. We demand forgiveness again. And I'm not sure that we stop and realize the miracle of God's mercy, the miracle of his forgiveness. When we do, that phrase in James, mercy triumphs over judgment, becomes really amazing. We deserve judgment. We broke the rules. He should take our keys. But he doesn't because our God chooses mercy and mercy triumphs over judgment. Jesus tells Peter, when Peter says, how many times should you forgive someone when they wrong you? Jesus says, 70 times seven. As many times as they wrong you, show them mercy. It's in his very nature to do this. Even though we are involved in a rebellious insurrection against Creator God, He looks at us in all of our offense. And for many of us, we're not talking about ignorant sin here. We're not talking about this thing that we did and now we realize, oh my gosh, I shouldn't be doing that. Now that I'm acquainted with Scripture, I know better. I'm talking about the willful sin that you and I commit every week, every day. Who am I kidding? That's offensive to Creator God. And yet he shows us mercy because lamentation says his mercies are new every morning. Every day requires more of God's forgiveness. Every day we break curfew and every day he gives us mercy for that. He withholds the punishment from us that we do deserve. He withholds the separation from us that we do deserve, the damnation from us that we do deserve. That's God's mercy. But it gets better because I think God's grace adds another layer on top of that that's even more remarkable. Look at what Scripture says about God's grace, just two verses really quickly. In Ephesians, Paul writes, for by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God. And then on in Romans he writes, and we are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. So mercy forgives us. God's mercy forgives us, but God's grace restores us. You see? God's mercy says, you're forgiven. I know you messed up. I know you broke curfew. You're forgiven. But then God's grace says, and I've made a way for you to be in my family. He fills up the tank. God's mercy says, I no longer hold your sins against you. God's grace says, because of that, I sent my son to die for you, and now you have a seat at my table etern, Do you understand? God's mercy says we messed up, we've offended Creator God, we've willfully sinned, and we've offended Him, and we deserve punishment, and He says, I'm not going to punish you. And He could stop there. He could say, I'm not going to punish you, I'm not going to punish you this one time for breaking curfew, but don't mess up anymore. And then if we mess up again, then we're done. We're toast. That's it. But in his grace and in his goodness, he doesn't stop at forgiveness. He stops at restoration. Not only are you forgiven, but now here, have a seat at my table. Not only are you forgiven, but now you are an adopted son or daughter of the king. You are an heir to the universal throne. Not only am I not going to hold it against you, not only am I going to clothe you in the righteousness ofal son. For those of you who are not familiar with it, I'm about to give you the quickest, worst rendition of it ever. All right. I've preached about this before. I can do a better job than this, but for the sake of time, we're going to look at some essential details. The parable of the prodigal son goes like this. There's a father who's wealthy and he has two sons. And one of those sons, the younger one, looks at the dad and he says, you know what? I really just want your stuff. I don't want you. Can you just go ahead and give me my inheritance? I'd rather you be dead anyway. Just give me my money so that I can live how I want. And that father, in his goodness, for reasons I don't understand, says, okay, fine, and gives him the money. And the son goes off into the city and he spends it on living in ways that just feed his appetites and his lusts. And he runs out of money. He spends it in totally dishonorable ways. He comes to the end of it. Everybody leaves him. He can't find a job. He ends up eating slop on a pig farm. And one day the Bible says he comes to his senses in this really poignant moment and he decides, I'm going to go back to my dad's house. But he works out this speech in his head where he's going to go back and he's going to say, I'm going to go back and I'm going to tell him, can you just please forgive me and let me be your servant? I don't deserve to be your son anymore. What I've done is too offensive. Will you please just let me be your servant? Because they live better than I do right now. And so he heads home with this speech in mind, which, by the way, it's a pretty fair speech, right? Dude took his dad's money, went off and spent it however he wanted to, wasted it on debaucherous things, and then comes back with his hat in his hand. Yeah, you're darn right he doesn't deserve to be a son anymore. He should live as a servant, at least for a few years, right? But he goes back, and the father sees him from a long way off and runs out to greet him. And the son starts in with his speech, dad, I'm so sorry, I don't deserve, yada, yada, yada. And the dad shuts him up right away, flings his arms around him and hugs him. And in that moment, the son knows that he's forgiven, that his father's not going to hold those things against him. That's mercy. But he doesn't stop there. He takes the ring, the signet of the family, and he puts it on his son's finger. And he takes the robe and he takes the slippers and he puts those on the son. And then he goes and he kills the fattened calf, the really good stuff. And he throws a big, huge party. And he says, my son is back, and he welcomes him right back into the family, which he didn't have to do, and his behavior didn't warrant. It's the perfect picture of the mercy and the grace that God offers us. We're the prodigals. We run away and make willful decisions to offend our God, to throw off his authority in our life and be our own authority. And then at some point or another, we come back, hat in hand, apologetic, I'm so sorry. And he forgives us. But he doesn't just forgive us. He restores us. He doesn't just say, hey, I'm not mad at you. Come here. You would expect that he would say, you're forgiven. Get away from me. I need a minute. That's not what he does. He says, you're forgiven. And then he hugs us. And then he sends his son, his only son, whom he loves, who was perfect, who never offended him, to die for you and for me. He gave us that gift. Do you understand? We don't deserve the grace of Jesus. We don't deserve that. We didn't earn it. Our behavior doesn't warrant it. Nowhere in the scripture is there a contract that says when we break the law and offend Almighty God that he owes us the death of his son? That's not the deal. But he does it anyways. That's grace. And in light of that, the mercy of forgiveness and the grace of restoration, we should want to exuberantly praise our God. But I'm also aware of the fact that many of us, as we listen to this, if you look at the ends of the spectrum of, Nick, you better shut up so I can start praising God right now. I'm about to jump out of my skin. And then, oh, okay, that's cool. I think I understand grace and mercy a little bit better now. A lot of us are closer to this end. A lot of us have responded in our heads and in our hearts to what I just said in that way. Oh, okay, yeah, I get it. I understand that better. That's good. Thank you. And it makes me wonder, me included, why we're on that end of the spectrum. And as I thought about that this week, I could only include that it's probably because we're all entitled brats. We're probably on that end of the spectrum because there's a very good chance that the two to three hundred adults I'm talking to right now are really just entitled brats. Here's what I mean. I just want to give you a picture of my daughter's life. I have a daughter named Lily. She just recently turned five. This is her last six weeks. Before you get offended at me calling you an entitled brat, which I did just do, just hear me out. Lily's last six weeks have been unbelievable. She is, through no fault of her own, incredibly entitled now. I ran this by Jen. She's not happy I'm saying this, but we've accepted that it's true. Here's what's happened with her. In December, we as a family spent basically the month down in Athens, Georgia with Jen's family as her dad transitioned into eternity. And in doing that, with Christmas coming up, there are people here in Raleigh who love us and who love Lily and wanted to make sure that Lily got a gift. So a couple times I would come back to Raleigh to take care of some church stuff, and there would be packages waiting on me at the house. I had, I literally, the first time I came back, this is embarrassing, we had some neighbors collecting our mail for us. I had to get a wheelbarrow and go down to their house and fill it up with all the stuff that was waiting on us. And then they pulled a wagon and we unloaded it at my house. That was Christmas arriving at the Rector's. That's us. And other people had like dropped things off at the door. So now I go home, I'm getting these gifts. I take them back to Lily, who is now opening these gifts like, hey, all these people got you these things. Okay, great, thank you. So she's opening them. We're trying to do the video with excitement. She's trying to fan excitement, but she's four at the time. She's not really good at this yet. She doesn't know that's part of the deal when you get gifts. So she's already getting gifts in early December. I made another trip back. There's more stuff waiting. I bring that back. I go ahead and give that to her because we know that there's Christmas coming. We don't want to mute those things. Then at Jen's house, because of things going on, we did early Christmas with her dad. So all the grandkids go in and she's now opening three or four other gifts from her grandparents. Thank you for these and these and these. Then Christmas Eve, we have real Christmas with Jen's family and she gets more gifts. Then the next day we go to my family's house and she gets more gifts, right, on Christmas. And so now the situation in a state that we don't even live in is at my parents' house, there's a pile of gifts that's too big to carry back to Jen's parents' house. So we just have to leave it there for a second. At Jen's parents' house, she has gifts strewn across three stories of a home, including inside a princess room that her grandfather made for her while he still could that she gets to sleep in, complete with lit teepee, okay? This is her life. There's a mess of toys there. There's some on the main floor. There's a basement that she's adopted as a playroom. And then there's toys in the playroom that my parents have for her. And then she comes back. We don't get back until early January, right? When we get back, there's more gifts waiting on her because people at the church love her and are so good to us. And then her birthday's on January 15th. So on January 15th, prior to that, more gifts are showing up at the house. She's opening them up. She lives in a, in a, like a dang gift parade. It's a totally normal thing for her to come home and open up to like, hey, these two things came for you today. And she just opens it up like they're nothing. Then on her birthday, the neighborhood kids come over and give her stuff she doesn't need in exchange for cake that they don't need. And then the next day we have church drive by where the families come through and they hand her more stuff that she doesn't need. And we wave at them in the freezing cold, and we just have so much junk all over our house. And to this child, it's totally normal. She has no idea that she lives inside of a gift parade. They just show up every day. And what Jen and I have realized is she's entitled. Now, I will say this. She is not a brat. She's not that. That word was for dramatic effect only. She's sweet and kind and loving, but she has no capacity to show the proper gratitude for all the gifts that she's been getting because to her it's a totally normal thing. It's embarrassing to me how much people love us and love her. And I don't know what I'm going to do as a dad. I've literally tried to talk Jen into when somebody gives us a gift, let's put it in a room somewhere. And then as she is good, if she has a good week, then we'll give her one of the gifts from the gift room, right? To try to help her earn it. I don't know exactly how to solve this. I would imagine that we're not on an island with this issue. But the reality of my daughter's life is she's entitled. And she doesn't know it. We're going to try to correct it. But what I understand is that that entitlement blinds her to what generosity really is. That entitlement works to mute her joy because she sees everything through the lens of this is normal. I deserve this. If I ask for a thing, I get the thing. This is how life goes. And she has no reason to believe that that's not how life goes. She's only barely five, and she's loved. See, here's the thing. I think it's great. I'm happy for her. I'm floored by the love that our family experiences. I'm grateful that she gets to live a life like that. But she has no perspective on how grateful she should really be. Because again, her entitlement blinds her to the generosity around her and serves to mute her joy that she should have when she receives a gift. I bring that up because I believe that you and I live in a stinking gift parade and we just don't know it. We live in parades of God's goodness and we don't see it. All of our life, if we grew up in church, as soon as you're involved in church, at some point or another, you're going to hear, you've sinned and you've offended Almighty God. And then as soon as that is said to help us feel better, as a capstone to it, you've sinned and offended Almighty God, but God offers us mercy, so you're good. Jesus died on the cross for your sins, so you're fine. You've sinned, you don't get to spend eternity with heaven, but God offers us mercy and sends his son to die for us, so you're forgiven. So we never have to sit in the reality of what our sin really warrants. We never have to sit under the weight of, I have sinned, I have chosen my authority over God's authority, and that has earned me eternal separation from him. We don't have to sit in that for more than 30 seconds before the pastor comes back and says, but God died for you, so we have mercy. We never stop to think that we don't deserve mercy. We never stop to consider that these gifts don't have to keep showing up at my house. We've never done the math to understand that God doesn't owe you forgiveness. Do you understand? He doesn't owe it to you. He created you. He set you on the planet. He said, these are the rules. This is how you can please me. And we've all at different points in our life said, you know, I'm not really that interested in pleasing you. He doesn't owe us forgiveness for that. We walk around like we're entitled to it. We walk around like we deserve it. We walk around like, listen, the deal should be, God, I'm going to mess up a couple times. If you could let some people kill your son, that seems pretty fair. Grace, we are not owed mercy. That's nowhere in the contract. You say, yeah, but God is love. God forgives. He is love. He does forgive. He's also just. And what we deserve is separation from the God that we've offended. But because mercy triumphs over judgment, and because His mercies are new every morning, he withholds that judgment from us and he offers us forgiveness. He offers us a mercy that we are not owed and that we do not deserve. Yet we are so familiar with it and we sing songs about it so often and we count on it and take it for granted so regularly that sometimes we treat mercy like another doll that someone handed us out the window that, yeah, of course I get this. It's my birthday. This is what we do. And our entitlement blinds us to the grandeur and the majesty of God's mercy. Not to mention the graces that we don't see. Grace is a goodness that we get that we have not earned. Grace is God's favor on our life that doesn't warrant it. We just walked through the really, and we're in the middle of the really difficult season of losing Jen's dad. His name was John. Towards the end of John's life, we found out we were pregnant with a boy that we're going to name John. What grace from God. What grace from God that he says, listen, everybody has to go. As appointed to man wants to die. Everyone's going to have to walk this path. And now it's John's turn to walk this path. But because I love you and because you're good and because you're my child, you're good because I made you good. Here's another John for you to love. That's grace. We don't deserve that. We didn't warrant that. Do you understand that the goodness in your life is grace? It's God's goodness in your life that when you get the new car and you drive it down the road and it smells nice and it looks nice and you're real proud of yourself and it makes us feel like we arrived, that happiness, that moment, that's God's grace. When we sit in our living room and our kids are back from college and we watch our grandkids scurry around or we see their joy and a gift that we were able to buy them, like that's God's grace. When we sit around with our friends and we laugh and we have a good night and we go home and we feel warm, that's God's grace. Your gifts and talents that got you where you are, those are gifts from God that are his grace. His grace is all over our lives. And if we would just stop and look around and acknowledge that we're in a dang gift parade, I think we would be blown away by God's goodness. It reminds me of one of my favorite verses in John, where he simply writes, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From God's fullness, out of the goodness of his heart, we have all received grace upon grace. He just lavishes them upon us because he's a good father and he likes to see you happy. He likes it when you cry tears of joy. He likes the moments that you share with your husband or your wife or your friend or your parents or your kids. He likes those sweet moments. He designs those for you. He doesn't just forgive you. He doesn't just say, hey, I'm not going to hold your sins against you, but he fills up your tank with gas every day over and over from his fullness. We have all received grace upon grace. He doesn't just forgive you. He sends his son to die for you and he restores you and he welcomes you into his house to sit at his table. And these little snippets of grace are just glimpses into eternity where it's nothing but grace and nothing but goodness and nothing but joy that's waiting for us, that he won for us, that he gifts to us that we didn't earn. And so I just wonder what God's grace and mercy will look like when we no longer see them through the lens of entitlement. I wonder what God's grace and mercy will look like when we no longer see those things through the lens of entitlement. When we can just stop for a second and acknowledge, yeah, I don't deserve mercy. That's not part of the deal. God chooses to show me mercy because he loves me. What will it look like if we take for a second? In a few minutes we're going to sing that song that has the line, I see the evidence of your goodness all around me. What would happen if we would look around at all the goodness in our life that's a gift from God and acknowledge that, man, we live inside of a gift parade. God has given us countless goodness and countless grace. He lavishes it upon us. His mercies are new every morning because we require them every morning. Let's this morning be grateful for God's grace and for God's mercy. Let's see them fresh and new, not through the lens of entitlement that blinds us to the grandeur of his generosity, but through the lens of humility that helps us see his grace and mercy for what they are. And let's be humbly blown away by those things. So sing along as we sing or sit and listen as we sing. But in light of God's grace and mercy, let's praise him together this morning.

Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be with you in this way. I am excited for the fifth part in our series called Things You Should Know, where we're looking through things in Scripture or that come up in church or in Christendom that we are familiar with, we've heard of before, but maybe we don't know how to explain or maybe it hasn't been discussed or maybe we're just too far down the rabbit hole of faith to raise our hand and ask about these things to get some clarity. And so what we wanted to do, so that you didn't have to ask those embarrassing questions in small groups, is take five weeks here at the beginning of the year and talk through some of these topics that we may have questions about, because we don't really discuss them all the time. This morning, I wanted us to look at grace and mercy. Grace and mercy are two things that we see come up in Scripture a lot. We're going to look at Scripture in a little bit to see how replete it is with references to God's grace and God's mercy. And we sing songs about them. We certainly know about them. We've heard about them. The name of the church is Grace, for crying out loud. But I wonder how many of us would be confident in whatever your working definition of grace is. I wonder how many of us would be confident understanding mercy or explaining it to our kids if they heard those words and said, hey, what does that mean? How many of you would feel comfortable going, I got this, I'm going to knock this out of the park? If I asked those of us listening and watching, hey, could you explain grace and mercy to the church? Could I get you to come in one Sunday morning, I'm just going to bring you up on stage, and you tell the good people of grace what the name of the church really means. Now, I have no doubt in our church, we would do a good job. There would be, I think, a myriad answers across a wide range of definitions using a lot of unnecessary words that would be mostly right. But I think it's worth it as a church to take some time and define these words in a simple way and understand what grace and mercy really are. Because when we understand God's grace and God's mercy towards us, I think that we can't help but want to respond in exuberant praise. I think when we really understand what's going on with grace and mercy, when we really properly understand those two characteristics of God, that it inspires within us a response of gratitude, and that gratitude manifests joy, and it ought to make us want to leap out of our skin and praise our good God. Which is why we've positioned the sermon at the beginning of the service this week, and we're going to transition right into worship as I wrap up the sermon. Because I wanted to give you guys a chance to respond to the reality of God's grace and mercy. So with that in mind, and I would also say, for those of you who are listening to this or me, not on Sunday morning, if you're catching up later in the day, if you're listening on a podcast in the car or on a walk or something like that, as you listen to my voice right now, I would encourage you, plan to listen to some praise and worship music on your own at the end of this sermon. Just go ahead and budget some time in your head to listen to two or three songs or just have it playing in the car and allow yourself to respond to what's shared here this morning. But with that preamble, I wanted to jump right in to defining these words for us so we have a working definition here at Grace. So mercy, the way I understand it, is simply when we do not get what we deserve. Mercy is when we do not get something that we deserve. When our actions or our attitude or our behavior warrants punishment, something punitive, or just some natural consequences, and we don't receive those consequences, we don't receive the punishment that we deserve, when we've earned some trouble and we don't get into that trouble, that's mercy. So mercy is simply when we don't get something that we do deserve. Think of it this way. Pretend you've got a 16-year-old son. He's just got a new car. He's got the keys. And part of the deal with having the freedom to drive is that there's a curfew. And his very first time out, he goes out with his buddies and he breaks a curfew. And he understands that you guys have set up these rules that if you go and you break curfew, when you come back, we're going to take your car keys for a week. That's the deal. All right? So he gets back, he's broken curfew, and what he deserves is for you to take his car keys. And instead you say, you know what? I hope that you remember this. I want to forgive you. I'm not going to hold this against you. Go into bed. I'm not going to take your car keys. Right? That's mercy. He does not get a punishment that he does deserve. He doesn't get the consequences that his behaviors warrant. You just showed your son mercy. That's what that is. So mercy is when we do not get something that we do deserve. Grace, conversely, is when we do get something that we don't deserve. Grace is when we get a special favor or a blessing that we did not earn, that our behavior does not warrant. So we go back to the 16-year-old kid. You've forgiven him and you've sent him to his room, go to bed. I'm not going to take your keys. You can continue to have that freedom. You deserve that punishment, but I'm not going to give it to you. But grace is this. Maybe part of the agreement with your son is if he's going to have the freedom of driving, then he has to be responsible and earn his own gas money, which is a pretty fair driving arrangement across, I think, all families. That's a pretty typical arrangement. You're going to have a car, you've got to pay for your gas money. And because you love him, and because you want him to be blessed, and because it seems like he felt particularly bad about breaking curfew, not only do you send him to bed without taking his keys, but then after he's gone, you take his car and you sneak over to the gas station and you fill that thing all the way up for him. And you leave it there as a surprise the next morning. That's grace. Grace is the full gas tank that he doesn't deserve. He just broke the rules, man. He doesn't deserve that at all. He doesn't deserve any special favors. But because you love him, because you're a good parent, you fill up his gas tank. That's grace, right? And it's important that we understand these concepts because they are all over Scripture. Scripture shows us over and over again that God shows us mercy and that God shows us grace. I went through this week and just kind of looked at some of the passages, and I wanted you to see a few of them. So I'm going to read them kind of machine gun style real quick here. There's going to be three in a row for mercy, and then we're going to talk about these. But just look what Scripture has to say about mercy. I love this one in James. This is just a snippet of the verse, but it's a simple phrase. James writes that mercy triumphs over judgment. And then on in Lamentations, back in the Old Testament, the scriptures say, And then finally, Paul writes in Ephesians, What we see in those verses very clearly is that God's mercy is the forgiveness of our sins. God's mercy to us is forgiving our sins, is not giving us the just punishment that we deserve for our sins. I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but when we sin, it is offensive to Creator God. When we sin, we take up arms in a violent insurrection against God's domain in the universe. Last week, we talked about Satan, and we talked about his fundamental sin that is all of our fundamental sins, which is to look at God and to say, you're supposed to be up there. You're supposed to be the authority figure, but I don't want that to be true in my life, so I'm going to be my own authority figure. When we sin, when we choose something that is outside of God's will, what we're saying to God is, I don't accept your authority in my life. You're not the boss of me. I'm the boss of me. You don't make my decisions. I make my decisions. You see, when we sin, it is an active rebellion against the way that God created us. God is the creator. We are the created. I'm firmly convinced, and I've said it before, that that's why Genesis starts the way it does. The very first words in the Bible are, in the beginning, God created. It establishes that relationship, creator, creation. In charge, subservient. And when we sin, we go, I don't like that you're in charge. I want to be in charge. And we rebel against God. And God sent his son in light of that rebellion to make a path back to him so that we could spend eternity with him. And God says, when we sin, listen, you can't spend eternity with me anymore. You can't do it. You're imperfect. You've offended me. You violated the terms of the agreement. I am taking your keys. And then God sends his son to make a way for us to go to heaven anyways, for us to spend eternity with him anyways. And what do we do? We trample on that. We sin again. We demand forgiveness again. And I'm not sure that we stop and realize the miracle of God's mercy, the miracle of his forgiveness. When we do, that phrase in James, mercy triumphs over judgment, becomes really amazing. We deserve judgment. We broke the rules. He should take our keys. But he doesn't because our God chooses mercy and mercy triumphs over judgment. Jesus tells Peter, when Peter says, how many times should you forgive someone when they wrong you? Jesus says, 70 times seven. As many times as they wrong you, show them mercy. It's in his very nature to do this. Even though we are involved in a rebellious insurrection against Creator God, He looks at us in all of our offense. And for many of us, we're not talking about ignorant sin here. We're not talking about this thing that we did and now we realize, oh my gosh, I shouldn't be doing that. Now that I'm acquainted with Scripture, I know better. I'm talking about the willful sin that you and I commit every week, every day. Who am I kidding? That's offensive to Creator God. And yet he shows us mercy because lamentation says his mercies are new every morning. Every day requires more of God's forgiveness. Every day we break curfew and every day he gives us mercy for that. He withholds the punishment from us that we do deserve. He withholds the separation from us that we do deserve, the damnation from us that we do deserve. That's God's mercy. But it gets better because I think God's grace adds another layer on top of that that's even more remarkable. Look at what Scripture says about God's grace, just two verses really quickly. In Ephesians, Paul writes, for by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God. And then on in Romans he writes, and we are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. So mercy forgives us. God's mercy forgives us, but God's grace restores us. You see? God's mercy says, you're forgiven. I know you messed up. I know you broke curfew. You're forgiven. But then God's grace says, and I've made a way for you to be in my family. He fills up the tank. God's mercy says, I no longer hold your sins against you. God's grace says, because of that, I sent my son to die for you, and now you have a seat at my table etern, Do you understand? God's mercy says we messed up, we've offended Creator God, we've willfully sinned, and we've offended Him, and we deserve punishment, and He says, I'm not going to punish you. And He could stop there. He could say, I'm not going to punish you, I'm not going to punish you this one time for breaking curfew, but don't mess up anymore. And then if we mess up again, then we're done. We're toast. That's it. But in his grace and in his goodness, he doesn't stop at forgiveness. He stops at restoration. Not only are you forgiven, but now here, have a seat at my table. Not only are you forgiven, but now you are an adopted son or daughter of the king. You are an heir to the universal throne. Not only am I not going to hold it against you, not only am I going to clothe you in the righteousness ofal son. For those of you who are not familiar with it, I'm about to give you the quickest, worst rendition of it ever. All right. I've preached about this before. I can do a better job than this, but for the sake of time, we're going to look at some essential details. The parable of the prodigal son goes like this. There's a father who's wealthy and he has two sons. And one of those sons, the younger one, looks at the dad and he says, you know what? I really just want your stuff. I don't want you. Can you just go ahead and give me my inheritance? I'd rather you be dead anyway. Just give me my money so that I can live how I want. And that father, in his goodness, for reasons I don't understand, says, okay, fine, and gives him the money. And the son goes off into the city and he spends it on living in ways that just feed his appetites and his lusts. And he runs out of money. He spends it in totally dishonorable ways. He comes to the end of it. Everybody leaves him. He can't find a job. He ends up eating slop on a pig farm. And one day the Bible says he comes to his senses in this really poignant moment and he decides, I'm going to go back to my dad's house. But he works out this speech in his head where he's going to go back and he's going to say, I'm going to go back and I'm going to tell him, can you just please forgive me and let me be your servant? I don't deserve to be your son anymore. What I've done is too offensive. Will you please just let me be your servant? Because they live better than I do right now. And so he heads home with this speech in mind, which, by the way, it's a pretty fair speech, right? Dude took his dad's money, went off and spent it however he wanted to, wasted it on debaucherous things, and then comes back with his hat in his hand. Yeah, you're darn right he doesn't deserve to be a son anymore. He should live as a servant, at least for a few years, right? But he goes back, and the father sees him from a long way off and runs out to greet him. And the son starts in with his speech, dad, I'm so sorry, I don't deserve, yada, yada, yada. And the dad shuts him up right away, flings his arms around him and hugs him. And in that moment, the son knows that he's forgiven, that his father's not going to hold those things against him. That's mercy. But he doesn't stop there. He takes the ring, the signet of the family, and he puts it on his son's finger. And he takes the robe and he takes the slippers and he puts those on the son. And then he goes and he kills the fattened calf, the really good stuff. And he throws a big, huge party. And he says, my son is back, and he welcomes him right back into the family, which he didn't have to do, and his behavior didn't warrant. It's the perfect picture of the mercy and the grace that God offers us. We're the prodigals. We run away and make willful decisions to offend our God, to throw off his authority in our life and be our own authority. And then at some point or another, we come back, hat in hand, apologetic, I'm so sorry. And he forgives us. But he doesn't just forgive us. He restores us. He doesn't just say, hey, I'm not mad at you. Come here. You would expect that he would say, you're forgiven. Get away from me. I need a minute. That's not what he does. He says, you're forgiven. And then he hugs us. And then he sends his son, his only son, whom he loves, who was perfect, who never offended him, to die for you and for me. He gave us that gift. Do you understand? We don't deserve the grace of Jesus. We don't deserve that. We didn't earn it. Our behavior doesn't warrant it. Nowhere in the scripture is there a contract that says when we break the law and offend Almighty God that he owes us the death of his son? That's not the deal. But he does it anyways. That's grace. And in light of that, the mercy of forgiveness and the grace of restoration, we should want to exuberantly praise our God. But I'm also aware of the fact that many of us, as we listen to this, if you look at the ends of the spectrum of, Nick, you better shut up so I can start praising God right now. I'm about to jump out of my skin. And then, oh, okay, that's cool. I think I understand grace and mercy a little bit better now. A lot of us are closer to this end. A lot of us have responded in our heads and in our hearts to what I just said in that way. Oh, okay, yeah, I get it. I understand that better. That's good. Thank you. And it makes me wonder, me included, why we're on that end of the spectrum. And as I thought about that this week, I could only include that it's probably because we're all entitled brats. We're probably on that end of the spectrum because there's a very good chance that the two to three hundred adults I'm talking to right now are really just entitled brats. Here's what I mean. I just want to give you a picture of my daughter's life. I have a daughter named Lily. She just recently turned five. This is her last six weeks. Before you get offended at me calling you an entitled brat, which I did just do, just hear me out. Lily's last six weeks have been unbelievable. She is, through no fault of her own, incredibly entitled now. I ran this by Jen. She's not happy I'm saying this, but we've accepted that it's true. Here's what's happened with her. In December, we as a family spent basically the month down in Athens, Georgia with Jen's family as her dad transitioned into eternity. And in doing that, with Christmas coming up, there are people here in Raleigh who love us and who love Lily and wanted to make sure that Lily got a gift. So a couple times I would come back to Raleigh to take care of some church stuff, and there would be packages waiting on me at the house. I had, I literally, the first time I came back, this is embarrassing, we had some neighbors collecting our mail for us. I had to get a wheelbarrow and go down to their house and fill it up with all the stuff that was waiting on us. And then they pulled a wagon and we unloaded it at my house. That was Christmas arriving at the Rector's. That's us. And other people had like dropped things off at the door. So now I go home, I'm getting these gifts. I take them back to Lily, who is now opening these gifts like, hey, all these people got you these things. Okay, great, thank you. So she's opening them. We're trying to do the video with excitement. She's trying to fan excitement, but she's four at the time. She's not really good at this yet. She doesn't know that's part of the deal when you get gifts. So she's already getting gifts in early December. I made another trip back. There's more stuff waiting. I bring that back. I go ahead and give that to her because we know that there's Christmas coming. We don't want to mute those things. Then at Jen's house, because of things going on, we did early Christmas with her dad. So all the grandkids go in and she's now opening three or four other gifts from her grandparents. Thank you for these and these and these. Then Christmas Eve, we have real Christmas with Jen's family and she gets more gifts. Then the next day we go to my family's house and she gets more gifts, right, on Christmas. And so now the situation in a state that we don't even live in is at my parents' house, there's a pile of gifts that's too big to carry back to Jen's parents' house. So we just have to leave it there for a second. At Jen's parents' house, she has gifts strewn across three stories of a home, including inside a princess room that her grandfather made for her while he still could that she gets to sleep in, complete with lit teepee, okay? This is her life. There's a mess of toys there. There's some on the main floor. There's a basement that she's adopted as a playroom. And then there's toys in the playroom that my parents have for her. And then she comes back. We don't get back until early January, right? When we get back, there's more gifts waiting on her because people at the church love her and are so good to us. And then her birthday's on January 15th. So on January 15th, prior to that, more gifts are showing up at the house. She's opening them up. She lives in a, in a, like a dang gift parade. It's a totally normal thing for her to come home and open up to like, hey, these two things came for you today. And she just opens it up like they're nothing. Then on her birthday, the neighborhood kids come over and give her stuff she doesn't need in exchange for cake that they don't need. And then the next day we have church drive by where the families come through and they hand her more stuff that she doesn't need. And we wave at them in the freezing cold, and we just have so much junk all over our house. And to this child, it's totally normal. She has no idea that she lives inside of a gift parade. They just show up every day. And what Jen and I have realized is she's entitled. Now, I will say this. She is not a brat. She's not that. That word was for dramatic effect only. She's sweet and kind and loving, but she has no capacity to show the proper gratitude for all the gifts that she's been getting because to her it's a totally normal thing. It's embarrassing to me how much people love us and love her. And I don't know what I'm going to do as a dad. I've literally tried to talk Jen into when somebody gives us a gift, let's put it in a room somewhere. And then as she is good, if she has a good week, then we'll give her one of the gifts from the gift room, right? To try to help her earn it. I don't know exactly how to solve this. I would imagine that we're not on an island with this issue. But the reality of my daughter's life is she's entitled. And she doesn't know it. We're going to try to correct it. But what I understand is that that entitlement blinds her to what generosity really is. That entitlement works to mute her joy because she sees everything through the lens of this is normal. I deserve this. If I ask for a thing, I get the thing. This is how life goes. And she has no reason to believe that that's not how life goes. She's only barely five, and she's loved. See, here's the thing. I think it's great. I'm happy for her. I'm floored by the love that our family experiences. I'm grateful that she gets to live a life like that. But she has no perspective on how grateful she should really be. Because again, her entitlement blinds her to the generosity around her and serves to mute her joy that she should have when she receives a gift. I bring that up because I believe that you and I live in a stinking gift parade and we just don't know it. We live in parades of God's goodness and we don't see it. All of our life, if we grew up in church, as soon as you're involved in church, at some point or another, you're going to hear, you've sinned and you've offended Almighty God. And then as soon as that is said to help us feel better, as a capstone to it, you've sinned and offended Almighty God, but God offers us mercy, so you're good. Jesus died on the cross for your sins, so you're fine. You've sinned, you don't get to spend eternity with heaven, but God offers us mercy and sends his son to die for us, so you're forgiven. So we never have to sit in the reality of what our sin really warrants. We never have to sit under the weight of, I have sinned, I have chosen my authority over God's authority, and that has earned me eternal separation from him. We don't have to sit in that for more than 30 seconds before the pastor comes back and says, but God died for you, so we have mercy. We never stop to think that we don't deserve mercy. We never stop to consider that these gifts don't have to keep showing up at my house. We've never done the math to understand that God doesn't owe you forgiveness. Do you understand? He doesn't owe it to you. He created you. He set you on the planet. He said, these are the rules. This is how you can please me. And we've all at different points in our life said, you know, I'm not really that interested in pleasing you. He doesn't owe us forgiveness for that. We walk around like we're entitled to it. We walk around like we deserve it. We walk around like, listen, the deal should be, God, I'm going to mess up a couple times. If you could let some people kill your son, that seems pretty fair. Grace, we are not owed mercy. That's nowhere in the contract. You say, yeah, but God is love. God forgives. He is love. He does forgive. He's also just. And what we deserve is separation from the God that we've offended. But because mercy triumphs over judgment, and because His mercies are new every morning, he withholds that judgment from us and he offers us forgiveness. He offers us a mercy that we are not owed and that we do not deserve. Yet we are so familiar with it and we sing songs about it so often and we count on it and take it for granted so regularly that sometimes we treat mercy like another doll that someone handed us out the window that, yeah, of course I get this. It's my birthday. This is what we do. And our entitlement blinds us to the grandeur and the majesty of God's mercy. Not to mention the graces that we don't see. Grace is a goodness that we get that we have not earned. Grace is God's favor on our life that doesn't warrant it. We just walked through the really, and we're in the middle of the really difficult season of losing Jen's dad. His name was John. Towards the end of John's life, we found out we were pregnant with a boy that we're going to name John. What grace from God. What grace from God that he says, listen, everybody has to go. As appointed to man wants to die. Everyone's going to have to walk this path. And now it's John's turn to walk this path. But because I love you and because you're good and because you're my child, you're good because I made you good. Here's another John for you to love. That's grace. We don't deserve that. We didn't warrant that. Do you understand that the goodness in your life is grace? It's God's goodness in your life that when you get the new car and you drive it down the road and it smells nice and it looks nice and you're real proud of yourself and it makes us feel like we arrived, that happiness, that moment, that's God's grace. When we sit in our living room and our kids are back from college and we watch our grandkids scurry around or we see their joy and a gift that we were able to buy them, like that's God's grace. When we sit around with our friends and we laugh and we have a good night and we go home and we feel warm, that's God's grace. Your gifts and talents that got you where you are, those are gifts from God that are his grace. His grace is all over our lives. And if we would just stop and look around and acknowledge that we're in a dang gift parade, I think we would be blown away by God's goodness. It reminds me of one of my favorite verses in John, where he simply writes, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From God's fullness, out of the goodness of his heart, we have all received grace upon grace. He just lavishes them upon us because he's a good father and he likes to see you happy. He likes it when you cry tears of joy. He likes the moments that you share with your husband or your wife or your friend or your parents or your kids. He likes those sweet moments. He designs those for you. He doesn't just forgive you. He doesn't just say, hey, I'm not going to hold your sins against you, but he fills up your tank with gas every day over and over from his fullness. We have all received grace upon grace. He doesn't just forgive you. He sends his son to die for you and he restores you and he welcomes you into his house to sit at his table. And these little snippets of grace are just glimpses into eternity where it's nothing but grace and nothing but goodness and nothing but joy that's waiting for us, that he won for us, that he gifts to us that we didn't earn. And so I just wonder what God's grace and mercy will look like when we no longer see them through the lens of entitlement. I wonder what God's grace and mercy will look like when we no longer see those things through the lens of entitlement. When we can just stop for a second and acknowledge, yeah, I don't deserve mercy. That's not part of the deal. God chooses to show me mercy because he loves me. What will it look like if we take for a second? In a few minutes we're going to sing that song that has the line, I see the evidence of your goodness all around me. What would happen if we would look around at all the goodness in our life that's a gift from God and acknowledge that, man, we live inside of a gift parade. God has given us countless goodness and countless grace. He lavishes it upon us. His mercies are new every morning because we require them every morning. Let's this morning be grateful for God's grace and for God's mercy. Let's see them fresh and new, not through the lens of entitlement that blinds us to the grandeur of his generosity, but through the lens of humility that helps us see his grace and mercy for what they are. And let's be humbly blown away by those things. So sing along as we sing or sit and listen as we sing. But in light of God's grace and mercy, let's praise him together this morning.

Well, my name is Nate, and I say I get to be the pastor here, although that's less convincing since I just said I don't want to preach to you guys. I still like to be the pastor. I just want to sit in the service, too, you know? And if I haven't gotten to meet you, I really would love to do that in the lobby afterwards if that's something that you would like to do as well. We are in the last part of our series called The Blessed Life, where we're looking at the blessings that come at the beginning of Jesus' first recorded public address, the Sermon on the Mount. You can find it in Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. That's where we've been looking at the blessings. But it's also recorded in Luke chapter 6, so you can find it there as well. As we've looked at the blessings, we've looked at three of them. Last week, Doug looked at poor in spirit, did a phenomenal job. Thank you once again, Doug. I told Doug after the service last week, and I would say publicly, that I think the church is so very blessed when we can just kind of give him this little idea or verse or thought. I think one time I allowed him like a part of one sentence, please preach on just this part of one sentence. And he takes that into his laboratory for like six months and just thinks on it and then just says, here you go. And we all just kind of walk away going, I think I should listen to that three or four more times, but we're so blessed by that. So thank you. This week, I want to look at the final blessing that we have selected. And when I say we, I mean me. There's nine blessings, and I picked three of them to talk about. Doug picked the other one. And as I chose them, one of the ones that I wanted to talk about as we moved through this series was this one found in Matthew chapter 5, verse 9. And it simply says, blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be the children of God, the sons and daughters of God, which is quite the blessing for this one. The others, you know, theirs is the kingdom of heaven, that they will be, their hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied, that will be filled, they will inherit the earth. But this one, God literally says, if you are a peacemaker, I will adopt you as my child. That's the blessing that flows from being someone who seeks to make peace. And for most of us, this is not the first time we've encountered this blessing or beatitude. Blessed are the peacemakers. And so when we think of it, we probably think of peacemakers. What I think about peacemakers, I had an experience a week, 10 days ago, where I met a buddy of mine in the afternoon just to chit-chat and catch up, just kind of like you do sometimes. And we got to talking, and he asked me about a mutual acquaintance of ours and how my relationship was with him. And I said, well, it's not super good. There's really still kind of a lot of hurt and anger there, so I wouldn't say that we're actually talking very much. And he said, well, why is that? Why is that bad? And for eight to ten minutes, I kind of enumerated my sob story of why I'm angry at this person, why I'm holding a grudge against this person, and why I'm not really too keen on cleaning that up. We don't really run in the same circles. We don't really run into each other. So it's not something that's in my face all the time. And I'm perfectly happy just floating through life, never forgiving them, never talking to them, just making them anathema to me and just moving on down the road. And I enumerated to him all the reasons why I'm justified in this hurt. And he responded with, you're right, that makes sense. And I would be angry too. You know you need to talk to him and forgive him, right? Just like flippantly, as if he hadn't heard the methodical case I laid out for 10 minutes so that he would know, yes, God does tell us to forgive, but surely this, Nate, is the exception. You were so deeply wronged. You do not have to forgive this person. He said, you know you have to forgive him, right? And I was like, eh, I mean, I think we're good. And he was like, no, you're not. You know you need to talk to him. And I'm like, yeah, but I don't want to. And he goes, okay, but you should. He's really stubborn, and he's not very smart. So this was really annoying. And I finally looked at him and I said, yeah, I know, you're right. I do. I don't want to, but I'll pray that I want to and that I can. And that was two weeks ago. I've thought about that person and that conversation every day since. And choosing a sermon on being a peacemaker doesn't help with the conviction that you have in your life that you've not made peace. I don't hold a lot of grudges, but apparently when I do, I hold them pretty tight. And so I thought, what a well-timed sermon for me. I don't know if it's going to help you guys. I'll just preach to myself. None of y'all hold grudges or mad at anybody. But I thought, what a well-timed sermon for me. I'm going to need this. This is going to be one of those ones that I'll be freshly convicted as I go through it. And it is. But as I approached the topic and began to read up on it, began to think through it, it actually came out in my studies that that sort of peacemaking, person to person, is not really what Jesus was talking about when he said, blessed are the peacemakers. See, to Jesus, a true peacemaker is one who reconciles someone with their God. So a peacemaker is someone who seeks to reconcile someone else with their creator God, which is different than horizontal peacemaking. A peacemaker is one who makes peace vertically between a person and their God. And so I kind of came into the week loaded for bear on why peacemaking is so important, why it matters so much, why we need to pursue it, and even the active part of peacemaking, how making peace isn't just staying quiet and simmering with anger and never saying anything to someone else to kind of not disturb the peace, but sometimes making peace looks like the exact opposite of peace for the sake of peace, right? Sometimes making peace looks like getting involved in World War II for the sake of making peace. And so sometimes in our lives and in our relationship, we can't just sit back. We can't just idly stand by and try to keep the waters calm where there's tension simmering underneath it. We need to actively pursue peace with difficult, challenging conversations. And I was ready to preach this because that's something I don't mind doing. And I felt like I was preaching from a strong suit. And it turns out I'm not. It's funny how God works because that's not really what this sermon is about. It's about the fact that making peace in the eyes of Jesus, first and foremost, means reconciling people to their God. And so really, as much as my buddy was a peacemaker that day, and really ultimately pushed me closer to my God in reconciliation with others, a true peacemaker is more like my friend who's a pastor. I have a friend who is a pastor and his gift, he's got this gift of evangelism. He shares Jesus all the time everywhere he goes. He's one of those guys when you go out to eat with him and the waiter or the waitress brings the food to the table, he'll say, hey, we're about to pray. Is there anything going on in your life we can pray about? And if you're like me, that makes you just a little tense. It's a little bit uncomfortable, but I can't tell you how many times out of that simple question people have broken down, people have shared things, people have wanted to talk. He'll stay after the meal and lead them to Christ right there in the restaurant. He likes to golf. He'll go golfing and he'll witness to his caddy for 18 holes when he goes on trips. And by the end, he's posting a selfie next to his caddy who just accepted Christ. And like, if you're next to him on an airplane and you don't know Jesus, you're at least going to fake like you do before the end of that flight. He is going to share his faith with you. He is going to share it all the time, and he is constantly, constantly helping people reconcile themselves with their creator. That's what a peacemaker does. A peacemaker helps someone see there is a creator God of the universe who really loves us, as we just sang, and pursues us and comes after us when we are the prodigal son or the prodigal daughter. He chases after us. He waits for us eagerly. He desires us. And we were made, Garden of Eden, perfect creation, perfect relationship. God walked with them in the cool of the evening. God designed you to be in relationship with him. It's the only reason you exist. It's the only reason he wanted to create you is so he could share himself with you. The problem is when we sin, and the easiest way to understand sin is when we assume authority in our life. When God is here and we are here and we go, gosh, I don't like this arrangement. I'm going to start making my own decisions regardless of what God wants me to do. Those decisions are sin. And that sin wrecks our relationship with God. And we cannot be reconciled to him. There is nothing we can do to reconcile our relationship with our creator God. And God in his goodness, because he loves us, sent his son to die for us and create a path of reconciliation back to him so that all we need to do to be reconciled to our creator God is open up our eyes to the fact that he created us, that he loves us, that our sin has distorted our relationship, but that he sent his son to die for us so that that relationship might be restored. And that's what heaven is. It's to exist in eternity in a perfect relationship with God. When we think about heaven, we probably think about the pearly gates and the golden streets and seeing our loved ones and the marriage supper of the lamb and all the things that heaven is going to be. But what heaven really is, the real draw, is to exist in right relationship with our God for all of eternity, exactly as we were intended to do that. And so a peacemaker is someone who opens up the eyes of others that they might be reconciled with their God. Do you understand that the teachers who are in that room right there teaching the fourth and fifth graders and who are on the other side of the aquarium supply store down the dark hallway. Teaching our kindergarten through third graders. And the teachers all down this hall who are loving on our children. Do you understand they're making peace? But slowly by slowly, brick by brick, seemingly innocuous lesson plan by lesson plan, they're helping our children make peace with their God. Do you understand that our teachers are peacemakers? Do you understand that the people who come on Sunday nights and volunteer to be small group leaders for our students, who make awkward small talk with seventh graders so you don't have to. Are slowly by slowly, bit by bit, helping open the eyes of those students to their creator God who loves them and sent his son for them. That bit by bit, those small group leaders are helping those students be reconciled to their God. Do you understand that small group leaders who open up their home and their schedules and facilitate those conversations are peacemakers who are reconciling others to their God? Do you understand that when in a small group setting you share something from your journey, something from what God has shown you that can help somebody else, that in that small way, way in that moment that you too are being a peacemaker? That really we are being peacemakers anytime we help someone take a step towards God. Anytime we help someone reconcile themselves back to their creator, when we help someone make vertical peace, we are being peacemakers. And so Jesus says, blessed are those who help others make peace with me. Blessed are those who help others see themselves as I see them and see me as they should see me. And so in this way, not only is it volunteering in the children's and the students' and small groups and conversations, but it's also being willing to have those difficult conversations. It's also my friend who said, you know you need to forgive that person. And it's not because they were trying to help me make peace with that person. It's because helping me make peace with that person will help me make peace with my God. You're a peacemaker when you sit down with a friend who you love and you care about and you say, hey man, I don't want to be in this conversation right now any more than you want to be in it. But I've noticed this habit or this hang up or this addiction or this sin that's in your life and it's not helping you. It's hurting you. And I love you. And I want to see what you look like on the other side of this sin. That's making peace. When as a spouse, you look at your husband or your wife, and you say, hey, you're acting this way, you're doing this thing, you're developing this habit, you're developing this hang-up, and it needs to end where this does. When you put your foot down and you say no more, you're making peace. You're pushing them towards their creator. And in those moments when it's really difficult to make peace and yet we pursue it anyways. Vertical peace. Jesus says we are blessed because we're helping people to be reconciled to their creator God. And it occurred to me as I thought through what true peacemaking was that Jesus is the great peacemaker. He offers the great peace out of which all other peace flows. Jesus himself is the great peacemaker, and he offers the great peace out of which all other peace flows. I'll tell you what I mean, but he's the great peacemaker as he hangs on the cross, reconciling us back to our creator God. He did not have to do that. His relationship with his God was fine. His relationship with his father was fine, but he did it for me and you. So as he hangs on the cross, he is the great peacemaker, creating the great path of reconciliation and providing us with the great and perfect peace. And it makes me wonder, how could we ever seek to be at peace with ourselves if we are not first at peace with our creator? And as I thought about this concept, and I thought about the great peace that Jesus offers, it occurs to me that I should mention this. I'm going to move over here. I'm going to be in this portion of the stage, because this is not the sermon proper, okay? This is not what I'm driving at, but I do want to tell you this. So allow me a parenthetical portion of the sermon, okay? We live in a culture that is increasingly aware of mental health issues, anxiety and depression in particular. And it's not like these issues didn't exist before. We just didn't have words for them or labels for them. We didn't really understand them or know what to do with them. We just called it being sad or being discouraged or worrying too much. I was actually talking with a guy this week who has a daughter in college who's struggling pretty big with anxiety and depression right now. And he mentioned to me that as she's going to counseling, they're doing all the right things, and they're being really diligent about it. And she's been sharing with him some of the stuff that she's been learning in counseling, some of the symptoms and some of the things and some of the stuff that she sees manifesting in her life. And he's realized, oh my goodness, I've walked with that my whole life too. I shouldn't have a name for it. I just thought I was sad. So we live in a culture with an increasing awareness of these things. And I want to be really careful because I would not for a second try to be one of those pastors who says we pray away the depression. If you're worried, you just don't trust God enough. If you're depressed, you're just not experiencing the joy of Jesus and you need to pursue him harder and pray and sing more. Could be part of it. But probably that there's a legitimate chemical imbalance that needs counseling and that needs some drugs maybe even for a short time. And so I do not for a second want to say that we pray the depression and the anxiety away all the time as a first measure. There are some things that require actual treatment. I don't want to be ignorant about that. However, if it's true that God created us, if it's true that he fashioned your soul to crave him, if it's true that we, along with all creation in Romans 8, cry out for the return of the king, that creation groans for the return of God, for him to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, if we claw for Eden and the perfection that he created, if it's true that there's a creator God and that creator God made you and he made you to crave him and to need him and to only find satisfaction through knowing him and being reconciled to him, how could we possibly seek our own peace without being at peace with our creator? It's not the whole measure for mental illness, but it's got to be one of them, doesn't it? It's got to be a part of it, doesn't it? So I would simply say if you were one who struggles in that way, man, we want you to get all the counseling. We want you to get, if you need prescriptions, we want you to do those. We want you to be diligent about those things. But there's not enough therapy or prescriptions in the world to reconcile you to your creator. And there's not enough treatment in the world to give you the peace that he offers first. And even if that's not what you deal with, even if that's not your struggle, I would still ask you, how can you possibly be at peace with yourself and at peace with those around you if your soul is out of harmony with your creator God? So for many of us, the first peace we need to be making is with ourselves. For many of us this morning, and here at the end we're going to take communion, we're going to have an opportunity to do this. If you get nothing else from this but to leave here with the desire to be reconciled with your creator, this morning is a win. If there's sin in your life that's keeping you from having a good relationship with him, fix it. If you're like me and there's a relationship in your life, if there's a grudge that you're holding, if there's forgiveness that you need to extend and it's prohibiting you from having a perfectly peaceful relationship with your God, then fix it. If there's a habit that you're missing, a discipline that you lack, if there's a desire that you don't have, pray to God earnestly that he would speak into those things, that he would give you that desire, that he would give you that discipline, that he would supply you with that habit so that you might pursue him. But let's leave here determined and hopeful that we can be reconciled with our creator. God, let us first make peace with ourselves and in that way be peacemakers. But it does, to me, come full circles to reconciliation with others because how could we possibly be at peace with others if we are not at peace with our creator. If there is someone in your life that you're angry with, if there's someone that's angry with you, if there's someone that you're frustrated with. If there's a relationship that isn't right. No matter what the dynamic is there. They wronged you years ago. You can't let go of it. You wronged them and you've got too much pride to go to them. There's a misunderstanding. Whatever it is that's causing you to lack peace with a brother or a sister, instead of sitting back and expecting them to act, can I just encourage you to seek peace with your creator, God? Can I encourage you, instead of focusing on that broken relationship, can you focus on this one? And as God repairs this one, look what would happen. How could you possibly be at peace with our creator and not desire peace with others? Why do you think God has reminded me of this broken relationship I have every day for 14 days and he will not let it go? There's other things I'd like to think about. There's other stuff. I mean, listen, I've got plenty to be convicted about, but that's the thing right now, and it's not going anywhere. Why do you think that happens? Because my soul longs to be at peace with Creator God, and this horizontal relationship is messing up this vertical one, and so I need to go fix it to be back in right relationship with my creator. Those of you who have broken relationships in your life, someone that you haven't forgiven, someone that you haven't spoken to for years, someone that has something against you or you have it against them, how could you possibly be at peace with your creator and not seek peace with them? Not seek to be reconciled with them. So when we do this, and this is, I think, the really cool part, when we are peacemakers, when we first make peace with our God and ourselves, and then we make peace with others, we seek reconciled relationships, we encourage others to reconcile their relationships. When we make true peace, we are imitators of Jesus. When we make true peace with ourselves and with others, we are imitators of Jesus in the way that he is the great peacemaker, that he made the great path to reconciliation with our creator God. When we do that, we are imitators of Christ as we make peace with ourselves and others. And this is why the blessing is so profound. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the sons of God. They will be called the daughters, the children of God. Because we are imitators of Christ. Of course. Of course when we make peace with our creator God, we acknowledge that we have broken our relationship and that he sent his son to reconcile that relationship and we claim the death on the cross as our reconciliation. Of course we are called sons of God. That's the promise throughout the whole scripture. It means we're believers and he claims us. And of course as we seek to reconcile other people with their God and they come to know God in a profound way and they become believers and they become sons and daughters of God. Of course we are imitating Christ and then called sons of God. Of course that's why this is the blessing. Maybe this is why scripture prioritizes peace so profoundly. Paul writes in Romans, as far as it depends on you, seek peace. As far as it relies on you, make peace. No matter what, Paul ends all of his letters with grace and peace to you. And I've always wondered why Paul made such a big deal out of peace. Because he wasn't talking about this peace. He's talking about this peace. Maybe this is why Jesus prays the high priestly prayer, John chapter 17, his longest recorded prayer. You know what he prays for? He prays for unity. Here and there. Peace. It had never occurred to me before how all of these themes are woven throughout Scripture. This use of the word peace that we see over and over again, God's encouragement through the different authors to pursue peace, to be people of peace, to lead quiet and peaceful lives. Jesus opening up the Beatitudes with blessed by the peacemakers. It had never occurred to me why peace was throughout all scripture. Because peace means this peace. Reconciling with our creator God. And so my prayer for you this morning as we worshiped, this week as I prepared, is that you will seek peace with your creator. You will acknowledge he is the creator God who loves you. Your sin has distorted that relationship and broken it irreconcilably. Accept that Jesus died for you and created a path of reconciliation. Pursue that peace. And in your pursuit of that peace, look around you and help others pursue that peace as well. And in doing so, we are imitators of Jesus. And God will call us his children. Let's pray. Lord, I know there are plenty of us here, me included, who do not feel at peace with you, would you help us? Would you wrestle with us? Would you remind us of this lack of peace and the gentle way that you do it over and over again until we pursue it. Father, if there are people here who have never made peace with you, whose souls have never found rest in you, who have wandered from one thing to the next trying to find the peace and the satisfaction that only you offer. Would this morning be the morning that they rest easy in you and reconcile themselves, claim the reconciliation that you offer, and make peace with their creator, God, finally. Father, for those of us who need to make peace with others, would you give us the courage and the strength to do that? For those of us who need to pursue peace with you through eliminating things that are in our life, would you give us the courage to do that? If we need to pursue peace with you by adding things to our life, would you give us the desire and the discipline to do that? God, this morning, we simply pray for peace with you and with our brothers and sisters around us. Let us be peacemakers. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, my name is Nate, and I say I get to be the pastor here, although that's less convincing since I just said I don't want to preach to you guys. I still like to be the pastor. I just want to sit in the service, too, you know? And if I haven't gotten to meet you, I really would love to do that in the lobby afterwards if that's something that you would like to do as well. We are in the last part of our series called The Blessed Life, where we're looking at the blessings that come at the beginning of Jesus' first recorded public address, the Sermon on the Mount. You can find it in Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. That's where we've been looking at the blessings. But it's also recorded in Luke chapter 6, so you can find it there as well. As we've looked at the blessings, we've looked at three of them. Last week, Doug looked at poor in spirit, did a phenomenal job. Thank you once again, Doug. I told Doug after the service last week, and I would say publicly, that I think the church is so very blessed when we can just kind of give him this little idea or verse or thought. I think one time I allowed him like a part of one sentence, please preach on just this part of one sentence. And he takes that into his laboratory for like six months and just thinks on it and then just says, here you go. And we all just kind of walk away going, I think I should listen to that three or four more times, but we're so blessed by that. So thank you. This week, I want to look at the final blessing that we have selected. And when I say we, I mean me. There's nine blessings, and I picked three of them to talk about. Doug picked the other one. And as I chose them, one of the ones that I wanted to talk about as we moved through this series was this one found in Matthew chapter 5, verse 9. And it simply says, blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be the children of God, the sons and daughters of God, which is quite the blessing for this one. The others, you know, theirs is the kingdom of heaven, that they will be, their hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied, that will be filled, they will inherit the earth. But this one, God literally says, if you are a peacemaker, I will adopt you as my child. That's the blessing that flows from being someone who seeks to make peace. And for most of us, this is not the first time we've encountered this blessing or beatitude. Blessed are the peacemakers. And so when we think of it, we probably think of peacemakers. What I think about peacemakers, I had an experience a week, 10 days ago, where I met a buddy of mine in the afternoon just to chit-chat and catch up, just kind of like you do sometimes. And we got to talking, and he asked me about a mutual acquaintance of ours and how my relationship was with him. And I said, well, it's not super good. There's really still kind of a lot of hurt and anger there, so I wouldn't say that we're actually talking very much. And he said, well, why is that? Why is that bad? And for eight to ten minutes, I kind of enumerated my sob story of why I'm angry at this person, why I'm holding a grudge against this person, and why I'm not really too keen on cleaning that up. We don't really run in the same circles. We don't really run into each other. So it's not something that's in my face all the time. And I'm perfectly happy just floating through life, never forgiving them, never talking to them, just making them anathema to me and just moving on down the road. And I enumerated to him all the reasons why I'm justified in this hurt. And he responded with, you're right, that makes sense. And I would be angry too. You know you need to talk to him and forgive him, right? Just like flippantly, as if he hadn't heard the methodical case I laid out for 10 minutes so that he would know, yes, God does tell us to forgive, but surely this, Nate, is the exception. You were so deeply wronged. You do not have to forgive this person. He said, you know you have to forgive him, right? And I was like, eh, I mean, I think we're good. And he was like, no, you're not. You know you need to talk to him. And I'm like, yeah, but I don't want to. And he goes, okay, but you should. He's really stubborn, and he's not very smart. So this was really annoying. And I finally looked at him and I said, yeah, I know, you're right. I do. I don't want to, but I'll pray that I want to and that I can. And that was two weeks ago. I've thought about that person and that conversation every day since. And choosing a sermon on being a peacemaker doesn't help with the conviction that you have in your life that you've not made peace. I don't hold a lot of grudges, but apparently when I do, I hold them pretty tight. And so I thought, what a well-timed sermon for me. I don't know if it's going to help you guys. I'll just preach to myself. None of y'all hold grudges or mad at anybody. But I thought, what a well-timed sermon for me. I'm going to need this. This is going to be one of those ones that I'll be freshly convicted as I go through it. And it is. But as I approached the topic and began to read up on it, began to think through it, it actually came out in my studies that that sort of peacemaking, person to person, is not really what Jesus was talking about when he said, blessed are the peacemakers. See, to Jesus, a true peacemaker is one who reconciles someone with their God. So a peacemaker is someone who seeks to reconcile someone else with their creator God, which is different than horizontal peacemaking. A peacemaker is one who makes peace vertically between a person and their God. And so I kind of came into the week loaded for bear on why peacemaking is so important, why it matters so much, why we need to pursue it, and even the active part of peacemaking, how making peace isn't just staying quiet and simmering with anger and never saying anything to someone else to kind of not disturb the peace, but sometimes making peace looks like the exact opposite of peace for the sake of peace, right? Sometimes making peace looks like getting involved in World War II for the sake of making peace. And so sometimes in our lives and in our relationship, we can't just sit back. We can't just idly stand by and try to keep the waters calm where there's tension simmering underneath it. We need to actively pursue peace with difficult, challenging conversations. And I was ready to preach this because that's something I don't mind doing. And I felt like I was preaching from a strong suit. And it turns out I'm not. It's funny how God works because that's not really what this sermon is about. It's about the fact that making peace in the eyes of Jesus, first and foremost, means reconciling people to their God. And so really, as much as my buddy was a peacemaker that day, and really ultimately pushed me closer to my God in reconciliation with others, a true peacemaker is more like my friend who's a pastor. I have a friend who is a pastor and his gift, he's got this gift of evangelism. He shares Jesus all the time everywhere he goes. He's one of those guys when you go out to eat with him and the waiter or the waitress brings the food to the table, he'll say, hey, we're about to pray. Is there anything going on in your life we can pray about? And if you're like me, that makes you just a little tense. It's a little bit uncomfortable, but I can't tell you how many times out of that simple question people have broken down, people have shared things, people have wanted to talk. He'll stay after the meal and lead them to Christ right there in the restaurant. He likes to golf. He'll go golfing and he'll witness to his caddy for 18 holes when he goes on trips. And by the end, he's posting a selfie next to his caddy who just accepted Christ. And like, if you're next to him on an airplane and you don't know Jesus, you're at least going to fake like you do before the end of that flight. He is going to share his faith with you. He is going to share it all the time, and he is constantly, constantly helping people reconcile themselves with their creator. That's what a peacemaker does. A peacemaker helps someone see there is a creator God of the universe who really loves us, as we just sang, and pursues us and comes after us when we are the prodigal son or the prodigal daughter. He chases after us. He waits for us eagerly. He desires us. And we were made, Garden of Eden, perfect creation, perfect relationship. God walked with them in the cool of the evening. God designed you to be in relationship with him. It's the only reason you exist. It's the only reason he wanted to create you is so he could share himself with you. The problem is when we sin, and the easiest way to understand sin is when we assume authority in our life. When God is here and we are here and we go, gosh, I don't like this arrangement. I'm going to start making my own decisions regardless of what God wants me to do. Those decisions are sin. And that sin wrecks our relationship with God. And we cannot be reconciled to him. There is nothing we can do to reconcile our relationship with our creator God. And God in his goodness, because he loves us, sent his son to die for us and create a path of reconciliation back to him so that all we need to do to be reconciled to our creator God is open up our eyes to the fact that he created us, that he loves us, that our sin has distorted our relationship, but that he sent his son to die for us so that that relationship might be restored. And that's what heaven is. It's to exist in eternity in a perfect relationship with God. When we think about heaven, we probably think about the pearly gates and the golden streets and seeing our loved ones and the marriage supper of the lamb and all the things that heaven is going to be. But what heaven really is, the real draw, is to exist in right relationship with our God for all of eternity, exactly as we were intended to do that. And so a peacemaker is someone who opens up the eyes of others that they might be reconciled with their God. Do you understand that the teachers who are in that room right there teaching the fourth and fifth graders and who are on the other side of the aquarium supply store down the dark hallway. Teaching our kindergarten through third graders. And the teachers all down this hall who are loving on our children. Do you understand they're making peace? But slowly by slowly, brick by brick, seemingly innocuous lesson plan by lesson plan, they're helping our children make peace with their God. Do you understand that our teachers are peacemakers? Do you understand that the people who come on Sunday nights and volunteer to be small group leaders for our students, who make awkward small talk with seventh graders so you don't have to. Are slowly by slowly, bit by bit, helping open the eyes of those students to their creator God who loves them and sent his son for them. That bit by bit, those small group leaders are helping those students be reconciled to their God. Do you understand that small group leaders who open up their home and their schedules and facilitate those conversations are peacemakers who are reconciling others to their God? Do you understand that when in a small group setting you share something from your journey, something from what God has shown you that can help somebody else, that in that small way, way in that moment that you too are being a peacemaker? That really we are being peacemakers anytime we help someone take a step towards God. Anytime we help someone reconcile themselves back to their creator, when we help someone make vertical peace, we are being peacemakers. And so Jesus says, blessed are those who help others make peace with me. Blessed are those who help others see themselves as I see them and see me as they should see me. And so in this way, not only is it volunteering in the children's and the students' and small groups and conversations, but it's also being willing to have those difficult conversations. It's also my friend who said, you know you need to forgive that person. And it's not because they were trying to help me make peace with that person. It's because helping me make peace with that person will help me make peace with my God. You're a peacemaker when you sit down with a friend who you love and you care about and you say, hey man, I don't want to be in this conversation right now any more than you want to be in it. But I've noticed this habit or this hang up or this addiction or this sin that's in your life and it's not helping you. It's hurting you. And I love you. And I want to see what you look like on the other side of this sin. That's making peace. When as a spouse, you look at your husband or your wife, and you say, hey, you're acting this way, you're doing this thing, you're developing this habit, you're developing this hang-up, and it needs to end where this does. When you put your foot down and you say no more, you're making peace. You're pushing them towards their creator. And in those moments when it's really difficult to make peace and yet we pursue it anyways. Vertical peace. Jesus says we are blessed because we're helping people to be reconciled to their creator God. And it occurred to me as I thought through what true peacemaking was that Jesus is the great peacemaker. He offers the great peace out of which all other peace flows. Jesus himself is the great peacemaker, and he offers the great peace out of which all other peace flows. I'll tell you what I mean, but he's the great peacemaker as he hangs on the cross, reconciling us back to our creator God. He did not have to do that. His relationship with his God was fine. His relationship with his father was fine, but he did it for me and you. So as he hangs on the cross, he is the great peacemaker, creating the great path of reconciliation and providing us with the great and perfect peace. And it makes me wonder, how could we ever seek to be at peace with ourselves if we are not first at peace with our creator? And as I thought about this concept, and I thought about the great peace that Jesus offers, it occurs to me that I should mention this. I'm going to move over here. I'm going to be in this portion of the stage, because this is not the sermon proper, okay? This is not what I'm driving at, but I do want to tell you this. So allow me a parenthetical portion of the sermon, okay? We live in a culture that is increasingly aware of mental health issues, anxiety and depression in particular. And it's not like these issues didn't exist before. We just didn't have words for them or labels for them. We didn't really understand them or know what to do with them. We just called it being sad or being discouraged or worrying too much. I was actually talking with a guy this week who has a daughter in college who's struggling pretty big with anxiety and depression right now. And he mentioned to me that as she's going to counseling, they're doing all the right things, and they're being really diligent about it. And she's been sharing with him some of the stuff that she's been learning in counseling, some of the symptoms and some of the things and some of the stuff that she sees manifesting in her life. And he's realized, oh my goodness, I've walked with that my whole life too. I shouldn't have a name for it. I just thought I was sad. So we live in a culture with an increasing awareness of these things. And I want to be really careful because I would not for a second try to be one of those pastors who says we pray away the depression. If you're worried, you just don't trust God enough. If you're depressed, you're just not experiencing the joy of Jesus and you need to pursue him harder and pray and sing more. Could be part of it. But probably that there's a legitimate chemical imbalance that needs counseling and that needs some drugs maybe even for a short time. And so I do not for a second want to say that we pray the depression and the anxiety away all the time as a first measure. There are some things that require actual treatment. I don't want to be ignorant about that. However, if it's true that God created us, if it's true that he fashioned your soul to crave him, if it's true that we, along with all creation in Romans 8, cry out for the return of the king, that creation groans for the return of God, for him to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, if we claw for Eden and the perfection that he created, if it's true that there's a creator God and that creator God made you and he made you to crave him and to need him and to only find satisfaction through knowing him and being reconciled to him, how could we possibly seek our own peace without being at peace with our creator? It's not the whole measure for mental illness, but it's got to be one of them, doesn't it? It's got to be a part of it, doesn't it? So I would simply say if you were one who struggles in that way, man, we want you to get all the counseling. We want you to get, if you need prescriptions, we want you to do those. We want you to be diligent about those things. But there's not enough therapy or prescriptions in the world to reconcile you to your creator. And there's not enough treatment in the world to give you the peace that he offers first. And even if that's not what you deal with, even if that's not your struggle, I would still ask you, how can you possibly be at peace with yourself and at peace with those around you if your soul is out of harmony with your creator God? So for many of us, the first peace we need to be making is with ourselves. For many of us this morning, and here at the end we're going to take communion, we're going to have an opportunity to do this. If you get nothing else from this but to leave here with the desire to be reconciled with your creator, this morning is a win. If there's sin in your life that's keeping you from having a good relationship with him, fix it. If you're like me and there's a relationship in your life, if there's a grudge that you're holding, if there's forgiveness that you need to extend and it's prohibiting you from having a perfectly peaceful relationship with your God, then fix it. If there's a habit that you're missing, a discipline that you lack, if there's a desire that you don't have, pray to God earnestly that he would speak into those things, that he would give you that desire, that he would give you that discipline, that he would supply you with that habit so that you might pursue him. But let's leave here determined and hopeful that we can be reconciled with our creator. God, let us first make peace with ourselves and in that way be peacemakers. But it does, to me, come full circles to reconciliation with others because how could we possibly be at peace with others if we are not at peace with our creator. If there is someone in your life that you're angry with, if there's someone that's angry with you, if there's someone that you're frustrated with. If there's a relationship that isn't right. No matter what the dynamic is there. They wronged you years ago. You can't let go of it. You wronged them and you've got too much pride to go to them. There's a misunderstanding. Whatever it is that's causing you to lack peace with a brother or a sister, instead of sitting back and expecting them to act, can I just encourage you to seek peace with your creator, God? Can I encourage you, instead of focusing on that broken relationship, can you focus on this one? And as God repairs this one, look what would happen. How could you possibly be at peace with our creator and not desire peace with others? Why do you think God has reminded me of this broken relationship I have every day for 14 days and he will not let it go? There's other things I'd like to think about. There's other stuff. I mean, listen, I've got plenty to be convicted about, but that's the thing right now, and it's not going anywhere. Why do you think that happens? Because my soul longs to be at peace with Creator God, and this horizontal relationship is messing up this vertical one, and so I need to go fix it to be back in right relationship with my creator. Those of you who have broken relationships in your life, someone that you haven't forgiven, someone that you haven't spoken to for years, someone that has something against you or you have it against them, how could you possibly be at peace with your creator and not seek peace with them? Not seek to be reconciled with them. So when we do this, and this is, I think, the really cool part, when we are peacemakers, when we first make peace with our God and ourselves, and then we make peace with others, we seek reconciled relationships, we encourage others to reconcile their relationships. When we make true peace, we are imitators of Jesus. When we make true peace with ourselves and with others, we are imitators of Jesus in the way that he is the great peacemaker, that he made the great path to reconciliation with our creator God. When we do that, we are imitators of Christ as we make peace with ourselves and others. And this is why the blessing is so profound. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the sons of God. They will be called the daughters, the children of God. Because we are imitators of Christ. Of course. Of course when we make peace with our creator God, we acknowledge that we have broken our relationship and that he sent his son to reconcile that relationship and we claim the death on the cross as our reconciliation. Of course we are called sons of God. That's the promise throughout the whole scripture. It means we're believers and he claims us. And of course as we seek to reconcile other people with their God and they come to know God in a profound way and they become believers and they become sons and daughters of God. Of course we are imitating Christ and then called sons of God. Of course that's why this is the blessing. Maybe this is why scripture prioritizes peace so profoundly. Paul writes in Romans, as far as it depends on you, seek peace. As far as it relies on you, make peace. No matter what, Paul ends all of his letters with grace and peace to you. And I've always wondered why Paul made such a big deal out of peace. Because he wasn't talking about this peace. He's talking about this peace. Maybe this is why Jesus prays the high priestly prayer, John chapter 17, his longest recorded prayer. You know what he prays for? He prays for unity. Here and there. Peace. It had never occurred to me before how all of these themes are woven throughout Scripture. This use of the word peace that we see over and over again, God's encouragement through the different authors to pursue peace, to be people of peace, to lead quiet and peaceful lives. Jesus opening up the Beatitudes with blessed by the peacemakers. It had never occurred to me why peace was throughout all scripture. Because peace means this peace. Reconciling with our creator God. And so my prayer for you this morning as we worshiped, this week as I prepared, is that you will seek peace with your creator. You will acknowledge he is the creator God who loves you. Your sin has distorted that relationship and broken it irreconcilably. Accept that Jesus died for you and created a path of reconciliation. Pursue that peace. And in your pursuit of that peace, look around you and help others pursue that peace as well. And in doing so, we are imitators of Jesus. And God will call us his children. Let's pray. Lord, I know there are plenty of us here, me included, who do not feel at peace with you, would you help us? Would you wrestle with us? Would you remind us of this lack of peace and the gentle way that you do it over and over again until we pursue it. Father, if there are people here who have never made peace with you, whose souls have never found rest in you, who have wandered from one thing to the next trying to find the peace and the satisfaction that only you offer. Would this morning be the morning that they rest easy in you and reconcile themselves, claim the reconciliation that you offer, and make peace with their creator, God, finally. Father, for those of us who need to make peace with others, would you give us the courage and the strength to do that? For those of us who need to pursue peace with you through eliminating things that are in our life, would you give us the courage to do that? If we need to pursue peace with you by adding things to our life, would you give us the desire and the discipline to do that? God, this morning, we simply pray for peace with you and with our brothers and sisters around us. Let us be peacemakers. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, my name is Nate, and I say I get to be the pastor here, although that's less convincing since I just said I don't want to preach to you guys. I still like to be the pastor. I just want to sit in the service, too, you know? And if I haven't gotten to meet you, I really would love to do that in the lobby afterwards if that's something that you would like to do as well. We are in the last part of our series called The Blessed Life, where we're looking at the blessings that come at the beginning of Jesus' first recorded public address, the Sermon on the Mount. You can find it in Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. That's where we've been looking at the blessings. But it's also recorded in Luke chapter 6, so you can find it there as well. As we've looked at the blessings, we've looked at three of them. Last week, Doug looked at poor in spirit, did a phenomenal job. Thank you once again, Doug. I told Doug after the service last week, and I would say publicly, that I think the church is so very blessed when we can just kind of give him this little idea or verse or thought. I think one time I allowed him like a part of one sentence, please preach on just this part of one sentence. And he takes that into his laboratory for like six months and just thinks on it and then just says, here you go. And we all just kind of walk away going, I think I should listen to that three or four more times, but we're so blessed by that. So thank you. This week, I want to look at the final blessing that we have selected. And when I say we, I mean me. There's nine blessings, and I picked three of them to talk about. Doug picked the other one. And as I chose them, one of the ones that I wanted to talk about as we moved through this series was this one found in Matthew chapter 5, verse 9. And it simply says, blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be the children of God, the sons and daughters of God, which is quite the blessing for this one. The others, you know, theirs is the kingdom of heaven, that they will be, their hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied, that will be filled, they will inherit the earth. But this one, God literally says, if you are a peacemaker, I will adopt you as my child. That's the blessing that flows from being someone who seeks to make peace. And for most of us, this is not the first time we've encountered this blessing or beatitude. Blessed are the peacemakers. And so when we think of it, we probably think of peacemakers. What I think about peacemakers, I had an experience a week, 10 days ago, where I met a buddy of mine in the afternoon just to chit-chat and catch up, just kind of like you do sometimes. And we got to talking, and he asked me about a mutual acquaintance of ours and how my relationship was with him. And I said, well, it's not super good. There's really still kind of a lot of hurt and anger there, so I wouldn't say that we're actually talking very much. And he said, well, why is that? Why is that bad? And for eight to ten minutes, I kind of enumerated my sob story of why I'm angry at this person, why I'm holding a grudge against this person, and why I'm not really too keen on cleaning that up. We don't really run in the same circles. We don't really run into each other. So it's not something that's in my face all the time. And I'm perfectly happy just floating through life, never forgiving them, never talking to them, just making them anathema to me and just moving on down the road. And I enumerated to him all the reasons why I'm justified in this hurt. And he responded with, you're right, that makes sense. And I would be angry too. You know you need to talk to him and forgive him, right? Just like flippantly, as if he hadn't heard the methodical case I laid out for 10 minutes so that he would know, yes, God does tell us to forgive, but surely this, Nate, is the exception. You were so deeply wronged. You do not have to forgive this person. He said, you know you have to forgive him, right? And I was like, eh, I mean, I think we're good. And he was like, no, you're not. You know you need to talk to him. And I'm like, yeah, but I don't want to. And he goes, okay, but you should. He's really stubborn, and he's not very smart. So this was really annoying. And I finally looked at him and I said, yeah, I know, you're right. I do. I don't want to, but I'll pray that I want to and that I can. And that was two weeks ago. I've thought about that person and that conversation every day since. And choosing a sermon on being a peacemaker doesn't help with the conviction that you have in your life that you've not made peace. I don't hold a lot of grudges, but apparently when I do, I hold them pretty tight. And so I thought, what a well-timed sermon for me. I don't know if it's going to help you guys. I'll just preach to myself. None of y'all hold grudges or mad at anybody. But I thought, what a well-timed sermon for me. I'm going to need this. This is going to be one of those ones that I'll be freshly convicted as I go through it. And it is. But as I approached the topic and began to read up on it, began to think through it, it actually came out in my studies that that sort of peacemaking, person to person, is not really what Jesus was talking about when he said, blessed are the peacemakers. See, to Jesus, a true peacemaker is one who reconciles someone with their God. So a peacemaker is someone who seeks to reconcile someone else with their creator God, which is different than horizontal peacemaking. A peacemaker is one who makes peace vertically between a person and their God. And so I kind of came into the week loaded for bear on why peacemaking is so important, why it matters so much, why we need to pursue it, and even the active part of peacemaking, how making peace isn't just staying quiet and simmering with anger and never saying anything to someone else to kind of not disturb the peace, but sometimes making peace looks like the exact opposite of peace for the sake of peace, right? Sometimes making peace looks like getting involved in World War II for the sake of making peace. And so sometimes in our lives and in our relationship, we can't just sit back. We can't just idly stand by and try to keep the waters calm where there's tension simmering underneath it. We need to actively pursue peace with difficult, challenging conversations. And I was ready to preach this because that's something I don't mind doing. And I felt like I was preaching from a strong suit. And it turns out I'm not. It's funny how God works because that's not really what this sermon is about. It's about the fact that making peace in the eyes of Jesus, first and foremost, means reconciling people to their God. And so really, as much as my buddy was a peacemaker that day, and really ultimately pushed me closer to my God in reconciliation with others, a true peacemaker is more like my friend who's a pastor. I have a friend who is a pastor and his gift, he's got this gift of evangelism. He shares Jesus all the time everywhere he goes. He's one of those guys when you go out to eat with him and the waiter or the waitress brings the food to the table, he'll say, hey, we're about to pray. Is there anything going on in your life we can pray about? And if you're like me, that makes you just a little tense. It's a little bit uncomfortable, but I can't tell you how many times out of that simple question people have broken down, people have shared things, people have wanted to talk. He'll stay after the meal and lead them to Christ right there in the restaurant. He likes to golf. He'll go golfing and he'll witness to his caddy for 18 holes when he goes on trips. And by the end, he's posting a selfie next to his caddy who just accepted Christ. And like, if you're next to him on an airplane and you don't know Jesus, you're at least going to fake like you do before the end of that flight. He is going to share his faith with you. He is going to share it all the time, and he is constantly, constantly helping people reconcile themselves with their creator. That's what a peacemaker does. A peacemaker helps someone see there is a creator God of the universe who really loves us, as we just sang, and pursues us and comes after us when we are the prodigal son or the prodigal daughter. He chases after us. He waits for us eagerly. He desires us. And we were made, Garden of Eden, perfect creation, perfect relationship. God walked with them in the cool of the evening. God designed you to be in relationship with him. It's the only reason you exist. It's the only reason he wanted to create you is so he could share himself with you. The problem is when we sin, and the easiest way to understand sin is when we assume authority in our life. When God is here and we are here and we go, gosh, I don't like this arrangement. I'm going to start making my own decisions regardless of what God wants me to do. Those decisions are sin. And that sin wrecks our relationship with God. And we cannot be reconciled to him. There is nothing we can do to reconcile our relationship with our creator God. And God in his goodness, because he loves us, sent his son to die for us and create a path of reconciliation back to him so that all we need to do to be reconciled to our creator God is open up our eyes to the fact that he created us, that he loves us, that our sin has distorted our relationship, but that he sent his son to die for us so that that relationship might be restored. And that's what heaven is. It's to exist in eternity in a perfect relationship with God. When we think about heaven, we probably think about the pearly gates and the golden streets and seeing our loved ones and the marriage supper of the lamb and all the things that heaven is going to be. But what heaven really is, the real draw, is to exist in right relationship with our God for all of eternity, exactly as we were intended to do that. And so a peacemaker is someone who opens up the eyes of others that they might be reconciled with their God. Do you understand that the teachers who are in that room right there teaching the fourth and fifth graders and who are on the other side of the aquarium supply store down the dark hallway. Teaching our kindergarten through third graders. And the teachers all down this hall who are loving on our children. Do you understand they're making peace? But slowly by slowly, brick by brick, seemingly innocuous lesson plan by lesson plan, they're helping our children make peace with their God. Do you understand that our teachers are peacemakers? Do you understand that the people who come on Sunday nights and volunteer to be small group leaders for our students, who make awkward small talk with seventh graders so you don't have to. Are slowly by slowly, bit by bit, helping open the eyes of those students to their creator God who loves them and sent his son for them. That bit by bit, those small group leaders are helping those students be reconciled to their God. Do you understand that small group leaders who open up their home and their schedules and facilitate those conversations are peacemakers who are reconciling others to their God? Do you understand that when in a small group setting you share something from your journey, something from what God has shown you that can help somebody else, that in that small way, way in that moment that you too are being a peacemaker? That really we are being peacemakers anytime we help someone take a step towards God. Anytime we help someone reconcile themselves back to their creator, when we help someone make vertical peace, we are being peacemakers. And so Jesus says, blessed are those who help others make peace with me. Blessed are those who help others see themselves as I see them and see me as they should see me. And so in this way, not only is it volunteering in the children's and the students' and small groups and conversations, but it's also being willing to have those difficult conversations. It's also my friend who said, you know you need to forgive that person. And it's not because they were trying to help me make peace with that person. It's because helping me make peace with that person will help me make peace with my God. You're a peacemaker when you sit down with a friend who you love and you care about and you say, hey man, I don't want to be in this conversation right now any more than you want to be in it. But I've noticed this habit or this hang up or this addiction or this sin that's in your life and it's not helping you. It's hurting you. And I love you. And I want to see what you look like on the other side of this sin. That's making peace. When as a spouse, you look at your husband or your wife, and you say, hey, you're acting this way, you're doing this thing, you're developing this habit, you're developing this hang-up, and it needs to end where this does. When you put your foot down and you say no more, you're making peace. You're pushing them towards their creator. And in those moments when it's really difficult to make peace and yet we pursue it anyways. Vertical peace. Jesus says we are blessed because we're helping people to be reconciled to their creator God. And it occurred to me as I thought through what true peacemaking was that Jesus is the great peacemaker. He offers the great peace out of which all other peace flows. Jesus himself is the great peacemaker, and he offers the great peace out of which all other peace flows. I'll tell you what I mean, but he's the great peacemaker as he hangs on the cross, reconciling us back to our creator God. He did not have to do that. His relationship with his God was fine. His relationship with his father was fine, but he did it for me and you. So as he hangs on the cross, he is the great peacemaker, creating the great path of reconciliation and providing us with the great and perfect peace. And it makes me wonder, how could we ever seek to be at peace with ourselves if we are not first at peace with our creator? And as I thought about this concept, and I thought about the great peace that Jesus offers, it occurs to me that I should mention this. I'm going to move over here. I'm going to be in this portion of the stage, because this is not the sermon proper, okay? This is not what I'm driving at, but I do want to tell you this. So allow me a parenthetical portion of the sermon, okay? We live in a culture that is increasingly aware of mental health issues, anxiety and depression in particular. And it's not like these issues didn't exist before. We just didn't have words for them or labels for them. We didn't really understand them or know what to do with them. We just called it being sad or being discouraged or worrying too much. I was actually talking with a guy this week who has a daughter in college who's struggling pretty big with anxiety and depression right now. And he mentioned to me that as she's going to counseling, they're doing all the right things, and they're being really diligent about it. And she's been sharing with him some of the stuff that she's been learning in counseling, some of the symptoms and some of the things and some of the stuff that she sees manifesting in her life. And he's realized, oh my goodness, I've walked with that my whole life too. I shouldn't have a name for it. I just thought I was sad. So we live in a culture with an increasing awareness of these things. And I want to be really careful because I would not for a second try to be one of those pastors who says we pray away the depression. If you're worried, you just don't trust God enough. If you're depressed, you're just not experiencing the joy of Jesus and you need to pursue him harder and pray and sing more. Could be part of it. But probably that there's a legitimate chemical imbalance that needs counseling and that needs some drugs maybe even for a short time. And so I do not for a second want to say that we pray the depression and the anxiety away all the time as a first measure. There are some things that require actual treatment. I don't want to be ignorant about that. However, if it's true that God created us, if it's true that he fashioned your soul to crave him, if it's true that we, along with all creation in Romans 8, cry out for the return of the king, that creation groans for the return of God, for him to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue, if we claw for Eden and the perfection that he created, if it's true that there's a creator God and that creator God made you and he made you to crave him and to need him and to only find satisfaction through knowing him and being reconciled to him, how could we possibly seek our own peace without being at peace with our creator? It's not the whole measure for mental illness, but it's got to be one of them, doesn't it? It's got to be a part of it, doesn't it? So I would simply say if you were one who struggles in that way, man, we want you to get all the counseling. We want you to get, if you need prescriptions, we want you to do those. We want you to be diligent about those things. But there's not enough therapy or prescriptions in the world to reconcile you to your creator. And there's not enough treatment in the world to give you the peace that he offers first. And even if that's not what you deal with, even if that's not your struggle, I would still ask you, how can you possibly be at peace with yourself and at peace with those around you if your soul is out of harmony with your creator God? So for many of us, the first peace we need to be making is with ourselves. For many of us this morning, and here at the end we're going to take communion, we're going to have an opportunity to do this. If you get nothing else from this but to leave here with the desire to be reconciled with your creator, this morning is a win. If there's sin in your life that's keeping you from having a good relationship with him, fix it. If you're like me and there's a relationship in your life, if there's a grudge that you're holding, if there's forgiveness that you need to extend and it's prohibiting you from having a perfectly peaceful relationship with your God, then fix it. If there's a habit that you're missing, a discipline that you lack, if there's a desire that you don't have, pray to God earnestly that he would speak into those things, that he would give you that desire, that he would give you that discipline, that he would supply you with that habit so that you might pursue him. But let's leave here determined and hopeful that we can be reconciled with our creator. God, let us first make peace with ourselves and in that way be peacemakers. But it does, to me, come full circles to reconciliation with others because how could we possibly be at peace with others if we are not at peace with our creator. If there is someone in your life that you're angry with, if there's someone that's angry with you, if there's someone that you're frustrated with. If there's a relationship that isn't right. No matter what the dynamic is there. They wronged you years ago. You can't let go of it. You wronged them and you've got too much pride to go to them. There's a misunderstanding. Whatever it is that's causing you to lack peace with a brother or a sister, instead of sitting back and expecting them to act, can I just encourage you to seek peace with your creator, God? Can I encourage you, instead of focusing on that broken relationship, can you focus on this one? And as God repairs this one, look what would happen. How could you possibly be at peace with our creator and not desire peace with others? Why do you think God has reminded me of this broken relationship I have every day for 14 days and he will not let it go? There's other things I'd like to think about. There's other stuff. I mean, listen, I've got plenty to be convicted about, but that's the thing right now, and it's not going anywhere. Why do you think that happens? Because my soul longs to be at peace with Creator God, and this horizontal relationship is messing up this vertical one, and so I need to go fix it to be back in right relationship with my creator. Those of you who have broken relationships in your life, someone that you haven't forgiven, someone that you haven't spoken to for years, someone that has something against you or you have it against them, how could you possibly be at peace with your creator and not seek peace with them? Not seek to be reconciled with them. So when we do this, and this is, I think, the really cool part, when we are peacemakers, when we first make peace with our God and ourselves, and then we make peace with others, we seek reconciled relationships, we encourage others to reconcile their relationships. When we make true peace, we are imitators of Jesus. When we make true peace with ourselves and with others, we are imitators of Jesus in the way that he is the great peacemaker, that he made the great path to reconciliation with our creator God. When we do that, we are imitators of Christ as we make peace with ourselves and others. And this is why the blessing is so profound. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the sons of God. They will be called the daughters, the children of God. Because we are imitators of Christ. Of course. Of course when we make peace with our creator God, we acknowledge that we have broken our relationship and that he sent his son to reconcile that relationship and we claim the death on the cross as our reconciliation. Of course we are called sons of God. That's the promise throughout the whole scripture. It means we're believers and he claims us. And of course as we seek to reconcile other people with their God and they come to know God in a profound way and they become believers and they become sons and daughters of God. Of course we are imitating Christ and then called sons of God. Of course that's why this is the blessing. Maybe this is why scripture prioritizes peace so profoundly. Paul writes in Romans, as far as it depends on you, seek peace. As far as it relies on you, make peace. No matter what, Paul ends all of his letters with grace and peace to you. And I've always wondered why Paul made such a big deal out of peace. Because he wasn't talking about this peace. He's talking about this peace. Maybe this is why Jesus prays the high priestly prayer, John chapter 17, his longest recorded prayer. You know what he prays for? He prays for unity. Here and there. Peace. It had never occurred to me before how all of these themes are woven throughout Scripture. This use of the word peace that we see over and over again, God's encouragement through the different authors to pursue peace, to be people of peace, to lead quiet and peaceful lives. Jesus opening up the Beatitudes with blessed by the peacemakers. It had never occurred to me why peace was throughout all scripture. Because peace means this peace. Reconciling with our creator God. And so my prayer for you this morning as we worshiped, this week as I prepared, is that you will seek peace with your creator. You will acknowledge he is the creator God who loves you. Your sin has distorted that relationship and broken it irreconcilably. Accept that Jesus died for you and created a path of reconciliation. Pursue that peace. And in your pursuit of that peace, look around you and help others pursue that peace as well. And in doing so, we are imitators of Jesus. And God will call us his children. Let's pray. Lord, I know there are plenty of us here, me included, who do not feel at peace with you, would you help us? Would you wrestle with us? Would you remind us of this lack of peace and the gentle way that you do it over and over again until we pursue it. Father, if there are people here who have never made peace with you, whose souls have never found rest in you, who have wandered from one thing to the next trying to find the peace and the satisfaction that only you offer. Would this morning be the morning that they rest easy in you and reconcile themselves, claim the reconciliation that you offer, and make peace with their creator, God, finally. Father, for those of us who need to make peace with others, would you give us the courage and the strength to do that? For those of us who need to pursue peace with you through eliminating things that are in our life, would you give us the courage to do that? If we need to pursue peace with you by adding things to our life, would you give us the desire and the discipline to do that? God, this morning, we simply pray for peace with you and with our brothers and sisters around us. Let us be peacemakers. In Jesus' name, amen.

Good morning, Grace. Welcome to the new year. I am so thrilled to be here this morning. Before we jump into what we're actually going to be talking about and going to be walking through this morning, I wanted to take just a quick second to give you an update. I know as many of you guys have been walking alongside and have been praying for Nate and for Jen, as Jen has been in the process of her father has been going through pancreatic cancer. And a lot of you know, as we've talked about kind of during the Christmas season, that it looked like that during this Christmas holiday was going to be the time where he finally was able to pass on into eternity. And that did happen. John is now in heaven, in the arms of the Father that he committed his life to. He's able to be up there absolutely rejoicing in Jesus, this Jesus that he's loved his whole life. He now is able to see and to know and to touch and to worship with no distractions. But as that has happened, I say that not only to say continue to keep the Vincent and the Rector families in your prayers, but I also say that to say that I could see and I could tell through your virtual faces as I look at you through your screens that you were like, ugh, this guy again. And I get it. I know and I understand. But I say that to say that John's funeral was yesterday. It was yesterday at two o'clock and then they did a graveside afterwards. And so it's my pleasure and my joy this morning to just have the opportunity to take away that one small extra burden from Nate that while he was dealing with being there for his wife and for his family and while he was there helping plan a funeral and preparing words to say for a funeral that he didn't have to worry about. Also writing a sermon and worry about jumping in the car from the funeral and driving from Atlanta all the way to Raleigh just so he could be here preaching this morning. And so I'm thrilled and I'm excited to be here this morning, not only because I love being up here getting to preach and getting to talk with you guys about things that I'm passionate with, but in particular this morning, just as a way to alleviate just a little bit of stress from Nate that he didn't have to worry about doing all of that, about driving back just so he can preach a sermon and he could just spend this week with his family as they mourn, but also as they celebrate John's life, what it was and what now it is in perfection in eternity. And with that, I say welcome to the new year. And this morning, as we're kicking off the new year at Grace, we kick it off with a new series called Things You Should Know. And I know that that title leaves a bit to be desired. I know it's probably, you know, you're like, okay, that could go a few different directions. And if it's going to go in the direction of you're going to come up and be Professor Kyle and teach me all of these boring things I don't know, then I'm turning it off. And don't, don't turn it off. That's not what I'm up here doing. I admit that probably when it comes to things of wisdom and discernment and just pure knowledge and understanding of things, I could probably turn to you much quicker than you would turn to me to learn those things. But instead, as we're focusing on things you should know, what we're talking about is maybe some of those words or some of those concepts that we hear and that we talk about in church that we definitely know what they are, right? And we definitely, like, we could probably define them and we could use them in conversations pretty well, but that maybe when we take like a deep look, and you've all been there, right, where you use a word, and someone goes, do you really know what that word means? Okay, like give me a definition, and as you struggle with it, you go, gosh, maybe I don't actually fully know that definition. Or when you talk about that you know a lot about, you know, you say like, I know about this, I understand this. And as soon as someone asks you two or three questions, you go, goodness gracious, I don't know how to answer that. And so these instead, for the next five weeks, we're going to talk about some of these words, some of these concepts, and some of these beliefs that we have in our church and through scripture that definitely we know, that we probably know pretty well. Some of you are going to know very well, but some of those things that I think at times we talk a lot about, but maybe don't sit down to just only talk about that, to just get a full and holistic view and understanding of what they are. And so this morning, I have the distinct pleasure of talking about baptism. What a wonderful and what a beautiful time to talk about baptism, to talk about us giving our hearts to Jesus, of the symbol of us being dead as Jesus was killed and being resurrected as Jesus was being resurrected. As yesterday, we celebrated a man, Jen's father and Nate's father-in-law going to heaven as this beautiful celebration of life and a celebration of a faith that he committed to and a baptism that he committed to long ago that he's now able to see the full fruit and the full fruition of what that means. But this morning, we're talking about baptism. And I know that if you've been around grace for a while, then you're probably, as soon as I said we're talking about baptism, you probably were a bit confused. You're like, wait, didn't we have like an entire Sunday, like an entire sermon where Nate preached about baptism, about what it is, and about what it means? And the answer is yes. It was, I would say, a little bit less than two and a half years ago. And the reason why I remember that is because my first Sunday was right after Nate had given that message. And the reason I know that is because my first Sunday was when Grace celebrated this huge day of baptisms where we had a group of people come, different people throughout age groups and men and women and youth and student age folks come and celebrate and be baptized this first Sunday that I was at Grace. And it was incredible and it was remarkable. And in that sermon that Nate gave that got all of these people thinking about and got all these people excited about being baptism, he talked about what we believe baptism is at grace. That we believe that baptism is for those who are able to articulate a faith and have experienced salvation. That when someone is able to give their heart to Jesus, when someone is able to repent of their sin and fully realize and understand the magnitude of their sin and how their sin equals eternal death, but because God is a good God, that God, because he sent his son to earth, that his son who lived a perfect life, when he was killed, he was killed to put to death your sin, to put to death our sin. And as he was raised to life, he was raised in a symbol that in the same way, if we would give our hearts to faith, if we would put our faith in that Jesus, that because of that, we could go from eternal death and destruction to eternal life and to have an eternal relationship with God, our creator and our father, both on earth and in heaven and eternity. And so in the same way, when that happens, we believe that we baptize when someone comes to faith through immersion. That's just a big word for basically saying we dunk people. As Nate puts it, we get them full wet or completely wet or whatever it is, the weird phrase that he says. But basically when someone comes to faith, they come in front of the church and they're baptized and they're brought down into the water, completely underwater, and then being brought back up. And that is meant to be a symbol of the faith that we are giving our hearts to. I think the symbol is most beautifully put and most beautifully said by Paul in Romans, in Romans 6, 3 through 4, where he says, What a beautiful depiction, and what a beautiful description, and what a beautiful symbol that as we are being dunked into the water, that we are being gone. And that is signifying the death of our old life. That is signifying the death of our old selves. And most importantly, that is signifying the death of our sin that no longer binds us and no longer holds us back from knowing God and having a relationship with him. And as we come out of the water, just as Jesus was resurrected, so are we being resurrected in newness of life. That water has washed the sins away from us. And as we burst forth out of that water, we are bursting forth into eternity, into this eternal relationship with God. And we know and we understand, just as John Piper put so eloquently, that faith, faith is what unites us to Christ. Baptism symbolizes the union. Baptism is a symbol of the union of Christ. We understand and we know and we have knowledge that it is our faith in Jesus. It's our hearts being given to Jesus is what saves us. If that is not something we've experienced, then baptism is meaningless. Then believer's baptism becomes meaningless because the water isn't what saves us. Our faith is what saves us. And on a Sunday where we're talking about baptism and on a Sunday where we get to talk about baptism, I don't think that there's any way, nor should there ever be any way around getting to talk about why baptism is so significant, why it is so important that baptism is the symbol of coming to faith. Because coming to faith is what this is all about. We are called, as we're called to make disciples, we're called, part of that is being called to baptism, that we come to a saving knowledge of faith. We come and we give our hearts to Jesus and we know that our eternal resting place is with God in eternity in relationship with him. And so when we experience that faith, we bring that faith, we go and we make disciples, we tell people who that is, we tell people of this experience that we have had with Jesus so that they can experience it as well. And as they do, we're able to baptize them into the kingdom, into our eternal family. And so there's no way to not talk about that, nor should there be. But I also understand, and what I also realize is you're like, Kyle, this is all stuff that we've talked about. This is stuff we do know. You should change the title to Kyle Tells Us Things That We Already Know, right? Because you've heard this before, and I know that it's not an incredibly difficult concept to understand, right? That when you've heard, when you read scripture, it's like, okay, like, I understand that symbol. You know, I understand that the water is washing away our sins and that we're going from death into life. And I understand that it's not what saves us, but instead it's our faith that what saves us. But I do understand why it's important. But the reason this morning why I'm excited to talk about baptism is because one of my favorite aspects of baptism is also falls in line with the question that I most often get from the people who I talk with about getting baptized. Granted, these are normally students. They're normally like middle schoolers, high schoolers who have given their hearts to Jesus. They've come to know who Jesus is and they want to live their life for him. And so they come in and they talk to me and they're like, Kyle, like, I get it. I understand baptism. I think it's really cool. I get why it's important, but they're smart. And they're like, but if it's a symbol of our faith, don't you talk about all the time that our faith is personal and it's ours and it's our own hearts, that our faith is not about our parents' faith, that we don't have our parents' faith, we don't have our friends' faith, we don't have our kids' faiths in the words of an adult or of a parent? Don't you say that? And so if it is a personal thing, then wouldn't the symbol of baptism, wouldn't it be that I could just like invite you over or I could just call up Nate and say, hey, Nate, can you come over to the house? We'll go out back and you can baptize me and you can go out back. You can baptize me in my pool and we can be done with it. But instead, the question, so the question they have is, I understand all of that, but why do I have to do it in front of everybody? And I love that question. I think it's a great, and I think it's a great point that yes, certainly baptism is the symbol of your personal faith. And certainly the symbol of baptism is not lost when you do it by yourself or when you do it alone. But I love the question and I understand the question, especially if you can imagine sixth and seventh graders being like, Kyle, I don't like when anyone looks at me ever. Much less do I want to be the reason why an entire room of people are looking straight at me. I don't want to go, because it's like, it's not like I'm standing, I don't even want to stand in the back of like a choir or like stand in the like, as Rob always talks about when he's playing the bass, he's like, gosh, we got to get some more light on me so people can see me rocking the bass. It's like, students don't want to be in the dark playing instruments up front, much less have a spotlight on them being like, hey, everybody in this entire place, we're talking about this kid now. And I would imagine that this is something that you've probably thought about and considered as well, because don't grow out of people of not wanting like everyone to look at you. You don't grow out of like being like, oh, this feels weird. This feels awkward. I don't like having all of these people looking at me. And so I think it's a great question of why in the world do I have to be in front of everyone to get baptized? And with that question, I want to take a quick pivot and I want to tell you about one of the best and one of the most joy-filled days of my entire life. And I know with all of that, everything coming down the pipe, you're like, all right, now he's going to tell me about his baptism or he's going to tell me about someone he loves baptism. And while that certainly probably would have been a far better idea, I'm actually going to not talk about that, and I'm going to talk about something else. Instead, I want to tell you about the day that my brother, Jay, my younger brother, and his wife, Conley, got married. To give you a little background, to know me is to probably also know Jay and to know Conley. I talk about them quite often. Jay has been my best friend since, I guess, his birth because he's younger than me. So I think mathematically that works. And for our whole lives, since he's only a couple years younger than me, we've kind of just done all of the same things. We like the same things. We do the same things. We've always gotten along really well. We don't fight a ton. We just have always kind of gotten along. And so especially as the years progressed and as he got towards middle school and interests kind of began aligning even more, we just were kind of best friends and have been best friends ever since. He's the person I love most in this world. On the other side, Jay had this great friend named Conley when he was in elementary school. And as early as like sixth or seventh grade, they started dating or going out or being boyfriend and girlfriend. I don't know. Like they were in sixth grade. No one knew what to call it, whatever. But as funny as it is, and as goofy sometimes as middle school relationship goes, their relationship lasted through middle school and through high school and through college all the way to marriage. And so I say that to say that as long as I have known Jay and as long as I have been so close to Jay, almost as much as that time, I have known Conley in the same way. And so in the same way, his wife Conley, I have seen for a long, long time, for years and years, as basically my little sister and as basically just another one of my very best and closest friends. And for the same reason, Jay didn't have too many friends that weren't also great friends with Conley and vice versa. Conley's friends were great friends with Jay and loved Jay. Because for so much of their lives and so much of their growing up, they were growing up together. And so as people are walking in friendship with these two apart, they are walking in friendship with these two together, walking towards and anticipating the day, one day when they will finally be able to have a wedding and be married. And so you can imagine how wonderful and how joyful a celebration we had when they finally got married a couple years ago. It was unbelievable. I can't describe to you a time where I have been more joy-filled and more proud in my whole life than to stand next to Jay and watch him be married. Standing in there with a church full of people, church full of loved ones who absolutely love these two and would do anything for them. And the celebration as we sang hymns, the celebration as we joined in excitement and cheering as they vowed to each other and as Jay kissed the bride, as Jay kissed Conley, and as we went off into the reception and we danced the night away and did all of those things because there was not a time more joyful than that because what an incredible experience. And we all know it. Like, you don't know Jay and Conley, but you've probably been to a wedding and you've probably had a wedding before. And so you get it. Weddings are joyful. People love weddings. I have even heard tale, this is true, I have even heard tale that Nate Rector, our pastor, has actually been known to dance at weddings. Like they are joyful experiences. They are joyful celebrations of these two people making these vows and making these commitments to each other. And I think just as significantly, even if not more so, one of the great and incredible reasons to have a wedding where you invite loved ones in to celebrate with you is not simply to celebrate with you on that day or on that night where you are saying yes to your partner forever, but also outside of that day, after that celebration ends, that the people that are watching and the people that are witnessing Jay and Conley and whoever these two people are that are getting married, as they are vowing their hearts and their lives to the other person, then the loved ones around them are being invited into saying, hey, I am making this vow. I am making this commitment. I need you to walk alongside me in that. And I think that's maybe even a more significant reason to have a wedding and to share your vows in public with these people that love you because what those people know because they've been married or just, I mean, for me, I haven't been married, but what I know through experience and what I know through loving people is it gets harder, right? That it's not always the honeymoon. They call it the honeymoon stage because at some point it ends and it gets more difficult. And so as that happens, Jay and Conley have all of these people who just as joyfully as they're celebrating are also saying yes to a commitment of saying, I care about these people and so I am committed to partnering them, to walking alongside them, to providing them wisdom and to providing them guidance in their new lives together, bound together for life. I say yes to giving them accountability. I say yes to allowing them to ask questions and for me to check in. Jay, how's it going? Conley, how has everything been? Is there anything that's difficult or is there anything that's great? And all of those things. And you know that, right? I know that maybe we don't in the moment think about that, yeah, we're watching them make that vows. And so we're committing to helping them as loved ones uphold those vows. But we all know how excited we are to talk to a newly married couple, to ask them how things are going, to ask them about all the great things, but then you always have the, you know, a little bit more like, okay, so what are some of the hard things now? Yeah, I dealt with that too. This is kind of how I dealt with it. This is how you walk in that. This is how you walk through it. And so for those two reasons, to be able to joyfully celebrate these two people who are coming together, while also committing to say, I will partner with you as you walk in your entire life, as you walk in your life committed to this person, I have chosen and I will partner with you. I believe that those same reasons are the main reasons why we have big weddings where we invite our loved ones in to join. Because what we know so well, and as sad and heartbreaking as it is, we have people in our church this year who know all the well and all the more because of COVID that it's not what legally binds us, right? It's not legally required that you have a big group of friends and family and loved ones around you as you get married. It only requires you, the person you're marrying, and someone to witness it, right? So why do we do it? I think more than any other reasons, those two reasons, the ability to celebrate and the ability to have people there to partner with you are those two main reasons. And in the same way, I also believe that the reason that we do baptisms in front of the entire congregation are the same. That in public baptism, that public baptism invites the congregation to celebrate and to partner with the person that is being baptized. When someone has gone from death to life, it is something that deserves to be celebrated. And I would say, I would go beyond that. The Bible says not only that it deserves to be celebrated, but that it is literally being celebrated. In Luke 1.15, it says, In the same way I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents. If you have given your hearts to Jesus, if you have repented of that sin, if you have said yes to Jesus, if you have given your heart over to God, then the angels in heaven have rejoiced and have celebrated over you because of that. When you came to faith, angels in heaven celebrated. And so baptism is an earthly representation of the rejoicing that is taking place in heaven as someone has given their heart and given their life over to God. It's your family. It's your friends. It's your loved ones. It's your church family. Here in particular, it's your grace family coming together to celebrate that you know Jesus, that you have gone from eternal death to eternal life, and you now get to experience this eternal relationship with God, your creator. And we get to celebrate alongside you, and you get to be celebrated for this incredible moment and for this incredible thing that has happened in your heart, the greatest thing that can ever and will ever happen inside of your heart. Similar to weddings, once again, I think that there's another reason that is at least equally as important, if not more so, that when you're getting in front of these people, you're vowing and you're making a commitment, a lifelong, eternal commitment to God, to Christ. I know a lot of you probably were able to see, and if you haven't, you can go to our social media and you can watch the video of when Jordan was baptized a few weeks ago. And as she was baptized, as exciting and as joyful as that was, before she was actually put into the water, before Nate actually baptized her, he said, Jordan, I've got two questions for you. Have you accepted Christ as your Lord and Savior? He said, yes. He said, are you committed to living the rest of your life for him. Yes. So Jordan, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Before Jordan was baptized, she made this commitment. She made this vow, vowing and committing her heart for eternity to God, not only so that she can go to heaven, but so that in her life and in this life, she is committing to living the rest of her days, the rest of her life, glorifying and seeking after Jesus. And as she does that, what is being asked of you, and you have a part to play in this, us as her grace family have a part to play in this, in saying, okay, Jordan, I heard you say that. And so I know that just like there's a honeymoon stage in marriage, there's also a honeymoon stage in faith, that we're riding high and we have this spiritual high where we great, and Satan can't touch us, and we're trying our hardest to kill all of our sin, and we're just loving reading scripture and going closer to God. But in the days and weeks, months, and years to come, it gets more difficult. Life gets hard sometimes, and it's hard to maintain that. Or in the opposite, sometimes life gets really good. Sometimes what life is offering seems way better and seems way more valuable or important at that time than your faith or than your heart and maintaining it with Christ. And so with that knowledge, as you are saying yes to these two questions in baptism, I have given my heart to Jesus, I accept him as my Lord and Savior, and I commit to living the rest of my days for him. Then what the congregation, therefore, is being asked to do is saying, you are now my sister, you are now my brother in Christ. And so for that, I commit to partnering with you. To walking with you. To checking in on you. To making sure that you are continuing to press on towards Jesus. Asking you questions. Giving you advice. Giving you guidance. Giving you accountability when you need accountability. And for those reasons, though we are signifying and though we're symbolizing and though what is being celebrated is certainly a very personal and very internal thing of you giving your heart over to Jesus, it is made public and it is public because it is something that a congregation, that your family of believers around you should celebrate. And it is something that you should stand up because I promise you and you will hear us forever in eternity here at Grace talk about the value of people walking alongside of you. That faith can't be done alone. It is incredibly difficult to walk in your faith, to grow in your love and in your understanding and in your walk and in your life with Jesus if you don't have people walking alongside of you. And so when you make that commitment, you do it up in front of your congregation, up in front of your grace, in front of your church family, saying, hey, I commit to this and I'm asking you to walk with me. And grace family, those of you who have already made this commitment, those of you who have given your hearts to Jesus, those of you who have been baptized, when you compare the two, when you compare marriage and when you compare baptism, how much more joyfully should we celebrate someone who is not only committing their heart to another, but is committing their heart forever to Jesus. How much more should we celebrate literally someone going from death to life? And how much more committed should we be to that person? Committed should we be to their life and making sure that they are continuing to press after God, press after their Lord and Savior that they committed to on that day for us to see, for us to witness, and for us to celebrate. And so my question is, will you come? If this is a commitment you haven't made, today, tomorrow, this week, this year, would you press after Jesus? Jesus, I'm tired. I'm tired. We're tired of trying so hard and falling short. Jesus, I realize that that's the point. The point is that I will always and forever fall short without you. Will you say, Jesus, I'm done falling under sin. I'm done walking without you. Jesus, I need you. Will you say yes to the grace that is freely offered to you from God through Jesus' death and resurrection? Because God is just sitting there waiting for you. And for those of you who are listening this morning that maybe haven't been baptized and you're like, well, I've, you know, maybe I've given my heart to Jesus already or maybe I was a little bit worried and I had a little stage fright. I didn't want to do it in front of people. Maybe you listen this morning and you're like, gosh, I get it. I get it. I understand the value. I understand the importance, and I understand why it is important to do it in front of these people that I love, and these people that love me, and I'm walking next to in life. Would you come and talk to one of us? We would love to talk more about baptism. We'd love to set you up to baptize you. It'd be the greatest joy and honor in our whole lives. And Grace family, those of you who've given your hearts to Jesus, will you continue to celebrate those of us who are doing it now? And will you say yes to partnering with the rest of your Grace family and saying, I know I haven't cared quite so much about this person's spiritual life as I should have. And will you commit today to saying, yes, I am committed to partnering with these people as they're currently giving their hearts to Jesus or as this is my best friend and they gave their heart to Jesus 20 years ago and I need to be more partnered with them than I am. So will you come? I pray that you will. Pray with me. God, thank you for your son, for sending him. God, that as sin, as our sin, tears us away from you where we deserve nothing but death. God, that you sent your perfect son to die to take over that sin. And God, I thank you for that. And I thank you that all that you ask of us in return is a simple faith and is simply coming to you and saying, yes, I believe. And yes, I want to give my heart over to you. Lord, I pray that when we think of baptism, we think of that. We think of new life. We think of going from death to life. And God, I pray that even as some of us have moved beyond the stages where we are coming to a saving knowledge in you, God, as we have already maybe been baptized, that God, we realize that we still have a hand in these other people's salvation around us. That in our grace family, we have a hand in these people's salvation, and we have a hand in walking with these people as they are giving their hearts over to Jesus now. Allow us to commit to these people. Allow us to commit to our family. And God, first and foremost, allow us to stay committed and loving you. We love you so much. Amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Kyle, another one of the pastors here. We need to put out more chairs this week, all right? It's full. You guys didn't get the memo. It's summertime. You're not supposed to do this until September, but we are sure glad that you are here. We have been going through a series last summer and this summer called 27 that Mikey alluded to in the announcements, which were fantastic. Also, at the end, Mikey said, please rise. That's new. I like that language. A little courtroom drama in here. All rise. That's fantastic. Anyway, sorry, I got sidetracked. We've been going through last summer and this summer, 27, where we're going through the books of the New Testament. This morning, we arrive at the one that I've been avoiding for the duration of the series, last summer and this summer, because it's the book of Romans. Some of you know, others of you will, that Romans is the most theologically dense and rich book of the Bible that there is. You can make some arguments about some other stuff, but Romans is a, but I will do my best to give you a grasp of what it is to make it hopefully more approachable for those of us who have never read it before, to make it more approachable so we can know how we are reading it and what we are reading. And for those of us who know it well, to kind of think of it in this succinct way. Because here's one of the benefits of going through the whole book of Romans or the whole book of Philippians on a Sunday. And we're not going to hit all of the great details here. But here's one reason why it may actually be a helpful approach. Because when Paul wrote these letters, or when the other apostles wrote the other epistles, they wrote them to be read aloud to the church all at once in one sitting. These letters were not written by Paul to parse out and dissect and look at the Greek tense and the original meaning of this one particular word and have that compared to all the other times that word shows up in Scripture. Now listen, listen. That's good research. That's helpful knowledge. It's okay and good to dissect the Bible in that way. It's helpful to us, helps us understand. But please hear me when I say, it was not written for that to happen. It was written to be read at once to give us a big understanding of the large points that Paul or the other authors are attempting to make in the books or the letters that they wrote. So we need to be careful when we read scripture that we don't miss the forest for the trees. To that end, I would highly encourage you, if you've never done it, to sit down and read Romans from beginning to end. I would highly encourage you to sit down and read it all at once. I did it on a flight one time and not to be too whatever, but it was a really moving experience for me. I would really encourage you to read it from beginning to end. It takes about 45 minutes maybe, unless you're from Tennessee. It'll take a little longer. So it's difficult, it's difficult to synopsize all of Romans in a single verse or to point to a verse and go, this is the book of Romans. I'm going to open the argument with Romans chapter 12, verse 1. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you know your Bible well, you may be able to fabricate another argument from Romans. Maybe you think it's Romans 8.28. We could pull out other verses that I could anchor us in this morning, and they would be absolutely appropriate. But I'm going to anchor us in Romans chapter 12, verse 1, as kind of a synopsizing summary verse of the whole book. And this is what it says. Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship. I think this is a good encapsulating verse for the thrust of the book of Romans. Therefore, I urge you brothers, in view of God's mercy, and I memorized it this way, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship. Paul's encouragement, his pleading with us, is to live our lives as a living sacrifice. And this imagery of being a living sacrifice was very clear to the Jewish audience. Much of the early church was made up of people of Jewish heritage. They understood the sacrificial system. So they understood what it was to be a sacrifice. They had probably grown up sacrificing lambs and doves and bulls and goats and whatever. There's a whole book of the Old Testament, Leviticus, that details the sacrificial system. So they understood this language well. But that's why it would be striking to them, this concept of being a living sacrifice, because being a living sacrifice is a daily choice. In some ways, I don't mean to be too crass about it, but the goats got off easy in the Old Testament. Just one time, and that was it. Done. Forever. But Paul says that we are to be living sacrifices. Sacrificing ourselves every day. And when I think of what it means to be a living sacrifice, to live your life for the sake of others, I think right now, in my context, I think of moms of young children. Okay? I know that I'm biased. I know that that's my perspective right now. We have Lily, she's eight. John, he's three. And so our house takes a lot of energy to run right now. It is physically and emotionally draining. And I don't, listen, I don't have the experience of late elementary school, middle school kids, high school kids, so I'm not up here trying to play the suffering Olympics with you. I just, this is our perspective. And I just know from what I can see that Jen, as a stay-atat-home mom lives an exhausting life. Just yesterday, we spent the day, we're getting ready, we're going out to dinner with some friends and we spent the day getting the house cleaned because apparently you have to clean your house when a 17-year-old kid's coming over that's never cleaned a house in their life. I don't know why you have to do this. We have, you got to make sure the vacuum marks are upstairs, you know? So we're cleaning the house. We're scurrying around, you know, we're doing, we're doing things. And, uh, Johnny, we refer to him, uh, as Jen shadow, just her little buddy, just always right there with her all the time. Right. And so, and he's a lot, I was, uh, I was, I was telling somebody, I was watching some somebody I was watching some sprinting, some Olympics, I think yesterday. And I was locked into this particular race. They're doing the whole preamble. Sprinting races take forever to start, forever. It's absurd. So they're going through the whole preamble, and then it's the actual race, and it's like the 4x400 or whatever it is, and I'm watching the whole thing. And I realized, I'm standing in front of the TV just looking at it, and I realized when it ended that John had been talking to me the entire time. He had been talking the whole time. No idea what he said. We sat down yesterday at the end of the day to watch some more Olympics, and he sat on the couch next to me and sang a song about elephants and grass. He's just all day long. He's going, and Lily makes her presence known sometimes. So it's just all day, right? We get a little respite going to dinner. We come back after about a 90-minute reprieve, and as soon as we get home, both kids are awake, and they're waiting for mommy to get home. They have now got to this place where they just won't go to sleep until she tells them goodnight. They're not interested in me, and I'm fine with this for a couple reasons, because I can get right back to Olympic coverage, and if you lived in a house with Jen and two young kids, you wouldn't be their favorite either. Okay. I just admit defeat there. And it's fine. So John has gotten out of bed. He's turned his light on and his noisemaker off. And we lock it. We keep him locked in. So he doesn't wander in the night. He's banging the door. So she's got to go up there, get him to sleep. I leave, I read Lily, her devotional. Then Jen comes in and helps Lily get to bed. And then Jen comes downstairs, and we're watching TV, talking on the couch. And it was like maybe 15 minutes of quiet, right? And then we hear footsteps. Oh, no. So Lily comes down the stairs. She curls up on Jen's lap. She says, I don't feel well. Will you come lay down with me? And Jen looks at me over Lily's head and she goes, this started at 6.15 this morning. I am exhausted. She goes and she lays down with Lily. This morning, I get up. I get up early on Sundays, take a shower. Get out of the shower about 5.45, 6 o'clock. Jen's not in the bed anymore. I go in, check in John's room. She's in the seat holding John with a blanket over her. And I just kind of shook my head, kissed her on the head, came to church. That's exhausting. And that's what it is to be a living sacrifice. A living sacrifice organizes their life around the needs of others. That's what a living sacrifice does. A living sacrifice wakes up every day and says, I don't exist for me. I exist for them. My days are not my days. My days are their days. My resources are not my resources. They are their resources. My time, my quiet, my solitude, my needs are not my needs. They're their needs. And this is the life that God calls us to. It is, admittedly, a remarkably high bar that Paul would say you should live your lives as living sacrifices, sacrificing every day for the sake of God's kingdom, not your kingdom. In every meeting that you are in, in your workplace, this is an opportunity to minister and to pour Christ into the lives of the people around you. Every interaction with another customer or an employee at Harris Teeter is an opportunity. It is not your time to be quiet and put your head down and get out of there quickly. It is an opportunity for ministry that God is giving you. We are living our lives as living sacrifices. When the person calls you that you don't want to talk to, but you know you need to, you take that call with a smile on your face because we are living sacrifices. We are to live every day offering every moment to the service of God's kingdom. And that is a very tall order. But nobody demonstrated this better than Jesus himself. I am blown away every time I read through the gospels, noting how Jesus sacrificially loved everybody around him all the time. You read the Gospels and pay attention to all the times when Jesus just did a thing. He just performed a bunch of miracles. He just spoke to a big crowd. He just healed a bunch of people. He just taught the disciples. He just did a big thing that would be exhausting that we'd all want to rest from. as he's leaving it says he went to be in a quiet place alone and pray and people track him down and they ask him for more things and more teachings and more questions and it was just relentless but he lived his life. He lived and died and rose again as a living sacrifice and this is the standard to which all Christians are called. Now, how can God place such a tall order on us? Because if you're like me, you'll be lucky to live a third of your day as a living sacrifice. The other two thirds are going to my bank. If you're like me, you're lucky to be cognitively aware of your call to live as a living sacrifice every day. But we sang in the third song this morning that we worship God. I will worship you. I will worship you. I will worship you. Will you? Because your spiritual act of worship isn't to sit in church on Sunday and sing praise to God. That's part of it. But your spiritual act of worship, if you mean what you sing, is that we offer our lives as living sacrifices, living every moment for the service of God's kingdom, not ourselves. And so to me, the question becomes, how can God place that burden on us? What could possibly compel us to be obedient in that way? And historically, the answer to questions like this in church, at least to me, has been because God told you to. Because he told you to. Because you're supposed to. Because he's the boss. He is Lord and you are not. He's the he's the creator we are the creature we are the creation we have to do what he says because god made you created you destined you saved you now you should live your life in service to him out of a sense of ought but i just don't think that's a very satisfying answer. And I actually think that the book of Romans offers us in total a much better answer to that question. How can God, what should compel me to offer my life as a living sacrifice? Because that's a tall order. So here's what we're going to do. If you look at your notes, Shane grabbed me. Shane, a longtime Grace partner, grabbed me in the lobby, and he held up the notes. And he goes, what are you doing to us today, man? What's going on here? He goes, this feels like class. I know. I'm going to try to make this as not boring as possible, but I just thought, here's my thinking. If I can, in very simple language, tell you what each chapter means as we build to the back half of Romans, then you'll be able to follow the reasoning narrative that Paul is writing. It's like he's laying out a case to help us understand what salvation is, how it came into being, why it's so important, and what it means to us. And so he lays out over the course of eight chapters this doctrine of salvation and I think if I can explain to you basically the theme in every chapter that you may be able to leave here with a much better understanding of what the book of Romans is and how we can approach it so that if you want to read it on your own you can and you don't have to be intimidated by it so if it's's helpful at all to you, write these down. I'm going to go kind of quick through the chapters. We'll get you out of here by one o'clock. I promise. And you can keep this and it can help hopefully make Romans more approachable and understandable. And these are, listen, some of y'all know the Bible better than I do. And you're going to see my summaries of the chapters and you're going to think, that's dumb. That's not what I would have done. You're probably right. Okay. But these are mine. So I hope that they're true to scripture. But here's the flow of Romans and how it gives us an answer to the question, what compels us to live as living sacrifices? Romans chapter 1, you open it up, starts with some basic greetings and stuff like that, and then he gets into this discourse, and the point of the discourse is to say, hey, man has rejected God. Mankind, on the whole, has rejected God and is living as if God is not existent. Living as if God doesn't matter. Most of the world carries on agnostically, is what Paul is saying. And the culmination of this chapter is to say that not only does mankind, does everybody in our current culture and society, sin with freedom, but they encourage it when other people sin too. They embrace it and they love it. This, I think, is very relatable. It's hard to exist in our culture today and not see the idea that the trend over the last few decades has been moving, sometimes slowly, sometimes not, towards a godless society where society conducts itself as if God does not exist. So that's what he's saying in Romans chapter 1. Man has rejected God with the way that they live. Romans chapter 2, he follows that up. Because of that rejection, God is angry. The rejection has angered God. He created us. He purposed us. He provides us with life and sustenance. He sent His Son to die for us to make a path to reconciliation to Him. And what do we do with all of those gifts? We stomp on them and we reject them and we turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to them and we live as if He doesn't exist. So chapter 2 is about the earned wrath of God. He's ticked off that we have rejected him. That's the point that Paul is making. Then chapter three, he makes the point to a largely Jewish audience at the time. Hey, we cannot behave our way back into reconciliation. Our sin, that rejection of God, has broken our relationship with God, has severed it irrevocably, and we cannot white-knuckle or behave our way back into right relationship with God. We can't follow the rules well enough to make God okay with us again, to defer and overcome that wrath and that anger at our rejection, to make up for rejecting Him. We can't follow the rules well enough. That just, that can't happen. We're not going to behave our way into heaven. Chapter 4 moves through that, and he says what we can do, we cannot behave our way into reconciliation, and then chapter 4, for reconciliation, God requires our trust, not our behavior. That's why the first song we sang today was about believing in Christ. Because this is what God requires of us. He requires our trust, not our behavior. Chapter 5 tells us where to place that trust. Chapter 5, we placed that trust in Jesus Christ and what he did on the cross. There's this beautiful dissertation in 5 where he compares Adam to Jesus and he says, just as in Adam through one man sin entered the world, so now in Christ through one man salvation enters the world. And so we see Adam as a type Christ from the Old Testament reflecting to us who Jesus really is in the New Testament. He says we place our faith in Christ. And when I preach it, I always say that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And we're told what he does in chapter 5. In 6, then, we learn that we are not just delivered from God's anger, but into a new eternal life. In chapter 6, he introduces this idea of us being a new creature. And he paints this picture of baptism, where we are buried with Christ in death, and we are raised to walk in newness of life. We preach the gospel of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ when we physically, invisibly baptize people. That's why we do it in the service. That's why we go all the way under the water because it's a picture that he paints in Romans chapter 6. That because we are saved, we are reconciled with God, we are not just reconciled to heaven for eternity, but we are also reconciled from ourselves. We are no longer slaves to sin. We are rescued from sin and we are raised to walk in a newness of life. We can walk as a new creature where it is possible to sin no more. That brings up a really interesting pickle that we're all in because all of us still sin. And that's what Paul talks about in chapter 7. It's to me maybe the most human chapter in the whole Bible. And the way I would sum it up is to say this new life causes us to be at war with ourselves. We're told in scripture that we're a new creature. That we're not a slave to sin. I don't feel like that most days. I don't feel like this new creature that doesn't have to sin. I feel like this old creature that gets really disappointed in himself for how he carries on sometimes. And this is what Paul captures in the closing verses of chapter 7. Where he says essentially, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I want to do, the things I do not want to do, I do. The things I do want to do, I do not do. And then exasperatedly cries out, oh wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? I don't have any tattoos, but if I were to get one, that would be in the running. O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Man, if you haven't come there in your Christian walk, you just got saved last week. Because I feel like to be a believer is to know the good that you ought to do, is to know the bad that you ought not do, and to still struggle so much with those things. And Paul cries out and says, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God who provided a way in Christ Jesus. And then that gives way, chapter 7, that war, because we're a new creature, we're going to be at war with ourselves, that gives way to chapter 8. Romans chapter 8 is the greatest chapter in the Bible. To give you a sense of how inadequately I am handling the book of Romans today. A few years ago, we did an eight-week-long series in Romans chapter 8 called The Greatest Chapter, and I could have made it 12. I just didn't want to wear you guys out. Romans chapter 8 is a soaring chapter, and it says Jesus has won the war, and nothing can ever change that. He's won the war that you fight in yourself, and he's won the war against sin and death, and there is nothing that can ever change that. Romans chapter 8 is a culmination and climax of certainty. It is a beacon of Christendom that declares the power of Christ, and it ends with such a flourish where Paul says, for I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor demons nor rulers nor principality nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor anything in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. That's a powerful statement that Jesus loves you so much that he died for you, he's renewed your soul, he's reconciled you to Christ or to God and now he holds you in his grip so tightly that nothing in all creation, not even you, can separate yourself from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. It's magisterial when we look at it all the way through. And we see him build from Romans 1. We've rejected God. Romans 2, God's been angered by that rejection and hurt. Romans chapter 3, we cannot behave our way into fixing that. Romans chapter 4, we have to have faith, not behavior. Romans chapter 5, we place that faith in Christ. Romans chapter 6, because of our faith in Christ, we're a new creature. Romans chapter 7, that new creature wars with itself. Romans chapter 8, Jesus has won that war. Now and in eternity. And we can rest in that. Then we have the back half of Romans. Romans 9 through 16. And this is a gross oversimplification of those chapters. But the essential question that's being answered for the rest of the book is do we live in response to the first half of Romans? And I think Paul most succinctly answers that question in chapter 12, verse 1, when he says, therefore, my brothers. Now listen, when you're reading the Bible, especially Romans, and you see the word therefore, you have to ask, what's the therefore? Based on what? Therefore, what? Therefore, in view of God's mercy. Because of everything I just told you about in Romans 1 through 8, therefore, brothers, in view of God's mercy, in light of the rest of the message of this book and the glorious salvation offered to us by Christ, in light of that, in view of God's mercy, I urge you to live your lives as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship. You see, it is not a sense of ought that compels us to live our life for God's kingdom and not our own. It is an overwhelming sense of gratitude that drives us. Out of an overflow of gratitude, we live lives of sacrifice. Out of an overflow of the truths of gratitude of the truths of Romans chapters 1 through 8 we live lives of sacrifice we are so compelled by what that by what he has done for us that we spend the rest of our lives trying to help other people see what he has done for them. You understand? We steep ourselves in the gospel. We steep ourselves in the truth of scripture. We steep ourselves in the sacrifice of Christ with the daily awareness of what he does for us and that he's won the war for us and that he calls for us and that he loves us. He loves us. He really loves us. And he chases after us and he won't let us convince ourselves that he doesn't love us. He won't let us convince ourselves that we're not good enough for him or that we don't deserve him. He chases after us, and he comes for us, and he died for us. And if we will daily steep ourselves in that reality, we will live a life of such gratitude that we will be compelled to live a life for the sake of others as a living sacrifice. We will be so overwhelmed by the reality of what he's done for us that we will spend our lives trying to help other people see what he's done for them too. And when that is our mentality that changes our attitude in the drive-thru, that changes our interactions with our children, with our coworkers, with our employees and employers, when we walk in that sense of gratitude, it will be easy to live our lives as living sacrifices because we are so overwhelmed by what God has done for us that we want to spend our days helping other people see what God has done for them. I am reminded of that great verse, John 1 16, and And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. So here's what I hope you'll do. And here's my prayer to you this week, for you this week. The idea of offering our lives every moment of every day for the sake of others and not ourselves, is daunting. Really, in our power, it's impossible. Our only hope is to remember the message of Romans and be so grateful for all that God has done for us, for all that he's given us, and for the way that he saves us and forgives us and pursues us. To be so steeped in that gratitude that we cannot help but sacrifice for others so that we're not the only ones who realize all that God has done for us. I hope that we'll do that. I hope you'll do that. And I hope that this is just whetting your appetite for Romans and that you'll sit down and read it on your own too. Let's pray. Father, we are grateful to you. We are grateful for your son and for your sacrifice. God, help us to live lives of gratitude so that we might live as sacrifices for others as your son lived for us. God, if there is someone here who doesn't yet know you, I pray that they would. And maybe by simply walking through this wonderful book, they can better understand how to approach you and why they need you. God, be with us in our weeks. We're going to wake up tomorrow trying to live a life of sacrifice and we're going to stub our toe and we're going to mess up and we're going to say selfish things. But God, I pray that you would give us the grace for ourselves to get back up and let you lead us more and further and deeper. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Kyle, another one of the pastors here. We need to put out more chairs this week, all right? It's full. You guys didn't get the memo. It's summertime. You're not supposed to do this until September, but we are sure glad that you are here. We have been going through a series last summer and this summer called 27 that Mikey alluded to in the announcements, which were fantastic. Also, at the end, Mikey said, please rise. That's new. I like that language. A little courtroom drama in here. All rise. That's fantastic. Anyway, sorry, I got sidetracked. We've been going through last summer and this summer, 27, where we're going through the books of the New Testament. This morning, we arrive at the one that I've been avoiding for the duration of the series, last summer and this summer, because it's the book of Romans. Some of you know, others of you will, that Romans is the most theologically dense and rich book of the Bible that there is. You can make some arguments about some other stuff, but Romans is a, but I will do my best to give you a grasp of what it is to make it hopefully more approachable for those of us who have never read it before, to make it more approachable so we can know how we are reading it and what we are reading. And for those of us who know it well, to kind of think of it in this succinct way. Because here's one of the benefits of going through the whole book of Romans or the whole book of Philippians on a Sunday. And we're not going to hit all of the great details here. But here's one reason why it may actually be a helpful approach. Because when Paul wrote these letters, or when the other apostles wrote the other epistles, they wrote them to be read aloud to the church all at once in one sitting. These letters were not written by Paul to parse out and dissect and look at the Greek tense and the original meaning of this one particular word and have that compared to all the other times that word shows up in Scripture. Now listen, listen. That's good research. That's helpful knowledge. It's okay and good to dissect the Bible in that way. It's helpful to us, helps us understand. But please hear me when I say, it was not written for that to happen. It was written to be read at once to give us a big understanding of the large points that Paul or the other authors are attempting to make in the books or the letters that they wrote. So we need to be careful when we read scripture that we don't miss the forest for the trees. To that end, I would highly encourage you, if you've never done it, to sit down and read Romans from beginning to end. I would highly encourage you to sit down and read it all at once. I did it on a flight one time and not to be too whatever, but it was a really moving experience for me. I would really encourage you to read it from beginning to end. It takes about 45 minutes maybe, unless you're from Tennessee. It'll take a little longer. So it's difficult, it's difficult to synopsize all of Romans in a single verse or to point to a verse and go, this is the book of Romans. I'm going to open the argument with Romans chapter 12, verse 1. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you know your Bible well, you may be able to fabricate another argument from Romans. Maybe you think it's Romans 8.28. We could pull out other verses that I could anchor us in this morning, and they would be absolutely appropriate. But I'm going to anchor us in Romans chapter 12, verse 1, as kind of a synopsizing summary verse of the whole book. And this is what it says. Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship. I think this is a good encapsulating verse for the thrust of the book of Romans. Therefore, I urge you brothers, in view of God's mercy, and I memorized it this way, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship. Paul's encouragement, his pleading with us, is to live our lives as a living sacrifice. And this imagery of being a living sacrifice was very clear to the Jewish audience. Much of the early church was made up of people of Jewish heritage. They understood the sacrificial system. So they understood what it was to be a sacrifice. They had probably grown up sacrificing lambs and doves and bulls and goats and whatever. There's a whole book of the Old Testament, Leviticus, that details the sacrificial system. So they understood this language well. But that's why it would be striking to them, this concept of being a living sacrifice, because being a living sacrifice is a daily choice. In some ways, I don't mean to be too crass about it, but the goats got off easy in the Old Testament. Just one time, and that was it. Done. Forever. But Paul says that we are to be living sacrifices. Sacrificing ourselves every day. And when I think of what it means to be a living sacrifice, to live your life for the sake of others, I think right now, in my context, I think of moms of young children. Okay? I know that I'm biased. I know that that's my perspective right now. We have Lily, she's eight. John, he's three. And so our house takes a lot of energy to run right now. It is physically and emotionally draining. And I don't, listen, I don't have the experience of late elementary school, middle school kids, high school kids, so I'm not up here trying to play the suffering Olympics with you. I just, this is our perspective. And I just know from what I can see that Jen, as a stay-atat-home mom lives an exhausting life. Just yesterday, we spent the day, we're getting ready, we're going out to dinner with some friends and we spent the day getting the house cleaned because apparently you have to clean your house when a 17-year-old kid's coming over that's never cleaned a house in their life. I don't know why you have to do this. We have, you got to make sure the vacuum marks are upstairs, you know? So we're cleaning the house. We're scurrying around, you know, we're doing, we're doing things. And, uh, Johnny, we refer to him, uh, as Jen shadow, just her little buddy, just always right there with her all the time. Right. And so, and he's a lot, I was, uh, I was, I was telling somebody, I was watching some somebody I was watching some sprinting, some Olympics, I think yesterday. And I was locked into this particular race. They're doing the whole preamble. Sprinting races take forever to start, forever. It's absurd. So they're going through the whole preamble, and then it's the actual race, and it's like the 4x400 or whatever it is, and I'm watching the whole thing. And I realized, I'm standing in front of the TV just looking at it, and I realized when it ended that John had been talking to me the entire time. He had been talking the whole time. No idea what he said. We sat down yesterday at the end of the day to watch some more Olympics, and he sat on the couch next to me and sang a song about elephants and grass. He's just all day long. He's going, and Lily makes her presence known sometimes. So it's just all day, right? We get a little respite going to dinner. We come back after about a 90-minute reprieve, and as soon as we get home, both kids are awake, and they're waiting for mommy to get home. They have now got to this place where they just won't go to sleep until she tells them goodnight. They're not interested in me, and I'm fine with this for a couple reasons, because I can get right back to Olympic coverage, and if you lived in a house with Jen and two young kids, you wouldn't be their favorite either. Okay. I just admit defeat there. And it's fine. So John has gotten out of bed. He's turned his light on and his noisemaker off. And we lock it. We keep him locked in. So he doesn't wander in the night. He's banging the door. So she's got to go up there, get him to sleep. I leave, I read Lily, her devotional. Then Jen comes in and helps Lily get to bed. And then Jen comes downstairs, and we're watching TV, talking on the couch. And it was like maybe 15 minutes of quiet, right? And then we hear footsteps. Oh, no. So Lily comes down the stairs. She curls up on Jen's lap. She says, I don't feel well. Will you come lay down with me? And Jen looks at me over Lily's head and she goes, this started at 6.15 this morning. I am exhausted. She goes and she lays down with Lily. This morning, I get up. I get up early on Sundays, take a shower. Get out of the shower about 5.45, 6 o'clock. Jen's not in the bed anymore. I go in, check in John's room. She's in the seat holding John with a blanket over her. And I just kind of shook my head, kissed her on the head, came to church. That's exhausting. And that's what it is to be a living sacrifice. A living sacrifice organizes their life around the needs of others. That's what a living sacrifice does. A living sacrifice wakes up every day and says, I don't exist for me. I exist for them. My days are not my days. My days are their days. My resources are not my resources. They are their resources. My time, my quiet, my solitude, my needs are not my needs. They're their needs. And this is the life that God calls us to. It is, admittedly, a remarkably high bar that Paul would say you should live your lives as living sacrifices, sacrificing every day for the sake of God's kingdom, not your kingdom. In every meeting that you are in, in your workplace, this is an opportunity to minister and to pour Christ into the lives of the people around you. Every interaction with another customer or an employee at Harris Teeter is an opportunity. It is not your time to be quiet and put your head down and get out of there quickly. It is an opportunity for ministry that God is giving you. We are living our lives as living sacrifices. When the person calls you that you don't want to talk to, but you know you need to, you take that call with a smile on your face because we are living sacrifices. We are to live every day offering every moment to the service of God's kingdom. And that is a very tall order. But nobody demonstrated this better than Jesus himself. I am blown away every time I read through the gospels, noting how Jesus sacrificially loved everybody around him all the time. You read the Gospels and pay attention to all the times when Jesus just did a thing. He just performed a bunch of miracles. He just spoke to a big crowd. He just healed a bunch of people. He just taught the disciples. He just did a big thing that would be exhausting that we'd all want to rest from. as he's leaving it says he went to be in a quiet place alone and pray and people track him down and they ask him for more things and more teachings and more questions and it was just relentless but he lived his life. He lived and died and rose again as a living sacrifice and this is the standard to which all Christians are called. Now, how can God place such a tall order on us? Because if you're like me, you'll be lucky to live a third of your day as a living sacrifice. The other two thirds are going to my bank. If you're like me, you're lucky to be cognitively aware of your call to live as a living sacrifice every day. But we sang in the third song this morning that we worship God. I will worship you. I will worship you. I will worship you. Will you? Because your spiritual act of worship isn't to sit in church on Sunday and sing praise to God. That's part of it. But your spiritual act of worship, if you mean what you sing, is that we offer our lives as living sacrifices, living every moment for the service of God's kingdom, not ourselves. And so to me, the question becomes, how can God place that burden on us? What could possibly compel us to be obedient in that way? And historically, the answer to questions like this in church, at least to me, has been because God told you to. Because he told you to. Because you're supposed to. Because he's the boss. He is Lord and you are not. He's the he's the creator we are the creature we are the creation we have to do what he says because god made you created you destined you saved you now you should live your life in service to him out of a sense of ought but i just don't think that's a very satisfying answer. And I actually think that the book of Romans offers us in total a much better answer to that question. How can God, what should compel me to offer my life as a living sacrifice? Because that's a tall order. So here's what we're going to do. If you look at your notes, Shane grabbed me. Shane, a longtime Grace partner, grabbed me in the lobby, and he held up the notes. And he goes, what are you doing to us today, man? What's going on here? He goes, this feels like class. I know. I'm going to try to make this as not boring as possible, but I just thought, here's my thinking. If I can, in very simple language, tell you what each chapter means as we build to the back half of Romans, then you'll be able to follow the reasoning narrative that Paul is writing. It's like he's laying out a case to help us understand what salvation is, how it came into being, why it's so important, and what it means to us. And so he lays out over the course of eight chapters this doctrine of salvation and I think if I can explain to you basically the theme in every chapter that you may be able to leave here with a much better understanding of what the book of Romans is and how we can approach it so that if you want to read it on your own you can and you don't have to be intimidated by it so if it's's helpful at all to you, write these down. I'm going to go kind of quick through the chapters. We'll get you out of here by one o'clock. I promise. And you can keep this and it can help hopefully make Romans more approachable and understandable. And these are, listen, some of y'all know the Bible better than I do. And you're going to see my summaries of the chapters and you're going to think, that's dumb. That's not what I would have done. You're probably right. Okay. But these are mine. So I hope that they're true to scripture. But here's the flow of Romans and how it gives us an answer to the question, what compels us to live as living sacrifices? Romans chapter 1, you open it up, starts with some basic greetings and stuff like that, and then he gets into this discourse, and the point of the discourse is to say, hey, man has rejected God. Mankind, on the whole, has rejected God and is living as if God is not existent. Living as if God doesn't matter. Most of the world carries on agnostically, is what Paul is saying. And the culmination of this chapter is to say that not only does mankind, does everybody in our current culture and society, sin with freedom, but they encourage it when other people sin too. They embrace it and they love it. This, I think, is very relatable. It's hard to exist in our culture today and not see the idea that the trend over the last few decades has been moving, sometimes slowly, sometimes not, towards a godless society where society conducts itself as if God does not exist. So that's what he's saying in Romans chapter 1. Man has rejected God with the way that they live. Romans chapter 2, he follows that up. Because of that rejection, God is angry. The rejection has angered God. He created us. He purposed us. He provides us with life and sustenance. He sent His Son to die for us to make a path to reconciliation to Him. And what do we do with all of those gifts? We stomp on them and we reject them and we turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to them and we live as if He doesn't exist. So chapter 2 is about the earned wrath of God. He's ticked off that we have rejected him. That's the point that Paul is making. Then chapter three, he makes the point to a largely Jewish audience at the time. Hey, we cannot behave our way back into reconciliation. Our sin, that rejection of God, has broken our relationship with God, has severed it irrevocably, and we cannot white-knuckle or behave our way back into right relationship with God. We can't follow the rules well enough to make God okay with us again, to defer and overcome that wrath and that anger at our rejection, to make up for rejecting Him. We can't follow the rules well enough. That just, that can't happen. We're not going to behave our way into heaven. Chapter 4 moves through that, and he says what we can do, we cannot behave our way into reconciliation, and then chapter 4, for reconciliation, God requires our trust, not our behavior. That's why the first song we sang today was about believing in Christ. Because this is what God requires of us. He requires our trust, not our behavior. Chapter 5 tells us where to place that trust. Chapter 5, we placed that trust in Jesus Christ and what he did on the cross. There's this beautiful dissertation in 5 where he compares Adam to Jesus and he says, just as in Adam through one man sin entered the world, so now in Christ through one man salvation enters the world. And so we see Adam as a type Christ from the Old Testament reflecting to us who Jesus really is in the New Testament. He says we place our faith in Christ. And when I preach it, I always say that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And we're told what he does in chapter 5. In 6, then, we learn that we are not just delivered from God's anger, but into a new eternal life. In chapter 6, he introduces this idea of us being a new creature. And he paints this picture of baptism, where we are buried with Christ in death, and we are raised to walk in newness of life. We preach the gospel of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ when we physically, invisibly baptize people. That's why we do it in the service. That's why we go all the way under the water because it's a picture that he paints in Romans chapter 6. That because we are saved, we are reconciled with God, we are not just reconciled to heaven for eternity, but we are also reconciled from ourselves. We are no longer slaves to sin. We are rescued from sin and we are raised to walk in a newness of life. We can walk as a new creature where it is possible to sin no more. That brings up a really interesting pickle that we're all in because all of us still sin. And that's what Paul talks about in chapter 7. It's to me maybe the most human chapter in the whole Bible. And the way I would sum it up is to say this new life causes us to be at war with ourselves. We're told in scripture that we're a new creature. That we're not a slave to sin. I don't feel like that most days. I don't feel like this new creature that doesn't have to sin. I feel like this old creature that gets really disappointed in himself for how he carries on sometimes. And this is what Paul captures in the closing verses of chapter 7. Where he says essentially, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I want to do, the things I do not want to do, I do. The things I do want to do, I do not do. And then exasperatedly cries out, oh wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? I don't have any tattoos, but if I were to get one, that would be in the running. O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Man, if you haven't come there in your Christian walk, you just got saved last week. Because I feel like to be a believer is to know the good that you ought to do, is to know the bad that you ought not do, and to still struggle so much with those things. And Paul cries out and says, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God who provided a way in Christ Jesus. And then that gives way, chapter 7, that war, because we're a new creature, we're going to be at war with ourselves, that gives way to chapter 8. Romans chapter 8 is the greatest chapter in the Bible. To give you a sense of how inadequately I am handling the book of Romans today. A few years ago, we did an eight-week-long series in Romans chapter 8 called The Greatest Chapter, and I could have made it 12. I just didn't want to wear you guys out. Romans chapter 8 is a soaring chapter, and it says Jesus has won the war, and nothing can ever change that. He's won the war that you fight in yourself, and he's won the war against sin and death, and there is nothing that can ever change that. Romans chapter 8 is a culmination and climax of certainty. It is a beacon of Christendom that declares the power of Christ, and it ends with such a flourish where Paul says, for I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor demons nor rulers nor principality nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor anything in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. That's a powerful statement that Jesus loves you so much that he died for you, he's renewed your soul, he's reconciled you to Christ or to God and now he holds you in his grip so tightly that nothing in all creation, not even you, can separate yourself from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. It's magisterial when we look at it all the way through. And we see him build from Romans 1. We've rejected God. Romans 2, God's been angered by that rejection and hurt. Romans chapter 3, we cannot behave our way into fixing that. Romans chapter 4, we have to have faith, not behavior. Romans chapter 5, we place that faith in Christ. Romans chapter 6, because of our faith in Christ, we're a new creature. Romans chapter 7, that new creature wars with itself. Romans chapter 8, Jesus has won that war. Now and in eternity. And we can rest in that. Then we have the back half of Romans. Romans 9 through 16. And this is a gross oversimplification of those chapters. But the essential question that's being answered for the rest of the book is do we live in response to the first half of Romans? And I think Paul most succinctly answers that question in chapter 12, verse 1, when he says, therefore, my brothers. Now listen, when you're reading the Bible, especially Romans, and you see the word therefore, you have to ask, what's the therefore? Based on what? Therefore, what? Therefore, in view of God's mercy. Because of everything I just told you about in Romans 1 through 8, therefore, brothers, in view of God's mercy, in light of the rest of the message of this book and the glorious salvation offered to us by Christ, in light of that, in view of God's mercy, I urge you to live your lives as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship. You see, it is not a sense of ought that compels us to live our life for God's kingdom and not our own. It is an overwhelming sense of gratitude that drives us. Out of an overflow of gratitude, we live lives of sacrifice. Out of an overflow of the truths of gratitude of the truths of Romans chapters 1 through 8 we live lives of sacrifice we are so compelled by what that by what he has done for us that we spend the rest of our lives trying to help other people see what he has done for them. You understand? We steep ourselves in the gospel. We steep ourselves in the truth of scripture. We steep ourselves in the sacrifice of Christ with the daily awareness of what he does for us and that he's won the war for us and that he calls for us and that he loves us. He loves us. He really loves us. And he chases after us and he won't let us convince ourselves that he doesn't love us. He won't let us convince ourselves that we're not good enough for him or that we don't deserve him. He chases after us, and he comes for us, and he died for us. And if we will daily steep ourselves in that reality, we will live a life of such gratitude that we will be compelled to live a life for the sake of others as a living sacrifice. We will be so overwhelmed by the reality of what he's done for us that we will spend our lives trying to help other people see what he's done for them too. And when that is our mentality that changes our attitude in the drive-thru, that changes our interactions with our children, with our coworkers, with our employees and employers, when we walk in that sense of gratitude, it will be easy to live our lives as living sacrifices because we are so overwhelmed by what God has done for us that we want to spend our days helping other people see what God has done for them. I am reminded of that great verse, John 1 16, and And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. So here's what I hope you'll do. And here's my prayer to you this week, for you this week. The idea of offering our lives every moment of every day for the sake of others and not ourselves, is daunting. Really, in our power, it's impossible. Our only hope is to remember the message of Romans and be so grateful for all that God has done for us, for all that he's given us, and for the way that he saves us and forgives us and pursues us. To be so steeped in that gratitude that we cannot help but sacrifice for others so that we're not the only ones who realize all that God has done for us. I hope that we'll do that. I hope you'll do that. And I hope that this is just whetting your appetite for Romans and that you'll sit down and read it on your own too. Let's pray. Father, we are grateful to you. We are grateful for your son and for your sacrifice. God, help us to live lives of gratitude so that we might live as sacrifices for others as your son lived for us. God, if there is someone here who doesn't yet know you, I pray that they would. And maybe by simply walking through this wonderful book, they can better understand how to approach you and why they need you. God, be with us in our weeks. We're going to wake up tomorrow trying to live a life of sacrifice and we're going to stub our toe and we're going to mess up and we're going to say selfish things. But God, I pray that you would give us the grace for ourselves to get back up and let you lead us more and further and deeper. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Kyle, another one of the pastors here. We need to put out more chairs this week, all right? It's full. You guys didn't get the memo. It's summertime. You're not supposed to do this until September, but we are sure glad that you are here. We have been going through a series last summer and this summer called 27 that Mikey alluded to in the announcements, which were fantastic. Also, at the end, Mikey said, please rise. That's new. I like that language. A little courtroom drama in here. All rise. That's fantastic. Anyway, sorry, I got sidetracked. We've been going through last summer and this summer, 27, where we're going through the books of the New Testament. This morning, we arrive at the one that I've been avoiding for the duration of the series, last summer and this summer, because it's the book of Romans. Some of you know, others of you will, that Romans is the most theologically dense and rich book of the Bible that there is. You can make some arguments about some other stuff, but Romans is a, but I will do my best to give you a grasp of what it is to make it hopefully more approachable for those of us who have never read it before, to make it more approachable so we can know how we are reading it and what we are reading. And for those of us who know it well, to kind of think of it in this succinct way. Because here's one of the benefits of going through the whole book of Romans or the whole book of Philippians on a Sunday. And we're not going to hit all of the great details here. But here's one reason why it may actually be a helpful approach. Because when Paul wrote these letters, or when the other apostles wrote the other epistles, they wrote them to be read aloud to the church all at once in one sitting. These letters were not written by Paul to parse out and dissect and look at the Greek tense and the original meaning of this one particular word and have that compared to all the other times that word shows up in Scripture. Now listen, listen. That's good research. That's helpful knowledge. It's okay and good to dissect the Bible in that way. It's helpful to us, helps us understand. But please hear me when I say, it was not written for that to happen. It was written to be read at once to give us a big understanding of the large points that Paul or the other authors are attempting to make in the books or the letters that they wrote. So we need to be careful when we read scripture that we don't miss the forest for the trees. To that end, I would highly encourage you, if you've never done it, to sit down and read Romans from beginning to end. I would highly encourage you to sit down and read it all at once. I did it on a flight one time and not to be too whatever, but it was a really moving experience for me. I would really encourage you to read it from beginning to end. It takes about 45 minutes maybe, unless you're from Tennessee. It'll take a little longer. So it's difficult, it's difficult to synopsize all of Romans in a single verse or to point to a verse and go, this is the book of Romans. I'm going to open the argument with Romans chapter 12, verse 1. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you know your Bible well, you may be able to fabricate another argument from Romans. Maybe you think it's Romans 8.28. We could pull out other verses that I could anchor us in this morning, and they would be absolutely appropriate. But I'm going to anchor us in Romans chapter 12, verse 1, as kind of a synopsizing summary verse of the whole book. And this is what it says. Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship. I think this is a good encapsulating verse for the thrust of the book of Romans. Therefore, I urge you brothers, in view of God's mercy, and I memorized it this way, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship. Paul's encouragement, his pleading with us, is to live our lives as a living sacrifice. And this imagery of being a living sacrifice was very clear to the Jewish audience. Much of the early church was made up of people of Jewish heritage. They understood the sacrificial system. So they understood what it was to be a sacrifice. They had probably grown up sacrificing lambs and doves and bulls and goats and whatever. There's a whole book of the Old Testament, Leviticus, that details the sacrificial system. So they understood this language well. But that's why it would be striking to them, this concept of being a living sacrifice, because being a living sacrifice is a daily choice. In some ways, I don't mean to be too crass about it, but the goats got off easy in the Old Testament. Just one time, and that was it. Done. Forever. But Paul says that we are to be living sacrifices. Sacrificing ourselves every day. And when I think of what it means to be a living sacrifice, to live your life for the sake of others, I think right now, in my context, I think of moms of young children. Okay? I know that I'm biased. I know that that's my perspective right now. We have Lily, she's eight. John, he's three. And so our house takes a lot of energy to run right now. It is physically and emotionally draining. And I don't, listen, I don't have the experience of late elementary school, middle school kids, high school kids, so I'm not up here trying to play the suffering Olympics with you. I just, this is our perspective. And I just know from what I can see that Jen, as a stay-atat-home mom lives an exhausting life. Just yesterday, we spent the day, we're getting ready, we're going out to dinner with some friends and we spent the day getting the house cleaned because apparently you have to clean your house when a 17-year-old kid's coming over that's never cleaned a house in their life. I don't know why you have to do this. We have, you got to make sure the vacuum marks are upstairs, you know? So we're cleaning the house. We're scurrying around, you know, we're doing, we're doing things. And, uh, Johnny, we refer to him, uh, as Jen shadow, just her little buddy, just always right there with her all the time. Right. And so, and he's a lot, I was, uh, I was, I was telling somebody, I was watching some somebody I was watching some sprinting, some Olympics, I think yesterday. And I was locked into this particular race. They're doing the whole preamble. Sprinting races take forever to start, forever. It's absurd. So they're going through the whole preamble, and then it's the actual race, and it's like the 4x400 or whatever it is, and I'm watching the whole thing. And I realized, I'm standing in front of the TV just looking at it, and I realized when it ended that John had been talking to me the entire time. He had been talking the whole time. No idea what he said. We sat down yesterday at the end of the day to watch some more Olympics, and he sat on the couch next to me and sang a song about elephants and grass. He's just all day long. He's going, and Lily makes her presence known sometimes. So it's just all day, right? We get a little respite going to dinner. We come back after about a 90-minute reprieve, and as soon as we get home, both kids are awake, and they're waiting for mommy to get home. They have now got to this place where they just won't go to sleep until she tells them goodnight. They're not interested in me, and I'm fine with this for a couple reasons, because I can get right back to Olympic coverage, and if you lived in a house with Jen and two young kids, you wouldn't be their favorite either. Okay. I just admit defeat there. And it's fine. So John has gotten out of bed. He's turned his light on and his noisemaker off. And we lock it. We keep him locked in. So he doesn't wander in the night. He's banging the door. So she's got to go up there, get him to sleep. I leave, I read Lily, her devotional. Then Jen comes in and helps Lily get to bed. And then Jen comes downstairs, and we're watching TV, talking on the couch. And it was like maybe 15 minutes of quiet, right? And then we hear footsteps. Oh, no. So Lily comes down the stairs. She curls up on Jen's lap. She says, I don't feel well. Will you come lay down with me? And Jen looks at me over Lily's head and she goes, this started at 6.15 this morning. I am exhausted. She goes and she lays down with Lily. This morning, I get up. I get up early on Sundays, take a shower. Get out of the shower about 5.45, 6 o'clock. Jen's not in the bed anymore. I go in, check in John's room. She's in the seat holding John with a blanket over her. And I just kind of shook my head, kissed her on the head, came to church. That's exhausting. And that's what it is to be a living sacrifice. A living sacrifice organizes their life around the needs of others. That's what a living sacrifice does. A living sacrifice wakes up every day and says, I don't exist for me. I exist for them. My days are not my days. My days are their days. My resources are not my resources. They are their resources. My time, my quiet, my solitude, my needs are not my needs. They're their needs. And this is the life that God calls us to. It is, admittedly, a remarkably high bar that Paul would say you should live your lives as living sacrifices, sacrificing every day for the sake of God's kingdom, not your kingdom. In every meeting that you are in, in your workplace, this is an opportunity to minister and to pour Christ into the lives of the people around you. Every interaction with another customer or an employee at Harris Teeter is an opportunity. It is not your time to be quiet and put your head down and get out of there quickly. It is an opportunity for ministry that God is giving you. We are living our lives as living sacrifices. When the person calls you that you don't want to talk to, but you know you need to, you take that call with a smile on your face because we are living sacrifices. We are to live every day offering every moment to the service of God's kingdom. And that is a very tall order. But nobody demonstrated this better than Jesus himself. I am blown away every time I read through the gospels, noting how Jesus sacrificially loved everybody around him all the time. You read the Gospels and pay attention to all the times when Jesus just did a thing. He just performed a bunch of miracles. He just spoke to a big crowd. He just healed a bunch of people. He just taught the disciples. He just did a big thing that would be exhausting that we'd all want to rest from. as he's leaving it says he went to be in a quiet place alone and pray and people track him down and they ask him for more things and more teachings and more questions and it was just relentless but he lived his life. He lived and died and rose again as a living sacrifice and this is the standard to which all Christians are called. Now, how can God place such a tall order on us? Because if you're like me, you'll be lucky to live a third of your day as a living sacrifice. The other two thirds are going to my bank. If you're like me, you're lucky to be cognitively aware of your call to live as a living sacrifice every day. But we sang in the third song this morning that we worship God. I will worship you. I will worship you. I will worship you. Will you? Because your spiritual act of worship isn't to sit in church on Sunday and sing praise to God. That's part of it. But your spiritual act of worship, if you mean what you sing, is that we offer our lives as living sacrifices, living every moment for the service of God's kingdom, not ourselves. And so to me, the question becomes, how can God place that burden on us? What could possibly compel us to be obedient in that way? And historically, the answer to questions like this in church, at least to me, has been because God told you to. Because he told you to. Because you're supposed to. Because he's the boss. He is Lord and you are not. He's the he's the creator we are the creature we are the creation we have to do what he says because god made you created you destined you saved you now you should live your life in service to him out of a sense of ought but i just don't think that's a very satisfying answer. And I actually think that the book of Romans offers us in total a much better answer to that question. How can God, what should compel me to offer my life as a living sacrifice? Because that's a tall order. So here's what we're going to do. If you look at your notes, Shane grabbed me. Shane, a longtime Grace partner, grabbed me in the lobby, and he held up the notes. And he goes, what are you doing to us today, man? What's going on here? He goes, this feels like class. I know. I'm going to try to make this as not boring as possible, but I just thought, here's my thinking. If I can, in very simple language, tell you what each chapter means as we build to the back half of Romans, then you'll be able to follow the reasoning narrative that Paul is writing. It's like he's laying out a case to help us understand what salvation is, how it came into being, why it's so important, and what it means to us. And so he lays out over the course of eight chapters this doctrine of salvation and I think if I can explain to you basically the theme in every chapter that you may be able to leave here with a much better understanding of what the book of Romans is and how we can approach it so that if you want to read it on your own you can and you don't have to be intimidated by it so if it's's helpful at all to you, write these down. I'm going to go kind of quick through the chapters. We'll get you out of here by one o'clock. I promise. And you can keep this and it can help hopefully make Romans more approachable and understandable. And these are, listen, some of y'all know the Bible better than I do. And you're going to see my summaries of the chapters and you're going to think, that's dumb. That's not what I would have done. You're probably right. Okay. But these are mine. So I hope that they're true to scripture. But here's the flow of Romans and how it gives us an answer to the question, what compels us to live as living sacrifices? Romans chapter 1, you open it up, starts with some basic greetings and stuff like that, and then he gets into this discourse, and the point of the discourse is to say, hey, man has rejected God. Mankind, on the whole, has rejected God and is living as if God is not existent. Living as if God doesn't matter. Most of the world carries on agnostically, is what Paul is saying. And the culmination of this chapter is to say that not only does mankind, does everybody in our current culture and society, sin with freedom, but they encourage it when other people sin too. They embrace it and they love it. This, I think, is very relatable. It's hard to exist in our culture today and not see the idea that the trend over the last few decades has been moving, sometimes slowly, sometimes not, towards a godless society where society conducts itself as if God does not exist. So that's what he's saying in Romans chapter 1. Man has rejected God with the way that they live. Romans chapter 2, he follows that up. Because of that rejection, God is angry. The rejection has angered God. He created us. He purposed us. He provides us with life and sustenance. He sent His Son to die for us to make a path to reconciliation to Him. And what do we do with all of those gifts? We stomp on them and we reject them and we turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to them and we live as if He doesn't exist. So chapter 2 is about the earned wrath of God. He's ticked off that we have rejected him. That's the point that Paul is making. Then chapter three, he makes the point to a largely Jewish audience at the time. Hey, we cannot behave our way back into reconciliation. Our sin, that rejection of God, has broken our relationship with God, has severed it irrevocably, and we cannot white-knuckle or behave our way back into right relationship with God. We can't follow the rules well enough to make God okay with us again, to defer and overcome that wrath and that anger at our rejection, to make up for rejecting Him. We can't follow the rules well enough. That just, that can't happen. We're not going to behave our way into heaven. Chapter 4 moves through that, and he says what we can do, we cannot behave our way into reconciliation, and then chapter 4, for reconciliation, God requires our trust, not our behavior. That's why the first song we sang today was about believing in Christ. Because this is what God requires of us. He requires our trust, not our behavior. Chapter 5 tells us where to place that trust. Chapter 5, we placed that trust in Jesus Christ and what he did on the cross. There's this beautiful dissertation in 5 where he compares Adam to Jesus and he says, just as in Adam through one man sin entered the world, so now in Christ through one man salvation enters the world. And so we see Adam as a type Christ from the Old Testament reflecting to us who Jesus really is in the New Testament. He says we place our faith in Christ. And when I preach it, I always say that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And we're told what he does in chapter 5. In 6, then, we learn that we are not just delivered from God's anger, but into a new eternal life. In chapter 6, he introduces this idea of us being a new creature. And he paints this picture of baptism, where we are buried with Christ in death, and we are raised to walk in newness of life. We preach the gospel of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ when we physically, invisibly baptize people. That's why we do it in the service. That's why we go all the way under the water because it's a picture that he paints in Romans chapter 6. That because we are saved, we are reconciled with God, we are not just reconciled to heaven for eternity, but we are also reconciled from ourselves. We are no longer slaves to sin. We are rescued from sin and we are raised to walk in a newness of life. We can walk as a new creature where it is possible to sin no more. That brings up a really interesting pickle that we're all in because all of us still sin. And that's what Paul talks about in chapter 7. It's to me maybe the most human chapter in the whole Bible. And the way I would sum it up is to say this new life causes us to be at war with ourselves. We're told in scripture that we're a new creature. That we're not a slave to sin. I don't feel like that most days. I don't feel like this new creature that doesn't have to sin. I feel like this old creature that gets really disappointed in himself for how he carries on sometimes. And this is what Paul captures in the closing verses of chapter 7. Where he says essentially, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I want to do, the things I do not want to do, I do. The things I do want to do, I do not do. And then exasperatedly cries out, oh wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? I don't have any tattoos, but if I were to get one, that would be in the running. O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Man, if you haven't come there in your Christian walk, you just got saved last week. Because I feel like to be a believer is to know the good that you ought to do, is to know the bad that you ought not do, and to still struggle so much with those things. And Paul cries out and says, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God who provided a way in Christ Jesus. And then that gives way, chapter 7, that war, because we're a new creature, we're going to be at war with ourselves, that gives way to chapter 8. Romans chapter 8 is the greatest chapter in the Bible. To give you a sense of how inadequately I am handling the book of Romans today. A few years ago, we did an eight-week-long series in Romans chapter 8 called The Greatest Chapter, and I could have made it 12. I just didn't want to wear you guys out. Romans chapter 8 is a soaring chapter, and it says Jesus has won the war, and nothing can ever change that. He's won the war that you fight in yourself, and he's won the war against sin and death, and there is nothing that can ever change that. Romans chapter 8 is a culmination and climax of certainty. It is a beacon of Christendom that declares the power of Christ, and it ends with such a flourish where Paul says, for I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor demons nor rulers nor principality nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor anything in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. That's a powerful statement that Jesus loves you so much that he died for you, he's renewed your soul, he's reconciled you to Christ or to God and now he holds you in his grip so tightly that nothing in all creation, not even you, can separate yourself from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. It's magisterial when we look at it all the way through. And we see him build from Romans 1. We've rejected God. Romans 2, God's been angered by that rejection and hurt. Romans chapter 3, we cannot behave our way into fixing that. Romans chapter 4, we have to have faith, not behavior. Romans chapter 5, we place that faith in Christ. Romans chapter 6, because of our faith in Christ, we're a new creature. Romans chapter 7, that new creature wars with itself. Romans chapter 8, Jesus has won that war. Now and in eternity. And we can rest in that. Then we have the back half of Romans. Romans 9 through 16. And this is a gross oversimplification of those chapters. But the essential question that's being answered for the rest of the book is do we live in response to the first half of Romans? And I think Paul most succinctly answers that question in chapter 12, verse 1, when he says, therefore, my brothers. Now listen, when you're reading the Bible, especially Romans, and you see the word therefore, you have to ask, what's the therefore? Based on what? Therefore, what? Therefore, in view of God's mercy. Because of everything I just told you about in Romans 1 through 8, therefore, brothers, in view of God's mercy, in light of the rest of the message of this book and the glorious salvation offered to us by Christ, in light of that, in view of God's mercy, I urge you to live your lives as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship. You see, it is not a sense of ought that compels us to live our life for God's kingdom and not our own. It is an overwhelming sense of gratitude that drives us. Out of an overflow of gratitude, we live lives of sacrifice. Out of an overflow of the truths of gratitude of the truths of Romans chapters 1 through 8 we live lives of sacrifice we are so compelled by what that by what he has done for us that we spend the rest of our lives trying to help other people see what he has done for them. You understand? We steep ourselves in the gospel. We steep ourselves in the truth of scripture. We steep ourselves in the sacrifice of Christ with the daily awareness of what he does for us and that he's won the war for us and that he calls for us and that he loves us. He loves us. He really loves us. And he chases after us and he won't let us convince ourselves that he doesn't love us. He won't let us convince ourselves that we're not good enough for him or that we don't deserve him. He chases after us, and he comes for us, and he died for us. And if we will daily steep ourselves in that reality, we will live a life of such gratitude that we will be compelled to live a life for the sake of others as a living sacrifice. We will be so overwhelmed by the reality of what he's done for us that we will spend our lives trying to help other people see what he's done for them too. And when that is our mentality that changes our attitude in the drive-thru, that changes our interactions with our children, with our coworkers, with our employees and employers, when we walk in that sense of gratitude, it will be easy to live our lives as living sacrifices because we are so overwhelmed by what God has done for us that we want to spend our days helping other people see what God has done for them. I am reminded of that great verse, John 1 16, and And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. So here's what I hope you'll do. And here's my prayer to you this week, for you this week. The idea of offering our lives every moment of every day for the sake of others and not ourselves, is daunting. Really, in our power, it's impossible. Our only hope is to remember the message of Romans and be so grateful for all that God has done for us, for all that he's given us, and for the way that he saves us and forgives us and pursues us. To be so steeped in that gratitude that we cannot help but sacrifice for others so that we're not the only ones who realize all that God has done for us. I hope that we'll do that. I hope you'll do that. And I hope that this is just whetting your appetite for Romans and that you'll sit down and read it on your own too. Let's pray. Father, we are grateful to you. We are grateful for your son and for your sacrifice. God, help us to live lives of gratitude so that we might live as sacrifices for others as your son lived for us. God, if there is someone here who doesn't yet know you, I pray that they would. And maybe by simply walking through this wonderful book, they can better understand how to approach you and why they need you. God, be with us in our weeks. We're going to wake up tomorrow trying to live a life of sacrifice and we're going to stub our toe and we're going to mess up and we're going to say selfish things. But God, I pray that you would give us the grace for ourselves to get back up and let you lead us more and further and deeper. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Kyle, another one of the pastors here. We need to put out more chairs this week, all right? It's full. You guys didn't get the memo. It's summertime. You're not supposed to do this until September, but we are sure glad that you are here. We have been going through a series last summer and this summer called 27 that Mikey alluded to in the announcements, which were fantastic. Also, at the end, Mikey said, please rise. That's new. I like that language. A little courtroom drama in here. All rise. That's fantastic. Anyway, sorry, I got sidetracked. We've been going through last summer and this summer, 27, where we're going through the books of the New Testament. This morning, we arrive at the one that I've been avoiding for the duration of the series, last summer and this summer, because it's the book of Romans. Some of you know, others of you will, that Romans is the most theologically dense and rich book of the Bible that there is. You can make some arguments about some other stuff, but Romans is a, but I will do my best to give you a grasp of what it is to make it hopefully more approachable for those of us who have never read it before, to make it more approachable so we can know how we are reading it and what we are reading. And for those of us who know it well, to kind of think of it in this succinct way. Because here's one of the benefits of going through the whole book of Romans or the whole book of Philippians on a Sunday. And we're not going to hit all of the great details here. But here's one reason why it may actually be a helpful approach. Because when Paul wrote these letters, or when the other apostles wrote the other epistles, they wrote them to be read aloud to the church all at once in one sitting. These letters were not written by Paul to parse out and dissect and look at the Greek tense and the original meaning of this one particular word and have that compared to all the other times that word shows up in Scripture. Now listen, listen. That's good research. That's helpful knowledge. It's okay and good to dissect the Bible in that way. It's helpful to us, helps us understand. But please hear me when I say, it was not written for that to happen. It was written to be read at once to give us a big understanding of the large points that Paul or the other authors are attempting to make in the books or the letters that they wrote. So we need to be careful when we read scripture that we don't miss the forest for the trees. To that end, I would highly encourage you, if you've never done it, to sit down and read Romans from beginning to end. I would highly encourage you to sit down and read it all at once. I did it on a flight one time and not to be too whatever, but it was a really moving experience for me. I would really encourage you to read it from beginning to end. It takes about 45 minutes maybe, unless you're from Tennessee. It'll take a little longer. So it's difficult, it's difficult to synopsize all of Romans in a single verse or to point to a verse and go, this is the book of Romans. I'm going to open the argument with Romans chapter 12, verse 1. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you know your Bible well, you may be able to fabricate another argument from Romans. Maybe you think it's Romans 8.28. We could pull out other verses that I could anchor us in this morning, and they would be absolutely appropriate. But I'm going to anchor us in Romans chapter 12, verse 1, as kind of a synopsizing summary verse of the whole book. And this is what it says. Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship. I think this is a good encapsulating verse for the thrust of the book of Romans. Therefore, I urge you brothers, in view of God's mercy, and I memorized it this way, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship. Paul's encouragement, his pleading with us, is to live our lives as a living sacrifice. And this imagery of being a living sacrifice was very clear to the Jewish audience. Much of the early church was made up of people of Jewish heritage. They understood the sacrificial system. So they understood what it was to be a sacrifice. They had probably grown up sacrificing lambs and doves and bulls and goats and whatever. There's a whole book of the Old Testament, Leviticus, that details the sacrificial system. So they understood this language well. But that's why it would be striking to them, this concept of being a living sacrifice, because being a living sacrifice is a daily choice. In some ways, I don't mean to be too crass about it, but the goats got off easy in the Old Testament. Just one time, and that was it. Done. Forever. But Paul says that we are to be living sacrifices. Sacrificing ourselves every day. And when I think of what it means to be a living sacrifice, to live your life for the sake of others, I think right now, in my context, I think of moms of young children. Okay? I know that I'm biased. I know that that's my perspective right now. We have Lily, she's eight. John, he's three. And so our house takes a lot of energy to run right now. It is physically and emotionally draining. And I don't, listen, I don't have the experience of late elementary school, middle school kids, high school kids, so I'm not up here trying to play the suffering Olympics with you. I just, this is our perspective. And I just know from what I can see that Jen, as a stay-atat-home mom lives an exhausting life. Just yesterday, we spent the day, we're getting ready, we're going out to dinner with some friends and we spent the day getting the house cleaned because apparently you have to clean your house when a 17-year-old kid's coming over that's never cleaned a house in their life. I don't know why you have to do this. We have, you got to make sure the vacuum marks are upstairs, you know? So we're cleaning the house. We're scurrying around, you know, we're doing, we're doing things. And, uh, Johnny, we refer to him, uh, as Jen shadow, just her little buddy, just always right there with her all the time. Right. And so, and he's a lot, I was, uh, I was, I was telling somebody, I was watching some somebody I was watching some sprinting, some Olympics, I think yesterday. And I was locked into this particular race. They're doing the whole preamble. Sprinting races take forever to start, forever. It's absurd. So they're going through the whole preamble, and then it's the actual race, and it's like the 4x400 or whatever it is, and I'm watching the whole thing. And I realized, I'm standing in front of the TV just looking at it, and I realized when it ended that John had been talking to me the entire time. He had been talking the whole time. No idea what he said. We sat down yesterday at the end of the day to watch some more Olympics, and he sat on the couch next to me and sang a song about elephants and grass. He's just all day long. He's going, and Lily makes her presence known sometimes. So it's just all day, right? We get a little respite going to dinner. We come back after about a 90-minute reprieve, and as soon as we get home, both kids are awake, and they're waiting for mommy to get home. They have now got to this place where they just won't go to sleep until she tells them goodnight. They're not interested in me, and I'm fine with this for a couple reasons, because I can get right back to Olympic coverage, and if you lived in a house with Jen and two young kids, you wouldn't be their favorite either. Okay. I just admit defeat there. And it's fine. So John has gotten out of bed. He's turned his light on and his noisemaker off. And we lock it. We keep him locked in. So he doesn't wander in the night. He's banging the door. So she's got to go up there, get him to sleep. I leave, I read Lily, her devotional. Then Jen comes in and helps Lily get to bed. And then Jen comes downstairs, and we're watching TV, talking on the couch. And it was like maybe 15 minutes of quiet, right? And then we hear footsteps. Oh, no. So Lily comes down the stairs. She curls up on Jen's lap. She says, I don't feel well. Will you come lay down with me? And Jen looks at me over Lily's head and she goes, this started at 6.15 this morning. I am exhausted. She goes and she lays down with Lily. This morning, I get up. I get up early on Sundays, take a shower. Get out of the shower about 5.45, 6 o'clock. Jen's not in the bed anymore. I go in, check in John's room. She's in the seat holding John with a blanket over her. And I just kind of shook my head, kissed her on the head, came to church. That's exhausting. And that's what it is to be a living sacrifice. A living sacrifice organizes their life around the needs of others. That's what a living sacrifice does. A living sacrifice wakes up every day and says, I don't exist for me. I exist for them. My days are not my days. My days are their days. My resources are not my resources. They are their resources. My time, my quiet, my solitude, my needs are not my needs. They're their needs. And this is the life that God calls us to. It is, admittedly, a remarkably high bar that Paul would say you should live your lives as living sacrifices, sacrificing every day for the sake of God's kingdom, not your kingdom. In every meeting that you are in, in your workplace, this is an opportunity to minister and to pour Christ into the lives of the people around you. Every interaction with another customer or an employee at Harris Teeter is an opportunity. It is not your time to be quiet and put your head down and get out of there quickly. It is an opportunity for ministry that God is giving you. We are living our lives as living sacrifices. When the person calls you that you don't want to talk to, but you know you need to, you take that call with a smile on your face because we are living sacrifices. We are to live every day offering every moment to the service of God's kingdom. And that is a very tall order. But nobody demonstrated this better than Jesus himself. I am blown away every time I read through the gospels, noting how Jesus sacrificially loved everybody around him all the time. You read the Gospels and pay attention to all the times when Jesus just did a thing. He just performed a bunch of miracles. He just spoke to a big crowd. He just healed a bunch of people. He just taught the disciples. He just did a big thing that would be exhausting that we'd all want to rest from. as he's leaving it says he went to be in a quiet place alone and pray and people track him down and they ask him for more things and more teachings and more questions and it was just relentless but he lived his life. He lived and died and rose again as a living sacrifice and this is the standard to which all Christians are called. Now, how can God place such a tall order on us? Because if you're like me, you'll be lucky to live a third of your day as a living sacrifice. The other two thirds are going to my bank. If you're like me, you're lucky to be cognitively aware of your call to live as a living sacrifice every day. But we sang in the third song this morning that we worship God. I will worship you. I will worship you. I will worship you. Will you? Because your spiritual act of worship isn't to sit in church on Sunday and sing praise to God. That's part of it. But your spiritual act of worship, if you mean what you sing, is that we offer our lives as living sacrifices, living every moment for the service of God's kingdom, not ourselves. And so to me, the question becomes, how can God place that burden on us? What could possibly compel us to be obedient in that way? And historically, the answer to questions like this in church, at least to me, has been because God told you to. Because he told you to. Because you're supposed to. Because he's the boss. He is Lord and you are not. He's the he's the creator we are the creature we are the creation we have to do what he says because god made you created you destined you saved you now you should live your life in service to him out of a sense of ought but i just don't think that's a very satisfying answer. And I actually think that the book of Romans offers us in total a much better answer to that question. How can God, what should compel me to offer my life as a living sacrifice? Because that's a tall order. So here's what we're going to do. If you look at your notes, Shane grabbed me. Shane, a longtime Grace partner, grabbed me in the lobby, and he held up the notes. And he goes, what are you doing to us today, man? What's going on here? He goes, this feels like class. I know. I'm going to try to make this as not boring as possible, but I just thought, here's my thinking. If I can, in very simple language, tell you what each chapter means as we build to the back half of Romans, then you'll be able to follow the reasoning narrative that Paul is writing. It's like he's laying out a case to help us understand what salvation is, how it came into being, why it's so important, and what it means to us. And so he lays out over the course of eight chapters this doctrine of salvation and I think if I can explain to you basically the theme in every chapter that you may be able to leave here with a much better understanding of what the book of Romans is and how we can approach it so that if you want to read it on your own you can and you don't have to be intimidated by it so if it's's helpful at all to you, write these down. I'm going to go kind of quick through the chapters. We'll get you out of here by one o'clock. I promise. And you can keep this and it can help hopefully make Romans more approachable and understandable. And these are, listen, some of y'all know the Bible better than I do. And you're going to see my summaries of the chapters and you're going to think, that's dumb. That's not what I would have done. You're probably right. Okay. But these are mine. So I hope that they're true to scripture. But here's the flow of Romans and how it gives us an answer to the question, what compels us to live as living sacrifices? Romans chapter 1, you open it up, starts with some basic greetings and stuff like that, and then he gets into this discourse, and the point of the discourse is to say, hey, man has rejected God. Mankind, on the whole, has rejected God and is living as if God is not existent. Living as if God doesn't matter. Most of the world carries on agnostically, is what Paul is saying. And the culmination of this chapter is to say that not only does mankind, does everybody in our current culture and society, sin with freedom, but they encourage it when other people sin too. They embrace it and they love it. This, I think, is very relatable. It's hard to exist in our culture today and not see the idea that the trend over the last few decades has been moving, sometimes slowly, sometimes not, towards a godless society where society conducts itself as if God does not exist. So that's what he's saying in Romans chapter 1. Man has rejected God with the way that they live. Romans chapter 2, he follows that up. Because of that rejection, God is angry. The rejection has angered God. He created us. He purposed us. He provides us with life and sustenance. He sent His Son to die for us to make a path to reconciliation to Him. And what do we do with all of those gifts? We stomp on them and we reject them and we turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to them and we live as if He doesn't exist. So chapter 2 is about the earned wrath of God. He's ticked off that we have rejected him. That's the point that Paul is making. Then chapter three, he makes the point to a largely Jewish audience at the time. Hey, we cannot behave our way back into reconciliation. Our sin, that rejection of God, has broken our relationship with God, has severed it irrevocably, and we cannot white-knuckle or behave our way back into right relationship with God. We can't follow the rules well enough to make God okay with us again, to defer and overcome that wrath and that anger at our rejection, to make up for rejecting Him. We can't follow the rules well enough. That just, that can't happen. We're not going to behave our way into heaven. Chapter 4 moves through that, and he says what we can do, we cannot behave our way into reconciliation, and then chapter 4, for reconciliation, God requires our trust, not our behavior. That's why the first song we sang today was about believing in Christ. Because this is what God requires of us. He requires our trust, not our behavior. Chapter 5 tells us where to place that trust. Chapter 5, we placed that trust in Jesus Christ and what he did on the cross. There's this beautiful dissertation in 5 where he compares Adam to Jesus and he says, just as in Adam through one man sin entered the world, so now in Christ through one man salvation enters the world. And so we see Adam as a type Christ from the Old Testament reflecting to us who Jesus really is in the New Testament. He says we place our faith in Christ. And when I preach it, I always say that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And we're told what he does in chapter 5. In 6, then, we learn that we are not just delivered from God's anger, but into a new eternal life. In chapter 6, he introduces this idea of us being a new creature. And he paints this picture of baptism, where we are buried with Christ in death, and we are raised to walk in newness of life. We preach the gospel of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ when we physically, invisibly baptize people. That's why we do it in the service. That's why we go all the way under the water because it's a picture that he paints in Romans chapter 6. That because we are saved, we are reconciled with God, we are not just reconciled to heaven for eternity, but we are also reconciled from ourselves. We are no longer slaves to sin. We are rescued from sin and we are raised to walk in a newness of life. We can walk as a new creature where it is possible to sin no more. That brings up a really interesting pickle that we're all in because all of us still sin. And that's what Paul talks about in chapter 7. It's to me maybe the most human chapter in the whole Bible. And the way I would sum it up is to say this new life causes us to be at war with ourselves. We're told in scripture that we're a new creature. That we're not a slave to sin. I don't feel like that most days. I don't feel like this new creature that doesn't have to sin. I feel like this old creature that gets really disappointed in himself for how he carries on sometimes. And this is what Paul captures in the closing verses of chapter 7. Where he says essentially, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I want to do, the things I do not want to do, I do. The things I do want to do, I do not do. And then exasperatedly cries out, oh wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? I don't have any tattoos, but if I were to get one, that would be in the running. O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Man, if you haven't come there in your Christian walk, you just got saved last week. Because I feel like to be a believer is to know the good that you ought to do, is to know the bad that you ought not do, and to still struggle so much with those things. And Paul cries out and says, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God who provided a way in Christ Jesus. And then that gives way, chapter 7, that war, because we're a new creature, we're going to be at war with ourselves, that gives way to chapter 8. Romans chapter 8 is the greatest chapter in the Bible. To give you a sense of how inadequately I am handling the book of Romans today. A few years ago, we did an eight-week-long series in Romans chapter 8 called The Greatest Chapter, and I could have made it 12. I just didn't want to wear you guys out. Romans chapter 8 is a soaring chapter, and it says Jesus has won the war, and nothing can ever change that. He's won the war that you fight in yourself, and he's won the war against sin and death, and there is nothing that can ever change that. Romans chapter 8 is a culmination and climax of certainty. It is a beacon of Christendom that declares the power of Christ, and it ends with such a flourish where Paul says, for I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor demons nor rulers nor principality nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor anything in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. That's a powerful statement that Jesus loves you so much that he died for you, he's renewed your soul, he's reconciled you to Christ or to God and now he holds you in his grip so tightly that nothing in all creation, not even you, can separate yourself from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. It's magisterial when we look at it all the way through. And we see him build from Romans 1. We've rejected God. Romans 2, God's been angered by that rejection and hurt. Romans chapter 3, we cannot behave our way into fixing that. Romans chapter 4, we have to have faith, not behavior. Romans chapter 5, we place that faith in Christ. Romans chapter 6, because of our faith in Christ, we're a new creature. Romans chapter 7, that new creature wars with itself. Romans chapter 8, Jesus has won that war. Now and in eternity. And we can rest in that. Then we have the back half of Romans. Romans 9 through 16. And this is a gross oversimplification of those chapters. But the essential question that's being answered for the rest of the book is do we live in response to the first half of Romans? And I think Paul most succinctly answers that question in chapter 12, verse 1, when he says, therefore, my brothers. Now listen, when you're reading the Bible, especially Romans, and you see the word therefore, you have to ask, what's the therefore? Based on what? Therefore, what? Therefore, in view of God's mercy. Because of everything I just told you about in Romans 1 through 8, therefore, brothers, in view of God's mercy, in light of the rest of the message of this book and the glorious salvation offered to us by Christ, in light of that, in view of God's mercy, I urge you to live your lives as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship. You see, it is not a sense of ought that compels us to live our life for God's kingdom and not our own. It is an overwhelming sense of gratitude that drives us. Out of an overflow of gratitude, we live lives of sacrifice. Out of an overflow of the truths of gratitude of the truths of Romans chapters 1 through 8 we live lives of sacrifice we are so compelled by what that by what he has done for us that we spend the rest of our lives trying to help other people see what he has done for them. You understand? We steep ourselves in the gospel. We steep ourselves in the truth of scripture. We steep ourselves in the sacrifice of Christ with the daily awareness of what he does for us and that he's won the war for us and that he calls for us and that he loves us. He loves us. He really loves us. And he chases after us and he won't let us convince ourselves that he doesn't love us. He won't let us convince ourselves that we're not good enough for him or that we don't deserve him. He chases after us, and he comes for us, and he died for us. And if we will daily steep ourselves in that reality, we will live a life of such gratitude that we will be compelled to live a life for the sake of others as a living sacrifice. We will be so overwhelmed by the reality of what he's done for us that we will spend our lives trying to help other people see what he's done for them too. And when that is our mentality that changes our attitude in the drive-thru, that changes our interactions with our children, with our coworkers, with our employees and employers, when we walk in that sense of gratitude, it will be easy to live our lives as living sacrifices because we are so overwhelmed by what God has done for us that we want to spend our days helping other people see what God has done for them. I am reminded of that great verse, John 1 16, and And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. So here's what I hope you'll do. And here's my prayer to you this week, for you this week. The idea of offering our lives every moment of every day for the sake of others and not ourselves, is daunting. Really, in our power, it's impossible. Our only hope is to remember the message of Romans and be so grateful for all that God has done for us, for all that he's given us, and for the way that he saves us and forgives us and pursues us. To be so steeped in that gratitude that we cannot help but sacrifice for others so that we're not the only ones who realize all that God has done for us. I hope that we'll do that. I hope you'll do that. And I hope that this is just whetting your appetite for Romans and that you'll sit down and read it on your own too. Let's pray. Father, we are grateful to you. We are grateful for your son and for your sacrifice. God, help us to live lives of gratitude so that we might live as sacrifices for others as your son lived for us. God, if there is someone here who doesn't yet know you, I pray that they would. And maybe by simply walking through this wonderful book, they can better understand how to approach you and why they need you. God, be with us in our weeks. We're going to wake up tomorrow trying to live a life of sacrifice and we're going to stub our toe and we're going to mess up and we're going to say selfish things. But God, I pray that you would give us the grace for ourselves to get back up and let you lead us more and further and deeper. In Jesus' name, amen.