Good to see everybody. Thank you guys for that. As is often the case these days, when it's time for me to preach, I don't want to. I just want to keep singing. It's so good to get to sing with my church family and to look and see everyone praising. What a blessing that is. I'm actually going to invite you guys back into prayer as I start the sermon this week. I don't know if you guys know this. Tuesday is kind of a big deal for us in this country, and it would probably be wise for churches to pray over it. So join me in doing that. Father, Tuesday is the election, and this is, you know, one of the more contentious ones that we have ever experienced. It is more polarizing and divisive and filled with vitriol than any that I am aware of previously. So Father, I just pray that you'd be with us. Pray that you'd be in the process. May your hand be all over what happens on Tuesday and very likely, Father, in the weeks following. Would we see you in the nooks and crannies and the polling locations in the districts of this election and the results of it. And Father, more than anything, I pray that your people would be peacemakers in the wake of it. I pray that your people would be unifiers in the wake of it. That we wouldn't have a heart to be right. We wouldn't have a heart to gloat or to complain. Or even have a heart towards doomsday scenarios. But that God, your children would seek to make the peace that you have won. Help us to do that no matter what happens on Tuesday. It's in your son's name we pray, and we're able to do that. Amen. All right, this is the third part in our series called James. I take great pride in my creative series titles, and so this one is James. Last week, Kyle carried the torch exceptionally well in talking about taming the tongue. Take it easy, it wasn't that good. It was fine. I assigned that to him because he is better at that than I am. It was less hypocritical coming from Kyle than me, if you know me well. So I'm very glad about that. I would also say just as a general statement so you guys know that it's a big value for me and for the elders and for Grace to have different voices up here speaking into your lives. So we will always look for opportunities for people besides me to continue to share and offer you their perspective, because I think we benefit from that. Scripture tells us that where there is many counselors, that there is wisdom and wise choices. So I think that that's a good thing. This week, we are jumping back into James chapter 2 to one of, some people call it controversial, though I don't really think that it is. It is confusing. A cursory glance at the passage, James 2 verses 14 through 26 is where we're going to be. If you're watching at home today, thank you so much for doing that. I don't blame you on this rainy morning, but I hope everybody will grab a Bible and interact with the text as we move through it, because we're going to go through that whole passage today. Just a cursory glance of the passage, it renders it a little bit confusing, I think, because as you move through the whole of Scripture, particularly the New Testament, the New Testament writers are very careful to explain that salvation comes through faith. Paul says it most pointedly confess with our mouth and believe with our heart that Jesus is Lord, then we will enter into the kingdom. Jesus beckons us to believe in him and to follow him. So we see over and over again through Scripture the miracle and the mystery of the gospel, which is salvation is offered to you free of merit, free of works, completely by faith. It is the greatest gift that could ever be given. God sent his son to die on the cross for you, for everyone, for the sins that you have committed and for the sins that he knows that you will commit. He died for those so that you might be reunited with his Father, with the Father, and with him, and with the Spirit for all of eternity. God loves you so much that he came after your soul by sending his Son to die on the cross for you. And if we place our faith in that death, then Scripture teaches us that we're going to heaven. Scripture teaches us that we will spend eternity in bliss with God. Scripture teaches us that because of that, we don't have to fear death. Scripture teaches us that because of that, we're a new creature. We're no longer a slave to sin as the old creature was. And so all through the Bible, we see salvation by faith. And then we get to James here at the end of the Bible. At the end of the Bible, this peculiar passage, James says, yeah, you show me your faith, I'll show you my works. You show me your faith without works and I'll show you a faith that's dead. As a matter of fact, let me show you how Abraham proved his faith by his works. And at a cursory glance, it seems like James is disagreeing with the rest of Scripture. The rest of Scripture is like, I'm good, I'm good, I have faith, I believe. And then James says, yeah, but if you believe you ought to do some stuff. And if you don't do some stuff, then you may not believe. Actually, James is more pointed than that. Remember we said that this was a well-crafted punch in the gut, this book was? James just says if you don't do some stuff, then you don't believe. It's not real. It's not sincere. And so even though it can seem a little bit contradictory, even though it can be challenging, I don't think it's confusing. I think it is crystal clear. So I want to walk us through James chapter 2 this morning and help us understand this passage and let us be appropriately challenged and worried by this passage because it's a tough one. This is what James writes. We'll start off with the first half of it. James 2, verses 14 through 18. So James shares this pretty stark, blunt reality. You can say all day long that you have faith. You can give a mental assent and a lip service to faith. Do you think that Jesus is the Son of God? Yes. But what James says is unless actions follow that, it's not sincere. We saw in chapter 1 that one of the things that James says about true religion, the thing that James says about true religion, is that true religion visits the widows and the orphans in their affliction and remains unstained from the world. So what he's saying is, true religion, people who truly have a genuine faith, will care for the poor and the needy. They will care to be a voice to the voiceless. And in continuing to pull that thread here in chapter two, he basically says, you can't call yourself a believer. You can't say that you have a genuine saving faith if you don't help someone who is in need. If someone comes to you and they say, I'm wet and I'm cold and I need a jacket and I live, I'm homeless and I'm in need. And we say, in our double-layered North Face jackets, I will pray for you. Be warm and filled. I hope you find good food. There's a place downtown called Seat at the Table. You should figure out a way to get there. It's great. And then we leave. James is saying, you don't care for the poor and the needy. You just like to say that you do. You're like me this morning. I was watching a woman get out of her car with a baby, and I watched her do it for like 10 minutes. And at the last second, I was like, you want me to come get you an umbrella? And she said, I mean, I'm good by now. And then she walked in. Like, if I really wanted, if I really cared about her, I would have walked out there with an umbrella. I just cared for the perception that I cared, right? What we do shows what we believe. It actually evidences that. So what James is saying here, and it's important not to miss this, is that works are an unavoidable result of a genuine faith. Works, good works, and we're going to talk about what those are, are an unavoidable result of a genuine faith. It is a natural consequence. If you have a genuine, believing, saving faith, then God will work in your heart to change you. There's a verse in Matthew that says, if you delight yourselves in the laws of the Lord, then he will give you the desires of your heart. And I've always loved that verse because it makes it seem like if I simply just love the Bible, then God will give me all the stuff that I want. I'm going to be a billionaire in no time. But what it means is when we reflect on God's word and we delight ourselves in it, we grow more like the principles in it. We grow more like God in character. And slowly, over time, because we delight in His Word, our heart beats for the same things that God's heart beats for. Our hearts beat with God. This is how the Spirit gets in our life and changes us. And the things that we want slowly become the things that He wants. The things that He delights in are the things that we delight in. And we're told in Romans that when we are saved, when we become a believer, when we have a true saving faith, that the old self, the old version of ourself that was a slave to sin, is buried with Christ and that this new self is resurrected with him on Easter. That's why baptism is a symbol of this rebirth. We go under the water. That's our old self being cast off and we rise as our new selves that God has radically and fundamentally changed. This new self has a Holy Spirit that's given to us as a down payment on our salvation, who speaks into us, who convicts us when we're going wrong, who encourages us when we're doing right. And so everything in Scripture points to the unavoidable reality that when God fundamentally changes our heart, when we have a saving faith and He rushes into our lives, that the unavoidable result is good works. Because we no longer have to choose our good works. They're a natural manifestation of the faith that is going on inside of us. That's what James is saying. And in saying this, this is important, James actually agrees with Jesus. In saying this, James actually agrees with the teachings of Jesus you have in your notes there. And at home, you should have been able to download the notes on the Gracevine. You have in your notes there two references, John 15, 5 and John 13, 35. And he says in those, John 15, 5 is this wonderful passage. He says, I am the vine and you are the branches. In our vernacular, I am the trunk and you are the branches. I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. I've talked about this before. When a branch is attached to a tree, it doesn't have to worry about when to produce the fruit or what kind of fruit to produce. All it has to worry about is staying attached to that tree. And Jesus says, if you abide in me and I in you, if you obey me, if you follow me, if you pursue me, if you walk with me, if you abide in me, then you will bear much fruit. You won't have to try to bear the fruit. You won't have to try to do the good works. You won't have to make a conscious effort to do it. Just abide in me and it will naturally produce a fruit in your life. James is simply agreeing with Jesus. He's saying it another way. He's saying it in a more pointed way so it's easier to understand. Then Jesus says again in John 13 35, he says, I give you a new command to love others as I have loved you. And then he says that the world will know that you are my disciples by your love for one another. The world will know that you are my children by what you do, by how you treat one another, by your actions. Jesus says you can say all day long that you love your brother. This is the exact example that James gives. You can say you love the poor and the needy, but if you walk away with your warm coat, then you don't. You don't really believe. Faith isn't really there. Jesus says, the world will know by your actions who you are. It's not a matter of just saying it. And honestly, we understand this principle. We get it. We've experienced this, that if there is love, there will be evidence, right? If you're not married, I think you can still appreciate the principles of this. When a husband and wife are married, when they get married, they stand at the altar and they make vows to each other. And they promise, I will love you and be faithful to you in sickness and in health and good times and in bad, in joy as well as in sorrow. It's one thing to stand on the altar and say those things. I had no clue what that meant when I was 25 years old. I said them and I meant them with my whole heart. I know what they mean now more than I did then. And those of you who have been married for 30 and 40 years, you know even way more than me what those words mean. And a husband, listen, a husband can tell his wife that he loves her. He can write her a nice card on her birthday, I love you, you're the best, you're the most beautiful woman in the world. Which apparently when people get married, everyone's unrealistic, right? I'm married to the most handsome man ever. Are you? Because we all look pretty average. Anyways, you can say nice things and it's fine to do that. It's fine to give a mental assent to it. But a wife knows if she's loved, right? If a husband loves his wife, he won't just tell her. He'll run interference for her on Saturday morning with the kids to try to let her get a little bit more sleep than she normally does. He'll clean the kitchen without being asked to clean the kitchen. He'll make a big deal over her birthday if she wants a big deal made of it. He'll make a little deal over her birthday if she wants a little deal made of it. He'll say kind things to her. He'll let her watch what she wants to watch. He'll take her car out on the weekend and wash it and fill it up with gas so that she doesn't have to worry about that. He'll learn the little things that let his wife know that she is loved. And she never has to wonder at that. And if a guy just says occasionally, hey, I love you, you know you're the best, and then never does anything, that's not love. That's selfishness. We understand this principle. We know this to be true in our own lives, and it's true of our faith as well. And it's so true of our faith, and James actually takes this, he actually doubles down on this. This idea of faith will produce works. Love will be manifested in how we act. By presenting us with this idea, and this is where it starts to get scary. According to James, mental assent is not the same as faith. Mental assent is not the same as faith. Promising love on the altar is not the same as loving for 30 years. Just agreeing mentally that Jesus is the Son of God is not a saving faith. This is why Jesus says another scary statement in the Gospels, not everyone who says unto me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. That should give you pause. This should give you pause. If what you're clinging to for your salvation is a prayer that you prayed when you were eight, the mental assent that you gave, we need to do some introspection about whether or not we have a saving faith. And I say that mental assent is not the same as faith because look at what James says in verse 19. He says, you believe that God is one. You do well. In other translations it says, good. Even the demons believe and shudder. You know who else knows that Jesus is the Son of God? Satan. You know who has way better theology than all of us collectively in this room? Demons. They know the Bible inside and out. They know who Jesus is, and they are scared of him. Yet they have not placed their faith in him for eternal life. They're still working towards something else. So a faith that simply gives a mental assent, that simply says, yeah, I think that's probably true, is a demonic faith, according to James. And we don't talk about demons and Satan here a lot, but it's in the passage. This is what he says, and this ought to give us pause that even demons go, yeah, Jesus is the Son of God, and they're scared of him, yet they don't have faith because it's more than just a mental assent. It's more than just agreeing with the set of facts. It's more than just confessing that Jesus is the Son of God. Again, I'll go back to that writing in Paul and Romans. If we confess with our hearts, if we confess with our mouths and believe in our hearts that Jesus is the Son of God, then we will be saved. Some of us stop at confessing with our mouths. That's where demons stop. And that's a scary, scary thing. James takes it a little bit further as he finishes out the passage. And he says that faith that doesn't provide works isn't even a saving faith. Faith that doesn't produce works isn't even a saving faith. He says it this way at the end of the passage. He says, A faith that is simply claimed and not evidenced and not met out with a series of good works and good deeds and love and grace and kindness, that's a dead faith. That's not a saving faith. A faith that we cling to because of a prayer that we prayed years ago and then nothing in our life changed after that is not a saving faith. That's why I am of the conviction, I've thought this for a long time from where I sit in ministry, that the surest sign that the gospel has taken root in someone's life is a radical change in their priorities. I've watched families come and go from churches. And you see families come and they profess a faith. They confess that they believe. And they come and maybe church attendance gets ramped up for a little bit. Maybe they're excited about it. They're caught up in the moment. But nothing between Sundays really changes. They still roll with the same group of people. And it's great. We ought to roll with the same group of people. We ought to have our friends who are not believers, but they can't be our only friends, and they can't have the only values that we emulate and try to not adopt. And the way that they spend their money doesn't change, and the way they spend their time doesn't change, and the way that they seek joy doesn't change. The only thing that really changes is now they go to church, and it makes them feel a little bit better. But eventually, eventually they'll start to fade away and then a year or two later, it's like that was just a flash in the pan. It was a confession, but it wasn't a sincere belief. Conversely, I've watched families profess a faith, come into church, kind of slowly step their way in, slowly take their next steps of obedience, becoming disciples of Christ, join small group, begin to give. Well, a huge indicator of someone's faith, and I don't talk about giving a lot, so hopefully you'll allow me this, is whether or not they give. I'm not talking about the church. I'm just talking about being generous people. Why else would you give 10% of your income away unless you were in love with a God who allowed you to do that as part of obedience to him? It doesn't make any sense. Why would a family do that unless God had radically changed their priorities? I've watched families come in and they had kids on ball teams and they were gone most weekends during the fall and the spring and every night of the week and it was consuming them. And they said, listen, because of our faith, because we want to be around church people more, we're not doing that. We're going to ratchet back all of our involvement everywhere else so that we can be involved in church. It's a radical change in priorities. I'm not saying that every family has to do that, but I am saying that that family radically changed their priorities. And to me, it's evidence that faith has taken hold. But James is very clear. If your faith is a faith that clings to a confession that you made years ago, and in the wake of your life, there is no difference. You're no different now than you were five years ago, and only you know the answer to that. And let me just twist it a little harder as I say that. Don't let yourself off the hook with this. Don't find pockets and ways to make yourself better when you really know that you're the same. If that's our faith, and there are no works, James says it's dead. So by now, you ought to be asking the question, well, crap, man, what are the works then? Because I'm a little nervous right now. What are the works that I ought to be producing? How do I know that I know that I know? How can I be certain? What kind of works is faith going to manifest in my life? I would point you to three passages to answer this question. The first is James 1.27. We talked about it earlier. I talked about it two weeks ago. It's the true religion passage. James says that, and I've that we are his disciples by our love for one another. So we should ask ourselves, as I look back on the wake of my life, do I have an increasing heart for the needy? Do I have an increasing desire to help those who are facing injustice and to be a voice for the voiceless? Or do I care about them as little now as I always have? Do I have an increased desire for holiness? Is the Holy Spirit in me, speaking into me and encouraging me as I venture into places where I need not be? Is he encouraging me as I venture towards places and people where I do need to be? Do I see that in my life? And then according to Jesus, do I look in my life and I see a wake of love in my life? Are there people who would point to me and say, I'm closer to Jesus because they love me well? Has that been manifesting itself in your life in such a way? And listen, the litmus test for this love, this godly love, this faith-inspired love that Jesus gives us is not loving the people who love us back. That's easy. Everyone does that. It's loving the people who don't love you back. It's loving the people that you don't have to love. It's loving the people when there's no transaction there. I'm not getting anything out of this. I just love you and I care for you. Do you have an increased wake of people that you love in your life that you don't have to love, that are sometimes unlovable? James says, if you have a genuine faith, then the answer to that question will be yes. And finally, Paul says in Galatians, we're told that we receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment for our salvation, that when we are saved, when we have a genuine faith, that the Holy Spirit rushes into our life, and that the Holy Spirit produces fruit. And the fruit of the Holy Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. So again, look at the wake of your life over the last three to five years. Are you producing? Are you experiencing more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Are you still the cranky grump that you've always been? Is it more? Is it less? Is it the same? And now listen. I know this is not a fun sermon. You did not get up and shower and brave the rain and you families, we opened kids ministry today. You didn't get your kids ready so that you could come in here and I could kick you in the teeth. I'm sorry about that. This is a hard one. If you're feeling uncomfortable, you should. If you're doubting your salvation, that's all right. Because Paul tells us in Philippians that we should continually work out our salvation with fear and trembling, that our understanding of our salvation and our relationship with God will change over the years. And if it's not, and if it's not challenged, and we're just allowed to walk through life clinging to this thing that we said once and not seeing any works and not actually being a genuine believer and not experiencing genuine faith, shame on me if I'm your pastor for years and I never confront you with the truth that James gives us here. I have to. And here's why we need to have these hard conversations with ourselves. Here's why we need to think through this and ask the question, do I have a genuine faith? Do I see that in my life? Am I sure that I'm sure that I'm sure? This week, Jen and I spent the week back home. Jen and Lily are driving back today. I've shared with the church through the journey. Jen's dad, about two years ago, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And so we've been walking through that, Jen and I have, as a family and with her family. And this last week, he made the decision to stop treatment and receive hospice care in the home. And so we went home to be with the family. The good news is, it was a really, it was a good, sweet, peaceful, life-giving, gracious week. It was good to be around the family. And we're probably talking about months, not weeks. And so that's good too. And we're looking forward to sweet times with John as a whole family. I would also say for those of you who love Jen, please direct your condolences through me. The last thing she needs is to drive home from Athens, be sad that she is not with her dad right now, and then have to answer emails and texts about how he's doing and thinking and all that stuff. So direct those through me. Thank you. But here's why I bring it up. Because I sat with that man this week who has a genuine faith. We were joking about the multiple jackets that he's given to homeless people and sign spinners on the corner of the road. He just stops his car, gets out of the car, and hands him his jacket. He worked at AT&T for years and years and years. He was the vice president of international real estate, yet he knew the name of the parking attendants, he knew their birthdays, and he gave them gifts. He left gifts for the cleaning people in his office. He had a genuine faith. And now, as he's made the decision to embrace death, he is totally fearless and completely at peace. He is living out the verse that says, oh death, where is your sting? It has none for John because he's not fearful. He's totally at peace and he's going to see his Savior. And he's looking forward to it. I want you to have that peace. I want you to know that peace. I want my church to understand what that is. And that peace doesn't come by avoiding the hard truths in Scripture. It comes by continually working out our salvation with fear and with trembling. It comes with being sure that we know that we know. It comes with a genuine faith that will unavoidably produce works. I want you to have that faith too. I want you to have that peace too. So go home. Be concerned. Be confused. Be fearful. Work it out. Make sense of it. If I've confused you today, email me. Let's have a Zoom call or let's have a lunch and let's talk about it. But it's a good thing to have these conversations. It's a good thing to think through these, because when we do, we can be sure that we're sure that we're sure, and we can live our lives in perfect peace, and that's what I want for you, and that's what I want for my church. Let's pray, and then I think we're going to sing one more song together. Father, you were good. In loss, you are good. In grief, you are present. And in joys, you celebrate. So God, thank you for all of those moments and all the ways that you're with us. Lord, I pray that no one here would unnecessarily doubt that they know you. On the flip side, God, I pray that some of us would very necessarily doubt it and that in that doubt we would find a saving faith for maybe the first time ever. God, if any of us listening to me now needs to cry out to you as we sing this song, would we do that? Would you give us the courage to kneel at our house or in these rows or stand and maybe not sing and maybe just pray and search our hearts for where we are with you? Give us a genuine faith. Give us a faith that's rooted so deeply that we abide in you and you produce fruit in us. Give us the peace that comes when we know that we know you. It's in your son's name that I pray all these things. Amen.
Good to see everybody. Thank you guys for that. As is often the case these days, when it's time for me to preach, I don't want to. I just want to keep singing. It's so good to get to sing with my church family and to look and see everyone praising. What a blessing that is. I'm actually going to invite you guys back into prayer as I start the sermon this week. I don't know if you guys know this. Tuesday is kind of a big deal for us in this country, and it would probably be wise for churches to pray over it. So join me in doing that. Father, Tuesday is the election, and this is, you know, one of the more contentious ones that we have ever experienced. It is more polarizing and divisive and filled with vitriol than any that I am aware of previously. So Father, I just pray that you'd be with us. Pray that you'd be in the process. May your hand be all over what happens on Tuesday and very likely, Father, in the weeks following. Would we see you in the nooks and crannies and the polling locations in the districts of this election and the results of it. And Father, more than anything, I pray that your people would be peacemakers in the wake of it. I pray that your people would be unifiers in the wake of it. That we wouldn't have a heart to be right. We wouldn't have a heart to gloat or to complain. Or even have a heart towards doomsday scenarios. But that God, your children would seek to make the peace that you have won. Help us to do that no matter what happens on Tuesday. It's in your son's name we pray, and we're able to do that. Amen. All right, this is the third part in our series called James. I take great pride in my creative series titles, and so this one is James. Last week, Kyle carried the torch exceptionally well in talking about taming the tongue. Take it easy, it wasn't that good. It was fine. I assigned that to him because he is better at that than I am. It was less hypocritical coming from Kyle than me, if you know me well. So I'm very glad about that. I would also say just as a general statement so you guys know that it's a big value for me and for the elders and for Grace to have different voices up here speaking into your lives. So we will always look for opportunities for people besides me to continue to share and offer you their perspective, because I think we benefit from that. Scripture tells us that where there is many counselors, that there is wisdom and wise choices. So I think that that's a good thing. This week, we are jumping back into James chapter 2 to one of, some people call it controversial, though I don't really think that it is. It is confusing. A cursory glance at the passage, James 2 verses 14 through 26 is where we're going to be. If you're watching at home today, thank you so much for doing that. I don't blame you on this rainy morning, but I hope everybody will grab a Bible and interact with the text as we move through it, because we're going to go through that whole passage today. Just a cursory glance of the passage, it renders it a little bit confusing, I think, because as you move through the whole of Scripture, particularly the New Testament, the New Testament writers are very careful to explain that salvation comes through faith. Paul says it most pointedly confess with our mouth and believe with our heart that Jesus is Lord, then we will enter into the kingdom. Jesus beckons us to believe in him and to follow him. So we see over and over again through Scripture the miracle and the mystery of the gospel, which is salvation is offered to you free of merit, free of works, completely by faith. It is the greatest gift that could ever be given. God sent his son to die on the cross for you, for everyone, for the sins that you have committed and for the sins that he knows that you will commit. He died for those so that you might be reunited with his Father, with the Father, and with him, and with the Spirit for all of eternity. God loves you so much that he came after your soul by sending his Son to die on the cross for you. And if we place our faith in that death, then Scripture teaches us that we're going to heaven. Scripture teaches us that we will spend eternity in bliss with God. Scripture teaches us that because of that, we don't have to fear death. Scripture teaches us that because of that, we're a new creature. We're no longer a slave to sin as the old creature was. And so all through the Bible, we see salvation by faith. And then we get to James here at the end of the Bible. At the end of the Bible, this peculiar passage, James says, yeah, you show me your faith, I'll show you my works. You show me your faith without works and I'll show you a faith that's dead. As a matter of fact, let me show you how Abraham proved his faith by his works. And at a cursory glance, it seems like James is disagreeing with the rest of Scripture. The rest of Scripture is like, I'm good, I'm good, I have faith, I believe. And then James says, yeah, but if you believe you ought to do some stuff. And if you don't do some stuff, then you may not believe. Actually, James is more pointed than that. Remember we said that this was a well-crafted punch in the gut, this book was? James just says if you don't do some stuff, then you don't believe. It's not real. It's not sincere. And so even though it can seem a little bit contradictory, even though it can be challenging, I don't think it's confusing. I think it is crystal clear. So I want to walk us through James chapter 2 this morning and help us understand this passage and let us be appropriately challenged and worried by this passage because it's a tough one. This is what James writes. We'll start off with the first half of it. James 2, verses 14 through 18. So James shares this pretty stark, blunt reality. You can say all day long that you have faith. You can give a mental assent and a lip service to faith. Do you think that Jesus is the Son of God? Yes. But what James says is unless actions follow that, it's not sincere. We saw in chapter 1 that one of the things that James says about true religion, the thing that James says about true religion, is that true religion visits the widows and the orphans in their affliction and remains unstained from the world. So what he's saying is, true religion, people who truly have a genuine faith, will care for the poor and the needy. They will care to be a voice to the voiceless. And in continuing to pull that thread here in chapter two, he basically says, you can't call yourself a believer. You can't say that you have a genuine saving faith if you don't help someone who is in need. If someone comes to you and they say, I'm wet and I'm cold and I need a jacket and I live, I'm homeless and I'm in need. And we say, in our double-layered North Face jackets, I will pray for you. Be warm and filled. I hope you find good food. There's a place downtown called Seat at the Table. You should figure out a way to get there. It's great. And then we leave. James is saying, you don't care for the poor and the needy. You just like to say that you do. You're like me this morning. I was watching a woman get out of her car with a baby, and I watched her do it for like 10 minutes. And at the last second, I was like, you want me to come get you an umbrella? And she said, I mean, I'm good by now. And then she walked in. Like, if I really wanted, if I really cared about her, I would have walked out there with an umbrella. I just cared for the perception that I cared, right? What we do shows what we believe. It actually evidences that. So what James is saying here, and it's important not to miss this, is that works are an unavoidable result of a genuine faith. Works, good works, and we're going to talk about what those are, are an unavoidable result of a genuine faith. It is a natural consequence. If you have a genuine, believing, saving faith, then God will work in your heart to change you. There's a verse in Matthew that says, if you delight yourselves in the laws of the Lord, then he will give you the desires of your heart. And I've always loved that verse because it makes it seem like if I simply just love the Bible, then God will give me all the stuff that I want. I'm going to be a billionaire in no time. But what it means is when we reflect on God's word and we delight ourselves in it, we grow more like the principles in it. We grow more like God in character. And slowly, over time, because we delight in His Word, our heart beats for the same things that God's heart beats for. Our hearts beat with God. This is how the Spirit gets in our life and changes us. And the things that we want slowly become the things that He wants. The things that He delights in are the things that we delight in. And we're told in Romans that when we are saved, when we become a believer, when we have a true saving faith, that the old self, the old version of ourself that was a slave to sin, is buried with Christ and that this new self is resurrected with him on Easter. That's why baptism is a symbol of this rebirth. We go under the water. That's our old self being cast off and we rise as our new selves that God has radically and fundamentally changed. This new self has a Holy Spirit that's given to us as a down payment on our salvation, who speaks into us, who convicts us when we're going wrong, who encourages us when we're doing right. And so everything in Scripture points to the unavoidable reality that when God fundamentally changes our heart, when we have a saving faith and He rushes into our lives, that the unavoidable result is good works. Because we no longer have to choose our good works. They're a natural manifestation of the faith that is going on inside of us. That's what James is saying. And in saying this, this is important, James actually agrees with Jesus. In saying this, James actually agrees with the teachings of Jesus you have in your notes there. And at home, you should have been able to download the notes on the Gracevine. You have in your notes there two references, John 15, 5 and John 13, 35. And he says in those, John 15, 5 is this wonderful passage. He says, I am the vine and you are the branches. In our vernacular, I am the trunk and you are the branches. I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. I've talked about this before. When a branch is attached to a tree, it doesn't have to worry about when to produce the fruit or what kind of fruit to produce. All it has to worry about is staying attached to that tree. And Jesus says, if you abide in me and I in you, if you obey me, if you follow me, if you pursue me, if you walk with me, if you abide in me, then you will bear much fruit. You won't have to try to bear the fruit. You won't have to try to do the good works. You won't have to make a conscious effort to do it. Just abide in me and it will naturally produce a fruit in your life. James is simply agreeing with Jesus. He's saying it another way. He's saying it in a more pointed way so it's easier to understand. Then Jesus says again in John 13 35, he says, I give you a new command to love others as I have loved you. And then he says that the world will know that you are my disciples by your love for one another. The world will know that you are my children by what you do, by how you treat one another, by your actions. Jesus says you can say all day long that you love your brother. This is the exact example that James gives. You can say you love the poor and the needy, but if you walk away with your warm coat, then you don't. You don't really believe. Faith isn't really there. Jesus says, the world will know by your actions who you are. It's not a matter of just saying it. And honestly, we understand this principle. We get it. We've experienced this, that if there is love, there will be evidence, right? If you're not married, I think you can still appreciate the principles of this. When a husband and wife are married, when they get married, they stand at the altar and they make vows to each other. And they promise, I will love you and be faithful to you in sickness and in health and good times and in bad, in joy as well as in sorrow. It's one thing to stand on the altar and say those things. I had no clue what that meant when I was 25 years old. I said them and I meant them with my whole heart. I know what they mean now more than I did then. And those of you who have been married for 30 and 40 years, you know even way more than me what those words mean. And a husband, listen, a husband can tell his wife that he loves her. He can write her a nice card on her birthday, I love you, you're the best, you're the most beautiful woman in the world. Which apparently when people get married, everyone's unrealistic, right? I'm married to the most handsome man ever. Are you? Because we all look pretty average. Anyways, you can say nice things and it's fine to do that. It's fine to give a mental assent to it. But a wife knows if she's loved, right? If a husband loves his wife, he won't just tell her. He'll run interference for her on Saturday morning with the kids to try to let her get a little bit more sleep than she normally does. He'll clean the kitchen without being asked to clean the kitchen. He'll make a big deal over her birthday if she wants a big deal made of it. He'll make a little deal over her birthday if she wants a little deal made of it. He'll say kind things to her. He'll let her watch what she wants to watch. He'll take her car out on the weekend and wash it and fill it up with gas so that she doesn't have to worry about that. He'll learn the little things that let his wife know that she is loved. And she never has to wonder at that. And if a guy just says occasionally, hey, I love you, you know you're the best, and then never does anything, that's not love. That's selfishness. We understand this principle. We know this to be true in our own lives, and it's true of our faith as well. And it's so true of our faith, and James actually takes this, he actually doubles down on this. This idea of faith will produce works. Love will be manifested in how we act. By presenting us with this idea, and this is where it starts to get scary. According to James, mental assent is not the same as faith. Mental assent is not the same as faith. Promising love on the altar is not the same as loving for 30 years. Just agreeing mentally that Jesus is the Son of God is not a saving faith. This is why Jesus says another scary statement in the Gospels, not everyone who says unto me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. That should give you pause. This should give you pause. If what you're clinging to for your salvation is a prayer that you prayed when you were eight, the mental assent that you gave, we need to do some introspection about whether or not we have a saving faith. And I say that mental assent is not the same as faith because look at what James says in verse 19. He says, you believe that God is one. You do well. In other translations it says, good. Even the demons believe and shudder. You know who else knows that Jesus is the Son of God? Satan. You know who has way better theology than all of us collectively in this room? Demons. They know the Bible inside and out. They know who Jesus is, and they are scared of him. Yet they have not placed their faith in him for eternal life. They're still working towards something else. So a faith that simply gives a mental assent, that simply says, yeah, I think that's probably true, is a demonic faith, according to James. And we don't talk about demons and Satan here a lot, but it's in the passage. This is what he says, and this ought to give us pause that even demons go, yeah, Jesus is the Son of God, and they're scared of him, yet they don't have faith because it's more than just a mental assent. It's more than just agreeing with the set of facts. It's more than just confessing that Jesus is the Son of God. Again, I'll go back to that writing in Paul and Romans. If we confess with our hearts, if we confess with our mouths and believe in our hearts that Jesus is the Son of God, then we will be saved. Some of us stop at confessing with our mouths. That's where demons stop. And that's a scary, scary thing. James takes it a little bit further as he finishes out the passage. And he says that faith that doesn't provide works isn't even a saving faith. Faith that doesn't produce works isn't even a saving faith. He says it this way at the end of the passage. He says, A faith that is simply claimed and not evidenced and not met out with a series of good works and good deeds and love and grace and kindness, that's a dead faith. That's not a saving faith. A faith that we cling to because of a prayer that we prayed years ago and then nothing in our life changed after that is not a saving faith. That's why I am of the conviction, I've thought this for a long time from where I sit in ministry, that the surest sign that the gospel has taken root in someone's life is a radical change in their priorities. I've watched families come and go from churches. And you see families come and they profess a faith. They confess that they believe. And they come and maybe church attendance gets ramped up for a little bit. Maybe they're excited about it. They're caught up in the moment. But nothing between Sundays really changes. They still roll with the same group of people. And it's great. We ought to roll with the same group of people. We ought to have our friends who are not believers, but they can't be our only friends, and they can't have the only values that we emulate and try to not adopt. And the way that they spend their money doesn't change, and the way they spend their time doesn't change, and the way that they seek joy doesn't change. The only thing that really changes is now they go to church, and it makes them feel a little bit better. But eventually, eventually they'll start to fade away and then a year or two later, it's like that was just a flash in the pan. It was a confession, but it wasn't a sincere belief. Conversely, I've watched families profess a faith, come into church, kind of slowly step their way in, slowly take their next steps of obedience, becoming disciples of Christ, join small group, begin to give. Well, a huge indicator of someone's faith, and I don't talk about giving a lot, so hopefully you'll allow me this, is whether or not they give. I'm not talking about the church. I'm just talking about being generous people. Why else would you give 10% of your income away unless you were in love with a God who allowed you to do that as part of obedience to him? It doesn't make any sense. Why would a family do that unless God had radically changed their priorities? I've watched families come in and they had kids on ball teams and they were gone most weekends during the fall and the spring and every night of the week and it was consuming them. And they said, listen, because of our faith, because we want to be around church people more, we're not doing that. We're going to ratchet back all of our involvement everywhere else so that we can be involved in church. It's a radical change in priorities. I'm not saying that every family has to do that, but I am saying that that family radically changed their priorities. And to me, it's evidence that faith has taken hold. But James is very clear. If your faith is a faith that clings to a confession that you made years ago, and in the wake of your life, there is no difference. You're no different now than you were five years ago, and only you know the answer to that. And let me just twist it a little harder as I say that. Don't let yourself off the hook with this. Don't find pockets and ways to make yourself better when you really know that you're the same. If that's our faith, and there are no works, James says it's dead. So by now, you ought to be asking the question, well, crap, man, what are the works then? Because I'm a little nervous right now. What are the works that I ought to be producing? How do I know that I know that I know? How can I be certain? What kind of works is faith going to manifest in my life? I would point you to three passages to answer this question. The first is James 1.27. We talked about it earlier. I talked about it two weeks ago. It's the true religion passage. James says that, and I've that we are his disciples by our love for one another. So we should ask ourselves, as I look back on the wake of my life, do I have an increasing heart for the needy? Do I have an increasing desire to help those who are facing injustice and to be a voice for the voiceless? Or do I care about them as little now as I always have? Do I have an increased desire for holiness? Is the Holy Spirit in me, speaking into me and encouraging me as I venture into places where I need not be? Is he encouraging me as I venture towards places and people where I do need to be? Do I see that in my life? And then according to Jesus, do I look in my life and I see a wake of love in my life? Are there people who would point to me and say, I'm closer to Jesus because they love me well? Has that been manifesting itself in your life in such a way? And listen, the litmus test for this love, this godly love, this faith-inspired love that Jesus gives us is not loving the people who love us back. That's easy. Everyone does that. It's loving the people who don't love you back. It's loving the people that you don't have to love. It's loving the people when there's no transaction there. I'm not getting anything out of this. I just love you and I care for you. Do you have an increased wake of people that you love in your life that you don't have to love, that are sometimes unlovable? James says, if you have a genuine faith, then the answer to that question will be yes. And finally, Paul says in Galatians, we're told that we receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment for our salvation, that when we are saved, when we have a genuine faith, that the Holy Spirit rushes into our life, and that the Holy Spirit produces fruit. And the fruit of the Holy Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. So again, look at the wake of your life over the last three to five years. Are you producing? Are you experiencing more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Are you still the cranky grump that you've always been? Is it more? Is it less? Is it the same? And now listen. I know this is not a fun sermon. You did not get up and shower and brave the rain and you families, we opened kids ministry today. You didn't get your kids ready so that you could come in here and I could kick you in the teeth. I'm sorry about that. This is a hard one. If you're feeling uncomfortable, you should. If you're doubting your salvation, that's all right. Because Paul tells us in Philippians that we should continually work out our salvation with fear and trembling, that our understanding of our salvation and our relationship with God will change over the years. And if it's not, and if it's not challenged, and we're just allowed to walk through life clinging to this thing that we said once and not seeing any works and not actually being a genuine believer and not experiencing genuine faith, shame on me if I'm your pastor for years and I never confront you with the truth that James gives us here. I have to. And here's why we need to have these hard conversations with ourselves. Here's why we need to think through this and ask the question, do I have a genuine faith? Do I see that in my life? Am I sure that I'm sure that I'm sure? This week, Jen and I spent the week back home. Jen and Lily are driving back today. I've shared with the church through the journey. Jen's dad, about two years ago, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And so we've been walking through that, Jen and I have, as a family and with her family. And this last week, he made the decision to stop treatment and receive hospice care in the home. And so we went home to be with the family. The good news is, it was a really, it was a good, sweet, peaceful, life-giving, gracious week. It was good to be around the family. And we're probably talking about months, not weeks. And so that's good too. And we're looking forward to sweet times with John as a whole family. I would also say for those of you who love Jen, please direct your condolences through me. The last thing she needs is to drive home from Athens, be sad that she is not with her dad right now, and then have to answer emails and texts about how he's doing and thinking and all that stuff. So direct those through me. Thank you. But here's why I bring it up. Because I sat with that man this week who has a genuine faith. We were joking about the multiple jackets that he's given to homeless people and sign spinners on the corner of the road. He just stops his car, gets out of the car, and hands him his jacket. He worked at AT&T for years and years and years. He was the vice president of international real estate, yet he knew the name of the parking attendants, he knew their birthdays, and he gave them gifts. He left gifts for the cleaning people in his office. He had a genuine faith. And now, as he's made the decision to embrace death, he is totally fearless and completely at peace. He is living out the verse that says, oh death, where is your sting? It has none for John because he's not fearful. He's totally at peace and he's going to see his Savior. And he's looking forward to it. I want you to have that peace. I want you to know that peace. I want my church to understand what that is. And that peace doesn't come by avoiding the hard truths in Scripture. It comes by continually working out our salvation with fear and with trembling. It comes with being sure that we know that we know. It comes with a genuine faith that will unavoidably produce works. I want you to have that faith too. I want you to have that peace too. So go home. Be concerned. Be confused. Be fearful. Work it out. Make sense of it. If I've confused you today, email me. Let's have a Zoom call or let's have a lunch and let's talk about it. But it's a good thing to have these conversations. It's a good thing to think through these, because when we do, we can be sure that we're sure that we're sure, and we can live our lives in perfect peace, and that's what I want for you, and that's what I want for my church. Let's pray, and then I think we're going to sing one more song together. Father, you were good. In loss, you are good. In grief, you are present. And in joys, you celebrate. So God, thank you for all of those moments and all the ways that you're with us. Lord, I pray that no one here would unnecessarily doubt that they know you. On the flip side, God, I pray that some of us would very necessarily doubt it and that in that doubt we would find a saving faith for maybe the first time ever. God, if any of us listening to me now needs to cry out to you as we sing this song, would we do that? Would you give us the courage to kneel at our house or in these rows or stand and maybe not sing and maybe just pray and search our hearts for where we are with you? Give us a genuine faith. Give us a faith that's rooted so deeply that we abide in you and you produce fruit in us. Give us the peace that comes when we know that we know you. It's in your son's name that I pray all these things. Amen.
Good to see everybody. Thank you guys for that. As is often the case these days, when it's time for me to preach, I don't want to. I just want to keep singing. It's so good to get to sing with my church family and to look and see everyone praising. What a blessing that is. I'm actually going to invite you guys back into prayer as I start the sermon this week. I don't know if you guys know this. Tuesday is kind of a big deal for us in this country, and it would probably be wise for churches to pray over it. So join me in doing that. Father, Tuesday is the election, and this is, you know, one of the more contentious ones that we have ever experienced. It is more polarizing and divisive and filled with vitriol than any that I am aware of previously. So Father, I just pray that you'd be with us. Pray that you'd be in the process. May your hand be all over what happens on Tuesday and very likely, Father, in the weeks following. Would we see you in the nooks and crannies and the polling locations in the districts of this election and the results of it. And Father, more than anything, I pray that your people would be peacemakers in the wake of it. I pray that your people would be unifiers in the wake of it. That we wouldn't have a heart to be right. We wouldn't have a heart to gloat or to complain. Or even have a heart towards doomsday scenarios. But that God, your children would seek to make the peace that you have won. Help us to do that no matter what happens on Tuesday. It's in your son's name we pray, and we're able to do that. Amen. All right, this is the third part in our series called James. I take great pride in my creative series titles, and so this one is James. Last week, Kyle carried the torch exceptionally well in talking about taming the tongue. Take it easy, it wasn't that good. It was fine. I assigned that to him because he is better at that than I am. It was less hypocritical coming from Kyle than me, if you know me well. So I'm very glad about that. I would also say just as a general statement so you guys know that it's a big value for me and for the elders and for Grace to have different voices up here speaking into your lives. So we will always look for opportunities for people besides me to continue to share and offer you their perspective, because I think we benefit from that. Scripture tells us that where there is many counselors, that there is wisdom and wise choices. So I think that that's a good thing. This week, we are jumping back into James chapter 2 to one of, some people call it controversial, though I don't really think that it is. It is confusing. A cursory glance at the passage, James 2 verses 14 through 26 is where we're going to be. If you're watching at home today, thank you so much for doing that. I don't blame you on this rainy morning, but I hope everybody will grab a Bible and interact with the text as we move through it, because we're going to go through that whole passage today. Just a cursory glance of the passage, it renders it a little bit confusing, I think, because as you move through the whole of Scripture, particularly the New Testament, the New Testament writers are very careful to explain that salvation comes through faith. Paul says it most pointedly confess with our mouth and believe with our heart that Jesus is Lord, then we will enter into the kingdom. Jesus beckons us to believe in him and to follow him. So we see over and over again through Scripture the miracle and the mystery of the gospel, which is salvation is offered to you free of merit, free of works, completely by faith. It is the greatest gift that could ever be given. God sent his son to die on the cross for you, for everyone, for the sins that you have committed and for the sins that he knows that you will commit. He died for those so that you might be reunited with his Father, with the Father, and with him, and with the Spirit for all of eternity. God loves you so much that he came after your soul by sending his Son to die on the cross for you. And if we place our faith in that death, then Scripture teaches us that we're going to heaven. Scripture teaches us that we will spend eternity in bliss with God. Scripture teaches us that because of that, we don't have to fear death. Scripture teaches us that because of that, we're a new creature. We're no longer a slave to sin as the old creature was. And so all through the Bible, we see salvation by faith. And then we get to James here at the end of the Bible. At the end of the Bible, this peculiar passage, James says, yeah, you show me your faith, I'll show you my works. You show me your faith without works and I'll show you a faith that's dead. As a matter of fact, let me show you how Abraham proved his faith by his works. And at a cursory glance, it seems like James is disagreeing with the rest of Scripture. The rest of Scripture is like, I'm good, I'm good, I have faith, I believe. And then James says, yeah, but if you believe you ought to do some stuff. And if you don't do some stuff, then you may not believe. Actually, James is more pointed than that. Remember we said that this was a well-crafted punch in the gut, this book was? James just says if you don't do some stuff, then you don't believe. It's not real. It's not sincere. And so even though it can seem a little bit contradictory, even though it can be challenging, I don't think it's confusing. I think it is crystal clear. So I want to walk us through James chapter 2 this morning and help us understand this passage and let us be appropriately challenged and worried by this passage because it's a tough one. This is what James writes. We'll start off with the first half of it. James 2, verses 14 through 18. So James shares this pretty stark, blunt reality. You can say all day long that you have faith. You can give a mental assent and a lip service to faith. Do you think that Jesus is the Son of God? Yes. But what James says is unless actions follow that, it's not sincere. We saw in chapter 1 that one of the things that James says about true religion, the thing that James says about true religion, is that true religion visits the widows and the orphans in their affliction and remains unstained from the world. So what he's saying is, true religion, people who truly have a genuine faith, will care for the poor and the needy. They will care to be a voice to the voiceless. And in continuing to pull that thread here in chapter two, he basically says, you can't call yourself a believer. You can't say that you have a genuine saving faith if you don't help someone who is in need. If someone comes to you and they say, I'm wet and I'm cold and I need a jacket and I live, I'm homeless and I'm in need. And we say, in our double-layered North Face jackets, I will pray for you. Be warm and filled. I hope you find good food. There's a place downtown called Seat at the Table. You should figure out a way to get there. It's great. And then we leave. James is saying, you don't care for the poor and the needy. You just like to say that you do. You're like me this morning. I was watching a woman get out of her car with a baby, and I watched her do it for like 10 minutes. And at the last second, I was like, you want me to come get you an umbrella? And she said, I mean, I'm good by now. And then she walked in. Like, if I really wanted, if I really cared about her, I would have walked out there with an umbrella. I just cared for the perception that I cared, right? What we do shows what we believe. It actually evidences that. So what James is saying here, and it's important not to miss this, is that works are an unavoidable result of a genuine faith. Works, good works, and we're going to talk about what those are, are an unavoidable result of a genuine faith. It is a natural consequence. If you have a genuine, believing, saving faith, then God will work in your heart to change you. There's a verse in Matthew that says, if you delight yourselves in the laws of the Lord, then he will give you the desires of your heart. And I've always loved that verse because it makes it seem like if I simply just love the Bible, then God will give me all the stuff that I want. I'm going to be a billionaire in no time. But what it means is when we reflect on God's word and we delight ourselves in it, we grow more like the principles in it. We grow more like God in character. And slowly, over time, because we delight in His Word, our heart beats for the same things that God's heart beats for. Our hearts beat with God. This is how the Spirit gets in our life and changes us. And the things that we want slowly become the things that He wants. The things that He delights in are the things that we delight in. And we're told in Romans that when we are saved, when we become a believer, when we have a true saving faith, that the old self, the old version of ourself that was a slave to sin, is buried with Christ and that this new self is resurrected with him on Easter. That's why baptism is a symbol of this rebirth. We go under the water. That's our old self being cast off and we rise as our new selves that God has radically and fundamentally changed. This new self has a Holy Spirit that's given to us as a down payment on our salvation, who speaks into us, who convicts us when we're going wrong, who encourages us when we're doing right. And so everything in Scripture points to the unavoidable reality that when God fundamentally changes our heart, when we have a saving faith and He rushes into our lives, that the unavoidable result is good works. Because we no longer have to choose our good works. They're a natural manifestation of the faith that is going on inside of us. That's what James is saying. And in saying this, this is important, James actually agrees with Jesus. In saying this, James actually agrees with the teachings of Jesus you have in your notes there. And at home, you should have been able to download the notes on the Gracevine. You have in your notes there two references, John 15, 5 and John 13, 35. And he says in those, John 15, 5 is this wonderful passage. He says, I am the vine and you are the branches. In our vernacular, I am the trunk and you are the branches. I am the vine, you are the branches. Abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. I've talked about this before. When a branch is attached to a tree, it doesn't have to worry about when to produce the fruit or what kind of fruit to produce. All it has to worry about is staying attached to that tree. And Jesus says, if you abide in me and I in you, if you obey me, if you follow me, if you pursue me, if you walk with me, if you abide in me, then you will bear much fruit. You won't have to try to bear the fruit. You won't have to try to do the good works. You won't have to make a conscious effort to do it. Just abide in me and it will naturally produce a fruit in your life. James is simply agreeing with Jesus. He's saying it another way. He's saying it in a more pointed way so it's easier to understand. Then Jesus says again in John 13 35, he says, I give you a new command to love others as I have loved you. And then he says that the world will know that you are my disciples by your love for one another. The world will know that you are my children by what you do, by how you treat one another, by your actions. Jesus says you can say all day long that you love your brother. This is the exact example that James gives. You can say you love the poor and the needy, but if you walk away with your warm coat, then you don't. You don't really believe. Faith isn't really there. Jesus says, the world will know by your actions who you are. It's not a matter of just saying it. And honestly, we understand this principle. We get it. We've experienced this, that if there is love, there will be evidence, right? If you're not married, I think you can still appreciate the principles of this. When a husband and wife are married, when they get married, they stand at the altar and they make vows to each other. And they promise, I will love you and be faithful to you in sickness and in health and good times and in bad, in joy as well as in sorrow. It's one thing to stand on the altar and say those things. I had no clue what that meant when I was 25 years old. I said them and I meant them with my whole heart. I know what they mean now more than I did then. And those of you who have been married for 30 and 40 years, you know even way more than me what those words mean. And a husband, listen, a husband can tell his wife that he loves her. He can write her a nice card on her birthday, I love you, you're the best, you're the most beautiful woman in the world. Which apparently when people get married, everyone's unrealistic, right? I'm married to the most handsome man ever. Are you? Because we all look pretty average. Anyways, you can say nice things and it's fine to do that. It's fine to give a mental assent to it. But a wife knows if she's loved, right? If a husband loves his wife, he won't just tell her. He'll run interference for her on Saturday morning with the kids to try to let her get a little bit more sleep than she normally does. He'll clean the kitchen without being asked to clean the kitchen. He'll make a big deal over her birthday if she wants a big deal made of it. He'll make a little deal over her birthday if she wants a little deal made of it. He'll say kind things to her. He'll let her watch what she wants to watch. He'll take her car out on the weekend and wash it and fill it up with gas so that she doesn't have to worry about that. He'll learn the little things that let his wife know that she is loved. And she never has to wonder at that. And if a guy just says occasionally, hey, I love you, you know you're the best, and then never does anything, that's not love. That's selfishness. We understand this principle. We know this to be true in our own lives, and it's true of our faith as well. And it's so true of our faith, and James actually takes this, he actually doubles down on this. This idea of faith will produce works. Love will be manifested in how we act. By presenting us with this idea, and this is where it starts to get scary. According to James, mental assent is not the same as faith. Mental assent is not the same as faith. Promising love on the altar is not the same as loving for 30 years. Just agreeing mentally that Jesus is the Son of God is not a saving faith. This is why Jesus says another scary statement in the Gospels, not everyone who says unto me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. That should give you pause. This should give you pause. If what you're clinging to for your salvation is a prayer that you prayed when you were eight, the mental assent that you gave, we need to do some introspection about whether or not we have a saving faith. And I say that mental assent is not the same as faith because look at what James says in verse 19. He says, you believe that God is one. You do well. In other translations it says, good. Even the demons believe and shudder. You know who else knows that Jesus is the Son of God? Satan. You know who has way better theology than all of us collectively in this room? Demons. They know the Bible inside and out. They know who Jesus is, and they are scared of him. Yet they have not placed their faith in him for eternal life. They're still working towards something else. So a faith that simply gives a mental assent, that simply says, yeah, I think that's probably true, is a demonic faith, according to James. And we don't talk about demons and Satan here a lot, but it's in the passage. This is what he says, and this ought to give us pause that even demons go, yeah, Jesus is the Son of God, and they're scared of him, yet they don't have faith because it's more than just a mental assent. It's more than just agreeing with the set of facts. It's more than just confessing that Jesus is the Son of God. Again, I'll go back to that writing in Paul and Romans. If we confess with our hearts, if we confess with our mouths and believe in our hearts that Jesus is the Son of God, then we will be saved. Some of us stop at confessing with our mouths. That's where demons stop. And that's a scary, scary thing. James takes it a little bit further as he finishes out the passage. And he says that faith that doesn't provide works isn't even a saving faith. Faith that doesn't produce works isn't even a saving faith. He says it this way at the end of the passage. He says, A faith that is simply claimed and not evidenced and not met out with a series of good works and good deeds and love and grace and kindness, that's a dead faith. That's not a saving faith. A faith that we cling to because of a prayer that we prayed years ago and then nothing in our life changed after that is not a saving faith. That's why I am of the conviction, I've thought this for a long time from where I sit in ministry, that the surest sign that the gospel has taken root in someone's life is a radical change in their priorities. I've watched families come and go from churches. And you see families come and they profess a faith. They confess that they believe. And they come and maybe church attendance gets ramped up for a little bit. Maybe they're excited about it. They're caught up in the moment. But nothing between Sundays really changes. They still roll with the same group of people. And it's great. We ought to roll with the same group of people. We ought to have our friends who are not believers, but they can't be our only friends, and they can't have the only values that we emulate and try to not adopt. And the way that they spend their money doesn't change, and the way they spend their time doesn't change, and the way that they seek joy doesn't change. The only thing that really changes is now they go to church, and it makes them feel a little bit better. But eventually, eventually they'll start to fade away and then a year or two later, it's like that was just a flash in the pan. It was a confession, but it wasn't a sincere belief. Conversely, I've watched families profess a faith, come into church, kind of slowly step their way in, slowly take their next steps of obedience, becoming disciples of Christ, join small group, begin to give. Well, a huge indicator of someone's faith, and I don't talk about giving a lot, so hopefully you'll allow me this, is whether or not they give. I'm not talking about the church. I'm just talking about being generous people. Why else would you give 10% of your income away unless you were in love with a God who allowed you to do that as part of obedience to him? It doesn't make any sense. Why would a family do that unless God had radically changed their priorities? I've watched families come in and they had kids on ball teams and they were gone most weekends during the fall and the spring and every night of the week and it was consuming them. And they said, listen, because of our faith, because we want to be around church people more, we're not doing that. We're going to ratchet back all of our involvement everywhere else so that we can be involved in church. It's a radical change in priorities. I'm not saying that every family has to do that, but I am saying that that family radically changed their priorities. And to me, it's evidence that faith has taken hold. But James is very clear. If your faith is a faith that clings to a confession that you made years ago, and in the wake of your life, there is no difference. You're no different now than you were five years ago, and only you know the answer to that. And let me just twist it a little harder as I say that. Don't let yourself off the hook with this. Don't find pockets and ways to make yourself better when you really know that you're the same. If that's our faith, and there are no works, James says it's dead. So by now, you ought to be asking the question, well, crap, man, what are the works then? Because I'm a little nervous right now. What are the works that I ought to be producing? How do I know that I know that I know? How can I be certain? What kind of works is faith going to manifest in my life? I would point you to three passages to answer this question. The first is James 1.27. We talked about it earlier. I talked about it two weeks ago. It's the true religion passage. James says that, and I've that we are his disciples by our love for one another. So we should ask ourselves, as I look back on the wake of my life, do I have an increasing heart for the needy? Do I have an increasing desire to help those who are facing injustice and to be a voice for the voiceless? Or do I care about them as little now as I always have? Do I have an increased desire for holiness? Is the Holy Spirit in me, speaking into me and encouraging me as I venture into places where I need not be? Is he encouraging me as I venture towards places and people where I do need to be? Do I see that in my life? And then according to Jesus, do I look in my life and I see a wake of love in my life? Are there people who would point to me and say, I'm closer to Jesus because they love me well? Has that been manifesting itself in your life in such a way? And listen, the litmus test for this love, this godly love, this faith-inspired love that Jesus gives us is not loving the people who love us back. That's easy. Everyone does that. It's loving the people who don't love you back. It's loving the people that you don't have to love. It's loving the people when there's no transaction there. I'm not getting anything out of this. I just love you and I care for you. Do you have an increased wake of people that you love in your life that you don't have to love, that are sometimes unlovable? James says, if you have a genuine faith, then the answer to that question will be yes. And finally, Paul says in Galatians, we're told that we receive the Holy Spirit as a down payment for our salvation, that when we are saved, when we have a genuine faith, that the Holy Spirit rushes into our life, and that the Holy Spirit produces fruit. And the fruit of the Holy Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. So again, look at the wake of your life over the last three to five years. Are you producing? Are you experiencing more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Are you still the cranky grump that you've always been? Is it more? Is it less? Is it the same? And now listen. I know this is not a fun sermon. You did not get up and shower and brave the rain and you families, we opened kids ministry today. You didn't get your kids ready so that you could come in here and I could kick you in the teeth. I'm sorry about that. This is a hard one. If you're feeling uncomfortable, you should. If you're doubting your salvation, that's all right. Because Paul tells us in Philippians that we should continually work out our salvation with fear and trembling, that our understanding of our salvation and our relationship with God will change over the years. And if it's not, and if it's not challenged, and we're just allowed to walk through life clinging to this thing that we said once and not seeing any works and not actually being a genuine believer and not experiencing genuine faith, shame on me if I'm your pastor for years and I never confront you with the truth that James gives us here. I have to. And here's why we need to have these hard conversations with ourselves. Here's why we need to think through this and ask the question, do I have a genuine faith? Do I see that in my life? Am I sure that I'm sure that I'm sure? This week, Jen and I spent the week back home. Jen and Lily are driving back today. I've shared with the church through the journey. Jen's dad, about two years ago, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And so we've been walking through that, Jen and I have, as a family and with her family. And this last week, he made the decision to stop treatment and receive hospice care in the home. And so we went home to be with the family. The good news is, it was a really, it was a good, sweet, peaceful, life-giving, gracious week. It was good to be around the family. And we're probably talking about months, not weeks. And so that's good too. And we're looking forward to sweet times with John as a whole family. I would also say for those of you who love Jen, please direct your condolences through me. The last thing she needs is to drive home from Athens, be sad that she is not with her dad right now, and then have to answer emails and texts about how he's doing and thinking and all that stuff. So direct those through me. Thank you. But here's why I bring it up. Because I sat with that man this week who has a genuine faith. We were joking about the multiple jackets that he's given to homeless people and sign spinners on the corner of the road. He just stops his car, gets out of the car, and hands him his jacket. He worked at AT&T for years and years and years. He was the vice president of international real estate, yet he knew the name of the parking attendants, he knew their birthdays, and he gave them gifts. He left gifts for the cleaning people in his office. He had a genuine faith. And now, as he's made the decision to embrace death, he is totally fearless and completely at peace. He is living out the verse that says, oh death, where is your sting? It has none for John because he's not fearful. He's totally at peace and he's going to see his Savior. And he's looking forward to it. I want you to have that peace. I want you to know that peace. I want my church to understand what that is. And that peace doesn't come by avoiding the hard truths in Scripture. It comes by continually working out our salvation with fear and with trembling. It comes with being sure that we know that we know. It comes with a genuine faith that will unavoidably produce works. I want you to have that faith too. I want you to have that peace too. So go home. Be concerned. Be confused. Be fearful. Work it out. Make sense of it. If I've confused you today, email me. Let's have a Zoom call or let's have a lunch and let's talk about it. But it's a good thing to have these conversations. It's a good thing to think through these, because when we do, we can be sure that we're sure that we're sure, and we can live our lives in perfect peace, and that's what I want for you, and that's what I want for my church. Let's pray, and then I think we're going to sing one more song together. Father, you were good. In loss, you are good. In grief, you are present. And in joys, you celebrate. So God, thank you for all of those moments and all the ways that you're with us. Lord, I pray that no one here would unnecessarily doubt that they know you. On the flip side, God, I pray that some of us would very necessarily doubt it and that in that doubt we would find a saving faith for maybe the first time ever. God, if any of us listening to me now needs to cry out to you as we sing this song, would we do that? Would you give us the courage to kneel at our house or in these rows or stand and maybe not sing and maybe just pray and search our hearts for where we are with you? Give us a genuine faith. Give us a faith that's rooted so deeply that we abide in you and you produce fruit in us. Give us the peace that comes when we know that we know you. It's in your son's name that I pray all these things. Amen.
All right, well, good morning, everybody. I see you all came at once, so I hope the sermon is good. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thank you for making grace a part of your Sunday. If you're watching us online, thank you for doing that. As we continue in our Gentle and Lowly series from the book Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, I hope it's touched you, moved your heart, compelled you towards Christ. Before I just jump in, I did want to acknowledge and praise God for the safe return of our Mexico team. We're glad that most of them are back with us. Some of y'all could have stayed in Mexico. It would have been fine with the rest of us. But for the most part, we're happy to have you. Karen, it was a good trip, I hear. Yeah. The other thing I'll tell you guys, just because we like to laugh at things, is I see Susie's here. Hi, Miss Susie. Susie Shank recently lost her husband, Mike, and we did the funeral here for that. That was just a few weeks ago. And Mike is a guy with my kind of sense of humor, so we got along very well. And he's a big Bills fan, and I'm a big Falcons fan. And last week week they played and that was the next game coming up on the schedule when I did the funeral service. It's possible that I said some disparaging things about the Bills in his service, which I was thrilled and delighted to get away with. Then the day of the game, I get a text from the deceased Mike Shank on my on my phone and I'm going what in the world and the text says this is a message from heaven go Bills screw the Falcons one of the better jokes that's ever been executed Suze that was fantastic I may have texted something back after our victory but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, that one was too good just to keep all to ourselves there. This morning, we, like I said, continue in our series, and we're going through that book, Gentle and Lowly, where we're looking at the heart of Christ. And there's a theme here that's building with the heart of Christ towards us. And next week is the final week of the series. And I'm going to land the plane in that theme. But as I was approaching this week, I chose the chapter that's entitled Rich in Mercy. It reminded me of this time in my life where I realized that my view of something, because what I want to compel us towards and where we want to land the plane today, I'll just tell you where we're going, is I want us to see how very impoverished our view of God's mercy is. And so I was trying to think of another time in my life. When did I realize, oh my gosh, I thought I understood what this was. And I really didn't until this moment. And it was, I thought I understood what love was until we had a kid. If you're a parent and you can remember back that far, you know that when your child is born, when your first child is born, there is this love that overtakes you that you never understood. And so when, when Jen and I were pregnant with Lily, like we knew that we were going to love this child. Obviously we're not psychopaths. We knew that we were going to love this kid. We knew that this was going to be a kind of love that we didn't understand. People would tell us you're going to love them so much, you're not going to believe it. And I would mentally assent to that. Yes. Yes, I'm sure that that is true. And you begin to wrap your mind around what it's like to have a child in your life and what it must be like to love them. But you really, nothing can really prepare you. You can't intellectually get there until you experience it. And I still remember the night and then the morning where we had Lily. I went to bed. Jen was very pregnant. And at about, and listen, Jen's not here this morning. I got a cold in the middle of the week and then I got over it and gave it to them. So all three of my family members are home now with a cold, sick. Jen texted me. I just made the children cry. I'm at my wits end. Please come home. Well, I got to preach, but I'll be there soon. So they're all home sick. So she's not going to know what I say here. And if I know my wife, she's not going to go back and listen to this. Okay. So this is, if is if I can trust you this is our secret she doesn't have to know I talked about this it's up to you guys jerks she her water we were sound asleep her water broke at 2 33 o'clock somewhere around there she got up got out of bed took shower. She didn't bother me. Took a shower, did her makeup, put on some nice clothes, put in earrings and a necklace. She was ready for dinner, man, at 3.30 in the morning when she woke me up. That's just the kind of girl she knew there was going to be some pictures made, you know? And so she had to be, she had to be ready. She wasn't going to be looking haggard at the, at the, at the, at the hospital. So she gets herself ready to go out to dinner at three 34 o'clock in the morning and then just gently jostles me. My water broke. We've got to go to the hospital. What? We go to the hospital. We're in labor. We is generous. She, she was very much in labor. I very much not. Um, and, and I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there next to her and we're trying to bring this baby into the world. And I'm, I'm Jen's, you know, in front of me and I'm in a chair facing this way. I'm looking at her face because I don't know, different husbands process this moment in different ways. I did not want to be facing the other way. I just, I want to be facing this way. So I was facing this way, and I'm just looking at her face. I'm holding her hand, doing the best I can to encourage her in this process. And we're sitting there. She's doing her part. And out comes this baby. And I can hear the baby crying. And then they, and it's Lily, and then they put Lily on Jen's chest. And Lily's little face is facing me. And now listen to me. I do not care what anybody says. There is no such thing as a cute newborn baby. Those things are gross and they look like space aliens. And something happens in your mind, I think from God and his sovereign design, that you in the moment as a parent, you think this is a precious child. It's not, it's disgusting. That's a gross, gross thing. But this crying, greasy alien gets placed on Jen's chest and not even looking at me because she can't look yet, just facing me. And I can see her face. And in that moment, it was like the Grinch happened in real life. My heart grew ten sizes. In that moment, I knew I would die for that little girl. And it took nothing. I'm getting worked up about it right now. It took nothing. I loved her so much with a love that I had never understood before. And for those of you, and for some of you, some of you really want to experience that love and you're not yet. And I'm so sorry because I know stuff like this is painful and I walked that journey for a while too. But before you have kids, people tell you you're going to love them. And you understand that you will. But when that space alien landed on Jim's chest, I have never felt more love in my life more instantly than I did then. Instantly, I would die for this kid. I would love her. Now my heart exists outside of my chest. And I was telling this to Kyle. He was our student pastor. Now he's our family pastor. And Aaron Winston, our former children's pastor, is now our discipleship pastor doing some other things. Some of y'all know that Kyle and I have been working together, been friends for 10 years plus. He worked for me at my previous church. And Kyle's like a little brother to me. I love him so much. And when he and his wife Ashlyn were pregnant, I was telling him, like, your heart's going to grow 10 sizes. Like, you're not ready for this. You're going to love this kid so much. And the kid's name now is Hayes, and I don't know how old Hayes is, a month and a half, two months, something like that. He might be a year old. I don't know. I'm bad. I'm bad with ages. And I told him, this is going to happen, man. And the day or the day after Hayes was born, I called him and he was crying. He said, you were right. You're right. I said, you understand it now? He goes, yeah, I understand. Your heart just, you realize how impoverished your view of love was because of how this overtakes your life all of a sudden. And then I remember when we were pregnant with John, once we started getting close to the date, I started feeling bad. I started feeling bad because I'm like, there's no way I'm going to love the second one like I loved the first one. There's no space left. And as a first child, I found that to be true. I found that to be true. Your love gradually diminishes the more children that you have. Faith and Phil Leverett, they're not even here. I'm picking on them. They've got five kids. They don't even know the fifth one's name. So I was already feeling bad because when I have John, when we had John, I was already kind of apologizing to him. Like, I'm sorry, kid. I don't know how to love you like I love Lily. I'm sure God will get me there. And then as soon as that space alien landed on my wife's chest, my heart grew again. And it expanded. And I would die for that one too. And I love it with my whole life. And there's nothing quite like that in life to acquaint you with what love really is. I realized in those moments I had an impoverished view of what I thought of was. And I bring that up because I believe, and Dane asserts in the book, that we have an impoverished view of God's mercy. We're aware of it. We're aware that God's mercy exists. Most of you in here, I would be surprised if anybody came in here this morning, even if you're just here visiting with family or you wandered in or this is your first time in church in 20 years and you consider yourself agnostic, whatever your situation is, I doubt anybody in here is surprised to hear that we as Christians, we ascribe mercy to God. We say that he is rich in mercy. We know God's a merciful God. But I'm not, and so we give mental assent to that truth, but I'm not sure that we really understand what his mercy is. And so let's see if we can't gain on it a little bit today. The way we're going to gain on it is to look in Ephesians, because Ephesians chapter two, we're just going to look at verses, we were going to look at verses 1 through 10, but we're just going to do 1 through 5. As I went through it this morning, I found a place to stop that I felt was more appropriate. So if you have a Bible, please open it up to Ephesians chapter 2. This is my favorite kind of sermon where we just go through the text and I kind of tell you how it hits me and hopefully hits us this week. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. You can open that up and we'll be in the text of Ephesians chapter two, verses one through five. Shoot, I wasn't planning on crying and make my nose run talking about my kids at the beginning. I should save that stuff for the end so I'm not sniffing the whole time. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul has this 10 verse discourse. That's one of the more famous passages in scripture. And he opens it like this. As for you, verse one, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Let's talk about this for a minute. Jim Price, would you mind giving me a tissue, please, sir? Thank you. It's going according to the flesh, gratifying its desires and thinking its thoughts. He's, he's describing a people who don't know Jesus. And because they don't know Jesus, they live according to the flesh in Pauline theology. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians. Paul two-thirds of the New Testament. Most of the letters in the New Testament were written by Paul. And so theologians have developed a theology. Oh, that's hilarious. Good. Someone apologize to Jim when he gets back from his very important errand. Jim, we found some. I'm so sorry. They were right behind here. I know. Go home. All right. Within those letters, theologians have developed a theology based around Paul. Anything that Paul did is Pauline, the Pauline epistles, Pauline theology, things like that. And so within Pauline theology, there's this idea of being dead in our transgressions and in our trespasses. And there is this idea that before we knew Jesus, we had no idea. We had no choice but to sin. We were creatures of the flesh. In Philippians, he says that they were, that their bellies were their Lord's. And they basically did whatever they craved and whatever they desired. And that's how he's describing people before they knew Jesus here in Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three. He's saying that we were dead in our transgressions because we just indulged in the flesh. There's life in the flesh in this theology, and there's life in the spirit. And life in the flesh is to live life as if God didn't exist, to just do whatever our nature wants to do. And life in the spirit is to live in light of the very real existence of God that's been infused in us and given us life and live according to God's desires and God's thoughts and God's standards. So when we're living according to the flesh, we're living according to our own standards and our own thoughts and our own desires. So think of it this way. Think of living according to the flesh is somewhat akin to living as an irresponsible college student. Okay. Now I'm not talking about the responsible college students, the ones that like go to class and take notes and study and care about their future and their GPA and are trying to get a good job or trying to get into a good grad school. I'm talking about students like me that didn't care about any of that. Students that just live for fun. What's the next fun thing we're going to do? What's the next hedonistic activity in which I can engage? And I don't want to paint the wrong picture of me as a college student because some of us, we think of irresponsible college student, our mind goes to partying and that's a thing. But that wasn't my thing. I went to Bible college. I was a pastoral ministries major. My rejection and hedonism looked like playing Madden instead of going to class or just going and playing Frisbee. Because in the early 2000s, you could not be a youth pastor if you could not throw a Frisbee. It was part of the deal. So if you were there at school, you're throwing Frisbees. You're doing all kinds of stuff, you're playing sports. I'm skipping class all the time. My GPA was incredibly low. You guys, you'll love this. I was one semester away from getting kicked out of my Bible college for poor chapel attendance, and then I became a pastor. How do you like that? And my thought is, make chapel better, and I want to go. You don't hear me guilting you into being here, do you? Some of my friends haven't been here for weeks. We all have ways in which we're irresponsible. And we remember those friends in college who were just, their Lord was their belly. They just kind of jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from activity to activity. They were unmoored by wisdom and rules and considerations of the future. They lived in the moment and they did what they wanted. And some of us were that person and some of us were friends with that person. But the reality is, in different times and ways, we've all been that person. All of us. There's nobody in this room who looks back on the last 5, 10, 25 plus years of their life and thinks to themselves, I pretty much nailed that. There was never a moment when I wavered from God's path. I can't think of a season in my life where I just meandered and I did what I want and I lived according to the flesh. Especially when we don't think of living according to the flesh simply as seeking pleasure. Because living according to the flesh can be to seek numbness or escape or stillness or comfort. And the reality of it is sometimes we did our sinning in college and then we get it out of our system. But sometimes we just figure out more nuanced ways to keep feeding that monster and frat parties become country club outings. And it's all the same motivation and it's all the same stuff. And it's still the same lack of discipline. It's the same lack of wisdom. We're still living according to the flesh. Our flesh has just found a way to adapt itself into acceptable adult society so we can still be responsible, productive members. But if we're being really, really honest with ourselves, we know we've all had seasons where when we look back at that time in our life, and maybe, maybe you're in one right now where if you're being honest, you're wandering, where you're living according to what you want to do, not what God wants you to do. We can remember times when we lived according to the flesh and its desires, and we jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from excitement to excitement, from numbness to numbness, from escape to escape. And we piddle our days away on our phone, dopamine-ing ourselves to death while we do nothing for the kingdom. There's nobody in here who hasn't had one of those seasons. And here's the thing that I want to point out. In this passage in Ephesians chapter 2, and those first verses, this is clearly a reference to people before they knew Jesus. He says, you were once like the others, following the prince of this world and the desires of your flesh. And the implication is, but now you know Jesus, and so you live according to the Spirit. And so it makes it seem like, well, before I knew Jesus, I messed up, and I lived according to the flesh, not according to the Spirit. I jumped from hedonism to hedonism, whatever it might be, and now I'm better, and now I'm saved, and now I live according to the Spirit. Except none of you in here have that experience, do you? If you've, let's do a show of hands. If you've been a Christian for over a decade, I would like for you to raise your hand right now. If in that decade, you've never once wandered away from God and lived according to the flesh. Raise your hand if since you got saved, miraculously, sin has not been a problem for you. I can't believe Bill Gentile didn't raise his hand for fun. Right? That's not our experience. But here's what's wonderful about that not being our experience is that wasn't Paul's either. And maybe the most human passage in the Bible at the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul says, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I do not want to do, I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And what he's just claimed in Romans 6 is we are no longer slaves to sin. We are free to walk in newness of life and live life in the spirit. And then in Romans 7, he laments that he can't do it. That if Paul were sitting in this room and I had asked that question, he wouldn't have raised his hand either because he continued to sin. So it's a human passage. And I love that phrase, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Because it's hard to be a Christian because we feel like we should be doing better and not living according to the flesh anymore and living according to the spirit. But we don't all the time. We have these pockets where we're living according to the spirit. And those are wonderful pockets and sometimes seasons. But we all walk through times when we are exactly what these verses say. We gratify the cravings of our flesh following its desires and thoughts. So, when we read this this morning, let us not render that for people prior to Christ, but let us render it to ourselves, knowing that these verses apply to us and we are in them. This is us. And this is important because of what follows. I stopped reading in the middle of verse 3 the first time. This time I'm going to read all of verse flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Because that's us, because of the times we've lived according to the flesh and not the spirit, we are by nature deserving of wrath. Now, wrath is not a thing that we like to talk about. None of you got in the car today and said, what's the sermon about? I hope it's on wrath. That's fun. Maybe we can sneak some hell in there. We don't like talking about wrath. We don't like the reality that by our nature we deserve it. And I've laid some groundwork for this in this series, so I'm not going to belabor the point in that way here. But a few different times in the series, I've invited you to imagine what Jesus's attitude towards us could be and by all rights should be. That there's a creator God in the universe, in heaven, that creates the universe to share himself with it and with us. He creates us in his image to glory in him and for him to glory in us. And we mess it up with our sin and he sends his son to rectify the situation and we kill him. What could Jesus's right attitude be towards us? Of course it could be wrath. If you accept the Christian narrative, it only makes sense that Jesus would be wrathful towards us as would God for our rejection of him. And so by our very nature, we are objects of wrath. But let me tell you another reason why we are objects of wrath that's actually within this passage that I find very interesting this morning. This discourse ends in verse 10. Verse 10 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It's one that I remind you of often. It's one that I pray over my children. It's one that I pray for parents as they try to guide their children because this is our goal. And this is how this discourse ends in Ephesians chapter two, verse 10. Four, we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The way I memorized it was the ESV and I like the word workmanship. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that we might walk in them. So here's the idea, is that God created each of you specifically and on purpose. You were not an accident. He calls it his handiwork, his craftsmanship. You were not his throwaway. He did not whittle you and go, oh, look at that. Okay. He, you were his craftsmanship. You are artisanal. You're fancy. If you were bread, you would be inside two plastic wrappers. Okay. Not the one, like the fancy bread. He made you on purpose. He made you intentionally. You're good with people because God made you that way. You like to serve because God made you that way. You're a people pleaser because God made you that way. You're an extrovert because God made you an extrovert on purpose. You're an introvert because God made you an introvert on purpose. You're an omnivore because God made you an omnivore on purpose. Do you understand? You're big and imposing because God wanted you to be big and imposing. You're small and frail because God wanted you to be small and frail. You have a big, strong voice. You have a weak voice because God wanted those things. You're shy because God wanted you to be observant. You're outspoken and boisterous because God wanted dinner parties to go well for his children. Do you understand? Everything that you have was intentionally given to you and bestowed upon you by God. It is not an accident of evolution. It is not an accident of your parents falling in love. The Bible says that he knew us before we were knit in our mother's womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. So every ounce of you was made on purpose by God. You are not an accident or a collision or a coincidence of biology. You were intentionally made by your creator to be exactly who you are. And the reason he made you that way is for your good works that he prepared for you before time that you might walk in them. He knit you together the way he did because he has prepared a path for you to walk of good works and it is your job to be who you created you to, he created you to be so that you might walk in the good works that he determined for you before time, which is how we know that you are not an accident of biology or people falling in love in the seventies. Do you understand? So here's the thing. If that's what God did, if he made you on purpose, if he knit you in your mother's womb, if you were fearfully and wonderfully made, and when he made you, before time, he knew the good works he wanted you to walk in in 2025. And he crafted you in such a way to prepare you to walk that exact path that he has for you. Then let's understand this. When we live according to the flesh, we pervert creation and reject God and his intentions. When we take all those things in our alchemy, that amalgamations of gifts and strengths and weaknesses, and we use that for what we want and not what God wants. When we take all of those gifts and abilities and we leverage those for ourselves to acquire for ourselves whatever it is we might want, love, fame, attention, money, power, whatever it is. When we take those gifts, God's handiwork, and we leverage those things to live according to the flesh and what we want, rather than what God wants, we pervert creation. Or maybe even worse, maybe we don't take those gifts and abilities that God gives us and leverage them for our own good, nor do we leverage them for the good of God. We just ignore them and we numb ourselves and we do nothing. It's even worse. Revelation says that because you're neither good nor bad, but lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. It's even worse to ignore the ways in which we're created and use them for absolutely nothing. But when we live according to the flesh and its thoughts and desires, using everything that God's made us to be to make ourselves happy and to keep ourselves content, rather than using everything that God has given us and made us to be to build his kingdom and to live according to the spirit, this is important. We pervert God's perfect creation. And we reject God and his intentions simply by the way that we live. This is why we are objects of wrath. Because we've taken this good, wonderful thing that he gave us and we've used it for our own ends, and we've muddied it up, and we've mucked it up. So when that passage concludes, we are like them objects, by our nature, objects of wrath, that's why, because we deserve it. Now, if we understand that and we're there together, that's what makes verses 4 and 5 all the more impactful and resounding. They say this. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. So there's a lot there. But, that's the way the verse starts. But, I always say when you're reading your Bible and you see a therefore, you have to ask, what's it there for? Romans chapter 8 says, therefore. It starts out therefore. So why is that there? Because of chapters one through seven and what was covered there because of that, this, but counteracts what was just said. You were created by God. You are children of the flesh. You live according to his desires. You used to do that. You are, you are deserving object of his wrath. But in spite of that, because of his great love for us, and there's no love to compare that to in humanity than the love of that baby landing on the chest of my wife. And knowing you have never done a single thing for me, and I will die for you. Because of his great love for us. Last week, Aaron Winston did a great job talking about how God yearns for us from the inside out, this yearning love, this pursuing love that God has for us. And because of that love, because God loves us like that, he pours out his mercy grace and mercy, and many of you can define these, but so that we're on the same page, we understand what we're talking about. Mercy is when you do not receive a punishment that you have earned, that you deserve. Grace is when you receive a gift that you did not earn and you do not deserve. Because of these countervailing forces in God, and because of his great love for you, he was compelled to make a way for you. Because of his richness and mercy, God is only described as rich in two things, grace and mercy. Dane asserts in the book that being rich in mercy is the only time in the Bible that God is described as rich in anything, which I'm sure if I could talk to him, it would make sense. I'm not trying to pick on him. I wrote down, I was going to put it on the screen, that God is only rich in mercy, but then in the same passage, it was said because of the riches of his grace. I'm like, OK, well, he's rich in grace, too. So it's those two things, grace and mercy. And listen, I want to share this thought with you. His mercy expressed and personified by Jesus has literally brought us from death to life. His mercy and his grace, expressed and personified by Jesus, has literally brought us from death to life. So we were deserving of wrath, but God, because of his great love for us, because of his richness and mercy, made a way for us to be restored to him, made a way for us to be restored to our former glory. Made a way for us to live a life without sin. To be buried with him in death and be raised to walk in newness of life. To live according to the spirit. To live as a new creation, anticipating our heavenly bodies and being restored with him. He made a way for restitution and restoration. And he did that by sending his son to die on the cross for us. His son is the personification of his mercy. And we, most of us, have heard this dozens and dozens, if not thousands of times. And we give intellectual assent to it, but I'm not sure if it clicks in what that actually means because we're numb to it. And so I was trying to think of a way that we could get just maybe a glimpse of how impoverished our view of mercy might be. And I came up with this, so we'll see if it works. Let's pretend that somewhere in high school or college, you started smoking cigarettes. Now, who among us didn't have a brief smoking phase in college? Alright, we're not here to cast aspersions. But let's say that you picked up a habit in high school or college, and you've got a best friend, really good buddy. And you start to pick it up, your buddy doesn't really say anything, They keep hanging out with you. But they notice kind of an uptick. Like it used to just be like socially or on the golf course or whatever. But now it's a little bit more. And they go, hey, I'm noticing you're smoking a lot more lately. Maybe I'm not here to make you feel bad, but maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe that's not good for you. Maybe you can cut back a little bit. And you go, yeah, you know, I hear you. I know it's not good, but it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Like, I've got it under control. Okay. So a few more months or years go by, and you and your buddy are still around, and your buddy goes, hey, listen, you really haven't tapered back. Like, This is going to become a problem. And I don't want that for you. This is not healthy. It's not good for you. Love you. It's not good for you. Maybe you want to consider making some better choices about this. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you're right. I need to quit. And so you quit. But you quit for three, four days a week. And then you start sneaking them again. And your buddy smells you. And they love you. And they go, hey, are you back on the horse? Yeah, been firing up some lung darts. Sorry about that. And you get back into the habit. And the years go by. And every now and again, your buddy gently prods. He says, hey, you should stop that, man. That's not good for you. And then once you're up to a pack or two a day, it gets real bad, and your buddy convinces you to go to rehab. I don't know if they have rehab for smokers. I'm sure the health care apparatus has figured out a way to get money for that. I don't know if you can actually do that, but in this story, you do. You go to rehab. It's really serious. You get clean. You come back and you're off. You're not smoking for a while, but eventually you start back up again. Your buddy gets your friends and family around, and they implore you, please, you're killing yourself. You've got to stop doing this. Yeah, I know, you're right. There's tears. You feel terrible. And you stop the best you can. But before you know it, you're doing it again. And you're doing it again, and you know you shouldn't. You're hiding it from your buddy because you don't want to disappoint him. But you know you're killing yourself. And then one day, you're at your house. Your buddy happens to be over. You start having a coughing fit. The last thing you remember is you're on the ground coughing and you're having a hard time breathing. And your buddy calls the ambulance and you're trying to wave him off. It's fine, I don't need it. He says, yes, you do, you're dying. And then the next thing you know, you wake up and you're in a hospital bed. And you look down and there's a scar down the middle of your chest. And the doctor comes in and you go, what happened? The doctor said, well, you were in pretty bad shape. You were living through machines. You had died. What's this scar for? You needed a lung transplant. Did I get one? Yeah, you got a lung transplant. Whose lungs are in me? What happened? Those are your buddy's lungs. Well, if these are his, how is he alive? He's not. He said it was more important to him for you to live. Not only did he want you to live, but he wanted you to experience what it was to have lungs that have never smoked. He wanted you to be able to play with your kids with lungs that could breathe really well. He wanted you to be able to experience the rest of your life as if you had never made any of those mistakes that you insisted on. And he wanted to give his life to do that. If we can get ourselves there, maybe we can grab a taste of how impoverished our view is of God's mercy. Because the truth is, that's all of us. We live lives of the flesh. We do what we want. And Jesus, our buddy, in children's church, we tell them, Jesus is your forever friend. Your forever friend walks alongside you and says, hey, that's not good for you. Hey, you're killing yourself. Hey, you're hurting yourself. Hey, you should stop. Hey, we need to get friends and family involved because your sins are not helping you. And what to me is so powerful about that illustration is that in the smoking illustration, those are choices that you made. And he warned you against over and over and over again and you kept making them. And then you wake up and there's a scar. And your buddy wanted you to live life as if you had never made any of the mistakes you did previously. Every single one of us has a scar down the center of our chest. For where Jesus died for us, because he wanted us to live a life as if none of the mistakes we made previously applied to us anymore. And he gave his life so that we didn't have to. So that we can be with our families and our children and our loved ones and our friends in such a way that we know what it is to walk in true love with them because none of our past mistakes apply to us anymore. That is the richness of God's mercy. That is the richness of His grace. We are all of us scarred and have received that transplant. So that we might experience what life is without our sins dogging us all the time. That's the richness of God's undeserved mercy. And I think that Dane sums it up best in this quote. I'm going to read it and then I'm going to pray and we're going to move into communion. Dane says this, God's mercy. It means on that day when we stand before him quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had. Oh God, may that be true. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your mercy. Thank you for finding its personification in Jesus. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for yearning for us, for loving us, for lavishing your love upon us. God, we do not deserve it. We are by nature objects of wrath, a deserved and earned wrath, a deserved frustration and anger. And you watch us run ourselves into the ground and you die for us anyways. I pray that this morning we would have just a little bit more of a rich view of what your mercy is and what it means and how wonderful and miraculous it is. Help us walk in gratitude and humility towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, well, good morning, everybody. I see you all came at once, so I hope the sermon is good. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thank you for making grace a part of your Sunday. If you're watching us online, thank you for doing that. As we continue in our Gentle and Lowly series from the book Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, I hope it's touched you, moved your heart, compelled you towards Christ. Before I just jump in, I did want to acknowledge and praise God for the safe return of our Mexico team. We're glad that most of them are back with us. Some of y'all could have stayed in Mexico. It would have been fine with the rest of us. But for the most part, we're happy to have you. Karen, it was a good trip, I hear. Yeah. The other thing I'll tell you guys, just because we like to laugh at things, is I see Susie's here. Hi, Miss Susie. Susie Shank recently lost her husband, Mike, and we did the funeral here for that. That was just a few weeks ago. And Mike is a guy with my kind of sense of humor, so we got along very well. And he's a big Bills fan, and I'm a big Falcons fan. And last week week they played and that was the next game coming up on the schedule when I did the funeral service. It's possible that I said some disparaging things about the Bills in his service, which I was thrilled and delighted to get away with. Then the day of the game, I get a text from the deceased Mike Shank on my on my phone and I'm going what in the world and the text says this is a message from heaven go Bills screw the Falcons one of the better jokes that's ever been executed Suze that was fantastic I may have texted something back after our victory but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, that one was too good just to keep all to ourselves there. This morning, we, like I said, continue in our series, and we're going through that book, Gentle and Lowly, where we're looking at the heart of Christ. And there's a theme here that's building with the heart of Christ towards us. And next week is the final week of the series. And I'm going to land the plane in that theme. But as I was approaching this week, I chose the chapter that's entitled Rich in Mercy. It reminded me of this time in my life where I realized that my view of something, because what I want to compel us towards and where we want to land the plane today, I'll just tell you where we're going, is I want us to see how very impoverished our view of God's mercy is. And so I was trying to think of another time in my life. When did I realize, oh my gosh, I thought I understood what this was. And I really didn't until this moment. And it was, I thought I understood what love was until we had a kid. If you're a parent and you can remember back that far, you know that when your child is born, when your first child is born, there is this love that overtakes you that you never understood. And so when, when Jen and I were pregnant with Lily, like we knew that we were going to love this child. Obviously we're not psychopaths. We knew that we were going to love this kid. We knew that this was going to be a kind of love that we didn't understand. People would tell us you're going to love them so much, you're not going to believe it. And I would mentally assent to that. Yes. Yes, I'm sure that that is true. And you begin to wrap your mind around what it's like to have a child in your life and what it must be like to love them. But you really, nothing can really prepare you. You can't intellectually get there until you experience it. And I still remember the night and then the morning where we had Lily. I went to bed. Jen was very pregnant. And at about, and listen, Jen's not here this morning. I got a cold in the middle of the week and then I got over it and gave it to them. So all three of my family members are home now with a cold, sick. Jen texted me. I just made the children cry. I'm at my wits end. Please come home. Well, I got to preach, but I'll be there soon. So they're all home sick. So she's not going to know what I say here. And if I know my wife, she's not going to go back and listen to this. Okay. So this is, if is if I can trust you this is our secret she doesn't have to know I talked about this it's up to you guys jerks she her water we were sound asleep her water broke at 2 33 o'clock somewhere around there she got up got out of bed took shower. She didn't bother me. Took a shower, did her makeup, put on some nice clothes, put in earrings and a necklace. She was ready for dinner, man, at 3.30 in the morning when she woke me up. That's just the kind of girl she knew there was going to be some pictures made, you know? And so she had to be, she had to be ready. She wasn't going to be looking haggard at the, at the, at the, at the hospital. So she gets herself ready to go out to dinner at three 34 o'clock in the morning and then just gently jostles me. My water broke. We've got to go to the hospital. What? We go to the hospital. We're in labor. We is generous. She, she was very much in labor. I very much not. Um, and, and I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there next to her and we're trying to bring this baby into the world. And I'm, I'm Jen's, you know, in front of me and I'm in a chair facing this way. I'm looking at her face because I don't know, different husbands process this moment in different ways. I did not want to be facing the other way. I just, I want to be facing this way. So I was facing this way, and I'm just looking at her face. I'm holding her hand, doing the best I can to encourage her in this process. And we're sitting there. She's doing her part. And out comes this baby. And I can hear the baby crying. And then they, and it's Lily, and then they put Lily on Jen's chest. And Lily's little face is facing me. And now listen to me. I do not care what anybody says. There is no such thing as a cute newborn baby. Those things are gross and they look like space aliens. And something happens in your mind, I think from God and his sovereign design, that you in the moment as a parent, you think this is a precious child. It's not, it's disgusting. That's a gross, gross thing. But this crying, greasy alien gets placed on Jen's chest and not even looking at me because she can't look yet, just facing me. And I can see her face. And in that moment, it was like the Grinch happened in real life. My heart grew ten sizes. In that moment, I knew I would die for that little girl. And it took nothing. I'm getting worked up about it right now. It took nothing. I loved her so much with a love that I had never understood before. And for those of you, and for some of you, some of you really want to experience that love and you're not yet. And I'm so sorry because I know stuff like this is painful and I walked that journey for a while too. But before you have kids, people tell you you're going to love them. And you understand that you will. But when that space alien landed on Jim's chest, I have never felt more love in my life more instantly than I did then. Instantly, I would die for this kid. I would love her. Now my heart exists outside of my chest. And I was telling this to Kyle. He was our student pastor. Now he's our family pastor. And Aaron Winston, our former children's pastor, is now our discipleship pastor doing some other things. Some of y'all know that Kyle and I have been working together, been friends for 10 years plus. He worked for me at my previous church. And Kyle's like a little brother to me. I love him so much. And when he and his wife Ashlyn were pregnant, I was telling him, like, your heart's going to grow 10 sizes. Like, you're not ready for this. You're going to love this kid so much. And the kid's name now is Hayes, and I don't know how old Hayes is, a month and a half, two months, something like that. He might be a year old. I don't know. I'm bad. I'm bad with ages. And I told him, this is going to happen, man. And the day or the day after Hayes was born, I called him and he was crying. He said, you were right. You're right. I said, you understand it now? He goes, yeah, I understand. Your heart just, you realize how impoverished your view of love was because of how this overtakes your life all of a sudden. And then I remember when we were pregnant with John, once we started getting close to the date, I started feeling bad. I started feeling bad because I'm like, there's no way I'm going to love the second one like I loved the first one. There's no space left. And as a first child, I found that to be true. I found that to be true. Your love gradually diminishes the more children that you have. Faith and Phil Leverett, they're not even here. I'm picking on them. They've got five kids. They don't even know the fifth one's name. So I was already feeling bad because when I have John, when we had John, I was already kind of apologizing to him. Like, I'm sorry, kid. I don't know how to love you like I love Lily. I'm sure God will get me there. And then as soon as that space alien landed on my wife's chest, my heart grew again. And it expanded. And I would die for that one too. And I love it with my whole life. And there's nothing quite like that in life to acquaint you with what love really is. I realized in those moments I had an impoverished view of what I thought of was. And I bring that up because I believe, and Dane asserts in the book, that we have an impoverished view of God's mercy. We're aware of it. We're aware that God's mercy exists. Most of you in here, I would be surprised if anybody came in here this morning, even if you're just here visiting with family or you wandered in or this is your first time in church in 20 years and you consider yourself agnostic, whatever your situation is, I doubt anybody in here is surprised to hear that we as Christians, we ascribe mercy to God. We say that he is rich in mercy. We know God's a merciful God. But I'm not, and so we give mental assent to that truth, but I'm not sure that we really understand what his mercy is. And so let's see if we can't gain on it a little bit today. The way we're going to gain on it is to look in Ephesians, because Ephesians chapter two, we're just going to look at verses, we were going to look at verses 1 through 10, but we're just going to do 1 through 5. As I went through it this morning, I found a place to stop that I felt was more appropriate. So if you have a Bible, please open it up to Ephesians chapter 2. This is my favorite kind of sermon where we just go through the text and I kind of tell you how it hits me and hopefully hits us this week. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. You can open that up and we'll be in the text of Ephesians chapter two, verses one through five. Shoot, I wasn't planning on crying and make my nose run talking about my kids at the beginning. I should save that stuff for the end so I'm not sniffing the whole time. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul has this 10 verse discourse. That's one of the more famous passages in scripture. And he opens it like this. As for you, verse one, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Let's talk about this for a minute. Jim Price, would you mind giving me a tissue, please, sir? Thank you. It's going according to the flesh, gratifying its desires and thinking its thoughts. He's, he's describing a people who don't know Jesus. And because they don't know Jesus, they live according to the flesh in Pauline theology. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians. Paul two-thirds of the New Testament. Most of the letters in the New Testament were written by Paul. And so theologians have developed a theology. Oh, that's hilarious. Good. Someone apologize to Jim when he gets back from his very important errand. Jim, we found some. I'm so sorry. They were right behind here. I know. Go home. All right. Within those letters, theologians have developed a theology based around Paul. Anything that Paul did is Pauline, the Pauline epistles, Pauline theology, things like that. And so within Pauline theology, there's this idea of being dead in our transgressions and in our trespasses. And there is this idea that before we knew Jesus, we had no idea. We had no choice but to sin. We were creatures of the flesh. In Philippians, he says that they were, that their bellies were their Lord's. And they basically did whatever they craved and whatever they desired. And that's how he's describing people before they knew Jesus here in Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three. He's saying that we were dead in our transgressions because we just indulged in the flesh. There's life in the flesh in this theology, and there's life in the spirit. And life in the flesh is to live life as if God didn't exist, to just do whatever our nature wants to do. And life in the spirit is to live in light of the very real existence of God that's been infused in us and given us life and live according to God's desires and God's thoughts and God's standards. So when we're living according to the flesh, we're living according to our own standards and our own thoughts and our own desires. So think of it this way. Think of living according to the flesh is somewhat akin to living as an irresponsible college student. Okay. Now I'm not talking about the responsible college students, the ones that like go to class and take notes and study and care about their future and their GPA and are trying to get a good job or trying to get into a good grad school. I'm talking about students like me that didn't care about any of that. Students that just live for fun. What's the next fun thing we're going to do? What's the next hedonistic activity in which I can engage? And I don't want to paint the wrong picture of me as a college student because some of us, we think of irresponsible college student, our mind goes to partying and that's a thing. But that wasn't my thing. I went to Bible college. I was a pastoral ministries major. My rejection and hedonism looked like playing Madden instead of going to class or just going and playing Frisbee. Because in the early 2000s, you could not be a youth pastor if you could not throw a Frisbee. It was part of the deal. So if you were there at school, you're throwing Frisbees. You're doing all kinds of stuff, you're playing sports. I'm skipping class all the time. My GPA was incredibly low. You guys, you'll love this. I was one semester away from getting kicked out of my Bible college for poor chapel attendance, and then I became a pastor. How do you like that? And my thought is, make chapel better, and I want to go. You don't hear me guilting you into being here, do you? Some of my friends haven't been here for weeks. We all have ways in which we're irresponsible. And we remember those friends in college who were just, their Lord was their belly. They just kind of jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from activity to activity. They were unmoored by wisdom and rules and considerations of the future. They lived in the moment and they did what they wanted. And some of us were that person and some of us were friends with that person. But the reality is, in different times and ways, we've all been that person. All of us. There's nobody in this room who looks back on the last 5, 10, 25 plus years of their life and thinks to themselves, I pretty much nailed that. There was never a moment when I wavered from God's path. I can't think of a season in my life where I just meandered and I did what I want and I lived according to the flesh. Especially when we don't think of living according to the flesh simply as seeking pleasure. Because living according to the flesh can be to seek numbness or escape or stillness or comfort. And the reality of it is sometimes we did our sinning in college and then we get it out of our system. But sometimes we just figure out more nuanced ways to keep feeding that monster and frat parties become country club outings. And it's all the same motivation and it's all the same stuff. And it's still the same lack of discipline. It's the same lack of wisdom. We're still living according to the flesh. Our flesh has just found a way to adapt itself into acceptable adult society so we can still be responsible, productive members. But if we're being really, really honest with ourselves, we know we've all had seasons where when we look back at that time in our life, and maybe, maybe you're in one right now where if you're being honest, you're wandering, where you're living according to what you want to do, not what God wants you to do. We can remember times when we lived according to the flesh and its desires, and we jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from excitement to excitement, from numbness to numbness, from escape to escape. And we piddle our days away on our phone, dopamine-ing ourselves to death while we do nothing for the kingdom. There's nobody in here who hasn't had one of those seasons. And here's the thing that I want to point out. In this passage in Ephesians chapter 2, and those first verses, this is clearly a reference to people before they knew Jesus. He says, you were once like the others, following the prince of this world and the desires of your flesh. And the implication is, but now you know Jesus, and so you live according to the Spirit. And so it makes it seem like, well, before I knew Jesus, I messed up, and I lived according to the flesh, not according to the Spirit. I jumped from hedonism to hedonism, whatever it might be, and now I'm better, and now I'm saved, and now I live according to the Spirit. Except none of you in here have that experience, do you? If you've, let's do a show of hands. If you've been a Christian for over a decade, I would like for you to raise your hand right now. If in that decade, you've never once wandered away from God and lived according to the flesh. Raise your hand if since you got saved, miraculously, sin has not been a problem for you. I can't believe Bill Gentile didn't raise his hand for fun. Right? That's not our experience. But here's what's wonderful about that not being our experience is that wasn't Paul's either. And maybe the most human passage in the Bible at the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul says, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I do not want to do, I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And what he's just claimed in Romans 6 is we are no longer slaves to sin. We are free to walk in newness of life and live life in the spirit. And then in Romans 7, he laments that he can't do it. That if Paul were sitting in this room and I had asked that question, he wouldn't have raised his hand either because he continued to sin. So it's a human passage. And I love that phrase, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Because it's hard to be a Christian because we feel like we should be doing better and not living according to the flesh anymore and living according to the spirit. But we don't all the time. We have these pockets where we're living according to the spirit. And those are wonderful pockets and sometimes seasons. But we all walk through times when we are exactly what these verses say. We gratify the cravings of our flesh following its desires and thoughts. So, when we read this this morning, let us not render that for people prior to Christ, but let us render it to ourselves, knowing that these verses apply to us and we are in them. This is us. And this is important because of what follows. I stopped reading in the middle of verse 3 the first time. This time I'm going to read all of verse flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Because that's us, because of the times we've lived according to the flesh and not the spirit, we are by nature deserving of wrath. Now, wrath is not a thing that we like to talk about. None of you got in the car today and said, what's the sermon about? I hope it's on wrath. That's fun. Maybe we can sneak some hell in there. We don't like talking about wrath. We don't like the reality that by our nature we deserve it. And I've laid some groundwork for this in this series, so I'm not going to belabor the point in that way here. But a few different times in the series, I've invited you to imagine what Jesus's attitude towards us could be and by all rights should be. That there's a creator God in the universe, in heaven, that creates the universe to share himself with it and with us. He creates us in his image to glory in him and for him to glory in us. And we mess it up with our sin and he sends his son to rectify the situation and we kill him. What could Jesus's right attitude be towards us? Of course it could be wrath. If you accept the Christian narrative, it only makes sense that Jesus would be wrathful towards us as would God for our rejection of him. And so by our very nature, we are objects of wrath. But let me tell you another reason why we are objects of wrath that's actually within this passage that I find very interesting this morning. This discourse ends in verse 10. Verse 10 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It's one that I remind you of often. It's one that I pray over my children. It's one that I pray for parents as they try to guide their children because this is our goal. And this is how this discourse ends in Ephesians chapter two, verse 10. Four, we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The way I memorized it was the ESV and I like the word workmanship. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that we might walk in them. So here's the idea, is that God created each of you specifically and on purpose. You were not an accident. He calls it his handiwork, his craftsmanship. You were not his throwaway. He did not whittle you and go, oh, look at that. Okay. He, you were his craftsmanship. You are artisanal. You're fancy. If you were bread, you would be inside two plastic wrappers. Okay. Not the one, like the fancy bread. He made you on purpose. He made you intentionally. You're good with people because God made you that way. You like to serve because God made you that way. You're a people pleaser because God made you that way. You're an extrovert because God made you an extrovert on purpose. You're an introvert because God made you an introvert on purpose. You're an omnivore because God made you an omnivore on purpose. Do you understand? You're big and imposing because God wanted you to be big and imposing. You're small and frail because God wanted you to be small and frail. You have a big, strong voice. You have a weak voice because God wanted those things. You're shy because God wanted you to be observant. You're outspoken and boisterous because God wanted dinner parties to go well for his children. Do you understand? Everything that you have was intentionally given to you and bestowed upon you by God. It is not an accident of evolution. It is not an accident of your parents falling in love. The Bible says that he knew us before we were knit in our mother's womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. So every ounce of you was made on purpose by God. You are not an accident or a collision or a coincidence of biology. You were intentionally made by your creator to be exactly who you are. And the reason he made you that way is for your good works that he prepared for you before time that you might walk in them. He knit you together the way he did because he has prepared a path for you to walk of good works and it is your job to be who you created you to, he created you to be so that you might walk in the good works that he determined for you before time, which is how we know that you are not an accident of biology or people falling in love in the seventies. Do you understand? So here's the thing. If that's what God did, if he made you on purpose, if he knit you in your mother's womb, if you were fearfully and wonderfully made, and when he made you, before time, he knew the good works he wanted you to walk in in 2025. And he crafted you in such a way to prepare you to walk that exact path that he has for you. Then let's understand this. When we live according to the flesh, we pervert creation and reject God and his intentions. When we take all those things in our alchemy, that amalgamations of gifts and strengths and weaknesses, and we use that for what we want and not what God wants. When we take all of those gifts and abilities and we leverage those for ourselves to acquire for ourselves whatever it is we might want, love, fame, attention, money, power, whatever it is. When we take those gifts, God's handiwork, and we leverage those things to live according to the flesh and what we want, rather than what God wants, we pervert creation. Or maybe even worse, maybe we don't take those gifts and abilities that God gives us and leverage them for our own good, nor do we leverage them for the good of God. We just ignore them and we numb ourselves and we do nothing. It's even worse. Revelation says that because you're neither good nor bad, but lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. It's even worse to ignore the ways in which we're created and use them for absolutely nothing. But when we live according to the flesh and its thoughts and desires, using everything that God's made us to be to make ourselves happy and to keep ourselves content, rather than using everything that God has given us and made us to be to build his kingdom and to live according to the spirit, this is important. We pervert God's perfect creation. And we reject God and his intentions simply by the way that we live. This is why we are objects of wrath. Because we've taken this good, wonderful thing that he gave us and we've used it for our own ends, and we've muddied it up, and we've mucked it up. So when that passage concludes, we are like them objects, by our nature, objects of wrath, that's why, because we deserve it. Now, if we understand that and we're there together, that's what makes verses 4 and 5 all the more impactful and resounding. They say this. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. So there's a lot there. But, that's the way the verse starts. But, I always say when you're reading your Bible and you see a therefore, you have to ask, what's it there for? Romans chapter 8 says, therefore. It starts out therefore. So why is that there? Because of chapters one through seven and what was covered there because of that, this, but counteracts what was just said. You were created by God. You are children of the flesh. You live according to his desires. You used to do that. You are, you are deserving object of his wrath. But in spite of that, because of his great love for us, and there's no love to compare that to in humanity than the love of that baby landing on the chest of my wife. And knowing you have never done a single thing for me, and I will die for you. Because of his great love for us. Last week, Aaron Winston did a great job talking about how God yearns for us from the inside out, this yearning love, this pursuing love that God has for us. And because of that love, because God loves us like that, he pours out his mercy grace and mercy, and many of you can define these, but so that we're on the same page, we understand what we're talking about. Mercy is when you do not receive a punishment that you have earned, that you deserve. Grace is when you receive a gift that you did not earn and you do not deserve. Because of these countervailing forces in God, and because of his great love for you, he was compelled to make a way for you. Because of his richness and mercy, God is only described as rich in two things, grace and mercy. Dane asserts in the book that being rich in mercy is the only time in the Bible that God is described as rich in anything, which I'm sure if I could talk to him, it would make sense. I'm not trying to pick on him. I wrote down, I was going to put it on the screen, that God is only rich in mercy, but then in the same passage, it was said because of the riches of his grace. I'm like, OK, well, he's rich in grace, too. So it's those two things, grace and mercy. And listen, I want to share this thought with you. His mercy expressed and personified by Jesus has literally brought us from death to life. His mercy and his grace, expressed and personified by Jesus, has literally brought us from death to life. So we were deserving of wrath, but God, because of his great love for us, because of his richness and mercy, made a way for us to be restored to him, made a way for us to be restored to our former glory. Made a way for us to live a life without sin. To be buried with him in death and be raised to walk in newness of life. To live according to the spirit. To live as a new creation, anticipating our heavenly bodies and being restored with him. He made a way for restitution and restoration. And he did that by sending his son to die on the cross for us. His son is the personification of his mercy. And we, most of us, have heard this dozens and dozens, if not thousands of times. And we give intellectual assent to it, but I'm not sure if it clicks in what that actually means because we're numb to it. And so I was trying to think of a way that we could get just maybe a glimpse of how impoverished our view of mercy might be. And I came up with this, so we'll see if it works. Let's pretend that somewhere in high school or college, you started smoking cigarettes. Now, who among us didn't have a brief smoking phase in college? Alright, we're not here to cast aspersions. But let's say that you picked up a habit in high school or college, and you've got a best friend, really good buddy. And you start to pick it up, your buddy doesn't really say anything, They keep hanging out with you. But they notice kind of an uptick. Like it used to just be like socially or on the golf course or whatever. But now it's a little bit more. And they go, hey, I'm noticing you're smoking a lot more lately. Maybe I'm not here to make you feel bad, but maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe that's not good for you. Maybe you can cut back a little bit. And you go, yeah, you know, I hear you. I know it's not good, but it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Like, I've got it under control. Okay. So a few more months or years go by, and you and your buddy are still around, and your buddy goes, hey, listen, you really haven't tapered back. Like, This is going to become a problem. And I don't want that for you. This is not healthy. It's not good for you. Love you. It's not good for you. Maybe you want to consider making some better choices about this. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you're right. I need to quit. And so you quit. But you quit for three, four days a week. And then you start sneaking them again. And your buddy smells you. And they love you. And they go, hey, are you back on the horse? Yeah, been firing up some lung darts. Sorry about that. And you get back into the habit. And the years go by. And every now and again, your buddy gently prods. He says, hey, you should stop that, man. That's not good for you. And then once you're up to a pack or two a day, it gets real bad, and your buddy convinces you to go to rehab. I don't know if they have rehab for smokers. I'm sure the health care apparatus has figured out a way to get money for that. I don't know if you can actually do that, but in this story, you do. You go to rehab. It's really serious. You get clean. You come back and you're off. You're not smoking for a while, but eventually you start back up again. Your buddy gets your friends and family around, and they implore you, please, you're killing yourself. You've got to stop doing this. Yeah, I know, you're right. There's tears. You feel terrible. And you stop the best you can. But before you know it, you're doing it again. And you're doing it again, and you know you shouldn't. You're hiding it from your buddy because you don't want to disappoint him. But you know you're killing yourself. And then one day, you're at your house. Your buddy happens to be over. You start having a coughing fit. The last thing you remember is you're on the ground coughing and you're having a hard time breathing. And your buddy calls the ambulance and you're trying to wave him off. It's fine, I don't need it. He says, yes, you do, you're dying. And then the next thing you know, you wake up and you're in a hospital bed. And you look down and there's a scar down the middle of your chest. And the doctor comes in and you go, what happened? The doctor said, well, you were in pretty bad shape. You were living through machines. You had died. What's this scar for? You needed a lung transplant. Did I get one? Yeah, you got a lung transplant. Whose lungs are in me? What happened? Those are your buddy's lungs. Well, if these are his, how is he alive? He's not. He said it was more important to him for you to live. Not only did he want you to live, but he wanted you to experience what it was to have lungs that have never smoked. He wanted you to be able to play with your kids with lungs that could breathe really well. He wanted you to be able to experience the rest of your life as if you had never made any of those mistakes that you insisted on. And he wanted to give his life to do that. If we can get ourselves there, maybe we can grab a taste of how impoverished our view is of God's mercy. Because the truth is, that's all of us. We live lives of the flesh. We do what we want. And Jesus, our buddy, in children's church, we tell them, Jesus is your forever friend. Your forever friend walks alongside you and says, hey, that's not good for you. Hey, you're killing yourself. Hey, you're hurting yourself. Hey, you should stop. Hey, we need to get friends and family involved because your sins are not helping you. And what to me is so powerful about that illustration is that in the smoking illustration, those are choices that you made. And he warned you against over and over and over again and you kept making them. And then you wake up and there's a scar. And your buddy wanted you to live life as if you had never made any of the mistakes you did previously. Every single one of us has a scar down the center of our chest. For where Jesus died for us, because he wanted us to live a life as if none of the mistakes we made previously applied to us anymore. And he gave his life so that we didn't have to. So that we can be with our families and our children and our loved ones and our friends in such a way that we know what it is to walk in true love with them because none of our past mistakes apply to us anymore. That is the richness of God's mercy. That is the richness of His grace. We are all of us scarred and have received that transplant. So that we might experience what life is without our sins dogging us all the time. That's the richness of God's undeserved mercy. And I think that Dane sums it up best in this quote. I'm going to read it and then I'm going to pray and we're going to move into communion. Dane says this, God's mercy. It means on that day when we stand before him quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had. Oh God, may that be true. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your mercy. Thank you for finding its personification in Jesus. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for yearning for us, for loving us, for lavishing your love upon us. God, we do not deserve it. We are by nature objects of wrath, a deserved and earned wrath, a deserved frustration and anger. And you watch us run ourselves into the ground and you die for us anyways. I pray that this morning we would have just a little bit more of a rich view of what your mercy is and what it means and how wonderful and miraculous it is. Help us walk in gratitude and humility towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, well, good morning, everybody. I see you all came at once, so I hope the sermon is good. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thank you for making grace a part of your Sunday. If you're watching us online, thank you for doing that. As we continue in our Gentle and Lowly series from the book Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, I hope it's touched you, moved your heart, compelled you towards Christ. Before I just jump in, I did want to acknowledge and praise God for the safe return of our Mexico team. We're glad that most of them are back with us. Some of y'all could have stayed in Mexico. It would have been fine with the rest of us. But for the most part, we're happy to have you. Karen, it was a good trip, I hear. Yeah. The other thing I'll tell you guys, just because we like to laugh at things, is I see Susie's here. Hi, Miss Susie. Susie Shank recently lost her husband, Mike, and we did the funeral here for that. That was just a few weeks ago. And Mike is a guy with my kind of sense of humor, so we got along very well. And he's a big Bills fan, and I'm a big Falcons fan. And last week week they played and that was the next game coming up on the schedule when I did the funeral service. It's possible that I said some disparaging things about the Bills in his service, which I was thrilled and delighted to get away with. Then the day of the game, I get a text from the deceased Mike Shank on my on my phone and I'm going what in the world and the text says this is a message from heaven go Bills screw the Falcons one of the better jokes that's ever been executed Suze that was fantastic I may have texted something back after our victory but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, that one was too good just to keep all to ourselves there. This morning, we, like I said, continue in our series, and we're going through that book, Gentle and Lowly, where we're looking at the heart of Christ. And there's a theme here that's building with the heart of Christ towards us. And next week is the final week of the series. And I'm going to land the plane in that theme. But as I was approaching this week, I chose the chapter that's entitled Rich in Mercy. It reminded me of this time in my life where I realized that my view of something, because what I want to compel us towards and where we want to land the plane today, I'll just tell you where we're going, is I want us to see how very impoverished our view of God's mercy is. And so I was trying to think of another time in my life. When did I realize, oh my gosh, I thought I understood what this was. And I really didn't until this moment. And it was, I thought I understood what love was until we had a kid. If you're a parent and you can remember back that far, you know that when your child is born, when your first child is born, there is this love that overtakes you that you never understood. And so when, when Jen and I were pregnant with Lily, like we knew that we were going to love this child. Obviously we're not psychopaths. We knew that we were going to love this kid. We knew that this was going to be a kind of love that we didn't understand. People would tell us you're going to love them so much, you're not going to believe it. And I would mentally assent to that. Yes. Yes, I'm sure that that is true. And you begin to wrap your mind around what it's like to have a child in your life and what it must be like to love them. But you really, nothing can really prepare you. You can't intellectually get there until you experience it. And I still remember the night and then the morning where we had Lily. I went to bed. Jen was very pregnant. And at about, and listen, Jen's not here this morning. I got a cold in the middle of the week and then I got over it and gave it to them. So all three of my family members are home now with a cold, sick. Jen texted me. I just made the children cry. I'm at my wits end. Please come home. Well, I got to preach, but I'll be there soon. So they're all home sick. So she's not going to know what I say here. And if I know my wife, she's not going to go back and listen to this. Okay. So this is, if is if I can trust you this is our secret she doesn't have to know I talked about this it's up to you guys jerks she her water we were sound asleep her water broke at 2 33 o'clock somewhere around there she got up got out of bed took shower. She didn't bother me. Took a shower, did her makeup, put on some nice clothes, put in earrings and a necklace. She was ready for dinner, man, at 3.30 in the morning when she woke me up. That's just the kind of girl she knew there was going to be some pictures made, you know? And so she had to be, she had to be ready. She wasn't going to be looking haggard at the, at the, at the, at the hospital. So she gets herself ready to go out to dinner at three 34 o'clock in the morning and then just gently jostles me. My water broke. We've got to go to the hospital. What? We go to the hospital. We're in labor. We is generous. She, she was very much in labor. I very much not. Um, and, and I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there next to her and we're trying to bring this baby into the world. And I'm, I'm Jen's, you know, in front of me and I'm in a chair facing this way. I'm looking at her face because I don't know, different husbands process this moment in different ways. I did not want to be facing the other way. I just, I want to be facing this way. So I was facing this way, and I'm just looking at her face. I'm holding her hand, doing the best I can to encourage her in this process. And we're sitting there. She's doing her part. And out comes this baby. And I can hear the baby crying. And then they, and it's Lily, and then they put Lily on Jen's chest. And Lily's little face is facing me. And now listen to me. I do not care what anybody says. There is no such thing as a cute newborn baby. Those things are gross and they look like space aliens. And something happens in your mind, I think from God and his sovereign design, that you in the moment as a parent, you think this is a precious child. It's not, it's disgusting. That's a gross, gross thing. But this crying, greasy alien gets placed on Jen's chest and not even looking at me because she can't look yet, just facing me. And I can see her face. And in that moment, it was like the Grinch happened in real life. My heart grew ten sizes. In that moment, I knew I would die for that little girl. And it took nothing. I'm getting worked up about it right now. It took nothing. I loved her so much with a love that I had never understood before. And for those of you, and for some of you, some of you really want to experience that love and you're not yet. And I'm so sorry because I know stuff like this is painful and I walked that journey for a while too. But before you have kids, people tell you you're going to love them. And you understand that you will. But when that space alien landed on Jim's chest, I have never felt more love in my life more instantly than I did then. Instantly, I would die for this kid. I would love her. Now my heart exists outside of my chest. And I was telling this to Kyle. He was our student pastor. Now he's our family pastor. And Aaron Winston, our former children's pastor, is now our discipleship pastor doing some other things. Some of y'all know that Kyle and I have been working together, been friends for 10 years plus. He worked for me at my previous church. And Kyle's like a little brother to me. I love him so much. And when he and his wife Ashlyn were pregnant, I was telling him, like, your heart's going to grow 10 sizes. Like, you're not ready for this. You're going to love this kid so much. And the kid's name now is Hayes, and I don't know how old Hayes is, a month and a half, two months, something like that. He might be a year old. I don't know. I'm bad. I'm bad with ages. And I told him, this is going to happen, man. And the day or the day after Hayes was born, I called him and he was crying. He said, you were right. You're right. I said, you understand it now? He goes, yeah, I understand. Your heart just, you realize how impoverished your view of love was because of how this overtakes your life all of a sudden. And then I remember when we were pregnant with John, once we started getting close to the date, I started feeling bad. I started feeling bad because I'm like, there's no way I'm going to love the second one like I loved the first one. There's no space left. And as a first child, I found that to be true. I found that to be true. Your love gradually diminishes the more children that you have. Faith and Phil Leverett, they're not even here. I'm picking on them. They've got five kids. They don't even know the fifth one's name. So I was already feeling bad because when I have John, when we had John, I was already kind of apologizing to him. Like, I'm sorry, kid. I don't know how to love you like I love Lily. I'm sure God will get me there. And then as soon as that space alien landed on my wife's chest, my heart grew again. And it expanded. And I would die for that one too. And I love it with my whole life. And there's nothing quite like that in life to acquaint you with what love really is. I realized in those moments I had an impoverished view of what I thought of was. And I bring that up because I believe, and Dane asserts in the book, that we have an impoverished view of God's mercy. We're aware of it. We're aware that God's mercy exists. Most of you in here, I would be surprised if anybody came in here this morning, even if you're just here visiting with family or you wandered in or this is your first time in church in 20 years and you consider yourself agnostic, whatever your situation is, I doubt anybody in here is surprised to hear that we as Christians, we ascribe mercy to God. We say that he is rich in mercy. We know God's a merciful God. But I'm not, and so we give mental assent to that truth, but I'm not sure that we really understand what his mercy is. And so let's see if we can't gain on it a little bit today. The way we're going to gain on it is to look in Ephesians, because Ephesians chapter two, we're just going to look at verses, we were going to look at verses 1 through 10, but we're just going to do 1 through 5. As I went through it this morning, I found a place to stop that I felt was more appropriate. So if you have a Bible, please open it up to Ephesians chapter 2. This is my favorite kind of sermon where we just go through the text and I kind of tell you how it hits me and hopefully hits us this week. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. You can open that up and we'll be in the text of Ephesians chapter two, verses one through five. Shoot, I wasn't planning on crying and make my nose run talking about my kids at the beginning. I should save that stuff for the end so I'm not sniffing the whole time. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul has this 10 verse discourse. That's one of the more famous passages in scripture. And he opens it like this. As for you, verse one, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Let's talk about this for a minute. Jim Price, would you mind giving me a tissue, please, sir? Thank you. It's going according to the flesh, gratifying its desires and thinking its thoughts. He's, he's describing a people who don't know Jesus. And because they don't know Jesus, they live according to the flesh in Pauline theology. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians. Paul two-thirds of the New Testament. Most of the letters in the New Testament were written by Paul. And so theologians have developed a theology. Oh, that's hilarious. Good. Someone apologize to Jim when he gets back from his very important errand. Jim, we found some. I'm so sorry. They were right behind here. I know. Go home. All right. Within those letters, theologians have developed a theology based around Paul. Anything that Paul did is Pauline, the Pauline epistles, Pauline theology, things like that. And so within Pauline theology, there's this idea of being dead in our transgressions and in our trespasses. And there is this idea that before we knew Jesus, we had no idea. We had no choice but to sin. We were creatures of the flesh. In Philippians, he says that they were, that their bellies were their Lord's. And they basically did whatever they craved and whatever they desired. And that's how he's describing people before they knew Jesus here in Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three. He's saying that we were dead in our transgressions because we just indulged in the flesh. There's life in the flesh in this theology, and there's life in the spirit. And life in the flesh is to live life as if God didn't exist, to just do whatever our nature wants to do. And life in the spirit is to live in light of the very real existence of God that's been infused in us and given us life and live according to God's desires and God's thoughts and God's standards. So when we're living according to the flesh, we're living according to our own standards and our own thoughts and our own desires. So think of it this way. Think of living according to the flesh is somewhat akin to living as an irresponsible college student. Okay. Now I'm not talking about the responsible college students, the ones that like go to class and take notes and study and care about their future and their GPA and are trying to get a good job or trying to get into a good grad school. I'm talking about students like me that didn't care about any of that. Students that just live for fun. What's the next fun thing we're going to do? What's the next hedonistic activity in which I can engage? And I don't want to paint the wrong picture of me as a college student because some of us, we think of irresponsible college student, our mind goes to partying and that's a thing. But that wasn't my thing. I went to Bible college. I was a pastoral ministries major. My rejection and hedonism looked like playing Madden instead of going to class or just going and playing Frisbee. Because in the early 2000s, you could not be a youth pastor if you could not throw a Frisbee. It was part of the deal. So if you were there at school, you're throwing Frisbees. You're doing all kinds of stuff, you're playing sports. I'm skipping class all the time. My GPA was incredibly low. You guys, you'll love this. I was one semester away from getting kicked out of my Bible college for poor chapel attendance, and then I became a pastor. How do you like that? And my thought is, make chapel better, and I want to go. You don't hear me guilting you into being here, do you? Some of my friends haven't been here for weeks. We all have ways in which we're irresponsible. And we remember those friends in college who were just, their Lord was their belly. They just kind of jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from activity to activity. They were unmoored by wisdom and rules and considerations of the future. They lived in the moment and they did what they wanted. And some of us were that person and some of us were friends with that person. But the reality is, in different times and ways, we've all been that person. All of us. There's nobody in this room who looks back on the last 5, 10, 25 plus years of their life and thinks to themselves, I pretty much nailed that. There was never a moment when I wavered from God's path. I can't think of a season in my life where I just meandered and I did what I want and I lived according to the flesh. Especially when we don't think of living according to the flesh simply as seeking pleasure. Because living according to the flesh can be to seek numbness or escape or stillness or comfort. And the reality of it is sometimes we did our sinning in college and then we get it out of our system. But sometimes we just figure out more nuanced ways to keep feeding that monster and frat parties become country club outings. And it's all the same motivation and it's all the same stuff. And it's still the same lack of discipline. It's the same lack of wisdom. We're still living according to the flesh. Our flesh has just found a way to adapt itself into acceptable adult society so we can still be responsible, productive members. But if we're being really, really honest with ourselves, we know we've all had seasons where when we look back at that time in our life, and maybe, maybe you're in one right now where if you're being honest, you're wandering, where you're living according to what you want to do, not what God wants you to do. We can remember times when we lived according to the flesh and its desires, and we jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from excitement to excitement, from numbness to numbness, from escape to escape. And we piddle our days away on our phone, dopamine-ing ourselves to death while we do nothing for the kingdom. There's nobody in here who hasn't had one of those seasons. And here's the thing that I want to point out. In this passage in Ephesians chapter 2, and those first verses, this is clearly a reference to people before they knew Jesus. He says, you were once like the others, following the prince of this world and the desires of your flesh. And the implication is, but now you know Jesus, and so you live according to the Spirit. And so it makes it seem like, well, before I knew Jesus, I messed up, and I lived according to the flesh, not according to the Spirit. I jumped from hedonism to hedonism, whatever it might be, and now I'm better, and now I'm saved, and now I live according to the Spirit. Except none of you in here have that experience, do you? If you've, let's do a show of hands. If you've been a Christian for over a decade, I would like for you to raise your hand right now. If in that decade, you've never once wandered away from God and lived according to the flesh. Raise your hand if since you got saved, miraculously, sin has not been a problem for you. I can't believe Bill Gentile didn't raise his hand for fun. Right? That's not our experience. But here's what's wonderful about that not being our experience is that wasn't Paul's either. And maybe the most human passage in the Bible at the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul says, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I do not want to do, I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And what he's just claimed in Romans 6 is we are no longer slaves to sin. We are free to walk in newness of life and live life in the spirit. And then in Romans 7, he laments that he can't do it. That if Paul were sitting in this room and I had asked that question, he wouldn't have raised his hand either because he continued to sin. So it's a human passage. And I love that phrase, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Because it's hard to be a Christian because we feel like we should be doing better and not living according to the flesh anymore and living according to the spirit. But we don't all the time. We have these pockets where we're living according to the spirit. And those are wonderful pockets and sometimes seasons. But we all walk through times when we are exactly what these verses say. We gratify the cravings of our flesh following its desires and thoughts. So, when we read this this morning, let us not render that for people prior to Christ, but let us render it to ourselves, knowing that these verses apply to us and we are in them. This is us. And this is important because of what follows. I stopped reading in the middle of verse 3 the first time. This time I'm going to read all of verse flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Because that's us, because of the times we've lived according to the flesh and not the spirit, we are by nature deserving of wrath. Now, wrath is not a thing that we like to talk about. None of you got in the car today and said, what's the sermon about? I hope it's on wrath. That's fun. Maybe we can sneak some hell in there. We don't like talking about wrath. We don't like the reality that by our nature we deserve it. And I've laid some groundwork for this in this series, so I'm not going to belabor the point in that way here. But a few different times in the series, I've invited you to imagine what Jesus's attitude towards us could be and by all rights should be. That there's a creator God in the universe, in heaven, that creates the universe to share himself with it and with us. He creates us in his image to glory in him and for him to glory in us. And we mess it up with our sin and he sends his son to rectify the situation and we kill him. What could Jesus's right attitude be towards us? Of course it could be wrath. If you accept the Christian narrative, it only makes sense that Jesus would be wrathful towards us as would God for our rejection of him. And so by our very nature, we are objects of wrath. But let me tell you another reason why we are objects of wrath that's actually within this passage that I find very interesting this morning. This discourse ends in verse 10. Verse 10 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It's one that I remind you of often. It's one that I pray over my children. It's one that I pray for parents as they try to guide their children because this is our goal. And this is how this discourse ends in Ephesians chapter two, verse 10. Four, we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The way I memorized it was the ESV and I like the word workmanship. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that we might walk in them. So here's the idea, is that God created each of you specifically and on purpose. You were not an accident. He calls it his handiwork, his craftsmanship. You were not his throwaway. He did not whittle you and go, oh, look at that. Okay. He, you were his craftsmanship. You are artisanal. You're fancy. If you were bread, you would be inside two plastic wrappers. Okay. Not the one, like the fancy bread. He made you on purpose. He made you intentionally. You're good with people because God made you that way. You like to serve because God made you that way. You're a people pleaser because God made you that way. You're an extrovert because God made you an extrovert on purpose. You're an introvert because God made you an introvert on purpose. You're an omnivore because God made you an omnivore on purpose. Do you understand? You're big and imposing because God wanted you to be big and imposing. You're small and frail because God wanted you to be small and frail. You have a big, strong voice. You have a weak voice because God wanted those things. You're shy because God wanted you to be observant. You're outspoken and boisterous because God wanted dinner parties to go well for his children. Do you understand? Everything that you have was intentionally given to you and bestowed upon you by God. It is not an accident of evolution. It is not an accident of your parents falling in love. The Bible says that he knew us before we were knit in our mother's womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. So every ounce of you was made on purpose by God. You are not an accident or a collision or a coincidence of biology. You were intentionally made by your creator to be exactly who you are. And the reason he made you that way is for your good works that he prepared for you before time that you might walk in them. He knit you together the way he did because he has prepared a path for you to walk of good works and it is your job to be who you created you to, he created you to be so that you might walk in the good works that he determined for you before time, which is how we know that you are not an accident of biology or people falling in love in the seventies. Do you understand? So here's the thing. If that's what God did, if he made you on purpose, if he knit you in your mother's womb, if you were fearfully and wonderfully made, and when he made you, before time, he knew the good works he wanted you to walk in in 2025. And he crafted you in such a way to prepare you to walk that exact path that he has for you. Then let's understand this. When we live according to the flesh, we pervert creation and reject God and his intentions. When we take all those things in our alchemy, that amalgamations of gifts and strengths and weaknesses, and we use that for what we want and not what God wants. When we take all of those gifts and abilities and we leverage those for ourselves to acquire for ourselves whatever it is we might want, love, fame, attention, money, power, whatever it is. When we take those gifts, God's handiwork, and we leverage those things to live according to the flesh and what we want, rather than what God wants, we pervert creation. Or maybe even worse, maybe we don't take those gifts and abilities that God gives us and leverage them for our own good, nor do we leverage them for the good of God. We just ignore them and we numb ourselves and we do nothing. It's even worse. Revelation says that because you're neither good nor bad, but lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. It's even worse to ignore the ways in which we're created and use them for absolutely nothing. But when we live according to the flesh and its thoughts and desires, using everything that God's made us to be to make ourselves happy and to keep ourselves content, rather than using everything that God has given us and made us to be to build his kingdom and to live according to the spirit, this is important. We pervert God's perfect creation. And we reject God and his intentions simply by the way that we live. This is why we are objects of wrath. Because we've taken this good, wonderful thing that he gave us and we've used it for our own ends, and we've muddied it up, and we've mucked it up. So when that passage concludes, we are like them objects, by our nature, objects of wrath, that's why, because we deserve it. Now, if we understand that and we're there together, that's what makes verses 4 and 5 all the more impactful and resounding. They say this. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. So there's a lot there. But, that's the way the verse starts. But, I always say when you're reading your Bible and you see a therefore, you have to ask, what's it there for? Romans chapter 8 says, therefore. It starts out therefore. So why is that there? Because of chapters one through seven and what was covered there because of that, this, but counteracts what was just said. You were created by God. You are children of the flesh. You live according to his desires. You used to do that. You are, you are deserving object of his wrath. But in spite of that, because of his great love for us, and there's no love to compare that to in humanity than the love of that baby landing on the chest of my wife. And knowing you have never done a single thing for me, and I will die for you. Because of his great love for us. Last week, Aaron Winston did a great job talking about how God yearns for us from the inside out, this yearning love, this pursuing love that God has for us. And because of that love, because God loves us like that, he pours out his mercy grace and mercy, and many of you can define these, but so that we're on the same page, we understand what we're talking about. Mercy is when you do not receive a punishment that you have earned, that you deserve. Grace is when you receive a gift that you did not earn and you do not deserve. Because of these countervailing forces in God, and because of his great love for you, he was compelled to make a way for you. Because of his richness and mercy, God is only described as rich in two things, grace and mercy. Dane asserts in the book that being rich in mercy is the only time in the Bible that God is described as rich in anything, which I'm sure if I could talk to him, it would make sense. I'm not trying to pick on him. I wrote down, I was going to put it on the screen, that God is only rich in mercy, but then in the same passage, it was said because of the riches of his grace. I'm like, OK, well, he's rich in grace, too. So it's those two things, grace and mercy. And listen, I want to share this thought with you. His mercy expressed and personified by Jesus has literally brought us from death to life. His mercy and his grace, expressed and personified by Jesus, has literally brought us from death to life. So we were deserving of wrath, but God, because of his great love for us, because of his richness and mercy, made a way for us to be restored to him, made a way for us to be restored to our former glory. Made a way for us to live a life without sin. To be buried with him in death and be raised to walk in newness of life. To live according to the spirit. To live as a new creation, anticipating our heavenly bodies and being restored with him. He made a way for restitution and restoration. And he did that by sending his son to die on the cross for us. His son is the personification of his mercy. And we, most of us, have heard this dozens and dozens, if not thousands of times. And we give intellectual assent to it, but I'm not sure if it clicks in what that actually means because we're numb to it. And so I was trying to think of a way that we could get just maybe a glimpse of how impoverished our view of mercy might be. And I came up with this, so we'll see if it works. Let's pretend that somewhere in high school or college, you started smoking cigarettes. Now, who among us didn't have a brief smoking phase in college? Alright, we're not here to cast aspersions. But let's say that you picked up a habit in high school or college, and you've got a best friend, really good buddy. And you start to pick it up, your buddy doesn't really say anything, They keep hanging out with you. But they notice kind of an uptick. Like it used to just be like socially or on the golf course or whatever. But now it's a little bit more. And they go, hey, I'm noticing you're smoking a lot more lately. Maybe I'm not here to make you feel bad, but maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe that's not good for you. Maybe you can cut back a little bit. And you go, yeah, you know, I hear you. I know it's not good, but it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Like, I've got it under control. Okay. So a few more months or years go by, and you and your buddy are still around, and your buddy goes, hey, listen, you really haven't tapered back. Like, This is going to become a problem. And I don't want that for you. This is not healthy. It's not good for you. Love you. It's not good for you. Maybe you want to consider making some better choices about this. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you're right. I need to quit. And so you quit. But you quit for three, four days a week. And then you start sneaking them again. And your buddy smells you. And they love you. And they go, hey, are you back on the horse? Yeah, been firing up some lung darts. Sorry about that. And you get back into the habit. And the years go by. And every now and again, your buddy gently prods. He says, hey, you should stop that, man. That's not good for you. And then once you're up to a pack or two a day, it gets real bad, and your buddy convinces you to go to rehab. I don't know if they have rehab for smokers. I'm sure the health care apparatus has figured out a way to get money for that. I don't know if you can actually do that, but in this story, you do. You go to rehab. It's really serious. You get clean. You come back and you're off. You're not smoking for a while, but eventually you start back up again. Your buddy gets your friends and family around, and they implore you, please, you're killing yourself. You've got to stop doing this. Yeah, I know, you're right. There's tears. You feel terrible. And you stop the best you can. But before you know it, you're doing it again. And you're doing it again, and you know you shouldn't. You're hiding it from your buddy because you don't want to disappoint him. But you know you're killing yourself. And then one day, you're at your house. Your buddy happens to be over. You start having a coughing fit. The last thing you remember is you're on the ground coughing and you're having a hard time breathing. And your buddy calls the ambulance and you're trying to wave him off. It's fine, I don't need it. He says, yes, you do, you're dying. And then the next thing you know, you wake up and you're in a hospital bed. And you look down and there's a scar down the middle of your chest. And the doctor comes in and you go, what happened? The doctor said, well, you were in pretty bad shape. You were living through machines. You had died. What's this scar for? You needed a lung transplant. Did I get one? Yeah, you got a lung transplant. Whose lungs are in me? What happened? Those are your buddy's lungs. Well, if these are his, how is he alive? He's not. He said it was more important to him for you to live. Not only did he want you to live, but he wanted you to experience what it was to have lungs that have never smoked. He wanted you to be able to play with your kids with lungs that could breathe really well. He wanted you to be able to experience the rest of your life as if you had never made any of those mistakes that you insisted on. And he wanted to give his life to do that. If we can get ourselves there, maybe we can grab a taste of how impoverished our view is of God's mercy. Because the truth is, that's all of us. We live lives of the flesh. We do what we want. And Jesus, our buddy, in children's church, we tell them, Jesus is your forever friend. Your forever friend walks alongside you and says, hey, that's not good for you. Hey, you're killing yourself. Hey, you're hurting yourself. Hey, you should stop. Hey, we need to get friends and family involved because your sins are not helping you. And what to me is so powerful about that illustration is that in the smoking illustration, those are choices that you made. And he warned you against over and over and over again and you kept making them. And then you wake up and there's a scar. And your buddy wanted you to live life as if you had never made any of the mistakes you did previously. Every single one of us has a scar down the center of our chest. For where Jesus died for us, because he wanted us to live a life as if none of the mistakes we made previously applied to us anymore. And he gave his life so that we didn't have to. So that we can be with our families and our children and our loved ones and our friends in such a way that we know what it is to walk in true love with them because none of our past mistakes apply to us anymore. That is the richness of God's mercy. That is the richness of His grace. We are all of us scarred and have received that transplant. So that we might experience what life is without our sins dogging us all the time. That's the richness of God's undeserved mercy. And I think that Dane sums it up best in this quote. I'm going to read it and then I'm going to pray and we're going to move into communion. Dane says this, God's mercy. It means on that day when we stand before him quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had. Oh God, may that be true. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your mercy. Thank you for finding its personification in Jesus. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for yearning for us, for loving us, for lavishing your love upon us. God, we do not deserve it. We are by nature objects of wrath, a deserved and earned wrath, a deserved frustration and anger. And you watch us run ourselves into the ground and you die for us anyways. I pray that this morning we would have just a little bit more of a rich view of what your mercy is and what it means and how wonderful and miraculous it is. Help us walk in gratitude and humility towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, well, good morning, everybody. I see you all came at once, so I hope the sermon is good. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thank you for making grace a part of your Sunday. If you're watching us online, thank you for doing that. As we continue in our Gentle and Lowly series from the book Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, I hope it's touched you, moved your heart, compelled you towards Christ. Before I just jump in, I did want to acknowledge and praise God for the safe return of our Mexico team. We're glad that most of them are back with us. Some of y'all could have stayed in Mexico. It would have been fine with the rest of us. But for the most part, we're happy to have you. Karen, it was a good trip, I hear. Yeah. The other thing I'll tell you guys, just because we like to laugh at things, is I see Susie's here. Hi, Miss Susie. Susie Shank recently lost her husband, Mike, and we did the funeral here for that. That was just a few weeks ago. And Mike is a guy with my kind of sense of humor, so we got along very well. And he's a big Bills fan, and I'm a big Falcons fan. And last week week they played and that was the next game coming up on the schedule when I did the funeral service. It's possible that I said some disparaging things about the Bills in his service, which I was thrilled and delighted to get away with. Then the day of the game, I get a text from the deceased Mike Shank on my on my phone and I'm going what in the world and the text says this is a message from heaven go Bills screw the Falcons one of the better jokes that's ever been executed Suze that was fantastic I may have texted something back after our victory but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, that one was too good just to keep all to ourselves there. This morning, we, like I said, continue in our series, and we're going through that book, Gentle and Lowly, where we're looking at the heart of Christ. And there's a theme here that's building with the heart of Christ towards us. And next week is the final week of the series. And I'm going to land the plane in that theme. But as I was approaching this week, I chose the chapter that's entitled Rich in Mercy. It reminded me of this time in my life where I realized that my view of something, because what I want to compel us towards and where we want to land the plane today, I'll just tell you where we're going, is I want us to see how very impoverished our view of God's mercy is. And so I was trying to think of another time in my life. When did I realize, oh my gosh, I thought I understood what this was. And I really didn't until this moment. And it was, I thought I understood what love was until we had a kid. If you're a parent and you can remember back that far, you know that when your child is born, when your first child is born, there is this love that overtakes you that you never understood. And so when, when Jen and I were pregnant with Lily, like we knew that we were going to love this child. Obviously we're not psychopaths. We knew that we were going to love this kid. We knew that this was going to be a kind of love that we didn't understand. People would tell us you're going to love them so much, you're not going to believe it. And I would mentally assent to that. Yes. Yes, I'm sure that that is true. And you begin to wrap your mind around what it's like to have a child in your life and what it must be like to love them. But you really, nothing can really prepare you. You can't intellectually get there until you experience it. And I still remember the night and then the morning where we had Lily. I went to bed. Jen was very pregnant. And at about, and listen, Jen's not here this morning. I got a cold in the middle of the week and then I got over it and gave it to them. So all three of my family members are home now with a cold, sick. Jen texted me. I just made the children cry. I'm at my wits end. Please come home. Well, I got to preach, but I'll be there soon. So they're all home sick. So she's not going to know what I say here. And if I know my wife, she's not going to go back and listen to this. Okay. So this is, if is if I can trust you this is our secret she doesn't have to know I talked about this it's up to you guys jerks she her water we were sound asleep her water broke at 2 33 o'clock somewhere around there she got up got out of bed took shower. She didn't bother me. Took a shower, did her makeup, put on some nice clothes, put in earrings and a necklace. She was ready for dinner, man, at 3.30 in the morning when she woke me up. That's just the kind of girl she knew there was going to be some pictures made, you know? And so she had to be, she had to be ready. She wasn't going to be looking haggard at the, at the, at the, at the hospital. So she gets herself ready to go out to dinner at three 34 o'clock in the morning and then just gently jostles me. My water broke. We've got to go to the hospital. What? We go to the hospital. We're in labor. We is generous. She, she was very much in labor. I very much not. Um, and, and I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there next to her and we're trying to bring this baby into the world. And I'm, I'm Jen's, you know, in front of me and I'm in a chair facing this way. I'm looking at her face because I don't know, different husbands process this moment in different ways. I did not want to be facing the other way. I just, I want to be facing this way. So I was facing this way, and I'm just looking at her face. I'm holding her hand, doing the best I can to encourage her in this process. And we're sitting there. She's doing her part. And out comes this baby. And I can hear the baby crying. And then they, and it's Lily, and then they put Lily on Jen's chest. And Lily's little face is facing me. And now listen to me. I do not care what anybody says. There is no such thing as a cute newborn baby. Those things are gross and they look like space aliens. And something happens in your mind, I think from God and his sovereign design, that you in the moment as a parent, you think this is a precious child. It's not, it's disgusting. That's a gross, gross thing. But this crying, greasy alien gets placed on Jen's chest and not even looking at me because she can't look yet, just facing me. And I can see her face. And in that moment, it was like the Grinch happened in real life. My heart grew ten sizes. In that moment, I knew I would die for that little girl. And it took nothing. I'm getting worked up about it right now. It took nothing. I loved her so much with a love that I had never understood before. And for those of you, and for some of you, some of you really want to experience that love and you're not yet. And I'm so sorry because I know stuff like this is painful and I walked that journey for a while too. But before you have kids, people tell you you're going to love them. And you understand that you will. But when that space alien landed on Jim's chest, I have never felt more love in my life more instantly than I did then. Instantly, I would die for this kid. I would love her. Now my heart exists outside of my chest. And I was telling this to Kyle. He was our student pastor. Now he's our family pastor. And Aaron Winston, our former children's pastor, is now our discipleship pastor doing some other things. Some of y'all know that Kyle and I have been working together, been friends for 10 years plus. He worked for me at my previous church. And Kyle's like a little brother to me. I love him so much. And when he and his wife Ashlyn were pregnant, I was telling him, like, your heart's going to grow 10 sizes. Like, you're not ready for this. You're going to love this kid so much. And the kid's name now is Hayes, and I don't know how old Hayes is, a month and a half, two months, something like that. He might be a year old. I don't know. I'm bad. I'm bad with ages. And I told him, this is going to happen, man. And the day or the day after Hayes was born, I called him and he was crying. He said, you were right. You're right. I said, you understand it now? He goes, yeah, I understand. Your heart just, you realize how impoverished your view of love was because of how this overtakes your life all of a sudden. And then I remember when we were pregnant with John, once we started getting close to the date, I started feeling bad. I started feeling bad because I'm like, there's no way I'm going to love the second one like I loved the first one. There's no space left. And as a first child, I found that to be true. I found that to be true. Your love gradually diminishes the more children that you have. Faith and Phil Leverett, they're not even here. I'm picking on them. They've got five kids. They don't even know the fifth one's name. So I was already feeling bad because when I have John, when we had John, I was already kind of apologizing to him. Like, I'm sorry, kid. I don't know how to love you like I love Lily. I'm sure God will get me there. And then as soon as that space alien landed on my wife's chest, my heart grew again. And it expanded. And I would die for that one too. And I love it with my whole life. And there's nothing quite like that in life to acquaint you with what love really is. I realized in those moments I had an impoverished view of what I thought of was. And I bring that up because I believe, and Dane asserts in the book, that we have an impoverished view of God's mercy. We're aware of it. We're aware that God's mercy exists. Most of you in here, I would be surprised if anybody came in here this morning, even if you're just here visiting with family or you wandered in or this is your first time in church in 20 years and you consider yourself agnostic, whatever your situation is, I doubt anybody in here is surprised to hear that we as Christians, we ascribe mercy to God. We say that he is rich in mercy. We know God's a merciful God. But I'm not, and so we give mental assent to that truth, but I'm not sure that we really understand what his mercy is. And so let's see if we can't gain on it a little bit today. The way we're going to gain on it is to look in Ephesians, because Ephesians chapter two, we're just going to look at verses, we were going to look at verses 1 through 10, but we're just going to do 1 through 5. As I went through it this morning, I found a place to stop that I felt was more appropriate. So if you have a Bible, please open it up to Ephesians chapter 2. This is my favorite kind of sermon where we just go through the text and I kind of tell you how it hits me and hopefully hits us this week. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. You can open that up and we'll be in the text of Ephesians chapter two, verses one through five. Shoot, I wasn't planning on crying and make my nose run talking about my kids at the beginning. I should save that stuff for the end so I'm not sniffing the whole time. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul has this 10 verse discourse. That's one of the more famous passages in scripture. And he opens it like this. As for you, verse one, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Let's talk about this for a minute. Jim Price, would you mind giving me a tissue, please, sir? Thank you. It's going according to the flesh, gratifying its desires and thinking its thoughts. He's, he's describing a people who don't know Jesus. And because they don't know Jesus, they live according to the flesh in Pauline theology. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians. Paul two-thirds of the New Testament. Most of the letters in the New Testament were written by Paul. And so theologians have developed a theology. Oh, that's hilarious. Good. Someone apologize to Jim when he gets back from his very important errand. Jim, we found some. I'm so sorry. They were right behind here. I know. Go home. All right. Within those letters, theologians have developed a theology based around Paul. Anything that Paul did is Pauline, the Pauline epistles, Pauline theology, things like that. And so within Pauline theology, there's this idea of being dead in our transgressions and in our trespasses. And there is this idea that before we knew Jesus, we had no idea. We had no choice but to sin. We were creatures of the flesh. In Philippians, he says that they were, that their bellies were their Lord's. And they basically did whatever they craved and whatever they desired. And that's how he's describing people before they knew Jesus here in Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three. He's saying that we were dead in our transgressions because we just indulged in the flesh. There's life in the flesh in this theology, and there's life in the spirit. And life in the flesh is to live life as if God didn't exist, to just do whatever our nature wants to do. And life in the spirit is to live in light of the very real existence of God that's been infused in us and given us life and live according to God's desires and God's thoughts and God's standards. So when we're living according to the flesh, we're living according to our own standards and our own thoughts and our own desires. So think of it this way. Think of living according to the flesh is somewhat akin to living as an irresponsible college student. Okay. Now I'm not talking about the responsible college students, the ones that like go to class and take notes and study and care about their future and their GPA and are trying to get a good job or trying to get into a good grad school. I'm talking about students like me that didn't care about any of that. Students that just live for fun. What's the next fun thing we're going to do? What's the next hedonistic activity in which I can engage? And I don't want to paint the wrong picture of me as a college student because some of us, we think of irresponsible college student, our mind goes to partying and that's a thing. But that wasn't my thing. I went to Bible college. I was a pastoral ministries major. My rejection and hedonism looked like playing Madden instead of going to class or just going and playing Frisbee. Because in the early 2000s, you could not be a youth pastor if you could not throw a Frisbee. It was part of the deal. So if you were there at school, you're throwing Frisbees. You're doing all kinds of stuff, you're playing sports. I'm skipping class all the time. My GPA was incredibly low. You guys, you'll love this. I was one semester away from getting kicked out of my Bible college for poor chapel attendance, and then I became a pastor. How do you like that? And my thought is, make chapel better, and I want to go. You don't hear me guilting you into being here, do you? Some of my friends haven't been here for weeks. We all have ways in which we're irresponsible. And we remember those friends in college who were just, their Lord was their belly. They just kind of jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from activity to activity. They were unmoored by wisdom and rules and considerations of the future. They lived in the moment and they did what they wanted. And some of us were that person and some of us were friends with that person. But the reality is, in different times and ways, we've all been that person. All of us. There's nobody in this room who looks back on the last 5, 10, 25 plus years of their life and thinks to themselves, I pretty much nailed that. There was never a moment when I wavered from God's path. I can't think of a season in my life where I just meandered and I did what I want and I lived according to the flesh. Especially when we don't think of living according to the flesh simply as seeking pleasure. Because living according to the flesh can be to seek numbness or escape or stillness or comfort. And the reality of it is sometimes we did our sinning in college and then we get it out of our system. But sometimes we just figure out more nuanced ways to keep feeding that monster and frat parties become country club outings. And it's all the same motivation and it's all the same stuff. And it's still the same lack of discipline. It's the same lack of wisdom. We're still living according to the flesh. Our flesh has just found a way to adapt itself into acceptable adult society so we can still be responsible, productive members. But if we're being really, really honest with ourselves, we know we've all had seasons where when we look back at that time in our life, and maybe, maybe you're in one right now where if you're being honest, you're wandering, where you're living according to what you want to do, not what God wants you to do. We can remember times when we lived according to the flesh and its desires, and we jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from excitement to excitement, from numbness to numbness, from escape to escape. And we piddle our days away on our phone, dopamine-ing ourselves to death while we do nothing for the kingdom. There's nobody in here who hasn't had one of those seasons. And here's the thing that I want to point out. In this passage in Ephesians chapter 2, and those first verses, this is clearly a reference to people before they knew Jesus. He says, you were once like the others, following the prince of this world and the desires of your flesh. And the implication is, but now you know Jesus, and so you live according to the Spirit. And so it makes it seem like, well, before I knew Jesus, I messed up, and I lived according to the flesh, not according to the Spirit. I jumped from hedonism to hedonism, whatever it might be, and now I'm better, and now I'm saved, and now I live according to the Spirit. Except none of you in here have that experience, do you? If you've, let's do a show of hands. If you've been a Christian for over a decade, I would like for you to raise your hand right now. If in that decade, you've never once wandered away from God and lived according to the flesh. Raise your hand if since you got saved, miraculously, sin has not been a problem for you. I can't believe Bill Gentile didn't raise his hand for fun. Right? That's not our experience. But here's what's wonderful about that not being our experience is that wasn't Paul's either. And maybe the most human passage in the Bible at the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul says, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I do not want to do, I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And what he's just claimed in Romans 6 is we are no longer slaves to sin. We are free to walk in newness of life and live life in the spirit. And then in Romans 7, he laments that he can't do it. That if Paul were sitting in this room and I had asked that question, he wouldn't have raised his hand either because he continued to sin. So it's a human passage. And I love that phrase, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Because it's hard to be a Christian because we feel like we should be doing better and not living according to the flesh anymore and living according to the spirit. But we don't all the time. We have these pockets where we're living according to the spirit. And those are wonderful pockets and sometimes seasons. But we all walk through times when we are exactly what these verses say. We gratify the cravings of our flesh following its desires and thoughts. So, when we read this this morning, let us not render that for people prior to Christ, but let us render it to ourselves, knowing that these verses apply to us and we are in them. This is us. And this is important because of what follows. I stopped reading in the middle of verse 3 the first time. This time I'm going to read all of verse flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Because that's us, because of the times we've lived according to the flesh and not the spirit, we are by nature deserving of wrath. Now, wrath is not a thing that we like to talk about. None of you got in the car today and said, what's the sermon about? I hope it's on wrath. That's fun. Maybe we can sneak some hell in there. We don't like talking about wrath. We don't like the reality that by our nature we deserve it. And I've laid some groundwork for this in this series, so I'm not going to belabor the point in that way here. But a few different times in the series, I've invited you to imagine what Jesus's attitude towards us could be and by all rights should be. That there's a creator God in the universe, in heaven, that creates the universe to share himself with it and with us. He creates us in his image to glory in him and for him to glory in us. And we mess it up with our sin and he sends his son to rectify the situation and we kill him. What could Jesus's right attitude be towards us? Of course it could be wrath. If you accept the Christian narrative, it only makes sense that Jesus would be wrathful towards us as would God for our rejection of him. And so by our very nature, we are objects of wrath. But let me tell you another reason why we are objects of wrath that's actually within this passage that I find very interesting this morning. This discourse ends in verse 10. Verse 10 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It's one that I remind you of often. It's one that I pray over my children. It's one that I pray for parents as they try to guide their children because this is our goal. And this is how this discourse ends in Ephesians chapter two, verse 10. Four, we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The way I memorized it was the ESV and I like the word workmanship. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that we might walk in them. So here's the idea, is that God created each of you specifically and on purpose. You were not an accident. He calls it his handiwork, his craftsmanship. You were not his throwaway. He did not whittle you and go, oh, look at that. Okay. He, you were his craftsmanship. You are artisanal. You're fancy. If you were bread, you would be inside two plastic wrappers. Okay. Not the one, like the fancy bread. He made you on purpose. He made you intentionally. You're good with people because God made you that way. You like to serve because God made you that way. You're a people pleaser because God made you that way. You're an extrovert because God made you an extrovert on purpose. You're an introvert because God made you an introvert on purpose. You're an omnivore because God made you an omnivore on purpose. Do you understand? You're big and imposing because God wanted you to be big and imposing. You're small and frail because God wanted you to be small and frail. You have a big, strong voice. You have a weak voice because God wanted those things. You're shy because God wanted you to be observant. You're outspoken and boisterous because God wanted dinner parties to go well for his children. Do you understand? Everything that you have was intentionally given to you and bestowed upon you by God. It is not an accident of evolution. It is not an accident of your parents falling in love. The Bible says that he knew us before we were knit in our mother's womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. So every ounce of you was made on purpose by God. You are not an accident or a collision or a coincidence of biology. You were intentionally made by your creator to be exactly who you are. And the reason he made you that way is for your good works that he prepared for you before time that you might walk in them. He knit you together the way he did because he has prepared a path for you to walk of good works and it is your job to be who you created you to, he created you to be so that you might walk in the good works that he determined for you before time, which is how we know that you are not an accident of biology or people falling in love in the seventies. Do you understand? So here's the thing. If that's what God did, if he made you on purpose, if he knit you in your mother's womb, if you were fearfully and wonderfully made, and when he made you, before time, he knew the good works he wanted you to walk in in 2025. And he crafted you in such a way to prepare you to walk that exact path that he has for you. Then let's understand this. When we live according to the flesh, we pervert creation and reject God and his intentions. When we take all those things in our alchemy, that amalgamations of gifts and strengths and weaknesses, and we use that for what we want and not what God wants. When we take all of those gifts and abilities and we leverage those for ourselves to acquire for ourselves whatever it is we might want, love, fame, attention, money, power, whatever it is. When we take those gifts, God's handiwork, and we leverage those things to live according to the flesh and what we want, rather than what God wants, we pervert creation. Or maybe even worse, maybe we don't take those gifts and abilities that God gives us and leverage them for our own good, nor do we leverage them for the good of God. We just ignore them and we numb ourselves and we do nothing. It's even worse. Revelation says that because you're neither good nor bad, but lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. It's even worse to ignore the ways in which we're created and use them for absolutely nothing. But when we live according to the flesh and its thoughts and desires, using everything that God's made us to be to make ourselves happy and to keep ourselves content, rather than using everything that God has given us and made us to be to build his kingdom and to live according to the spirit, this is important. We pervert God's perfect creation. And we reject God and his intentions simply by the way that we live. This is why we are objects of wrath. Because we've taken this good, wonderful thing that he gave us and we've used it for our own ends, and we've muddied it up, and we've mucked it up. So when that passage concludes, we are like them objects, by our nature, objects of wrath, that's why, because we deserve it. Now, if we understand that and we're there together, that's what makes verses 4 and 5 all the more impactful and resounding. They say this. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. So there's a lot there. But, that's the way the verse starts. But, I always say when you're reading your Bible and you see a therefore, you have to ask, what's it there for? Romans chapter 8 says, therefore. It starts out therefore. So why is that there? Because of chapters one through seven and what was covered there because of that, this, but counteracts what was just said. You were created by God. You are children of the flesh. You live according to his desires. You used to do that. You are, you are deserving object of his wrath. But in spite of that, because of his great love for us, and there's no love to compare that to in humanity than the love of that baby landing on the chest of my wife. And knowing you have never done a single thing for me, and I will die for you. Because of his great love for us. Last week, Aaron Winston did a great job talking about how God yearns for us from the inside out, this yearning love, this pursuing love that God has for us. And because of that love, because God loves us like that, he pours out his mercy grace and mercy, and many of you can define these, but so that we're on the same page, we understand what we're talking about. Mercy is when you do not receive a punishment that you have earned, that you deserve. Grace is when you receive a gift that you did not earn and you do not deserve. Because of these countervailing forces in God, and because of his great love for you, he was compelled to make a way for you. Because of his richness and mercy, God is only described as rich in two things, grace and mercy. Dane asserts in the book that being rich in mercy is the only time in the Bible that God is described as rich in anything, which I'm sure if I could talk to him, it would make sense. I'm not trying to pick on him. I wrote down, I was going to put it on the screen, that God is only rich in mercy, but then in the same passage, it was said because of the riches of his grace. I'm like, OK, well, he's rich in grace, too. So it's those two things, grace and mercy. And listen, I want to share this thought with you. His mercy expressed and personified by Jesus has literally brought us from death to life. His mercy and his grace, expressed and personified by Jesus, has literally brought us from death to life. So we were deserving of wrath, but God, because of his great love for us, because of his richness and mercy, made a way for us to be restored to him, made a way for us to be restored to our former glory. Made a way for us to live a life without sin. To be buried with him in death and be raised to walk in newness of life. To live according to the spirit. To live as a new creation, anticipating our heavenly bodies and being restored with him. He made a way for restitution and restoration. And he did that by sending his son to die on the cross for us. His son is the personification of his mercy. And we, most of us, have heard this dozens and dozens, if not thousands of times. And we give intellectual assent to it, but I'm not sure if it clicks in what that actually means because we're numb to it. And so I was trying to think of a way that we could get just maybe a glimpse of how impoverished our view of mercy might be. And I came up with this, so we'll see if it works. Let's pretend that somewhere in high school or college, you started smoking cigarettes. Now, who among us didn't have a brief smoking phase in college? Alright, we're not here to cast aspersions. But let's say that you picked up a habit in high school or college, and you've got a best friend, really good buddy. And you start to pick it up, your buddy doesn't really say anything, They keep hanging out with you. But they notice kind of an uptick. Like it used to just be like socially or on the golf course or whatever. But now it's a little bit more. And they go, hey, I'm noticing you're smoking a lot more lately. Maybe I'm not here to make you feel bad, but maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe that's not good for you. Maybe you can cut back a little bit. And you go, yeah, you know, I hear you. I know it's not good, but it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Like, I've got it under control. Okay. So a few more months or years go by, and you and your buddy are still around, and your buddy goes, hey, listen, you really haven't tapered back. Like, This is going to become a problem. And I don't want that for you. This is not healthy. It's not good for you. Love you. It's not good for you. Maybe you want to consider making some better choices about this. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you're right. I need to quit. And so you quit. But you quit for three, four days a week. And then you start sneaking them again. And your buddy smells you. And they love you. And they go, hey, are you back on the horse? Yeah, been firing up some lung darts. Sorry about that. And you get back into the habit. And the years go by. And every now and again, your buddy gently prods. He says, hey, you should stop that, man. That's not good for you. And then once you're up to a pack or two a day, it gets real bad, and your buddy convinces you to go to rehab. I don't know if they have rehab for smokers. I'm sure the health care apparatus has figured out a way to get money for that. I don't know if you can actually do that, but in this story, you do. You go to rehab. It's really serious. You get clean. You come back and you're off. You're not smoking for a while, but eventually you start back up again. Your buddy gets your friends and family around, and they implore you, please, you're killing yourself. You've got to stop doing this. Yeah, I know, you're right. There's tears. You feel terrible. And you stop the best you can. But before you know it, you're doing it again. And you're doing it again, and you know you shouldn't. You're hiding it from your buddy because you don't want to disappoint him. But you know you're killing yourself. And then one day, you're at your house. Your buddy happens to be over. You start having a coughing fit. The last thing you remember is you're on the ground coughing and you're having a hard time breathing. And your buddy calls the ambulance and you're trying to wave him off. It's fine, I don't need it. He says, yes, you do, you're dying. And then the next thing you know, you wake up and you're in a hospital bed. And you look down and there's a scar down the middle of your chest. And the doctor comes in and you go, what happened? The doctor said, well, you were in pretty bad shape. You were living through machines. You had died. What's this scar for? You needed a lung transplant. Did I get one? Yeah, you got a lung transplant. Whose lungs are in me? What happened? Those are your buddy's lungs. Well, if these are his, how is he alive? He's not. He said it was more important to him for you to live. Not only did he want you to live, but he wanted you to experience what it was to have lungs that have never smoked. He wanted you to be able to play with your kids with lungs that could breathe really well. He wanted you to be able to experience the rest of your life as if you had never made any of those mistakes that you insisted on. And he wanted to give his life to do that. If we can get ourselves there, maybe we can grab a taste of how impoverished our view is of God's mercy. Because the truth is, that's all of us. We live lives of the flesh. We do what we want. And Jesus, our buddy, in children's church, we tell them, Jesus is your forever friend. Your forever friend walks alongside you and says, hey, that's not good for you. Hey, you're killing yourself. Hey, you're hurting yourself. Hey, you should stop. Hey, we need to get friends and family involved because your sins are not helping you. And what to me is so powerful about that illustration is that in the smoking illustration, those are choices that you made. And he warned you against over and over and over again and you kept making them. And then you wake up and there's a scar. And your buddy wanted you to live life as if you had never made any of the mistakes you did previously. Every single one of us has a scar down the center of our chest. For where Jesus died for us, because he wanted us to live a life as if none of the mistakes we made previously applied to us anymore. And he gave his life so that we didn't have to. So that we can be with our families and our children and our loved ones and our friends in such a way that we know what it is to walk in true love with them because none of our past mistakes apply to us anymore. That is the richness of God's mercy. That is the richness of His grace. We are all of us scarred and have received that transplant. So that we might experience what life is without our sins dogging us all the time. That's the richness of God's undeserved mercy. And I think that Dane sums it up best in this quote. I'm going to read it and then I'm going to pray and we're going to move into communion. Dane says this, God's mercy. It means on that day when we stand before him quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had. Oh God, may that be true. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your mercy. Thank you for finding its personification in Jesus. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for yearning for us, for loving us, for lavishing your love upon us. God, we do not deserve it. We are by nature objects of wrath, a deserved and earned wrath, a deserved frustration and anger. And you watch us run ourselves into the ground and you die for us anyways. I pray that this morning we would have just a little bit more of a rich view of what your mercy is and what it means and how wonderful and miraculous it is. Help us walk in gratitude and humility towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, well, good morning, everybody. I see you all came at once, so I hope the sermon is good. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thank you for making grace a part of your Sunday. If you're watching us online, thank you for doing that. As we continue in our Gentle and Lowly series from the book Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, I hope it's touched you, moved your heart, compelled you towards Christ. Before I just jump in, I did want to acknowledge and praise God for the safe return of our Mexico team. We're glad that most of them are back with us. Some of y'all could have stayed in Mexico. It would have been fine with the rest of us. But for the most part, we're happy to have you. Karen, it was a good trip, I hear. Yeah. The other thing I'll tell you guys, just because we like to laugh at things, is I see Susie's here. Hi, Miss Susie. Susie Shank recently lost her husband, Mike, and we did the funeral here for that. That was just a few weeks ago. And Mike is a guy with my kind of sense of humor, so we got along very well. And he's a big Bills fan, and I'm a big Falcons fan. And last week week they played and that was the next game coming up on the schedule when I did the funeral service. It's possible that I said some disparaging things about the Bills in his service, which I was thrilled and delighted to get away with. Then the day of the game, I get a text from the deceased Mike Shank on my on my phone and I'm going what in the world and the text says this is a message from heaven go Bills screw the Falcons one of the better jokes that's ever been executed Suze that was fantastic I may have texted something back after our victory but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, that one was too good just to keep all to ourselves there. This morning, we, like I said, continue in our series, and we're going through that book, Gentle and Lowly, where we're looking at the heart of Christ. And there's a theme here that's building with the heart of Christ towards us. And next week is the final week of the series. And I'm going to land the plane in that theme. But as I was approaching this week, I chose the chapter that's entitled Rich in Mercy. It reminded me of this time in my life where I realized that my view of something, because what I want to compel us towards and where we want to land the plane today, I'll just tell you where we're going, is I want us to see how very impoverished our view of God's mercy is. And so I was trying to think of another time in my life. When did I realize, oh my gosh, I thought I understood what this was. And I really didn't until this moment. And it was, I thought I understood what love was until we had a kid. If you're a parent and you can remember back that far, you know that when your child is born, when your first child is born, there is this love that overtakes you that you never understood. And so when, when Jen and I were pregnant with Lily, like we knew that we were going to love this child. Obviously we're not psychopaths. We knew that we were going to love this kid. We knew that this was going to be a kind of love that we didn't understand. People would tell us you're going to love them so much, you're not going to believe it. And I would mentally assent to that. Yes. Yes, I'm sure that that is true. And you begin to wrap your mind around what it's like to have a child in your life and what it must be like to love them. But you really, nothing can really prepare you. You can't intellectually get there until you experience it. And I still remember the night and then the morning where we had Lily. I went to bed. Jen was very pregnant. And at about, and listen, Jen's not here this morning. I got a cold in the middle of the week and then I got over it and gave it to them. So all three of my family members are home now with a cold, sick. Jen texted me. I just made the children cry. I'm at my wits end. Please come home. Well, I got to preach, but I'll be there soon. So they're all home sick. So she's not going to know what I say here. And if I know my wife, she's not going to go back and listen to this. Okay. So this is, if is if I can trust you this is our secret she doesn't have to know I talked about this it's up to you guys jerks she her water we were sound asleep her water broke at 2 33 o'clock somewhere around there she got up got out of bed took shower. She didn't bother me. Took a shower, did her makeup, put on some nice clothes, put in earrings and a necklace. She was ready for dinner, man, at 3.30 in the morning when she woke me up. That's just the kind of girl she knew there was going to be some pictures made, you know? And so she had to be, she had to be ready. She wasn't going to be looking haggard at the, at the, at the, at the hospital. So she gets herself ready to go out to dinner at three 34 o'clock in the morning and then just gently jostles me. My water broke. We've got to go to the hospital. What? We go to the hospital. We're in labor. We is generous. She, she was very much in labor. I very much not. Um, and, and I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there next to her and we're trying to bring this baby into the world. And I'm, I'm Jen's, you know, in front of me and I'm in a chair facing this way. I'm looking at her face because I don't know, different husbands process this moment in different ways. I did not want to be facing the other way. I just, I want to be facing this way. So I was facing this way, and I'm just looking at her face. I'm holding her hand, doing the best I can to encourage her in this process. And we're sitting there. She's doing her part. And out comes this baby. And I can hear the baby crying. And then they, and it's Lily, and then they put Lily on Jen's chest. And Lily's little face is facing me. And now listen to me. I do not care what anybody says. There is no such thing as a cute newborn baby. Those things are gross and they look like space aliens. And something happens in your mind, I think from God and his sovereign design, that you in the moment as a parent, you think this is a precious child. It's not, it's disgusting. That's a gross, gross thing. But this crying, greasy alien gets placed on Jen's chest and not even looking at me because she can't look yet, just facing me. And I can see her face. And in that moment, it was like the Grinch happened in real life. My heart grew ten sizes. In that moment, I knew I would die for that little girl. And it took nothing. I'm getting worked up about it right now. It took nothing. I loved her so much with a love that I had never understood before. And for those of you, and for some of you, some of you really want to experience that love and you're not yet. And I'm so sorry because I know stuff like this is painful and I walked that journey for a while too. But before you have kids, people tell you you're going to love them. And you understand that you will. But when that space alien landed on Jim's chest, I have never felt more love in my life more instantly than I did then. Instantly, I would die for this kid. I would love her. Now my heart exists outside of my chest. And I was telling this to Kyle. He was our student pastor. Now he's our family pastor. And Aaron Winston, our former children's pastor, is now our discipleship pastor doing some other things. Some of y'all know that Kyle and I have been working together, been friends for 10 years plus. He worked for me at my previous church. And Kyle's like a little brother to me. I love him so much. And when he and his wife Ashlyn were pregnant, I was telling him, like, your heart's going to grow 10 sizes. Like, you're not ready for this. You're going to love this kid so much. And the kid's name now is Hayes, and I don't know how old Hayes is, a month and a half, two months, something like that. He might be a year old. I don't know. I'm bad. I'm bad with ages. And I told him, this is going to happen, man. And the day or the day after Hayes was born, I called him and he was crying. He said, you were right. You're right. I said, you understand it now? He goes, yeah, I understand. Your heart just, you realize how impoverished your view of love was because of how this overtakes your life all of a sudden. And then I remember when we were pregnant with John, once we started getting close to the date, I started feeling bad. I started feeling bad because I'm like, there's no way I'm going to love the second one like I loved the first one. There's no space left. And as a first child, I found that to be true. I found that to be true. Your love gradually diminishes the more children that you have. Faith and Phil Leverett, they're not even here. I'm picking on them. They've got five kids. They don't even know the fifth one's name. So I was already feeling bad because when I have John, when we had John, I was already kind of apologizing to him. Like, I'm sorry, kid. I don't know how to love you like I love Lily. I'm sure God will get me there. And then as soon as that space alien landed on my wife's chest, my heart grew again. And it expanded. And I would die for that one too. And I love it with my whole life. And there's nothing quite like that in life to acquaint you with what love really is. I realized in those moments I had an impoverished view of what I thought of was. And I bring that up because I believe, and Dane asserts in the book, that we have an impoverished view of God's mercy. We're aware of it. We're aware that God's mercy exists. Most of you in here, I would be surprised if anybody came in here this morning, even if you're just here visiting with family or you wandered in or this is your first time in church in 20 years and you consider yourself agnostic, whatever your situation is, I doubt anybody in here is surprised to hear that we as Christians, we ascribe mercy to God. We say that he is rich in mercy. We know God's a merciful God. But I'm not, and so we give mental assent to that truth, but I'm not sure that we really understand what his mercy is. And so let's see if we can't gain on it a little bit today. The way we're going to gain on it is to look in Ephesians, because Ephesians chapter two, we're just going to look at verses, we were going to look at verses 1 through 10, but we're just going to do 1 through 5. As I went through it this morning, I found a place to stop that I felt was more appropriate. So if you have a Bible, please open it up to Ephesians chapter 2. This is my favorite kind of sermon where we just go through the text and I kind of tell you how it hits me and hopefully hits us this week. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. You can open that up and we'll be in the text of Ephesians chapter two, verses one through five. Shoot, I wasn't planning on crying and make my nose run talking about my kids at the beginning. I should save that stuff for the end so I'm not sniffing the whole time. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul has this 10 verse discourse. That's one of the more famous passages in scripture. And he opens it like this. As for you, verse one, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Let's talk about this for a minute. Jim Price, would you mind giving me a tissue, please, sir? Thank you. It's going according to the flesh, gratifying its desires and thinking its thoughts. He's, he's describing a people who don't know Jesus. And because they don't know Jesus, they live according to the flesh in Pauline theology. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians. Paul two-thirds of the New Testament. Most of the letters in the New Testament were written by Paul. And so theologians have developed a theology. Oh, that's hilarious. Good. Someone apologize to Jim when he gets back from his very important errand. Jim, we found some. I'm so sorry. They were right behind here. I know. Go home. All right. Within those letters, theologians have developed a theology based around Paul. Anything that Paul did is Pauline, the Pauline epistles, Pauline theology, things like that. And so within Pauline theology, there's this idea of being dead in our transgressions and in our trespasses. And there is this idea that before we knew Jesus, we had no idea. We had no choice but to sin. We were creatures of the flesh. In Philippians, he says that they were, that their bellies were their Lord's. And they basically did whatever they craved and whatever they desired. And that's how he's describing people before they knew Jesus here in Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three. He's saying that we were dead in our transgressions because we just indulged in the flesh. There's life in the flesh in this theology, and there's life in the spirit. And life in the flesh is to live life as if God didn't exist, to just do whatever our nature wants to do. And life in the spirit is to live in light of the very real existence of God that's been infused in us and given us life and live according to God's desires and God's thoughts and God's standards. So when we're living according to the flesh, we're living according to our own standards and our own thoughts and our own desires. So think of it this way. Think of living according to the flesh is somewhat akin to living as an irresponsible college student. Okay. Now I'm not talking about the responsible college students, the ones that like go to class and take notes and study and care about their future and their GPA and are trying to get a good job or trying to get into a good grad school. I'm talking about students like me that didn't care about any of that. Students that just live for fun. What's the next fun thing we're going to do? What's the next hedonistic activity in which I can engage? And I don't want to paint the wrong picture of me as a college student because some of us, we think of irresponsible college student, our mind goes to partying and that's a thing. But that wasn't my thing. I went to Bible college. I was a pastoral ministries major. My rejection and hedonism looked like playing Madden instead of going to class or just going and playing Frisbee. Because in the early 2000s, you could not be a youth pastor if you could not throw a Frisbee. It was part of the deal. So if you were there at school, you're throwing Frisbees. You're doing all kinds of stuff, you're playing sports. I'm skipping class all the time. My GPA was incredibly low. You guys, you'll love this. I was one semester away from getting kicked out of my Bible college for poor chapel attendance, and then I became a pastor. How do you like that? And my thought is, make chapel better, and I want to go. You don't hear me guilting you into being here, do you? Some of my friends haven't been here for weeks. We all have ways in which we're irresponsible. And we remember those friends in college who were just, their Lord was their belly. They just kind of jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from activity to activity. They were unmoored by wisdom and rules and considerations of the future. They lived in the moment and they did what they wanted. And some of us were that person and some of us were friends with that person. But the reality is, in different times and ways, we've all been that person. All of us. There's nobody in this room who looks back on the last 5, 10, 25 plus years of their life and thinks to themselves, I pretty much nailed that. There was never a moment when I wavered from God's path. I can't think of a season in my life where I just meandered and I did what I want and I lived according to the flesh. Especially when we don't think of living according to the flesh simply as seeking pleasure. Because living according to the flesh can be to seek numbness or escape or stillness or comfort. And the reality of it is sometimes we did our sinning in college and then we get it out of our system. But sometimes we just figure out more nuanced ways to keep feeding that monster and frat parties become country club outings. And it's all the same motivation and it's all the same stuff. And it's still the same lack of discipline. It's the same lack of wisdom. We're still living according to the flesh. Our flesh has just found a way to adapt itself into acceptable adult society so we can still be responsible, productive members. But if we're being really, really honest with ourselves, we know we've all had seasons where when we look back at that time in our life, and maybe, maybe you're in one right now where if you're being honest, you're wandering, where you're living according to what you want to do, not what God wants you to do. We can remember times when we lived according to the flesh and its desires, and we jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from excitement to excitement, from numbness to numbness, from escape to escape. And we piddle our days away on our phone, dopamine-ing ourselves to death while we do nothing for the kingdom. There's nobody in here who hasn't had one of those seasons. And here's the thing that I want to point out. In this passage in Ephesians chapter 2, and those first verses, this is clearly a reference to people before they knew Jesus. He says, you were once like the others, following the prince of this world and the desires of your flesh. And the implication is, but now you know Jesus, and so you live according to the Spirit. And so it makes it seem like, well, before I knew Jesus, I messed up, and I lived according to the flesh, not according to the Spirit. I jumped from hedonism to hedonism, whatever it might be, and now I'm better, and now I'm saved, and now I live according to the Spirit. Except none of you in here have that experience, do you? If you've, let's do a show of hands. If you've been a Christian for over a decade, I would like for you to raise your hand right now. If in that decade, you've never once wandered away from God and lived according to the flesh. Raise your hand if since you got saved, miraculously, sin has not been a problem for you. I can't believe Bill Gentile didn't raise his hand for fun. Right? That's not our experience. But here's what's wonderful about that not being our experience is that wasn't Paul's either. And maybe the most human passage in the Bible at the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul says, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I do not want to do, I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And what he's just claimed in Romans 6 is we are no longer slaves to sin. We are free to walk in newness of life and live life in the spirit. And then in Romans 7, he laments that he can't do it. That if Paul were sitting in this room and I had asked that question, he wouldn't have raised his hand either because he continued to sin. So it's a human passage. And I love that phrase, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Because it's hard to be a Christian because we feel like we should be doing better and not living according to the flesh anymore and living according to the spirit. But we don't all the time. We have these pockets where we're living according to the spirit. And those are wonderful pockets and sometimes seasons. But we all walk through times when we are exactly what these verses say. We gratify the cravings of our flesh following its desires and thoughts. So, when we read this this morning, let us not render that for people prior to Christ, but let us render it to ourselves, knowing that these verses apply to us and we are in them. This is us. And this is important because of what follows. I stopped reading in the middle of verse 3 the first time. This time I'm going to read all of verse flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Because that's us, because of the times we've lived according to the flesh and not the spirit, we are by nature deserving of wrath. Now, wrath is not a thing that we like to talk about. None of you got in the car today and said, what's the sermon about? I hope it's on wrath. That's fun. Maybe we can sneak some hell in there. We don't like talking about wrath. We don't like the reality that by our nature we deserve it. And I've laid some groundwork for this in this series, so I'm not going to belabor the point in that way here. But a few different times in the series, I've invited you to imagine what Jesus's attitude towards us could be and by all rights should be. That there's a creator God in the universe, in heaven, that creates the universe to share himself with it and with us. He creates us in his image to glory in him and for him to glory in us. And we mess it up with our sin and he sends his son to rectify the situation and we kill him. What could Jesus's right attitude be towards us? Of course it could be wrath. If you accept the Christian narrative, it only makes sense that Jesus would be wrathful towards us as would God for our rejection of him. And so by our very nature, we are objects of wrath. But let me tell you another reason why we are objects of wrath that's actually within this passage that I find very interesting this morning. This discourse ends in verse 10. Verse 10 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It's one that I remind you of often. It's one that I pray over my children. It's one that I pray for parents as they try to guide their children because this is our goal. And this is how this discourse ends in Ephesians chapter two, verse 10. Four, we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The way I memorized it was the ESV and I like the word workmanship. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that we might walk in them. So here's the idea, is that God created each of you specifically and on purpose. You were not an accident. He calls it his handiwork, his craftsmanship. You were not his throwaway. He did not whittle you and go, oh, look at that. Okay. He, you were his craftsmanship. You are artisanal. You're fancy. If you were bread, you would be inside two plastic wrappers. Okay. Not the one, like the fancy bread. He made you on purpose. He made you intentionally. You're good with people because God made you that way. You like to serve because God made you that way. You're a people pleaser because God made you that way. You're an extrovert because God made you an extrovert on purpose. You're an introvert because God made you an introvert on purpose. You're an omnivore because God made you an omnivore on purpose. Do you understand? You're big and imposing because God wanted you to be big and imposing. You're small and frail because God wanted you to be small and frail. You have a big, strong voice. You have a weak voice because God wanted those things. You're shy because God wanted you to be observant. You're outspoken and boisterous because God wanted dinner parties to go well for his children. Do you understand? Everything that you have was intentionally given to you and bestowed upon you by God. It is not an accident of evolution. It is not an accident of your parents falling in love. The Bible says that he knew us before we were knit in our mother's womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. So every ounce of you was made on purpose by God. You are not an accident or a collision or a coincidence of biology. You were intentionally made by your creator to be exactly who you are. And the reason he made you that way is for your good works that he prepared for you before time that you might walk in them. He knit you together the way he did because he has prepared a path for you to walk of good works and it is your job to be who you created you to, he created you to be so that you might walk in the good works that he determined for you before time, which is how we know that you are not an accident of biology or people falling in love in the seventies. Do you understand? So here's the thing. If that's what God did, if he made you on purpose, if he knit you in your mother's womb, if you were fearfully and wonderfully made, and when he made you, before time, he knew the good works he wanted you to walk in in 2025. And he crafted you in such a way to prepare you to walk that exact path that he has for you. Then let's understand this. When we live according to the flesh, we pervert creation and reject God and his intentions. When we take all those things in our alchemy, that amalgamations of gifts and strengths and weaknesses, and we use that for what we want and not what God wants. When we take all of those gifts and abilities and we leverage those for ourselves to acquire for ourselves whatever it is we might want, love, fame, attention, money, power, whatever it is. When we take those gifts, God's handiwork, and we leverage those things to live according to the flesh and what we want, rather than what God wants, we pervert creation. Or maybe even worse, maybe we don't take those gifts and abilities that God gives us and leverage them for our own good, nor do we leverage them for the good of God. We just ignore them and we numb ourselves and we do nothing. It's even worse. Revelation says that because you're neither good nor bad, but lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. It's even worse to ignore the ways in which we're created and use them for absolutely nothing. But when we live according to the flesh and its thoughts and desires, using everything that God's made us to be to make ourselves happy and to keep ourselves content, rather than using everything that God has given us and made us to be to build his kingdom and to live according to the spirit, this is important. We pervert God's perfect creation. And we reject God and his intentions simply by the way that we live. This is why we are objects of wrath. Because we've taken this good, wonderful thing that he gave us and we've used it for our own ends, and we've muddied it up, and we've mucked it up. So when that passage concludes, we are like them objects, by our nature, objects of wrath, that's why, because we deserve it. Now, if we understand that and we're there together, that's what makes verses 4 and 5 all the more impactful and resounding. They say this. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. So there's a lot there. But, that's the way the verse starts. But, I always say when you're reading your Bible and you see a therefore, you have to ask, what's it there for? Romans chapter 8 says, therefore. It starts out therefore. So why is that there? Because of chapters one through seven and what was covered there because of that, this, but counteracts what was just said. You were created by God. You are children of the flesh. You live according to his desires. You used to do that. You are, you are deserving object of his wrath. But in spite of that, because of his great love for us, and there's no love to compare that to in humanity than the love of that baby landing on the chest of my wife. And knowing you have never done a single thing for me, and I will die for you. Because of his great love for us. Last week, Aaron Winston did a great job talking about how God yearns for us from the inside out, this yearning love, this pursuing love that God has for us. And because of that love, because God loves us like that, he pours out his mercy grace and mercy, and many of you can define these, but so that we're on the same page, we understand what we're talking about. Mercy is when you do not receive a punishment that you have earned, that you deserve. Grace is when you receive a gift that you did not earn and you do not deserve. Because of these countervailing forces in God, and because of his great love for you, he was compelled to make a way for you. Because of his richness and mercy, God is only described as rich in two things, grace and mercy. Dane asserts in the book that being rich in mercy is the only time in the Bible that God is described as rich in anything, which I'm sure if I could talk to him, it would make sense. I'm not trying to pick on him. I wrote down, I was going to put it on the screen, that God is only rich in mercy, but then in the same passage, it was said because of the riches of his grace. I'm like, OK, well, he's rich in grace, too. So it's those two things, grace and mercy. And listen, I want to share this thought with you. His mercy expressed and personified by Jesus has literally brought us from death to life. His mercy and his grace, expressed and personified by Jesus, has literally brought us from death to life. So we were deserving of wrath, but God, because of his great love for us, because of his richness and mercy, made a way for us to be restored to him, made a way for us to be restored to our former glory. Made a way for us to live a life without sin. To be buried with him in death and be raised to walk in newness of life. To live according to the spirit. To live as a new creation, anticipating our heavenly bodies and being restored with him. He made a way for restitution and restoration. And he did that by sending his son to die on the cross for us. His son is the personification of his mercy. And we, most of us, have heard this dozens and dozens, if not thousands of times. And we give intellectual assent to it, but I'm not sure if it clicks in what that actually means because we're numb to it. And so I was trying to think of a way that we could get just maybe a glimpse of how impoverished our view of mercy might be. And I came up with this, so we'll see if it works. Let's pretend that somewhere in high school or college, you started smoking cigarettes. Now, who among us didn't have a brief smoking phase in college? Alright, we're not here to cast aspersions. But let's say that you picked up a habit in high school or college, and you've got a best friend, really good buddy. And you start to pick it up, your buddy doesn't really say anything, They keep hanging out with you. But they notice kind of an uptick. Like it used to just be like socially or on the golf course or whatever. But now it's a little bit more. And they go, hey, I'm noticing you're smoking a lot more lately. Maybe I'm not here to make you feel bad, but maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe that's not good for you. Maybe you can cut back a little bit. And you go, yeah, you know, I hear you. I know it's not good, but it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Like, I've got it under control. Okay. So a few more months or years go by, and you and your buddy are still around, and your buddy goes, hey, listen, you really haven't tapered back. Like, This is going to become a problem. And I don't want that for you. This is not healthy. It's not good for you. Love you. It's not good for you. Maybe you want to consider making some better choices about this. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you're right. I need to quit. And so you quit. But you quit for three, four days a week. And then you start sneaking them again. And your buddy smells you. And they love you. And they go, hey, are you back on the horse? Yeah, been firing up some lung darts. Sorry about that. And you get back into the habit. And the years go by. And every now and again, your buddy gently prods. He says, hey, you should stop that, man. That's not good for you. And then once you're up to a pack or two a day, it gets real bad, and your buddy convinces you to go to rehab. I don't know if they have rehab for smokers. I'm sure the health care apparatus has figured out a way to get money for that. I don't know if you can actually do that, but in this story, you do. You go to rehab. It's really serious. You get clean. You come back and you're off. You're not smoking for a while, but eventually you start back up again. Your buddy gets your friends and family around, and they implore you, please, you're killing yourself. You've got to stop doing this. Yeah, I know, you're right. There's tears. You feel terrible. And you stop the best you can. But before you know it, you're doing it again. And you're doing it again, and you know you shouldn't. You're hiding it from your buddy because you don't want to disappoint him. But you know you're killing yourself. And then one day, you're at your house. Your buddy happens to be over. You start having a coughing fit. The last thing you remember is you're on the ground coughing and you're having a hard time breathing. And your buddy calls the ambulance and you're trying to wave him off. It's fine, I don't need it. He says, yes, you do, you're dying. And then the next thing you know, you wake up and you're in a hospital bed. And you look down and there's a scar down the middle of your chest. And the doctor comes in and you go, what happened? The doctor said, well, you were in pretty bad shape. You were living through machines. You had died. What's this scar for? You needed a lung transplant. Did I get one? Yeah, you got a lung transplant. Whose lungs are in me? What happened? Those are your buddy's lungs. Well, if these are his, how is he alive? He's not. He said it was more important to him for you to live. Not only did he want you to live, but he wanted you to experience what it was to have lungs that have never smoked. He wanted you to be able to play with your kids with lungs that could breathe really well. He wanted you to be able to experience the rest of your life as if you had never made any of those mistakes that you insisted on. And he wanted to give his life to do that. If we can get ourselves there, maybe we can grab a taste of how impoverished our view is of God's mercy. Because the truth is, that's all of us. We live lives of the flesh. We do what we want. And Jesus, our buddy, in children's church, we tell them, Jesus is your forever friend. Your forever friend walks alongside you and says, hey, that's not good for you. Hey, you're killing yourself. Hey, you're hurting yourself. Hey, you should stop. Hey, we need to get friends and family involved because your sins are not helping you. And what to me is so powerful about that illustration is that in the smoking illustration, those are choices that you made. And he warned you against over and over and over again and you kept making them. And then you wake up and there's a scar. And your buddy wanted you to live life as if you had never made any of the mistakes you did previously. Every single one of us has a scar down the center of our chest. For where Jesus died for us, because he wanted us to live a life as if none of the mistakes we made previously applied to us anymore. And he gave his life so that we didn't have to. So that we can be with our families and our children and our loved ones and our friends in such a way that we know what it is to walk in true love with them because none of our past mistakes apply to us anymore. That is the richness of God's mercy. That is the richness of His grace. We are all of us scarred and have received that transplant. So that we might experience what life is without our sins dogging us all the time. That's the richness of God's undeserved mercy. And I think that Dane sums it up best in this quote. I'm going to read it and then I'm going to pray and we're going to move into communion. Dane says this, God's mercy. It means on that day when we stand before him quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had. Oh God, may that be true. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your mercy. Thank you for finding its personification in Jesus. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for yearning for us, for loving us, for lavishing your love upon us. God, we do not deserve it. We are by nature objects of wrath, a deserved and earned wrath, a deserved frustration and anger. And you watch us run ourselves into the ground and you die for us anyways. I pray that this morning we would have just a little bit more of a rich view of what your mercy is and what it means and how wonderful and miraculous it is. Help us walk in gratitude and humility towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, well, good morning, everybody. I see you all came at once, so I hope the sermon is good. My name is Nate. It's good to see everybody. Thank you for making grace a part of your Sunday. If you're watching us online, thank you for doing that. As we continue in our Gentle and Lowly series from the book Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, I hope it's touched you, moved your heart, compelled you towards Christ. Before I just jump in, I did want to acknowledge and praise God for the safe return of our Mexico team. We're glad that most of them are back with us. Some of y'all could have stayed in Mexico. It would have been fine with the rest of us. But for the most part, we're happy to have you. Karen, it was a good trip, I hear. Yeah. The other thing I'll tell you guys, just because we like to laugh at things, is I see Susie's here. Hi, Miss Susie. Susie Shank recently lost her husband, Mike, and we did the funeral here for that. That was just a few weeks ago. And Mike is a guy with my kind of sense of humor, so we got along very well. And he's a big Bills fan, and I'm a big Falcons fan. And last week week they played and that was the next game coming up on the schedule when I did the funeral service. It's possible that I said some disparaging things about the Bills in his service, which I was thrilled and delighted to get away with. Then the day of the game, I get a text from the deceased Mike Shank on my on my phone and I'm going what in the world and the text says this is a message from heaven go Bills screw the Falcons one of the better jokes that's ever been executed Suze that was fantastic I may have texted something back after our victory but that's neither here nor there. But yeah, that one was too good just to keep all to ourselves there. This morning, we, like I said, continue in our series, and we're going through that book, Gentle and Lowly, where we're looking at the heart of Christ. And there's a theme here that's building with the heart of Christ towards us. And next week is the final week of the series. And I'm going to land the plane in that theme. But as I was approaching this week, I chose the chapter that's entitled Rich in Mercy. It reminded me of this time in my life where I realized that my view of something, because what I want to compel us towards and where we want to land the plane today, I'll just tell you where we're going, is I want us to see how very impoverished our view of God's mercy is. And so I was trying to think of another time in my life. When did I realize, oh my gosh, I thought I understood what this was. And I really didn't until this moment. And it was, I thought I understood what love was until we had a kid. If you're a parent and you can remember back that far, you know that when your child is born, when your first child is born, there is this love that overtakes you that you never understood. And so when, when Jen and I were pregnant with Lily, like we knew that we were going to love this child. Obviously we're not psychopaths. We knew that we were going to love this kid. We knew that this was going to be a kind of love that we didn't understand. People would tell us you're going to love them so much, you're not going to believe it. And I would mentally assent to that. Yes. Yes, I'm sure that that is true. And you begin to wrap your mind around what it's like to have a child in your life and what it must be like to love them. But you really, nothing can really prepare you. You can't intellectually get there until you experience it. And I still remember the night and then the morning where we had Lily. I went to bed. Jen was very pregnant. And at about, and listen, Jen's not here this morning. I got a cold in the middle of the week and then I got over it and gave it to them. So all three of my family members are home now with a cold, sick. Jen texted me. I just made the children cry. I'm at my wits end. Please come home. Well, I got to preach, but I'll be there soon. So they're all home sick. So she's not going to know what I say here. And if I know my wife, she's not going to go back and listen to this. Okay. So this is, if is if I can trust you this is our secret she doesn't have to know I talked about this it's up to you guys jerks she her water we were sound asleep her water broke at 2 33 o'clock somewhere around there she got up got out of bed took shower. She didn't bother me. Took a shower, did her makeup, put on some nice clothes, put in earrings and a necklace. She was ready for dinner, man, at 3.30 in the morning when she woke me up. That's just the kind of girl she knew there was going to be some pictures made, you know? And so she had to be, she had to be ready. She wasn't going to be looking haggard at the, at the, at the, at the hospital. So she gets herself ready to go out to dinner at three 34 o'clock in the morning and then just gently jostles me. My water broke. We've got to go to the hospital. What? We go to the hospital. We're in labor. We is generous. She, she was very much in labor. I very much not. Um, and, and I'm sitting there, I'm sitting there next to her and we're trying to bring this baby into the world. And I'm, I'm Jen's, you know, in front of me and I'm in a chair facing this way. I'm looking at her face because I don't know, different husbands process this moment in different ways. I did not want to be facing the other way. I just, I want to be facing this way. So I was facing this way, and I'm just looking at her face. I'm holding her hand, doing the best I can to encourage her in this process. And we're sitting there. She's doing her part. And out comes this baby. And I can hear the baby crying. And then they, and it's Lily, and then they put Lily on Jen's chest. And Lily's little face is facing me. And now listen to me. I do not care what anybody says. There is no such thing as a cute newborn baby. Those things are gross and they look like space aliens. And something happens in your mind, I think from God and his sovereign design, that you in the moment as a parent, you think this is a precious child. It's not, it's disgusting. That's a gross, gross thing. But this crying, greasy alien gets placed on Jen's chest and not even looking at me because she can't look yet, just facing me. And I can see her face. And in that moment, it was like the Grinch happened in real life. My heart grew ten sizes. In that moment, I knew I would die for that little girl. And it took nothing. I'm getting worked up about it right now. It took nothing. I loved her so much with a love that I had never understood before. And for those of you, and for some of you, some of you really want to experience that love and you're not yet. And I'm so sorry because I know stuff like this is painful and I walked that journey for a while too. But before you have kids, people tell you you're going to love them. And you understand that you will. But when that space alien landed on Jim's chest, I have never felt more love in my life more instantly than I did then. Instantly, I would die for this kid. I would love her. Now my heart exists outside of my chest. And I was telling this to Kyle. He was our student pastor. Now he's our family pastor. And Aaron Winston, our former children's pastor, is now our discipleship pastor doing some other things. Some of y'all know that Kyle and I have been working together, been friends for 10 years plus. He worked for me at my previous church. And Kyle's like a little brother to me. I love him so much. And when he and his wife Ashlyn were pregnant, I was telling him, like, your heart's going to grow 10 sizes. Like, you're not ready for this. You're going to love this kid so much. And the kid's name now is Hayes, and I don't know how old Hayes is, a month and a half, two months, something like that. He might be a year old. I don't know. I'm bad. I'm bad with ages. And I told him, this is going to happen, man. And the day or the day after Hayes was born, I called him and he was crying. He said, you were right. You're right. I said, you understand it now? He goes, yeah, I understand. Your heart just, you realize how impoverished your view of love was because of how this overtakes your life all of a sudden. And then I remember when we were pregnant with John, once we started getting close to the date, I started feeling bad. I started feeling bad because I'm like, there's no way I'm going to love the second one like I loved the first one. There's no space left. And as a first child, I found that to be true. I found that to be true. Your love gradually diminishes the more children that you have. Faith and Phil Leverett, they're not even here. I'm picking on them. They've got five kids. They don't even know the fifth one's name. So I was already feeling bad because when I have John, when we had John, I was already kind of apologizing to him. Like, I'm sorry, kid. I don't know how to love you like I love Lily. I'm sure God will get me there. And then as soon as that space alien landed on my wife's chest, my heart grew again. And it expanded. And I would die for that one too. And I love it with my whole life. And there's nothing quite like that in life to acquaint you with what love really is. I realized in those moments I had an impoverished view of what I thought of was. And I bring that up because I believe, and Dane asserts in the book, that we have an impoverished view of God's mercy. We're aware of it. We're aware that God's mercy exists. Most of you in here, I would be surprised if anybody came in here this morning, even if you're just here visiting with family or you wandered in or this is your first time in church in 20 years and you consider yourself agnostic, whatever your situation is, I doubt anybody in here is surprised to hear that we as Christians, we ascribe mercy to God. We say that he is rich in mercy. We know God's a merciful God. But I'm not, and so we give mental assent to that truth, but I'm not sure that we really understand what his mercy is. And so let's see if we can't gain on it a little bit today. The way we're going to gain on it is to look in Ephesians, because Ephesians chapter two, we're just going to look at verses, we were going to look at verses 1 through 10, but we're just going to do 1 through 5. As I went through it this morning, I found a place to stop that I felt was more appropriate. So if you have a Bible, please open it up to Ephesians chapter 2. This is my favorite kind of sermon where we just go through the text and I kind of tell you how it hits me and hopefully hits us this week. If you don't have a Bible, there's one in the seat back in front of you. You can open that up and we'll be in the text of Ephesians chapter two, verses one through five. Shoot, I wasn't planning on crying and make my nose run talking about my kids at the beginning. I should save that stuff for the end so I'm not sniffing the whole time. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul has this 10 verse discourse. That's one of the more famous passages in scripture. And he opens it like this. As for you, verse one, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Let's talk about this for a minute. Jim Price, would you mind giving me a tissue, please, sir? Thank you. It's going according to the flesh, gratifying its desires and thinking its thoughts. He's, he's describing a people who don't know Jesus. And because they don't know Jesus, they live according to the flesh in Pauline theology. Paul wrote the book of Ephesians. Paul two-thirds of the New Testament. Most of the letters in the New Testament were written by Paul. And so theologians have developed a theology. Oh, that's hilarious. Good. Someone apologize to Jim when he gets back from his very important errand. Jim, we found some. I'm so sorry. They were right behind here. I know. Go home. All right. Within those letters, theologians have developed a theology based around Paul. Anything that Paul did is Pauline, the Pauline epistles, Pauline theology, things like that. And so within Pauline theology, there's this idea of being dead in our transgressions and in our trespasses. And there is this idea that before we knew Jesus, we had no idea. We had no choice but to sin. We were creatures of the flesh. In Philippians, he says that they were, that their bellies were their Lord's. And they basically did whatever they craved and whatever they desired. And that's how he's describing people before they knew Jesus here in Ephesians chapter two, verses one through three. He's saying that we were dead in our transgressions because we just indulged in the flesh. There's life in the flesh in this theology, and there's life in the spirit. And life in the flesh is to live life as if God didn't exist, to just do whatever our nature wants to do. And life in the spirit is to live in light of the very real existence of God that's been infused in us and given us life and live according to God's desires and God's thoughts and God's standards. So when we're living according to the flesh, we're living according to our own standards and our own thoughts and our own desires. So think of it this way. Think of living according to the flesh is somewhat akin to living as an irresponsible college student. Okay. Now I'm not talking about the responsible college students, the ones that like go to class and take notes and study and care about their future and their GPA and are trying to get a good job or trying to get into a good grad school. I'm talking about students like me that didn't care about any of that. Students that just live for fun. What's the next fun thing we're going to do? What's the next hedonistic activity in which I can engage? And I don't want to paint the wrong picture of me as a college student because some of us, we think of irresponsible college student, our mind goes to partying and that's a thing. But that wasn't my thing. I went to Bible college. I was a pastoral ministries major. My rejection and hedonism looked like playing Madden instead of going to class or just going and playing Frisbee. Because in the early 2000s, you could not be a youth pastor if you could not throw a Frisbee. It was part of the deal. So if you were there at school, you're throwing Frisbees. You're doing all kinds of stuff, you're playing sports. I'm skipping class all the time. My GPA was incredibly low. You guys, you'll love this. I was one semester away from getting kicked out of my Bible college for poor chapel attendance, and then I became a pastor. How do you like that? And my thought is, make chapel better, and I want to go. You don't hear me guilting you into being here, do you? Some of my friends haven't been here for weeks. We all have ways in which we're irresponsible. And we remember those friends in college who were just, their Lord was their belly. They just kind of jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from activity to activity. They were unmoored by wisdom and rules and considerations of the future. They lived in the moment and they did what they wanted. And some of us were that person and some of us were friends with that person. But the reality is, in different times and ways, we've all been that person. All of us. There's nobody in this room who looks back on the last 5, 10, 25 plus years of their life and thinks to themselves, I pretty much nailed that. There was never a moment when I wavered from God's path. I can't think of a season in my life where I just meandered and I did what I want and I lived according to the flesh. Especially when we don't think of living according to the flesh simply as seeking pleasure. Because living according to the flesh can be to seek numbness or escape or stillness or comfort. And the reality of it is sometimes we did our sinning in college and then we get it out of our system. But sometimes we just figure out more nuanced ways to keep feeding that monster and frat parties become country club outings. And it's all the same motivation and it's all the same stuff. And it's still the same lack of discipline. It's the same lack of wisdom. We're still living according to the flesh. Our flesh has just found a way to adapt itself into acceptable adult society so we can still be responsible, productive members. But if we're being really, really honest with ourselves, we know we've all had seasons where when we look back at that time in our life, and maybe, maybe you're in one right now where if you're being honest, you're wandering, where you're living according to what you want to do, not what God wants you to do. We can remember times when we lived according to the flesh and its desires, and we jumped from fun thing to fun thing, from excitement to excitement, from numbness to numbness, from escape to escape. And we piddle our days away on our phone, dopamine-ing ourselves to death while we do nothing for the kingdom. There's nobody in here who hasn't had one of those seasons. And here's the thing that I want to point out. In this passage in Ephesians chapter 2, and those first verses, this is clearly a reference to people before they knew Jesus. He says, you were once like the others, following the prince of this world and the desires of your flesh. And the implication is, but now you know Jesus, and so you live according to the Spirit. And so it makes it seem like, well, before I knew Jesus, I messed up, and I lived according to the flesh, not according to the Spirit. I jumped from hedonism to hedonism, whatever it might be, and now I'm better, and now I'm saved, and now I live according to the Spirit. Except none of you in here have that experience, do you? If you've, let's do a show of hands. If you've been a Christian for over a decade, I would like for you to raise your hand right now. If in that decade, you've never once wandered away from God and lived according to the flesh. Raise your hand if since you got saved, miraculously, sin has not been a problem for you. I can't believe Bill Gentile didn't raise his hand for fun. Right? That's not our experience. But here's what's wonderful about that not being our experience is that wasn't Paul's either. And maybe the most human passage in the Bible at the end of Romans chapter 7, Paul says, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I do not want to do, I do. Oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? And what he's just claimed in Romans 6 is we are no longer slaves to sin. We are free to walk in newness of life and live life in the spirit. And then in Romans 7, he laments that he can't do it. That if Paul were sitting in this room and I had asked that question, he wouldn't have raised his hand either because he continued to sin. So it's a human passage. And I love that phrase, oh, wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Because it's hard to be a Christian because we feel like we should be doing better and not living according to the flesh anymore and living according to the spirit. But we don't all the time. We have these pockets where we're living according to the spirit. And those are wonderful pockets and sometimes seasons. But we all walk through times when we are exactly what these verses say. We gratify the cravings of our flesh following its desires and thoughts. So, when we read this this morning, let us not render that for people prior to Christ, but let us render it to ourselves, knowing that these verses apply to us and we are in them. This is us. And this is important because of what follows. I stopped reading in the middle of verse 3 the first time. This time I'm going to read all of verse flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. Because that's us, because of the times we've lived according to the flesh and not the spirit, we are by nature deserving of wrath. Now, wrath is not a thing that we like to talk about. None of you got in the car today and said, what's the sermon about? I hope it's on wrath. That's fun. Maybe we can sneak some hell in there. We don't like talking about wrath. We don't like the reality that by our nature we deserve it. And I've laid some groundwork for this in this series, so I'm not going to belabor the point in that way here. But a few different times in the series, I've invited you to imagine what Jesus's attitude towards us could be and by all rights should be. That there's a creator God in the universe, in heaven, that creates the universe to share himself with it and with us. He creates us in his image to glory in him and for him to glory in us. And we mess it up with our sin and he sends his son to rectify the situation and we kill him. What could Jesus's right attitude be towards us? Of course it could be wrath. If you accept the Christian narrative, it only makes sense that Jesus would be wrathful towards us as would God for our rejection of him. And so by our very nature, we are objects of wrath. But let me tell you another reason why we are objects of wrath that's actually within this passage that I find very interesting this morning. This discourse ends in verse 10. Verse 10 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. It's one that I remind you of often. It's one that I pray over my children. It's one that I pray for parents as they try to guide their children because this is our goal. And this is how this discourse ends in Ephesians chapter two, verse 10. Four, we are God's handiwork created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. The way I memorized it was the ESV and I like the word workmanship. We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works before time that we might walk in them. So here's the idea, is that God created each of you specifically and on purpose. You were not an accident. He calls it his handiwork, his craftsmanship. You were not his throwaway. He did not whittle you and go, oh, look at that. Okay. He, you were his craftsmanship. You are artisanal. You're fancy. If you were bread, you would be inside two plastic wrappers. Okay. Not the one, like the fancy bread. He made you on purpose. He made you intentionally. You're good with people because God made you that way. You like to serve because God made you that way. You're a people pleaser because God made you that way. You're an extrovert because God made you an extrovert on purpose. You're an introvert because God made you an introvert on purpose. You're an omnivore because God made you an omnivore on purpose. Do you understand? You're big and imposing because God wanted you to be big and imposing. You're small and frail because God wanted you to be small and frail. You have a big, strong voice. You have a weak voice because God wanted those things. You're shy because God wanted you to be observant. You're outspoken and boisterous because God wanted dinner parties to go well for his children. Do you understand? Everything that you have was intentionally given to you and bestowed upon you by God. It is not an accident of evolution. It is not an accident of your parents falling in love. The Bible says that he knew us before we were knit in our mother's womb, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. So every ounce of you was made on purpose by God. You are not an accident or a collision or a coincidence of biology. You were intentionally made by your creator to be exactly who you are. And the reason he made you that way is for your good works that he prepared for you before time that you might walk in them. He knit you together the way he did because he has prepared a path for you to walk of good works and it is your job to be who you created you to, he created you to be so that you might walk in the good works that he determined for you before time, which is how we know that you are not an accident of biology or people falling in love in the seventies. Do you understand? So here's the thing. If that's what God did, if he made you on purpose, if he knit you in your mother's womb, if you were fearfully and wonderfully made, and when he made you, before time, he knew the good works he wanted you to walk in in 2025. And he crafted you in such a way to prepare you to walk that exact path that he has for you. Then let's understand this. When we live according to the flesh, we pervert creation and reject God and his intentions. When we take all those things in our alchemy, that amalgamations of gifts and strengths and weaknesses, and we use that for what we want and not what God wants. When we take all of those gifts and abilities and we leverage those for ourselves to acquire for ourselves whatever it is we might want, love, fame, attention, money, power, whatever it is. When we take those gifts, God's handiwork, and we leverage those things to live according to the flesh and what we want, rather than what God wants, we pervert creation. Or maybe even worse, maybe we don't take those gifts and abilities that God gives us and leverage them for our own good, nor do we leverage them for the good of God. We just ignore them and we numb ourselves and we do nothing. It's even worse. Revelation says that because you're neither good nor bad, but lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth. It's even worse to ignore the ways in which we're created and use them for absolutely nothing. But when we live according to the flesh and its thoughts and desires, using everything that God's made us to be to make ourselves happy and to keep ourselves content, rather than using everything that God has given us and made us to be to build his kingdom and to live according to the spirit, this is important. We pervert God's perfect creation. And we reject God and his intentions simply by the way that we live. This is why we are objects of wrath. Because we've taken this good, wonderful thing that he gave us and we've used it for our own ends, and we've muddied it up, and we've mucked it up. So when that passage concludes, we are like them objects, by our nature, objects of wrath, that's why, because we deserve it. Now, if we understand that and we're there together, that's what makes verses 4 and 5 all the more impactful and resounding. They say this. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved. So there's a lot there. But, that's the way the verse starts. But, I always say when you're reading your Bible and you see a therefore, you have to ask, what's it there for? Romans chapter 8 says, therefore. It starts out therefore. So why is that there? Because of chapters one through seven and what was covered there because of that, this, but counteracts what was just said. You were created by God. You are children of the flesh. You live according to his desires. You used to do that. You are, you are deserving object of his wrath. But in spite of that, because of his great love for us, and there's no love to compare that to in humanity than the love of that baby landing on the chest of my wife. And knowing you have never done a single thing for me, and I will die for you. Because of his great love for us. Last week, Aaron Winston did a great job talking about how God yearns for us from the inside out, this yearning love, this pursuing love that God has for us. And because of that love, because God loves us like that, he pours out his mercy grace and mercy, and many of you can define these, but so that we're on the same page, we understand what we're talking about. Mercy is when you do not receive a punishment that you have earned, that you deserve. Grace is when you receive a gift that you did not earn and you do not deserve. Because of these countervailing forces in God, and because of his great love for you, he was compelled to make a way for you. Because of his richness and mercy, God is only described as rich in two things, grace and mercy. Dane asserts in the book that being rich in mercy is the only time in the Bible that God is described as rich in anything, which I'm sure if I could talk to him, it would make sense. I'm not trying to pick on him. I wrote down, I was going to put it on the screen, that God is only rich in mercy, but then in the same passage, it was said because of the riches of his grace. I'm like, OK, well, he's rich in grace, too. So it's those two things, grace and mercy. And listen, I want to share this thought with you. His mercy expressed and personified by Jesus has literally brought us from death to life. His mercy and his grace, expressed and personified by Jesus, has literally brought us from death to life. So we were deserving of wrath, but God, because of his great love for us, because of his richness and mercy, made a way for us to be restored to him, made a way for us to be restored to our former glory. Made a way for us to live a life without sin. To be buried with him in death and be raised to walk in newness of life. To live according to the spirit. To live as a new creation, anticipating our heavenly bodies and being restored with him. He made a way for restitution and restoration. And he did that by sending his son to die on the cross for us. His son is the personification of his mercy. And we, most of us, have heard this dozens and dozens, if not thousands of times. And we give intellectual assent to it, but I'm not sure if it clicks in what that actually means because we're numb to it. And so I was trying to think of a way that we could get just maybe a glimpse of how impoverished our view of mercy might be. And I came up with this, so we'll see if it works. Let's pretend that somewhere in high school or college, you started smoking cigarettes. Now, who among us didn't have a brief smoking phase in college? Alright, we're not here to cast aspersions. But let's say that you picked up a habit in high school or college, and you've got a best friend, really good buddy. And you start to pick it up, your buddy doesn't really say anything, They keep hanging out with you. But they notice kind of an uptick. Like it used to just be like socially or on the golf course or whatever. But now it's a little bit more. And they go, hey, I'm noticing you're smoking a lot more lately. Maybe I'm not here to make you feel bad, but maybe you shouldn't do that. Maybe that's not good for you. Maybe you can cut back a little bit. And you go, yeah, you know, I hear you. I know it's not good, but it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal. Like, I've got it under control. Okay. So a few more months or years go by, and you and your buddy are still around, and your buddy goes, hey, listen, you really haven't tapered back. Like, This is going to become a problem. And I don't want that for you. This is not healthy. It's not good for you. Love you. It's not good for you. Maybe you want to consider making some better choices about this. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you're right. I need to quit. And so you quit. But you quit for three, four days a week. And then you start sneaking them again. And your buddy smells you. And they love you. And they go, hey, are you back on the horse? Yeah, been firing up some lung darts. Sorry about that. And you get back into the habit. And the years go by. And every now and again, your buddy gently prods. He says, hey, you should stop that, man. That's not good for you. And then once you're up to a pack or two a day, it gets real bad, and your buddy convinces you to go to rehab. I don't know if they have rehab for smokers. I'm sure the health care apparatus has figured out a way to get money for that. I don't know if you can actually do that, but in this story, you do. You go to rehab. It's really serious. You get clean. You come back and you're off. You're not smoking for a while, but eventually you start back up again. Your buddy gets your friends and family around, and they implore you, please, you're killing yourself. You've got to stop doing this. Yeah, I know, you're right. There's tears. You feel terrible. And you stop the best you can. But before you know it, you're doing it again. And you're doing it again, and you know you shouldn't. You're hiding it from your buddy because you don't want to disappoint him. But you know you're killing yourself. And then one day, you're at your house. Your buddy happens to be over. You start having a coughing fit. The last thing you remember is you're on the ground coughing and you're having a hard time breathing. And your buddy calls the ambulance and you're trying to wave him off. It's fine, I don't need it. He says, yes, you do, you're dying. And then the next thing you know, you wake up and you're in a hospital bed. And you look down and there's a scar down the middle of your chest. And the doctor comes in and you go, what happened? The doctor said, well, you were in pretty bad shape. You were living through machines. You had died. What's this scar for? You needed a lung transplant. Did I get one? Yeah, you got a lung transplant. Whose lungs are in me? What happened? Those are your buddy's lungs. Well, if these are his, how is he alive? He's not. He said it was more important to him for you to live. Not only did he want you to live, but he wanted you to experience what it was to have lungs that have never smoked. He wanted you to be able to play with your kids with lungs that could breathe really well. He wanted you to be able to experience the rest of your life as if you had never made any of those mistakes that you insisted on. And he wanted to give his life to do that. If we can get ourselves there, maybe we can grab a taste of how impoverished our view is of God's mercy. Because the truth is, that's all of us. We live lives of the flesh. We do what we want. And Jesus, our buddy, in children's church, we tell them, Jesus is your forever friend. Your forever friend walks alongside you and says, hey, that's not good for you. Hey, you're killing yourself. Hey, you're hurting yourself. Hey, you should stop. Hey, we need to get friends and family involved because your sins are not helping you. And what to me is so powerful about that illustration is that in the smoking illustration, those are choices that you made. And he warned you against over and over and over again and you kept making them. And then you wake up and there's a scar. And your buddy wanted you to live life as if you had never made any of the mistakes you did previously. Every single one of us has a scar down the center of our chest. For where Jesus died for us, because he wanted us to live a life as if none of the mistakes we made previously applied to us anymore. And he gave his life so that we didn't have to. So that we can be with our families and our children and our loved ones and our friends in such a way that we know what it is to walk in true love with them because none of our past mistakes apply to us anymore. That is the richness of God's mercy. That is the richness of His grace. We are all of us scarred and have received that transplant. So that we might experience what life is without our sins dogging us all the time. That's the richness of God's undeserved mercy. And I think that Dane sums it up best in this quote. I'm going to read it and then I'm going to pray and we're going to move into communion. Dane says this, God's mercy. It means on that day when we stand before him quietly, unhurriedly, we will weep with relief, shocked at how impoverished a view of his mercy-rich heart we had. Oh God, may that be true. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your mercy. Thank you for finding its personification in Jesus. Thank you for your grace. Thank you for yearning for us, for loving us, for lavishing your love upon us. God, we do not deserve it. We are by nature objects of wrath, a deserved and earned wrath, a deserved frustration and anger. And you watch us run ourselves into the ground and you die for us anyways. I pray that this morning we would have just a little bit more of a rich view of what your mercy is and what it means and how wonderful and miraculous it is. Help us walk in gratitude and humility towards you. In Jesus' name, amen.
Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. Hey, who yelled that? Hey, Maker. Good morning to you, pal. Good to see you. I'm just going to keep this in my pocket and hope that works. This is Family Jammy Sunday. I love this Sunday. I love how festive everyone is. A couple thoughts about it. First of all, you may look at my good friend Steve Brown over here and think, dude, you're wearing a blazer. That's not very festive. In his defense, this is how he sleeps, okay? Those are his pajamas. He's being very festive today. I also think it's really funny that we got up and we showered and some of us did makeup and hair and everything and then we put pajamas back on. So I think what we should do next year is just all agree that those of us who are going to participate, because we like fun, are going to just go to bed in these pajamas. And however we wake up is how we come to church. Then we'll be a real family together, you know? Before I just dive into the sermon, thank you for coming to Grace. If you're watching online, thank you for watching wherever you are and whatever you may be doing. I want to stop and acknowledge this is our last Sunday together in 2025. And I think it's appropriate to pause and say that. This has been a good year for us. God has blessed us. He's blessed us with new people, with new families. I got a lot of comments. I can't remember if it was last Sunday or Sunday before last. They all blur together to me. Was it last Sunday that we did the kids sing? Was that last Sunday? I got a lot of comments from folks who don't have kids in the kids men that went, holy cow, we have so many kids. Yeah, we do. We have about 50 plus kids per week. It's amazing. God's been really good to us. We were able to announce that we're going to move forward with the building campaign or with actually getting the building out of the ground. We're in the campaign. We've got a little ways to go, but we've hit the gas and we're moving forward. And we hope that two years from now we'll be worshiping in the new building for Christmas. So that's really cool too. But God has been really good to us this year. So before I just finish, before we just finish the year without acknowledging it, would you stop and pray a prayer of gratitude with me and then we'll get into the sermon. Father, thank you so much for who you are and for what you've done. God, we like to say that we think you like this church. We don't know why you like us, but you seem to. And you always take care of us. And you always guide us down the right paths. And you always provide for us in unexpected ways. We thank you for the families that are here, for the leaders that are here, for the servants that are here, for the hearts that are here. And we pray that we would continue to do our best to be good stewards of the people you entrust us with. Thank you for 2025, for the year that it was. Thank you for walking with us through it in the high times and in the lows. And God, as we look forward to this next year, we pray that you would continue to walk with us as we attempt to continue to walk with you. In Jesus' name, amen. This morning in our series, Here We Go A-Wassling, where we're looking at different Christmas songs and finding the meaning within them so that hopefully it can imbue them with greater meaning for us as we sing them, not just this Christmas, but in the Christmases to come. This morning, we arrive at what I believe to be one of the most underrated Christmas songs ever. Now, when I call it this, I know that I run this risk. I may be up here trumpeting my own ignorance, and I'm aware of that. And you may be thinking, well, that's no different than any Sunday, Nate. And that is true, but those other Sundays, I might not be aware that I'm doing it. But this Sunday, I could be doing it because I could say this hymn or this Christmas song, and you'd be like, yeah, no kidding. That's one of my all-time favorites. But I think for many of us, this is not one that we think of a lot, which is Come Thou Long Expected Jesus. Now, I've heard some people mispronounce it, Come Thou Long Expectant Jesus. That's a different song, all right? That's not what we believe. Okay, so it's Come Thou Long Expected Jesus by his people. That's the song. Now, what you may not know about this song is that it was written in 1744 by a man named John Wesley. If you have a Methodist background, then you stand on the shoulders, or it was written by Charles Wesley, rather. You stand on the shoulders, thanks Liz, she's my walking, she's my real-time editor. Just, If there's giggles, I've said something incorrect, and I'll hear about it afterwards. When she walked in today, because I'm going to use it later in the sermon, I just grabbed her and I said, what's the name of the Grinch's dog? And she said, Max. And I'm like, all right, great, thanks. And she kept walking. It was written by Charles Wesley in 1744. John and Charles Wesley started the Methodist denomination, and it is said that over their lifetime, just allow me to be a history nerd for just a second, 9% of you will care about this, but those who do will deeply care. It's said that over their lifetime, they rode over 250,000 miles by horseback through the countrysides of England and the United States, traveling as itinerant preachers. They would go to a church in the morning, they would preach, then they would get on their horse and they would travel to the next town, they would get there and preach. And church just started when they showed up, which would be really nice, because I get here at about 5.45 on Sunday mornings, and if you could just all be here, we could get on with our days afterwards. The church just starts when the pastor shows up, but that's how it worked, and they would preach three, four, five times a Sunday and then make the circuit again, and that's how they spread the good news of Jesus Christ throughout the countryside. They have a really rich history of faith. John was more of the preacher, and Wesley was more of the poet, and he wrote hymns and songs and poems. And this, I believe, is one of his best ones. And it is absolutely dripping with scripture. It is so rich in scripture. It's so rich in scripture that as I've gone through these songs, I've tried to see like, what's the point of the song? Where is it taking us? And you might remember that a couple of years ago, we did a series called The Songs We Sing, where we looked at hymns, not Christmas songs, but hymns that we sing throughout the year. And we said, where are these coming from in Scripture? And generally, they're all coming from the same place, and you can kind of funnel towards the same direction. But as I got to this particular hymn, this particular Christmas song, it was difficult to pick one way to go because it's so replete with spiritual richness. You can tell that the man who wrote this knew his Bible incredibly well, and it drips out of the words. So rather than focusing our attention on one thing, what I want to do is walk through the way that we're going to sing it today, much to the chagrin of some. We're going to sing the first two verses and then a bridge, and we're going to talk about that bridge when we get there. But I want to go through it. I'm going to read through it line by line. Some of the lines are going to come up on the screen, and I want to show you where it comes from in Scripture. So here's what I'll say up front. Every point that I make this morning, every verse that I share, every insight that I have into a particular line may not be the one for you, but I hope that this morning you can grab on to something that will sit with you, that as you sing it, because I'm going to preach to the song. I'm not going to pray at the end of my sermon. The band's going to come up at a certain point. We have a carefully crafted cue. It's going to work perfectly, just like my microphone. And they're going to come up, and I'm going to step down, and we're going to go straight into song. The idea is for me to preach in such a way that we catch something of meaning that imbues this with something that stirs our hearts, and then we stand and we sing and we shout together in full-throated praise of God with a new appreciation of what this song is. So let's dive into it and look at the lyrics of the song. Of course, the first line that won't be on the screen is, Come thou long expected Jesus. That's what it says first. And so I want us to really understand what that is, what that means, why it's there. Come thou long expected Jesus. So let's put ourselves in the mindset of the contemporaries of Joseph and Mary. And someone we'll talk about in a few minutes, a man named Simeon. And John the Baptist. And Elizabeth. Let's put ourselves in the contemporary, in the place of the believers who lived at the same time as Joseph and Mary in the pregnant months and days before the Messiah was born. Now, they were Jews. And if you are a Jewish person, you are descendant from Abraham. And they were clinging to a promise that God made to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12. And if you've been here for any length of time, you've heard me say that you really cannot understand the Bible without having a proper appreciation and understanding of what happens in Genesis 12. A very quick breakdown of the beginning of the Old Testament. The first three chapters is the creation poem. That's how we got here. In the beginning, God created is the first sentence in the Bible, first stanza of the Bible. And that sets up the fundamental relationship for all of eternity. God is the creator and we are the created. God is the creator and we are the creation. And you'll see in those first three chapters, we have what's called the fall of man. And what was man's great sin? It was listening to his wife. But what was the wife's great sin? The wife's great sin and the man's was elevating themselves from creation to know, I want to be Lord like the Creator. I don't want to submit to Him. I want to be like Him. I can know right from wrong, and I can be my own Lord, and I can be my own King. That's the fundamental sin of all mankind. And anything that you have in your life that you might think of as sin or question as sin, the root of it is, nope, God, I'm not going to accept your standards and your lordship. I'm going to make myself lord of my own life. I'm going to put myself on equal playing field with you, on par with you, okay? So that's what the first three chapters address. Then after that, chapters 4 to 11 is what's called the prehistoric narrative. And we have two separate times where God is revealing himself to all of mankind in the exact same way, giving us the chance to respond to him in the exact same way. And one of them ends terribly with the flood in Genesis chapter 6. And then he says, okay, let's try again. Hamshim and Japheth, y'all go populate the earth. Those are the sons of Noah. Y'all go populate the earth. And then that leads to Genesis 11, the Tower of Babel, where they try to build a tower to reach the sky. Why? To be like God. And God says, I've given you your chance to come to me all at once by revealing myself to you all at once. Now the redemptive focus of God goes from the whole world down to one family, one man, Abraham from Ur of the Chaldeans, which we know is the Sumerian dynasty. And God tells Abraham, I want you to go to this place where I will show you. And so he gathers up all of his things and he leaves with his wife Sarai at the time, later to become Sarah. And they go to what we know as Israel, the promised land. And when they get there, this is the important part, God says to Abraham, I'm going to make you a promise. I'm going to enter into a covenant with you. We know it as the Abrahamic covenant. That I'm going to give you this land that you're on right now, Israel, the promised land. God's kept that promise. The Hebrew people have it. And then he said, your descendants are going to be like the sand on the shore and the stars in the sky. God's kept that promise. The Jewish diaspora sprawls throughout the entire globe. And then he said, and one of those descendants is going to bless the whole earth. This is the messianic promise. This is the promise to which the descendants of Abraham cling throughout the Old Testament. And the span of time between Abraham and the birth of Christ, where we pick it up in Matthew, the span of time between Genesis 12 and Matthew chapter 1 is about 2,000 years. So for 2,000 years, granddaddies and dads and grandmas and moms would pass on their faith through oral tradition to their children. And they would take them to the synagogue or to the temple. And the rabbis and the priests would teach their children about this Messiah, amongst other things, about this Messiah who is to come. He's known as the coming one. And there's prophecies about him. And every generation, they wait and they look. And every generation, they hope and they wonder, is Jesus going to come? Is God going to keep his promise? Are they going to send the promise? Is the promised Messiah coming? Is he born yet? Is he here yet? Every generation looks with anticipation for this Jesus. So when we arrive in Matthew chapter 1 and in Luke chapter 2, these famous birth stories, what we have is 2,000 years of patient waiting for the Messiah to arrive. So this opening line, come thou long expected Jesus, that is what it's referring to, is that 2,000 year wait. Now here's where we can relate to this. You don't have to use your imagination to put yourself there. Unless you became a Christian last week, you understand that one of our hopes and one of our expectations is that Jesus is going to come again. Is that the Messiah will come back. And that he will come crashing through the clouds and he will get us. And he will take us to heaven. And there will be a new heaven and a new earth and that we'll be a part of it. So we have the same angst and agony and waiting that later we're going to talk about in Romans chapter 8 that they did in Joseph and Moses and Jerry's time. We'll go with that. In their time. We have that same anticipation and waiting. And do you not think that in those 2,000 years that there were kids that grew up in houses where mom and dad told them Jesus is coming, a Messiah is coming, a Messiah is coming, and that those kids went, I don't think he is. I'm out. Just like in our families that happens. You don't think there's some attrition over time and then some revivals over time in ancient Israel. There were. And there are now. So we don't have to stretch to relate to this line, come thou long expected Jesus, which is where we start. Then after that, I love this line, born to set thy people free from what? From our fears and sins release us Scripture that more adequately, accurately, and completely describes this dynamic than in Romans 6, verses 6-11. So read with me these verses. Here's what Paul's saying there. He's saying that before you knew Jesus, you were like a blind person groping in the dark and you didn't know where to go. Before you knew Jesus, you had no choice but to sin. You were a slave to it. He says in another book that our righteous deeds are as filthy rags if we have no faith. It's this idea that if we don't know Jesus, that even the good things we do are so marred with motives and a rejection of his lordship that they can't be considered righteous. We cannot do righteous things aside from Christ. We have, therefore, no choice but to sin when we are apart from Christ. But what Paul tells us is when we are buried with him in death and raised to walk in newness of life, this picture of baptism that we find in Romans 5 and Romans 6, that we actually walk in this newness of life where we are no longer slaves to sin. And because we know Jesus and because he's cleansed us and because he's sanctifying us, making us more like him in character, we now have the option not to sin. That the good things we do can be in submission to the lordship of God and motivated by the right things and a love for other people because we have Jesus in our hearts and we're no longer a slaves to sin. So the things that we struggle with and that trip us up, the things that we're ashamed of, the things that hold us in shackles, the things that we don't want anybody to know, when Jesus comes, we are no longer a slave to those. So Charles Wesley says, from our sins, release us. That's what he means, we're no longer a slave to sin. But he also says, from our fears. From our fears, release us. And it's covered in that verse too. Any society you go to, anywhere in the world, the greatest fear of everyone in the room is death. Now, Jerry Seinfeld has this great joke where some of you guys know it. I heard some giggles. Where he says that he saw a study recently where the number one fear of people is public speaking. And that just below that was death. And his joke is that means if you go to a funeral, the person speaking would rather be in the coffin than giving the eulogy. That's a funny joke. It's also stupid. No one would rather actually do that. I've given plenty of eulogies. They're not that hard. You just read them. If you're literate and your mouth works, you can give a eulogy. So we all have this fear of death. And we have this fear of death because it seems so final. That when we watch someone we love wither away, and one day they close their eyes and they don't open them again, it feels so final and so done. If there's a tragedy and someone dies suddenly, it feels so final and so complete. But what we know is that those who believe in Christ are saved, and that we're resurrected to heaven, so that when we say goodbye to a loved one, we say goodbye for now, not forever. And that as we face death ourselves, as we grapple with our own mortality, we know that one day we are going to cross that bridge too, but when we do, we say goodbye for now and not forever. I don't know if you've ever had the privilege of watching someone slowly march towards their own death and cross that horizon. But I can think of three people, I will not enumerate them, but I can think of three people in my life that I watched in faith accept the fact that they were going to die in the coming weeks and months and it was unwavering and their joy was completely steady and their smile was constantly there and they were excited to meet their God. Why? Because Jesus has released them from their fears. So we sing that line, born to set thy people free from our fears and sins, release us. We're no longer slaves to sin and we don't have to fear death. That's a wonderful line. Then it says, let us find our rest in thee. That's an allusion to come ye all who are weary and heavy laden for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. I am gentle and humble in heart and in me you will find rest. Let us find our rest in you. Then, I love this line and we may not know what this means at first, Israel's strength and consolation. Israel's strength and consolation is found most pointedly in Luke chapter 2, verse 25. This is the famous story of Simeon holding up baby Jesus. I'll read the verse and I'll explain to you what's going on. Now there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout. He was waiting for the consolation of Israel and the Holy Spirit was on him. Some of you may remember, I've done this sermon twice here, once at another church. And if it were up to me, I would preach this sermon every year on Christmas. I call it the zeal of Simeon. And I think it captures Christmas. And so you walk through all the eras of the Old Testament. Is the Messiah here? Is the Messiah here? Is it Moses? No. Is it David? No. Is it Elijah? No. And you walk through all of these people until you get to Jesus. And Simeon was a devout and righteous man. And he had pledged a vow of silence until he was able to lay eyes on the Messiah. And so Mary brought Jesus to the temple after his birth. And Simeon happened to be there, and he essentially says, I can die now. I'm happy, for I have received the consolation of Israel. Israel's strength and consolation. It always makes me smirk a little bit when I hear people talking about the state of our world and all the tragedies that happen. How can there be a God if there's this many hardships? If there's this much tragedy? And I think, well, it's a fair thought. And that's its own discussion. But if you look at the scope of history, you've got it pretty easy. We're like billionaires complaining that the air conditioning isn't exactly right. Do you know how much harder it was to live in ancient Israel than it is to live in America, in an ancient third-world country without running water or electricity? Do you know how much infant death they dealt with? Do you know what life expectancy was, mid-40s? Do you have any idea how hard it was to go to war every year? Do you have any idea how hard it is to tend your own crops just to feed your own family? No, we have no concept of how hard it was. Israel was a nation of slaves born in Egypt that had to be set free by God in a miraculous way. They went through a series of judges where they were oppressed by surrounding nations and the judges had to beat back the oppression. They went through a series of kings. They had kings for several hundred years and they only had three good ones. They were sunk into civil war. They were ruled by evil men. They got taken over by the Babylonians and by the Persians and carried off into slavery. They spent generations in slavery in Persia and in Babylon wondering if they would ever get back to the promised land that God had promised to them. Parents had to convince their children, God has not forgotten about us, we just have to wait on his timing. It was really hard to be an Israelite. They needed consoling, and they got it in the person of Jesus. Israel's strength and consolation. And I don't want to do the Olympics of suffering. We suffer too, and you suffer too. But if you want to talk to people who had known suffering and needed consolation, it was the people of Israel. But Jesus is our consolation too, and he waits on us as well. He is our strength and our consolation. Then we finish that verse kind of in summary. Hope of all the earth thou art, dear desire of every nation, joy of every longing heart, joy of every heart. And it reminded me of this verse. There's plenty of places we could look at for this particular ethic or idea, but this is where I go. You make known to me the path of life. You fill me with joy in your I learned the verse. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. During this time of year, you'll hear the word Emmanuel more than you hear any other time of year. And many of you know that Emmanuel means God with us. And so in Jesus' presence, we usher it down, and in so doing, we say, bring us your joy. We hope in you, dear desire of every nation, hope of all the earth thou art, and joy of every longing heart. So in him, we find joy. That's why we sing joy to the world. That's why this is such a festive time of year. And so that's how we kind of sum it up. When Jesus comes down, he brings joy with him. And so to sing to him and invite him in is to invite his joy, sometimes in a place where we need it desperately. Now we go to verse two. Born thy people to deliver. We've talked about that. And I love this part. Born a child and yet a king. This takes us to the most famous Christmas verse in scripture. And I believe that this is part of Handel's Messiah. Is that right? Does anybody know? Okay, good. Thank you. Liz knows. Of course she does. Would you like to just write my sermons, please? For to us, a child is born. And by the way, every year I try to get Gibby to do Handel's Messiah because it's amazing and I love it, but it requires a choir and an orchestra and he gets a little lazy, you know? Like he doesn't care very much about the church. He's just getting through it. So at the new church, I haven't told you guys this yet, we're actually going to have an orchestra pit. It's going to be great. I'm kidding, guys. We're not going to do that. We're going to seat 100 less people, but we will have an oboe. The verse says this, For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. Of the greatness of his government and peace there will be no end. He will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord Almighty will accomplish this. So, Charles condenses that to born a child and yet a king. But when you expand it and you extrapolate it, it very clearly comes out of Isaiah. Unto us a child is born. Unto us a son is given. Because then it says, born to reign in us forever. Now thy gracious kingdom bring. Here, I would just point you to Romans chapter 10 verse 9. If you declare with your mouth is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Born to reign in us forever, now thy gracious kingdom bring. I love this part, and this part's a good reminder. Because these two verses here, the first two, are focused on Christmas. And what Christmas is. And welcoming in this baby Jesus. It starts appropriately. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm not there yet, Ms. Lynn. I know, I'm hard to follow. I don't give her any notes or anything. She just has to guess and she does a great job and I do a poor one. We have a lot of joy in this season. We celebrate a lot. And these verses point towards Christmas. They remind us of the coming Messiah. They start the exact right way. Come thou long expected Jesus. And then it tells us of the sentiments of Christmas and what we want to usher in. Born a child and yet a king. Call us to you. Reign in us. Reign through us. Come and claim your kingdom. But these lines remind us of something very important that we tend to overlook. At Christmas, we all have our celebrations, and we should do them, except for wearing a Steeler's hat. Anne Francis, you don't even like the Steelers. Keith, his disease is spreading. I know. I know. We all have our traditions. This week we went to, there's a street in Bedford called Winter Song. And you go and you park. It's awesome. It's absolutely incredible. And we would just walk down it and take it in. It's like it's from a movie. We like to go to this house where there's a radio station tuned to the different things in the front yard. I saw one in Falls River where it said tuned to like 97.3 and they had like four lights out there and I'm like, no thanks, pal. I'll just listen to my own Christmas music. But we have these different traditions and those are wonderful things to do with our families. I remember growing up, I loved Christmas. I loved Christmas. My favorite thing was we would go to my mom's family's house, the Greens, with three E's. You guys can figure out where the E's go. And we would go on Christmas Eve. We'd go in the afternoon. We'd take everybody's presents. Everything would be wrapped. And we'd hang out all afternoon. Mama was in the kitchen bustling. Papa was helping a little bit, but that was Mama's deal. She was getting dinner ready for everybody. And we're running around with everybody. It was my mom. My mom was the oldest of four. We had Uncle Degg, who in the 80s, his nickname was Flash, and his wife Sally called him Flash. Quick story about Flash, he got in a motorcycle accident and had to be rushed to the hospital with a broken leg. To visit him, his wife had to get wheeled in because both of her legs were broken because she was hanging her foot out of the car when she flipped it a few days ago. So that's just a good, fun story about Uncle Deg. Then we had Aunt Lori, and we had Aunt Deanna, and eventually we had Uncle Glenn when she met him. This is a deep cut, but Uncle Glenn and Aunt Deanna were the closest thing to Todd and Margo I've ever met in my life. They were pretty awesome. And then I had my cousins, Kim and Randy and Jeffrey and then my sister Amy and we'd run around all day. And then the next day we'd come back and we were allowed to bring our favorite toy that Santa brought us and we'd go back and we'd spend the whole day at Mama and Papa's again with everybody and it was awesome. But every third year we had to fly down to Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, and have Christmas with my dad's mom and stepdad, and that was the worst. I hated it, and my weird cousins that I didn't really know, I hated going down there, and then I had to pretend to love my family, and I didn't. I still don't, and that's true. I love some of them. Uncle Glenn and Debbie, if you're watching this, I love you. You're one of the ones. They do keep up sometimes. But my favorite tradition was when I was at Mama and Papa's house in the afternoons. Papa would get this little mischievous grin on his face, and he'd get down on his hands and knees, and suddenly he became Max the dog, and I became the Grinch. And we'd sneak from his bedroom to the living room, real low, so nobody could see us, although everybody did. And we'd sneak over to the Christmas tree, and we'd grab up all of Mama's presents, and then we'd scamper, giggling like school children, back into their bedroom and hide them. And then that night, we'd go to open presents, and Mama played her part, made a big fuss, why didn't I get any presents? Where are my presents? She's very upset. We're giggling maniacally. And then we rush back, and we get the presents, because now my Grinch heart has grown ten times, and we give Mama all of her presents, and she opens them last. I loved doing that. And those are good traditions, and we should have those, and I hope that you do too. But let us not forget that Jesus didn't come to give us Christmas traditions. He didn't come to give us an excuse to celebrate and to gorge ourselves on food and to get gifts and to give gifts. He didn't come to give us the Christmas season. What he came to do is rule, and he didn't even come to be the Lord of the universe alone. He came to be the Lord of you. At Christmas, Jesus didn't come to give us an excuse to celebrate. He didn't come to give us traditions. He didn't even come for us to experience joy. He came to be the king of the universe, for the government to be upon his shoulder and provide peace for eternity. But let us not forget that he also came to be the king of you. Remember that fundamental relationship? He came to remind you to set it straight. So let's have our fun at Christmas. But Jesus came to be Lord of your life too. Yeah? Now, we're going to move to the bridge. Before we do, three quick points. First one, we got a little preview. The first two verses in this point us towards Christmas. I noticed this as I went through the song. These two verses, they're backward focused. So we look in the rear view mirror, we remember Christmas, and we put ourselves where it was and what it was, and we remember all that it was. And so we appreciate Christmas. So they point us to Christmas. And what I love about the bridge that we're about to go through that was added on subsequent to in later years by other artists is that this, the end of the song points us to eternity, which is the ultimate point of Christmas. So now we focused on Christmas and what we're about to do in the song is look forward to eternity. And that's the point of Christmas. The point of Christmas now is to remind us this, that Christmas reminds us that God keeps his promises. Christmas reminds us that God keeps his promises. For 2,000 years, for 2,000 years, next week we're going to look at this line in O Holy Night, long lay the world in sin and error pining. For 2,000 years they looked forward to the reception of this Messiah. Then they received him. Now for the last 2,000 years, we anticipate his return. So Christmas every year is a reminder, God kept his promise once after a 2,000 year wait. He'll keep it again. Okay? That's what Christmas is for. Now, I'm tight on time, so I want to go through this quickly. The first several lines, you draw the hearts of shepherds, you draw the hearts of kings. Even as a baby, you were changing everything. You called me to your kingdom before your lips could speak, and even as a baby, you were reaching out for me. Those are wonderful lines, but I want to focus on what follows. Because when we sing it, you're going to feel the song start to build as these lines come up. And you're going to kind of, that's when I want to kind of jump out of my shoes and just really let it go. And here's what we sing. And now we are awaiting the day of your return. See, now we're focused on eternity. Yes, celebrate Christmas. Now we're focused on eternity. It reminded me of these verses. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. So what we have is this great group of verses in Romans chapter 8 that says, we know that all of creation has been groaning for the return of the King, for the return of the Messiah that came and then left and is looking forward to his return. Not only that, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit grown inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and the redemption of our bodies. We were designed to long for Christ. And so Christmas orients us in Christ's coming and then points us towards his future return. That's what it's for. All of creation groans for that. When every eye will see you as heaven comes to earth. I'm going to go through this one, Lynn. I'm not going to read this one. As heaven comes to earth, this is from Revelation 21, 1 through 4, where it says God will be with his people and his people will be with their God and there will be no more weeping and no more crying and no more pain anymore for the former things have passed away. It speaks of this kingdom, this new heaven, and this new earth that we anticipate as we look towards eternity. Until the sky is open, until the trumpet sounds, that's all from Revelation. This is another reason why it's pointing us towards eternity. This whole last stanza is rooted in Revelation. It's looking forward to the second return of Christ. And then this line that feels like a throwaway line, but man, it's such an important one. And I want to rest here for just a second, if you'll indulge me. It says, the bride is getting ready. The bride is getting ready. Revelation 19, 7. Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory, for the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. Charles pulls this right out of Scripture. And we're told several times that the church is the bride of Christ. And men, if you have a hard time thinking of yourself as a bride, I heard a pastor say that women have to deal with this all the time. I walk into a room and I say, hey guys, how we doing? And women just have to accept that they're a guy now. Okay? And that in the Bible that they have to just be a part of mankind, not man and womankind. So like, they deal with it a lot. So if your fragile ego has a hard time being a bride, talk to a therapist, all right? We're the bride of Christ. And I'll just say as an aside, when we think about the bride getting ready, it's gotten a little ridiculous, hasn't it? I can remember growing up. Raise your hand if you can remember growing up. Whoever went to a wedding reception in a fellowship hall. Yeah. And what did they have in the fellowship hall? They had dinner mints. They had chalky dinner mints. Thank you, Bill. They had, let's play this game. What else did they have, Bill? Nuts. Yes. Punch, yes, the church ladies did punch, and no one spiked it at Baptist churches. They had the little sandwiches. They had the little cucumber sandwiches. Who eats cucumber sandwiches? Who made that? Or egg salad sandwich or pimento. Yeah, pimento cheese, and you have to say it the right way. It's not pimento. We're not carpetbaggers here. It's pimento cheese, yeah. Sorry, those of you who say it correctly and are carpetbaggers. The whole thing with the dress was like a thousand bucks. And now, holy smokes, it's unbelievably expensive. The social media has ruined not the brides, but their poor fathers who have to pay for this. Do you know, I've done about 150 to 200 weddings in my life. And do you know one of the things I find most absurd about weddings is now most brides make their dad buy silk pajamas for their bridal party. And those pajamas match, right? And what they do is they all wear the pajamas to the venue so they can get ready at the venue. But here's the thing about the pajamas. Did they sleep in them the night before? No. They got up and they put on a little bit of makeup so they can go put on more makeup. Yeah? And then they wear the pajamas, they get in the car and they drive to the venue and then they get ready. They got a hair stylist there and sometimes makeup and whatever or aunt whoever and then they all get ready. And no one sees the pajamas except them. They put them on to ride in the car and then to go take them off and to put on the dress. It's the most, and they've got to cost, every time I see it, I'm like, those have to cost $500. I don't know why we're spending money on these pajamas. But there's so many little things like that. But here's the thing. We might think of the bride as getting ready the day of the wedding. But you better believe that from the day of engagement to the day of commencement, that bride is getting ready. As soon as she says yes, that bride begins to get ready. She begins to make plans. They begin to, they look for a florist. They look for the right officiant. They get a DJ. Are we going to do live music? They go to their dad. What's the budget? And the dad gives them the budget knowing full well they're going to exceed it by 20%. So if he's a shrewd negotiator, he will underscore it, right? They do the florist. They do the catering. What kind of food do we want? We've got to go to a cake tasting. We've got to go do this. We've got to go tour venues. We've got to see when the date's going to be. What are your colors? I don't know because I don't know if I'm getting married in the summer or in the fall. And that matters a lot. Am I going to get married indoor or outdoor? It's all these decisions. And so from the moment of engagement to the moment of commencement, that bride is getting ready. And in this line, as we expect, as we say, come thou long expected Jesus, come and claim your bride. What is our job? To get ready, to pursue holiness, to welcome him, to ask for him to come, to live expectantly, knowing that one day he will come and claim his bride. And so as we sing that line, the bride is getting ready, let it remind you as a church, it is our job to pursue holiness and to pursue our Jesus and to pursue righteousness so that when our Jesus comes, we are ready to receive him. As the bride of Christ, let Christmas remind us to get ready. And then it says this, as it says the bride is getting ready, the very next line is, the church is singing out. And then we go back into the first verse. And so when it says, the church is singing out, guys, let's let it rip. Let's sing with full-throated praise to our God. And we have a chance again to shout to our Lord. Come thou long-expected Jesus, born to set thy people free. From our fears and sins release us. Let us find our rest in thee. Come thou long-expected Jesus. Please stand and let's sing that together like we mean it.
