Romans 8

Well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. And I actually am kind of laughing to myself because this morning's sermon is about family. And during that worship set, I think we got some good illustrations of family. Power goes out, it goes wrong. You guys kept singing. It was actually really beautiful. And I was proud of you in that moment. I just want it to be stated for the record that there was a surge back there, and there's a button that turns on all of the equipment that the sound comes through, and I remembered that and hit the button. That's right. I saved Christmas. The other really funny thing that happened up here that I just want to share with you guys because families have inside jokes, and this is a good one one for us. In the song, Hark the Herald, I'm going to do it, Aaron. In the song, Hark the Herald, Angels Sing, there's a verse where it said there's a line that says, like, hail incarnate deity. But that's a tough line to sing, and Aaron can't quite get it. So when he says it, he sings hail incarnate deity, like carne asada, like tacos, right? And you can't hear him sing the song and not hail the incarnate deity, which is pretty great because he is also the God of carne asada. And so I swore I wasn't going to look at him. We were laughing before the service about it in rehearsal. I swore I wasn't going to look at him. I didn't want to throw him off. So I didn't, but then he backs off. You know, he does the thing where he backs off the mic, right? and everybody sings, and it's a spiritual moment. It was not spiritual in Hark the Herald. He had to compose himself. So then I lean over to Jen and tell her what he's doing, and then he sees me talking to her. I'm sorry. And so then he starts laughing again. So then he gives you guys a spiritual chance to sing the song again while he composes himself. So anyways, that's what happened during Hark the Herald. But yeah, this morning is about family because when we think of Christmas, we think of family, right? It's inevitably a part of the Christmas season. And that means different things to different people. For some of us, it means really good things. For some of us, when we think about Christmas and we think about the holidays and we think about seeing our families, our moms and our dads, our grandparents, our brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, all that stuff, it's a good, sweet time. We're really excited about it. We're really looking forward to it. And if that's you, that's fantastic. For others of us, it's stressful. I talked to a couple people this morning. You got big Christmas plans? And they go, yeah, we got to get lots of places, you know, or we got lots of people coming over, lots of big stuff to do. And for those who say, gosh, it feels stressful because there's so many people coming over, there's going to be so many folks there, or I've got so many people to go see, like, man, there's a lot of folks who'd be pretty jealous of that. Those are the golden years, man. Soak those up. For others of us, when we think about family at Christmas, it's stressful. We know we're going to be stepping into an environment, we're going to be sitting around a dinner table, where there's certain landmines that are going to be laid for us, and we better not step on them. And some of you want to step on them real bad, right? And your wife's like, please don't do it. Please don't say the thing. The conversation gets political. You want to say your thing. You know you shouldn't. Some of us are stepping into stressful situations, and not even just in a silly way, but family's just tense. Family's hard right now. And then there are others and these are the people that I think about the most. And if this is you, just know that I may not be praying for you by name, but I'm praying for you in general and your situation as often as I can remember to do it. There are others for whom thinking about family during Christmas is hard because either there's loss or there's loneliness, right? Christmas is hard because this is the first Christmas with that empty seat where someone's not where they're supposed to be and everything's going to feel different. Or it's been five years since the loss, but it still hurts the same when you sit around. I know that when my family lost my papa, Christmases were just, they just were never the same. They just weren't. I haven't had that much joy in a Christmas since we lost him. For others in our body, Christmas is a time of loneliness. It's a time when everybody else goes to their families and we might not have ours around us or at all. And if that's you, I pray for you often because I hate that for you. But I think that no matter where we are on that spectrum of good, dreading, where it just hurts no matter where we are, and for many of us, for most of us, we're probably a Venn diagram of all of those, right? As we approach, I doubt anyone's only good and anyone's only bad. There's just a good mix in there. But I think that the principles that come out of the Bible around family can actually encourage and inspire us no matter where we sit on the spectrum. And I've actually been really excited and looking forward to sharing this sermon with you because this sermon is one that kind of came through a little aha moment in my office. I knew that I was going to be preaching about family, and I didn't really know what I wanted to preach. I had no great inspiration. None of the ideas that I had sounded any good to me. And so I was just kind of sitting in my office thinking, and I do, when I don't know what to preach about, I do what I would assume most pastors do or should do, is I just kind of sit down with the Bible and I'm like, all right, God, what does your Bible say about this thing? And I just go through passages or I open up the Bible and I read passages until one catches me and I go, oh, that's the thing. That's what grace needs this week. And then I preach the Bible. And so I wasn't sure what to preach about. And Aaron Gibson happened to be in my office at the time. So he was my guinea pig that morning. And I said, hey, man, I got to preach about family. Here's what I'm thinking. Can you kind of help me make sense of this? Does anything click with you? What should I pursue? And so we started talking back and forth about this idea of family. And I started thinking through, well, how does the Bible address family? Where does it talk about family? And to be honest with you, the Bible is pretty scant in terms of passages that directly address family and tell parents how to parents and kids how to kid and grandparents how to grandparent. Like it doesn't have a lot of that in there. So I'm trying to figure out what is God, what does your word say about family and how does that apply to grace? And Aaron said something that triggered a thought in my head, and as often goes in these conversations when I'm trying to figure out what to preach, and I'm just talking to whoever is closest that I can grab and will listen to me. He said something that triggered a thought, and I started going through scripture in my head, and he was still, he was, he at that point became Charlie Brown's mom. Like, there was words coming out, but I'm looking out the window window and I said, I got it, man. Thanks so much. I'm excited. And so I just thought about family over the course of scripture and what it's supposed to be and what it's supposed to do and how God designed it. So if we look in the Old Testament, where we do have more directives about family, one of the first things we see is that family makes the top 10 list, which is actually pretty cool. It's in the 10 commandments, right? One of the commandments, honor your father and mother and the Lord for this is right. And that commandment looks different for different people at different ages. It looks different for me to honor my parents now than it did when I was 11, and it'll look different in 20 years than it does right now. And it has different implications in different family scenarios, right? Blended families and stuff like that. And so honor your father and mother is this just profound principle that comes out of the Old Testament where God prioritizes it enough to put it in the Ten Commandments. And implicit within that commandment to the parents is, hey, act in a way that's worthy of honor, right? Earn the honor of your children if they're going to be commanded to give it to you. And then there's other places in Scripture. Proverbs has some things to say that if we obey, our parents will live a long and fruitful life and that parents are told to raise a child up in the way they must go and they will not depart from it. So we raise them up by teaching them God's principles. But there is one passage, it's actually two different passages in the same book that say the same thing that really kind of outline for us or show us, depict for us the purpose of family as God intended it. So we can find this in Deuteronomy 6 or Deuteronomy 11. They say the same things. I just like the way Deuteronomy 11 is worded just a little bit better. So I'm going to read that to you now so we can see God's design for family. He's just taught them his law, told them how to live, basically giving them what their version of the Bible was, and this is what he says as a result of it. You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, listen, parents, I just taught you my law. I just shared with you my love and my truth. Now, I want you to put those all over your home. I want you to bind them on your hands. I want you to bind them on your forehead. I want you to write them on your walls. I want you to write them on your doorpost. And I want you to talk about them with your children when you're waking and before you sleep, as you come and you go, as you sit down for mealtimes, talk about my word with your children. And so what we see, and this is a profound thing, what we see is that God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his gospel. God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his love and for his truth. Now, they wouldn't have called it the gospel in the Old Testament, but we call it the gospel. The gospel is the story of the good news of Jesus. It's God's love and God's truth. And we can see from Deuteronomy and from the way the family is structured in the Old Testament that it is God's design for the family, that it would be the primary delivery system of his love and his truth in the life of children as they grow up. That the purpose of family from a spiritual perspective is to create the safe space to incubate the faith of our children so that they can grow up knowing who their God is. And then there's a generational implication in this where we do it for our children and for their children and for the children's children. And there's a responsibility forever to turn around and teach the previous generation the faith that you inherited from your mother and father. That the divine design for families is that a mama and a daddy would impart their faith on their children. You can't overstate how important this is. That our children, listen, if you have kids in your house, listen, that our children would grow up looking at our faith and knowing that this is the faith that they can learn. This is the faith that they can mimic. This is the faith that they can follow. They ought to grow up in our home looking at a godly marriage and knowing this is what I want one day. What I want one day is the way my father loves my mother. What I want one day is the way my mom loves my dad. That's what I want one day. Our kids should grow up in homes and be able to say that. They should grow up in homes where they are discipled, where we parents take it as our responsibility to impart what we know about our faith onto our children. Can I tell you that now that I have two kids, you know what keeps me up at night theologically when I think through difficult questions or truths of scripture or realities of walking with God? Do you know who I'm thinking about when I'm trying to figure those things out for myself? Because it ain't you. It's not my church, it's my children. I want to impart a good faith onto them so that when they enter into adulthood, they have a firm foundation. That they encounter less hiccups than I did. That's our job, parents. Our job in the home is to create a safe space for our kids to grow up where they know that they are loved by their God and by their parents and that their God and their parents are proud of them. We create that incubator in the home so they grow up in this safe space and they have a good family and then they turn around and they do that to their kids. That's clearly the divine design of family in the Bible and it's clearly what our families are supposed to do for us is to be God's delivery system of his grace and truth and love in our lives. We should be able to look at the generations that came before us and see what it is to have a heart for God and walk in that. And grandparents, you're not off the hook, okay? You might be thinking, well, my kids are, that ship has sailed, my kids are grown, they're out, what happened happened, and now we have to live in that reality, and that may be true. But this commandment in Deuteronomy was given to a culture of people that lived intergenerationally. They lived as clans. They lived together. So this isn't just for parents and children. This is for grandparents and adult children and grandchildren. And those of you who have adult kids, can I just tell you something? I don't care how old they are. They'd be 41, like me. They'd be 31 or 21. We still need mamas and daddies, okay? We still need parents. We still need people that we can look at and ask questions to. We still need an older generation that we can be vulnerable with, that can have grace with us, that can watch some of the mistakes that we're about to make and say, hey, hey, brother, I love you. Don't do that. Older generations in this room, my generation, we still need mamas and daddies. You never get too old for that. And those of you who are older than me and you have parents who are still alive, you know you still need them too. And you know you still miss them. This responsibility never fades. It's our job to love on and demonstrate to the generations that come. And my generation, it's going to sound like I'm making jokes because I make jokes because I'm a dummy sometimes, but I'm not making jokes right now. We need to watch people age gracefully so that we know what it is to do that. We need to watch people care for their aging parents so we know how to do that with tenderness and grace when it's our turn. We need to watch how you interact with your adult children who don't make some of the choices you want them to make or who do. We need to see how that's done. We need to watch that. We need that in our lives. And so this family, as the delivery system for God's grace and goodness and truth and instruction in our life, that never fades. And we never graduate out of that need. And now some of you, as I say this, you have good families. You're like these couples that I get to marry sometimes. I do a fair amount of weddings every year, and one of my favorite things that I get to do on occasion within a wedding ceremony is when the couple will talk to me. I always talk to them in premarital counseling about their families, and what was it like growing up in your home? How are your mamas and your daddies and that kind of thing? And every now and again, I'll be working with a couple and they will say, we had great families. We had great parents growing up. I loved growing up in my home. We want our home to look like their home. They were wonderful and yada, yada, yada. And I'll say, well, do you want to honor them in the service? And they're like, yeah, that would be great. And so what I do is after the exchanging of rings, I always pray over the couple. And what we'll do sometimes is we'll surprise the parents and I'll invite them up in the ceremony and I'll have some words written about how they understand that they're standing on shoulders of their parents who gave them this great upbringing and they're so grateful for it and they want to do the same thing in their home. So they want to acknowledge their parents in the wedding ceremony as they create a new family and their parents come up and lay hands on them and I get to pray over all of them. And that's just a sweet moment to see that generational love and faith, to see parents who took this seriously and kids who realize that their parents did that for them. So some of us come from good families. And those of us that do, Jen and I come from great families. We should acknowledge that we were born on third base. We did not hit a triple. God gave us a good set of cards, and we should be grateful for that. So part of today is just encouraging us that we should praise God for our good families. If you come from a good family, if you have a mom and a daddy who took this seriously, who modeled God's love for you and who taught you their faith, will you text them today? Will you call them? Will you tell them that you're grateful for that? Will you acknowledge the goodness that you come from? Because as I talk about this, what a family should do, how God designed the family, how he purposed it, I know that there are plenty of people in this room who feel bad because they weren't that. Who feel angry because my family didn't do this for me. Yeah, that's what a family's supposed to do. That's what a dad's supposed to do. My dad, he walked out that door when I was eight, so I didn't get this, man. I didn't get that idyllic childhood. I'm not looking forward to Christmas. It's going to be tense. It's going to be difficult. Sometimes we have families that let us down. We come to church, and everything's good, and everything smiles, and everybody's buddy-buddy, and behind the scenes, the wife knows and the kids know, he is heck to deal with. The husband knows and the kids know, man, mom's not the same person when she's not at church. Well, we come from broken families. We come from abusive families. We come from addicted families. And we feel like spiritual orphans because we just don't have somebody pouring into us like God designed family to do. And others of us, we had a great family. And then there was the diagnosis. Or the accident. And then there was loss. And we don't have that family that we used to have. We don't have that person to look to like we need to. And so I think the real question becomes, yeah, this is what God designed family to do, to be the divine delivery system of his goodness and his grace and his truth and his love. But for many of us, our families have fallen short of that. So the question becomes, what do we do when our family hasn't done what it's supposed to do? What are we supposed to do when our family has left some gaps? My parents didn't teach me their faith. My dad left. My mom left. My childhood was not good. I love my dad. He taught me faith, but he's gone now, and I don't know who to ask. I love my mom. She taught me faith, but she's gone now, and I don't know who to talk to or who to go to, and I don't know how I'm going to navigate these adult years on my own. What do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? And our situation is less than idyllic. To that question, I began to think about the New Testament. We talked about what the Old Testament has to say about family. What does the New Testament have to say about family? What's the language around family after Jesus comes on the scene? Once Christmas arrives, how does that impact family? And when I thought about the New Testament, I can't think of anywhere in the New Testament that specifically addresses family and family behavior. There's stuff about children honoring parents. There's stuff about gender roles within a family, but there's not anything about family dynamics in the Bible where it's specifically addressed in the New Testament that I'm aware of. But I began to think through the times where family is mentioned in the New Testament. And do you know that most of the time that family is mentioned in the New Testament, it's mentioned as imagery for how the church ought to behave? It's mentioned to help us understand how we, the church, should behave towards each other and begin to understand one another. That most of the family language in the New Testament is not actually about physical family. It's imagery about our spiritual family. I'll show you what I'm talking about so that you know that I'm not making this up. On your notes, there's a list of references there. We're not going to put all of them up on the screen. I just want you to know that if you want to go back and open up your Bible and double check me on this, there you go. There's the footnotes. You can do that. But in Ephesians 2, Paul talks about, he introduces this idea of a spiritual family. He says that we're no longer aliens and sojourners. We're no longer spiritual orphans, but that we are now, we now have membership in this heavenly family. And so he introduces to us this idea of an additional family. And then in 1 Timothy, I like this passage, in 1 Timothy chapter 5, Paul is writing to his disciple Timothy, who he's sent off to Ephesus to be the pastor there, the church in Ephesus, where we see the book of Ephesians. Timothy was the pastor pastor there trained by Paul. And 1 and 2 Timothy are letters of advice to him as he leads this church. And in chapter 5 of the first letter, he says, when you have conflicts with people, let me tell you how I want you to handle it. If you need to confront a man who's older than you, confront him as a father. If you need to talk to a woman who's older than you, confront her as a mother. If you need to talk to a younger man, one of your peers, talk to him as a brother. A younger woman, talk to her as a sister. And so what it tells me as a pastor is that when I talk to you in meetings and conversation, on Sunday morning, when I preach, I preach to you as if I'm preaching to my own family. I treat you like I would my own family. And I do not think that that instruction, though it's not explicit in the text, I do not think that that instruction is limited to just pastors and elders, but all of God's children. That you would regard men who are older than you as fathers, women who are older than you as mothers, and then your peers as brothers and sisters. That we should treat each other as family. And I'm going to get to it in a minute as to why I think this. But I think that is such a profoundly good teaching that we should treat each other like that. Then in Matthew chapter 12, Jesus says this really interesting thing where he's preaching to some people and he's talking with a crowd and somebody kind of cuts through and says, hey, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here to see you. And Jesus just says, my mother and my brothers are the ones who obey the will of God. Like they're family, this is family too. And then in Galatians, we see Paul again talk about this concept of family and how we've been adopted into God's family and we are heirs to the throne of God. And this is locked in for us most in Romans chapter 8. So I'm going to read this to you here. Romans chapter 8 verses 14 through 17 really tells us a lot about our spiritual family. Paul writes this, for all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. And that really should say sons and daughters of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but have received the spirit of adoption as sons and daughters by whom we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs, we are Christians, and again, to be a Christian, you simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you believe those things, then the Bible teaches that God has given you the Spirit as a down payment on your salvation in heaven. And what Paul tells us is when we receive the Spirit, then we are adopted into God's family, that we are heirs to God and co-heirs with Christ. We are brothers and sisters, and Christ is our brother. And so as you think through what the New Testament has to say about family, and you try to answer that question, what do we do when my family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? I think we accept the reality from the New Testament that through the gift of Jesus, we also receive the gift of a new supplemental family. And I meant to change that word supplemental to spiritual. But through the gift of Jesus, through the arrival of Christ, once Jesus shows up in the gospels, the Bible starts to talk differently about family. It's God's way of acknowledging, just like he did the rest of the world, yes, I intended for each and every boy and girl who is born to grow up in a family with parents who love them, who teach them about God, who show them God's love, who model for them maturity in their faith, and who surround them with other people and kind of create this incubator, this safe space for kids to grow up where they know they're loved and they know that God is proud of them. Yeah, that's the design. But God also acknowledges that when sin enters the world, things start to break down and the family is not immune from that. And so what do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We take solace in the fact that we are given a new supplemental spiritual family. And this is probably my favorite thing about grace. It's how much grace feels like my family. It's how much when the power goes out, we don't care, we're going to keep singing. Can I just tell you, I wasn't one bit worried. I wasn't like, oh gosh, what are we going to do if the power went out? You know what we're going to do? We're going to cut the fourth song and I was going to come up here and yell at you. That's what we're going to do. And you know what you guys were going to do? You're going to be totally cool with it. Nobody would leave and be like, that place stinks. And if you did, okay. Sorry. Nothing we can do about it. There wasn't one ounce of stress because you guys are family. Because we love each other. Because we show up for each other. And I was thinking about this reality in just mine and Jen's life. Six years ago, we moved away from our families. And though we have great families, that move created a void for us. Lily and John, our kids, they have great grandparents, but they didn't get to see them as often as we'd like. And so you know what God and his goodness did? He put us in a church that has people that are a generation older than us who love us and who love our children and who we consider to be our Raleigh grandparents, who we can call and say, gosh, something came up. Will you come sit with the kids? And they love to do it. We were given, you know what I was given? I think about this a lot, and I don't think those of you who fit into this category, I don't think you know how grateful I am for you. I have a really good dad. But when I came to this church, I was given a bunch of spiritual fathers who are older than me, who have walked through seasons that I haven't, who pour into me, who love me, who advise me, who befriend me, and who encourage me. And it has become my spiritual family. Jen has women in the church who are a generation older than her, who love on her, who we can go to, who we can ask questions to, who have become our Raleigh mamas and daddies. We have brothers and sisters in this church, in our small group, who we walk through the same seasons of life together, and we can lean on each other, and we're not alone. And that spiritual family here doesn't for one second replace our genetic family. It doesn't for one second replace the families that we were born into, but it supplements those families. And sometimes, even in the loss that we've experienced, sometimes we can get such joy out of our church family that just for a second, we don't think about that as much. So I want you to know that in grace you have a faith family. You have brothers and sisters who want to watch out for you. You have mamas and daddies who want to pour into you. There are children in this church who need your love. There are children in this church who need your direction that you can get involved with and turn around and pour into the younger generations. But this church needs to, according to Scripture, operate as a supplemental family that fills in the gaps that are left behind by the families that we were born into. So what do we do if our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We allow the church to be the place that is the primary delivery system of God's love and of God's grace and of God's truth. We're not just the children, but everybody who's here knows that they are loved. They're loved by their brothers and sisters. They're cared for by their brothers and sisters. They are cared for by their spiritual moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas. And that we believe in them and in who God created them to be and in watching them grow up to become those people. And when I say grow up, I don't just mean 10-year-olds becoming 25-year-olds. I mean someone who is 50, but spiritually they're two, and we get to watch them grow into their faith. So first, know that grace is your family. That's what we are here for. Second, as a family, we want to share the love that we have with everybody who comes in here. We want people to feel like family as soon as they walk in the doors. One of my favorite movies at the holiday season is Family Stone. And it's not, I'm not going to get into the plot of it, but one of the underlying themes of that movie, and they don't address it directly, but I think one of the reasons I love it so much is that that family is set up and you can just tell that everybody who walks in that door is loved and everybody they bring home with them is loved too. And I want Grace to feel like that. That everybody who walks in those doors is loved and is part of our family as soon as they wanna be. And everybody that you invite, we're gonna love them too. No matter who they are, no matter where they've been, no matter what they've done, we're gonna love on them. But I know that some of us have families that have let us down. Some of us had families that don't feel the same. Let God's family of faith be your supplemental family that fills in the gaps. And then that way, we can love each other, encourage each other, and continue to push each other towards Christ. And then once we feel that sense of family here, let's look out and see who God is bringing in and love on them too. I'm going to continue to use grace, faith, family in my language moving forward. And this overview of family in the Bible is exactly why I'm going to do that. I'm going to pray and then we've got some instructions for you after the service. Father, we love you. We thank you for being our heavenly Father. God, we thank you for our good families. Those of us that have them, we're so grateful for them. We thank you for good moms and dads that aren't perfect but love you well and love us too. God, I pray for those walking into Christmas who are walking into stressful situations or hurtful situations. I just pray that you would be with them, that they would see you, that they would know that you were loved, that you would show up in those spaces. And God, I pray that grace can be a place that fills in the gaps for those who are a part of us that were left by the families that they were born into. Give us good, rich, deep relationships, God, that push us towards you and that help us grow and help us know that we're loved by those around us and by you. Let us be a faithful family of faith. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. And I actually am kind of laughing to myself because this morning's sermon is about family. And during that worship set, I think we got some good illustrations of family. Power goes out, it goes wrong. You guys kept singing. It was actually really beautiful. And I was proud of you in that moment. I just want it to be stated for the record that there was a surge back there, and there's a button that turns on all of the equipment that the sound comes through, and I remembered that and hit the button. That's right. I saved Christmas. The other really funny thing that happened up here that I just want to share with you guys because families have inside jokes, and this is a good one one for us. In the song, Hark the Herald, I'm going to do it, Aaron. In the song, Hark the Herald, Angels Sing, there's a verse where it said there's a line that says, like, hail incarnate deity. But that's a tough line to sing, and Aaron can't quite get it. So when he says it, he sings hail incarnate deity, like carne asada, like tacos, right? And you can't hear him sing the song and not hail the incarnate deity, which is pretty great because he is also the God of carne asada. And so I swore I wasn't going to look at him. We were laughing before the service about it in rehearsal. I swore I wasn't going to look at him. I didn't want to throw him off. So I didn't, but then he backs off. You know, he does the thing where he backs off the mic, right? and everybody sings, and it's a spiritual moment. It was not spiritual in Hark the Herald. He had to compose himself. So then I lean over to Jen and tell her what he's doing, and then he sees me talking to her. I'm sorry. And so then he starts laughing again. So then he gives you guys a spiritual chance to sing the song again while he composes himself. So anyways, that's what happened during Hark the Herald. But yeah, this morning is about family because when we think of Christmas, we think of family, right? It's inevitably a part of the Christmas season. And that means different things to different people. For some of us, it means really good things. For some of us, when we think about Christmas and we think about the holidays and we think about seeing our families, our moms and our dads, our grandparents, our brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, all that stuff, it's a good, sweet time. We're really excited about it. We're really looking forward to it. And if that's you, that's fantastic. For others of us, it's stressful. I talked to a couple people this morning. You got big Christmas plans? And they go, yeah, we got to get lots of places, you know, or we got lots of people coming over, lots of big stuff to do. And for those who say, gosh, it feels stressful because there's so many people coming over, there's going to be so many folks there, or I've got so many people to go see, like, man, there's a lot of folks who'd be pretty jealous of that. Those are the golden years, man. Soak those up. For others of us, when we think about family at Christmas, it's stressful. We know we're going to be stepping into an environment, we're going to be sitting around a dinner table, where there's certain landmines that are going to be laid for us, and we better not step on them. And some of you want to step on them real bad, right? And your wife's like, please don't do it. Please don't say the thing. The conversation gets political. You want to say your thing. You know you shouldn't. Some of us are stepping into stressful situations, and not even just in a silly way, but family's just tense. Family's hard right now. And then there are others and these are the people that I think about the most. And if this is you, just know that I may not be praying for you by name, but I'm praying for you in general and your situation as often as I can remember to do it. There are others for whom thinking about family during Christmas is hard because either there's loss or there's loneliness, right? Christmas is hard because this is the first Christmas with that empty seat where someone's not where they're supposed to be and everything's going to feel different. Or it's been five years since the loss, but it still hurts the same when you sit around. I know that when my family lost my papa, Christmases were just, they just were never the same. They just weren't. I haven't had that much joy in a Christmas since we lost him. For others in our body, Christmas is a time of loneliness. It's a time when everybody else goes to their families and we might not have ours around us or at all. And if that's you, I pray for you often because I hate that for you. But I think that no matter where we are on that spectrum of good, dreading, where it just hurts no matter where we are, and for many of us, for most of us, we're probably a Venn diagram of all of those, right? As we approach, I doubt anyone's only good and anyone's only bad. There's just a good mix in there. But I think that the principles that come out of the Bible around family can actually encourage and inspire us no matter where we sit on the spectrum. And I've actually been really excited and looking forward to sharing this sermon with you because this sermon is one that kind of came through a little aha moment in my office. I knew that I was going to be preaching about family, and I didn't really know what I wanted to preach. I had no great inspiration. None of the ideas that I had sounded any good to me. And so I was just kind of sitting in my office thinking, and I do, when I don't know what to preach about, I do what I would assume most pastors do or should do, is I just kind of sit down with the Bible and I'm like, all right, God, what does your Bible say about this thing? And I just go through passages or I open up the Bible and I read passages until one catches me and I go, oh, that's the thing. That's what grace needs this week. And then I preach the Bible. And so I wasn't sure what to preach about. And Aaron Gibson happened to be in my office at the time. So he was my guinea pig that morning. And I said, hey, man, I got to preach about family. Here's what I'm thinking. Can you kind of help me make sense of this? Does anything click with you? What should I pursue? And so we started talking back and forth about this idea of family. And I started thinking through, well, how does the Bible address family? Where does it talk about family? And to be honest with you, the Bible is pretty scant in terms of passages that directly address family and tell parents how to parents and kids how to kid and grandparents how to grandparent. Like it doesn't have a lot of that in there. So I'm trying to figure out what is God, what does your word say about family and how does that apply to grace? And Aaron said something that triggered a thought in my head, and as often goes in these conversations when I'm trying to figure out what to preach, and I'm just talking to whoever is closest that I can grab and will listen to me. He said something that triggered a thought, and I started going through scripture in my head, and he was still, he was, he at that point became Charlie Brown's mom. Like, there was words coming out, but I'm looking out the window window and I said, I got it, man. Thanks so much. I'm excited. And so I just thought about family over the course of scripture and what it's supposed to be and what it's supposed to do and how God designed it. So if we look in the Old Testament, where we do have more directives about family, one of the first things we see is that family makes the top 10 list, which is actually pretty cool. It's in the 10 commandments, right? One of the commandments, honor your father and mother and the Lord for this is right. And that commandment looks different for different people at different ages. It looks different for me to honor my parents now than it did when I was 11, and it'll look different in 20 years than it does right now. And it has different implications in different family scenarios, right? Blended families and stuff like that. And so honor your father and mother is this just profound principle that comes out of the Old Testament where God prioritizes it enough to put it in the Ten Commandments. And implicit within that commandment to the parents is, hey, act in a way that's worthy of honor, right? Earn the honor of your children if they're going to be commanded to give it to you. And then there's other places in Scripture. Proverbs has some things to say that if we obey, our parents will live a long and fruitful life and that parents are told to raise a child up in the way they must go and they will not depart from it. So we raise them up by teaching them God's principles. But there is one passage, it's actually two different passages in the same book that say the same thing that really kind of outline for us or show us, depict for us the purpose of family as God intended it. So we can find this in Deuteronomy 6 or Deuteronomy 11. They say the same things. I just like the way Deuteronomy 11 is worded just a little bit better. So I'm going to read that to you now so we can see God's design for family. He's just taught them his law, told them how to live, basically giving them what their version of the Bible was, and this is what he says as a result of it. You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, listen, parents, I just taught you my law. I just shared with you my love and my truth. Now, I want you to put those all over your home. I want you to bind them on your hands. I want you to bind them on your forehead. I want you to write them on your walls. I want you to write them on your doorpost. And I want you to talk about them with your children when you're waking and before you sleep, as you come and you go, as you sit down for mealtimes, talk about my word with your children. And so what we see, and this is a profound thing, what we see is that God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his gospel. God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his love and for his truth. Now, they wouldn't have called it the gospel in the Old Testament, but we call it the gospel. The gospel is the story of the good news of Jesus. It's God's love and God's truth. And we can see from Deuteronomy and from the way the family is structured in the Old Testament that it is God's design for the family, that it would be the primary delivery system of his love and his truth in the life of children as they grow up. That the purpose of family from a spiritual perspective is to create the safe space to incubate the faith of our children so that they can grow up knowing who their God is. And then there's a generational implication in this where we do it for our children and for their children and for the children's children. And there's a responsibility forever to turn around and teach the previous generation the faith that you inherited from your mother and father. That the divine design for families is that a mama and a daddy would impart their faith on their children. You can't overstate how important this is. That our children, listen, if you have kids in your house, listen, that our children would grow up looking at our faith and knowing that this is the faith that they can learn. This is the faith that they can mimic. This is the faith that they can follow. They ought to grow up in our home looking at a godly marriage and knowing this is what I want one day. What I want one day is the way my father loves my mother. What I want one day is the way my mom loves my dad. That's what I want one day. Our kids should grow up in homes and be able to say that. They should grow up in homes where they are discipled, where we parents take it as our responsibility to impart what we know about our faith onto our children. Can I tell you that now that I have two kids, you know what keeps me up at night theologically when I think through difficult questions or truths of scripture or realities of walking with God? Do you know who I'm thinking about when I'm trying to figure those things out for myself? Because it ain't you. It's not my church, it's my children. I want to impart a good faith onto them so that when they enter into adulthood, they have a firm foundation. That they encounter less hiccups than I did. That's our job, parents. Our job in the home is to create a safe space for our kids to grow up where they know that they are loved by their God and by their parents and that their God and their parents are proud of them. We create that incubator in the home so they grow up in this safe space and they have a good family and then they turn around and they do that to their kids. That's clearly the divine design of family in the Bible and it's clearly what our families are supposed to do for us is to be God's delivery system of his grace and truth and love in our lives. We should be able to look at the generations that came before us and see what it is to have a heart for God and walk in that. And grandparents, you're not off the hook, okay? You might be thinking, well, my kids are, that ship has sailed, my kids are grown, they're out, what happened happened, and now we have to live in that reality, and that may be true. But this commandment in Deuteronomy was given to a culture of people that lived intergenerationally. They lived as clans. They lived together. So this isn't just for parents and children. This is for grandparents and adult children and grandchildren. And those of you who have adult kids, can I just tell you something? I don't care how old they are. They'd be 41, like me. They'd be 31 or 21. We still need mamas and daddies, okay? We still need parents. We still need people that we can look at and ask questions to. We still need an older generation that we can be vulnerable with, that can have grace with us, that can watch some of the mistakes that we're about to make and say, hey, hey, brother, I love you. Don't do that. Older generations in this room, my generation, we still need mamas and daddies. You never get too old for that. And those of you who are older than me and you have parents who are still alive, you know you still need them too. And you know you still miss them. This responsibility never fades. It's our job to love on and demonstrate to the generations that come. And my generation, it's going to sound like I'm making jokes because I make jokes because I'm a dummy sometimes, but I'm not making jokes right now. We need to watch people age gracefully so that we know what it is to do that. We need to watch people care for their aging parents so we know how to do that with tenderness and grace when it's our turn. We need to watch how you interact with your adult children who don't make some of the choices you want them to make or who do. We need to see how that's done. We need to watch that. We need that in our lives. And so this family, as the delivery system for God's grace and goodness and truth and instruction in our life, that never fades. And we never graduate out of that need. And now some of you, as I say this, you have good families. You're like these couples that I get to marry sometimes. I do a fair amount of weddings every year, and one of my favorite things that I get to do on occasion within a wedding ceremony is when the couple will talk to me. I always talk to them in premarital counseling about their families, and what was it like growing up in your home? How are your mamas and your daddies and that kind of thing? And every now and again, I'll be working with a couple and they will say, we had great families. We had great parents growing up. I loved growing up in my home. We want our home to look like their home. They were wonderful and yada, yada, yada. And I'll say, well, do you want to honor them in the service? And they're like, yeah, that would be great. And so what I do is after the exchanging of rings, I always pray over the couple. And what we'll do sometimes is we'll surprise the parents and I'll invite them up in the ceremony and I'll have some words written about how they understand that they're standing on shoulders of their parents who gave them this great upbringing and they're so grateful for it and they want to do the same thing in their home. So they want to acknowledge their parents in the wedding ceremony as they create a new family and their parents come up and lay hands on them and I get to pray over all of them. And that's just a sweet moment to see that generational love and faith, to see parents who took this seriously and kids who realize that their parents did that for them. So some of us come from good families. And those of us that do, Jen and I come from great families. We should acknowledge that we were born on third base. We did not hit a triple. God gave us a good set of cards, and we should be grateful for that. So part of today is just encouraging us that we should praise God for our good families. If you come from a good family, if you have a mom and a daddy who took this seriously, who modeled God's love for you and who taught you their faith, will you text them today? Will you call them? Will you tell them that you're grateful for that? Will you acknowledge the goodness that you come from? Because as I talk about this, what a family should do, how God designed the family, how he purposed it, I know that there are plenty of people in this room who feel bad because they weren't that. Who feel angry because my family didn't do this for me. Yeah, that's what a family's supposed to do. That's what a dad's supposed to do. My dad, he walked out that door when I was eight, so I didn't get this, man. I didn't get that idyllic childhood. I'm not looking forward to Christmas. It's going to be tense. It's going to be difficult. Sometimes we have families that let us down. We come to church, and everything's good, and everything smiles, and everybody's buddy-buddy, and behind the scenes, the wife knows and the kids know, he is heck to deal with. The husband knows and the kids know, man, mom's not the same person when she's not at church. Well, we come from broken families. We come from abusive families. We come from addicted families. And we feel like spiritual orphans because we just don't have somebody pouring into us like God designed family to do. And others of us, we had a great family. And then there was the diagnosis. Or the accident. And then there was loss. And we don't have that family that we used to have. We don't have that person to look to like we need to. And so I think the real question becomes, yeah, this is what God designed family to do, to be the divine delivery system of his goodness and his grace and his truth and his love. But for many of us, our families have fallen short of that. So the question becomes, what do we do when our family hasn't done what it's supposed to do? What are we supposed to do when our family has left some gaps? My parents didn't teach me their faith. My dad left. My mom left. My childhood was not good. I love my dad. He taught me faith, but he's gone now, and I don't know who to ask. I love my mom. She taught me faith, but she's gone now, and I don't know who to talk to or who to go to, and I don't know how I'm going to navigate these adult years on my own. What do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? And our situation is less than idyllic. To that question, I began to think about the New Testament. We talked about what the Old Testament has to say about family. What does the New Testament have to say about family? What's the language around family after Jesus comes on the scene? Once Christmas arrives, how does that impact family? And when I thought about the New Testament, I can't think of anywhere in the New Testament that specifically addresses family and family behavior. There's stuff about children honoring parents. There's stuff about gender roles within a family, but there's not anything about family dynamics in the Bible where it's specifically addressed in the New Testament that I'm aware of. But I began to think through the times where family is mentioned in the New Testament. And do you know that most of the time that family is mentioned in the New Testament, it's mentioned as imagery for how the church ought to behave? It's mentioned to help us understand how we, the church, should behave towards each other and begin to understand one another. That most of the family language in the New Testament is not actually about physical family. It's imagery about our spiritual family. I'll show you what I'm talking about so that you know that I'm not making this up. On your notes, there's a list of references there. We're not going to put all of them up on the screen. I just want you to know that if you want to go back and open up your Bible and double check me on this, there you go. There's the footnotes. You can do that. But in Ephesians 2, Paul talks about, he introduces this idea of a spiritual family. He says that we're no longer aliens and sojourners. We're no longer spiritual orphans, but that we are now, we now have membership in this heavenly family. And so he introduces to us this idea of an additional family. And then in 1 Timothy, I like this passage, in 1 Timothy chapter 5, Paul is writing to his disciple Timothy, who he's sent off to Ephesus to be the pastor there, the church in Ephesus, where we see the book of Ephesians. Timothy was the pastor pastor there trained by Paul. And 1 and 2 Timothy are letters of advice to him as he leads this church. And in chapter 5 of the first letter, he says, when you have conflicts with people, let me tell you how I want you to handle it. If you need to confront a man who's older than you, confront him as a father. If you need to talk to a woman who's older than you, confront her as a mother. If you need to talk to a younger man, one of your peers, talk to him as a brother. A younger woman, talk to her as a sister. And so what it tells me as a pastor is that when I talk to you in meetings and conversation, on Sunday morning, when I preach, I preach to you as if I'm preaching to my own family. I treat you like I would my own family. And I do not think that that instruction, though it's not explicit in the text, I do not think that that instruction is limited to just pastors and elders, but all of God's children. That you would regard men who are older than you as fathers, women who are older than you as mothers, and then your peers as brothers and sisters. That we should treat each other as family. And I'm going to get to it in a minute as to why I think this. But I think that is such a profoundly good teaching that we should treat each other like that. Then in Matthew chapter 12, Jesus says this really interesting thing where he's preaching to some people and he's talking with a crowd and somebody kind of cuts through and says, hey, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here to see you. And Jesus just says, my mother and my brothers are the ones who obey the will of God. Like they're family, this is family too. And then in Galatians, we see Paul again talk about this concept of family and how we've been adopted into God's family and we are heirs to the throne of God. And this is locked in for us most in Romans chapter 8. So I'm going to read this to you here. Romans chapter 8 verses 14 through 17 really tells us a lot about our spiritual family. Paul writes this, for all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. And that really should say sons and daughters of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but have received the spirit of adoption as sons and daughters by whom we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs, we are Christians, and again, to be a Christian, you simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you believe those things, then the Bible teaches that God has given you the Spirit as a down payment on your salvation in heaven. And what Paul tells us is when we receive the Spirit, then we are adopted into God's family, that we are heirs to God and co-heirs with Christ. We are brothers and sisters, and Christ is our brother. And so as you think through what the New Testament has to say about family, and you try to answer that question, what do we do when my family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? I think we accept the reality from the New Testament that through the gift of Jesus, we also receive the gift of a new supplemental family. And I meant to change that word supplemental to spiritual. But through the gift of Jesus, through the arrival of Christ, once Jesus shows up in the gospels, the Bible starts to talk differently about family. It's God's way of acknowledging, just like he did the rest of the world, yes, I intended for each and every boy and girl who is born to grow up in a family with parents who love them, who teach them about God, who show them God's love, who model for them maturity in their faith, and who surround them with other people and kind of create this incubator, this safe space for kids to grow up where they know they're loved and they know that God is proud of them. Yeah, that's the design. But God also acknowledges that when sin enters the world, things start to break down and the family is not immune from that. And so what do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We take solace in the fact that we are given a new supplemental spiritual family. And this is probably my favorite thing about grace. It's how much grace feels like my family. It's how much when the power goes out, we don't care, we're going to keep singing. Can I just tell you, I wasn't one bit worried. I wasn't like, oh gosh, what are we going to do if the power went out? You know what we're going to do? We're going to cut the fourth song and I was going to come up here and yell at you. That's what we're going to do. And you know what you guys were going to do? You're going to be totally cool with it. Nobody would leave and be like, that place stinks. And if you did, okay. Sorry. Nothing we can do about it. There wasn't one ounce of stress because you guys are family. Because we love each other. Because we show up for each other. And I was thinking about this reality in just mine and Jen's life. Six years ago, we moved away from our families. And though we have great families, that move created a void for us. Lily and John, our kids, they have great grandparents, but they didn't get to see them as often as we'd like. And so you know what God and his goodness did? He put us in a church that has people that are a generation older than us who love us and who love our children and who we consider to be our Raleigh grandparents, who we can call and say, gosh, something came up. Will you come sit with the kids? And they love to do it. We were given, you know what I was given? I think about this a lot, and I don't think those of you who fit into this category, I don't think you know how grateful I am for you. I have a really good dad. But when I came to this church, I was given a bunch of spiritual fathers who are older than me, who have walked through seasons that I haven't, who pour into me, who love me, who advise me, who befriend me, and who encourage me. And it has become my spiritual family. Jen has women in the church who are a generation older than her, who love on her, who we can go to, who we can ask questions to, who have become our Raleigh mamas and daddies. We have brothers and sisters in this church, in our small group, who we walk through the same seasons of life together, and we can lean on each other, and we're not alone. And that spiritual family here doesn't for one second replace our genetic family. It doesn't for one second replace the families that we were born into, but it supplements those families. And sometimes, even in the loss that we've experienced, sometimes we can get such joy out of our church family that just for a second, we don't think about that as much. So I want you to know that in grace you have a faith family. You have brothers and sisters who want to watch out for you. You have mamas and daddies who want to pour into you. There are children in this church who need your love. There are children in this church who need your direction that you can get involved with and turn around and pour into the younger generations. But this church needs to, according to Scripture, operate as a supplemental family that fills in the gaps that are left behind by the families that we were born into. So what do we do if our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We allow the church to be the place that is the primary delivery system of God's love and of God's grace and of God's truth. We're not just the children, but everybody who's here knows that they are loved. They're loved by their brothers and sisters. They're cared for by their brothers and sisters. They are cared for by their spiritual moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas. And that we believe in them and in who God created them to be and in watching them grow up to become those people. And when I say grow up, I don't just mean 10-year-olds becoming 25-year-olds. I mean someone who is 50, but spiritually they're two, and we get to watch them grow into their faith. So first, know that grace is your family. That's what we are here for. Second, as a family, we want to share the love that we have with everybody who comes in here. We want people to feel like family as soon as they walk in the doors. One of my favorite movies at the holiday season is Family Stone. And it's not, I'm not going to get into the plot of it, but one of the underlying themes of that movie, and they don't address it directly, but I think one of the reasons I love it so much is that that family is set up and you can just tell that everybody who walks in that door is loved and everybody they bring home with them is loved too. And I want Grace to feel like that. That everybody who walks in those doors is loved and is part of our family as soon as they wanna be. And everybody that you invite, we're gonna love them too. No matter who they are, no matter where they've been, no matter what they've done, we're gonna love on them. But I know that some of us have families that have let us down. Some of us had families that don't feel the same. Let God's family of faith be your supplemental family that fills in the gaps. And then that way, we can love each other, encourage each other, and continue to push each other towards Christ. And then once we feel that sense of family here, let's look out and see who God is bringing in and love on them too. I'm going to continue to use grace, faith, family in my language moving forward. And this overview of family in the Bible is exactly why I'm going to do that. I'm going to pray and then we've got some instructions for you after the service. Father, we love you. We thank you for being our heavenly Father. God, we thank you for our good families. Those of us that have them, we're so grateful for them. We thank you for good moms and dads that aren't perfect but love you well and love us too. God, I pray for those walking into Christmas who are walking into stressful situations or hurtful situations. I just pray that you would be with them, that they would see you, that they would know that you were loved, that you would show up in those spaces. And God, I pray that grace can be a place that fills in the gaps for those who are a part of us that were left by the families that they were born into. Give us good, rich, deep relationships, God, that push us towards you and that help us grow and help us know that we're loved by those around us and by you. Let us be a faithful family of faith. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. And I actually am kind of laughing to myself because this morning's sermon is about family. And during that worship set, I think we got some good illustrations of family. Power goes out, it goes wrong. You guys kept singing. It was actually really beautiful. And I was proud of you in that moment. I just want it to be stated for the record that there was a surge back there, and there's a button that turns on all of the equipment that the sound comes through, and I remembered that and hit the button. That's right. I saved Christmas. The other really funny thing that happened up here that I just want to share with you guys because families have inside jokes, and this is a good one one for us. In the song, Hark the Herald, I'm going to do it, Aaron. In the song, Hark the Herald, Angels Sing, there's a verse where it said there's a line that says, like, hail incarnate deity. But that's a tough line to sing, and Aaron can't quite get it. So when he says it, he sings hail incarnate deity, like carne asada, like tacos, right? And you can't hear him sing the song and not hail the incarnate deity, which is pretty great because he is also the God of carne asada. And so I swore I wasn't going to look at him. We were laughing before the service about it in rehearsal. I swore I wasn't going to look at him. I didn't want to throw him off. So I didn't, but then he backs off. You know, he does the thing where he backs off the mic, right? and everybody sings, and it's a spiritual moment. It was not spiritual in Hark the Herald. He had to compose himself. So then I lean over to Jen and tell her what he's doing, and then he sees me talking to her. I'm sorry. And so then he starts laughing again. So then he gives you guys a spiritual chance to sing the song again while he composes himself. So anyways, that's what happened during Hark the Herald. But yeah, this morning is about family because when we think of Christmas, we think of family, right? It's inevitably a part of the Christmas season. And that means different things to different people. For some of us, it means really good things. For some of us, when we think about Christmas and we think about the holidays and we think about seeing our families, our moms and our dads, our grandparents, our brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, all that stuff, it's a good, sweet time. We're really excited about it. We're really looking forward to it. And if that's you, that's fantastic. For others of us, it's stressful. I talked to a couple people this morning. You got big Christmas plans? And they go, yeah, we got to get lots of places, you know, or we got lots of people coming over, lots of big stuff to do. And for those who say, gosh, it feels stressful because there's so many people coming over, there's going to be so many folks there, or I've got so many people to go see, like, man, there's a lot of folks who'd be pretty jealous of that. Those are the golden years, man. Soak those up. For others of us, when we think about family at Christmas, it's stressful. We know we're going to be stepping into an environment, we're going to be sitting around a dinner table, where there's certain landmines that are going to be laid for us, and we better not step on them. And some of you want to step on them real bad, right? And your wife's like, please don't do it. Please don't say the thing. The conversation gets political. You want to say your thing. You know you shouldn't. Some of us are stepping into stressful situations, and not even just in a silly way, but family's just tense. Family's hard right now. And then there are others and these are the people that I think about the most. And if this is you, just know that I may not be praying for you by name, but I'm praying for you in general and your situation as often as I can remember to do it. There are others for whom thinking about family during Christmas is hard because either there's loss or there's loneliness, right? Christmas is hard because this is the first Christmas with that empty seat where someone's not where they're supposed to be and everything's going to feel different. Or it's been five years since the loss, but it still hurts the same when you sit around. I know that when my family lost my papa, Christmases were just, they just were never the same. They just weren't. I haven't had that much joy in a Christmas since we lost him. For others in our body, Christmas is a time of loneliness. It's a time when everybody else goes to their families and we might not have ours around us or at all. And if that's you, I pray for you often because I hate that for you. But I think that no matter where we are on that spectrum of good, dreading, where it just hurts no matter where we are, and for many of us, for most of us, we're probably a Venn diagram of all of those, right? As we approach, I doubt anyone's only good and anyone's only bad. There's just a good mix in there. But I think that the principles that come out of the Bible around family can actually encourage and inspire us no matter where we sit on the spectrum. And I've actually been really excited and looking forward to sharing this sermon with you because this sermon is one that kind of came through a little aha moment in my office. I knew that I was going to be preaching about family, and I didn't really know what I wanted to preach. I had no great inspiration. None of the ideas that I had sounded any good to me. And so I was just kind of sitting in my office thinking, and I do, when I don't know what to preach about, I do what I would assume most pastors do or should do, is I just kind of sit down with the Bible and I'm like, all right, God, what does your Bible say about this thing? And I just go through passages or I open up the Bible and I read passages until one catches me and I go, oh, that's the thing. That's what grace needs this week. And then I preach the Bible. And so I wasn't sure what to preach about. And Aaron Gibson happened to be in my office at the time. So he was my guinea pig that morning. And I said, hey, man, I got to preach about family. Here's what I'm thinking. Can you kind of help me make sense of this? Does anything click with you? What should I pursue? And so we started talking back and forth about this idea of family. And I started thinking through, well, how does the Bible address family? Where does it talk about family? And to be honest with you, the Bible is pretty scant in terms of passages that directly address family and tell parents how to parents and kids how to kid and grandparents how to grandparent. Like it doesn't have a lot of that in there. So I'm trying to figure out what is God, what does your word say about family and how does that apply to grace? And Aaron said something that triggered a thought in my head, and as often goes in these conversations when I'm trying to figure out what to preach, and I'm just talking to whoever is closest that I can grab and will listen to me. He said something that triggered a thought, and I started going through scripture in my head, and he was still, he was, he at that point became Charlie Brown's mom. Like, there was words coming out, but I'm looking out the window window and I said, I got it, man. Thanks so much. I'm excited. And so I just thought about family over the course of scripture and what it's supposed to be and what it's supposed to do and how God designed it. So if we look in the Old Testament, where we do have more directives about family, one of the first things we see is that family makes the top 10 list, which is actually pretty cool. It's in the 10 commandments, right? One of the commandments, honor your father and mother and the Lord for this is right. And that commandment looks different for different people at different ages. It looks different for me to honor my parents now than it did when I was 11, and it'll look different in 20 years than it does right now. And it has different implications in different family scenarios, right? Blended families and stuff like that. And so honor your father and mother is this just profound principle that comes out of the Old Testament where God prioritizes it enough to put it in the Ten Commandments. And implicit within that commandment to the parents is, hey, act in a way that's worthy of honor, right? Earn the honor of your children if they're going to be commanded to give it to you. And then there's other places in Scripture. Proverbs has some things to say that if we obey, our parents will live a long and fruitful life and that parents are told to raise a child up in the way they must go and they will not depart from it. So we raise them up by teaching them God's principles. But there is one passage, it's actually two different passages in the same book that say the same thing that really kind of outline for us or show us, depict for us the purpose of family as God intended it. So we can find this in Deuteronomy 6 or Deuteronomy 11. They say the same things. I just like the way Deuteronomy 11 is worded just a little bit better. So I'm going to read that to you now so we can see God's design for family. He's just taught them his law, told them how to live, basically giving them what their version of the Bible was, and this is what he says as a result of it. You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, listen, parents, I just taught you my law. I just shared with you my love and my truth. Now, I want you to put those all over your home. I want you to bind them on your hands. I want you to bind them on your forehead. I want you to write them on your walls. I want you to write them on your doorpost. And I want you to talk about them with your children when you're waking and before you sleep, as you come and you go, as you sit down for mealtimes, talk about my word with your children. And so what we see, and this is a profound thing, what we see is that God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his gospel. God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his love and for his truth. Now, they wouldn't have called it the gospel in the Old Testament, but we call it the gospel. The gospel is the story of the good news of Jesus. It's God's love and God's truth. And we can see from Deuteronomy and from the way the family is structured in the Old Testament that it is God's design for the family, that it would be the primary delivery system of his love and his truth in the life of children as they grow up. That the purpose of family from a spiritual perspective is to create the safe space to incubate the faith of our children so that they can grow up knowing who their God is. And then there's a generational implication in this where we do it for our children and for their children and for the children's children. And there's a responsibility forever to turn around and teach the previous generation the faith that you inherited from your mother and father. That the divine design for families is that a mama and a daddy would impart their faith on their children. You can't overstate how important this is. That our children, listen, if you have kids in your house, listen, that our children would grow up looking at our faith and knowing that this is the faith that they can learn. This is the faith that they can mimic. This is the faith that they can follow. They ought to grow up in our home looking at a godly marriage and knowing this is what I want one day. What I want one day is the way my father loves my mother. What I want one day is the way my mom loves my dad. That's what I want one day. Our kids should grow up in homes and be able to say that. They should grow up in homes where they are discipled, where we parents take it as our responsibility to impart what we know about our faith onto our children. Can I tell you that now that I have two kids, you know what keeps me up at night theologically when I think through difficult questions or truths of scripture or realities of walking with God? Do you know who I'm thinking about when I'm trying to figure those things out for myself? Because it ain't you. It's not my church, it's my children. I want to impart a good faith onto them so that when they enter into adulthood, they have a firm foundation. That they encounter less hiccups than I did. That's our job, parents. Our job in the home is to create a safe space for our kids to grow up where they know that they are loved by their God and by their parents and that their God and their parents are proud of them. We create that incubator in the home so they grow up in this safe space and they have a good family and then they turn around and they do that to their kids. That's clearly the divine design of family in the Bible and it's clearly what our families are supposed to do for us is to be God's delivery system of his grace and truth and love in our lives. We should be able to look at the generations that came before us and see what it is to have a heart for God and walk in that. And grandparents, you're not off the hook, okay? You might be thinking, well, my kids are, that ship has sailed, my kids are grown, they're out, what happened happened, and now we have to live in that reality, and that may be true. But this commandment in Deuteronomy was given to a culture of people that lived intergenerationally. They lived as clans. They lived together. So this isn't just for parents and children. This is for grandparents and adult children and grandchildren. And those of you who have adult kids, can I just tell you something? I don't care how old they are. They'd be 41, like me. They'd be 31 or 21. We still need mamas and daddies, okay? We still need parents. We still need people that we can look at and ask questions to. We still need an older generation that we can be vulnerable with, that can have grace with us, that can watch some of the mistakes that we're about to make and say, hey, hey, brother, I love you. Don't do that. Older generations in this room, my generation, we still need mamas and daddies. You never get too old for that. And those of you who are older than me and you have parents who are still alive, you know you still need them too. And you know you still miss them. This responsibility never fades. It's our job to love on and demonstrate to the generations that come. And my generation, it's going to sound like I'm making jokes because I make jokes because I'm a dummy sometimes, but I'm not making jokes right now. We need to watch people age gracefully so that we know what it is to do that. We need to watch people care for their aging parents so we know how to do that with tenderness and grace when it's our turn. We need to watch how you interact with your adult children who don't make some of the choices you want them to make or who do. We need to see how that's done. We need to watch that. We need that in our lives. And so this family, as the delivery system for God's grace and goodness and truth and instruction in our life, that never fades. And we never graduate out of that need. And now some of you, as I say this, you have good families. You're like these couples that I get to marry sometimes. I do a fair amount of weddings every year, and one of my favorite things that I get to do on occasion within a wedding ceremony is when the couple will talk to me. I always talk to them in premarital counseling about their families, and what was it like growing up in your home? How are your mamas and your daddies and that kind of thing? And every now and again, I'll be working with a couple and they will say, we had great families. We had great parents growing up. I loved growing up in my home. We want our home to look like their home. They were wonderful and yada, yada, yada. And I'll say, well, do you want to honor them in the service? And they're like, yeah, that would be great. And so what I do is after the exchanging of rings, I always pray over the couple. And what we'll do sometimes is we'll surprise the parents and I'll invite them up in the ceremony and I'll have some words written about how they understand that they're standing on shoulders of their parents who gave them this great upbringing and they're so grateful for it and they want to do the same thing in their home. So they want to acknowledge their parents in the wedding ceremony as they create a new family and their parents come up and lay hands on them and I get to pray over all of them. And that's just a sweet moment to see that generational love and faith, to see parents who took this seriously and kids who realize that their parents did that for them. So some of us come from good families. And those of us that do, Jen and I come from great families. We should acknowledge that we were born on third base. We did not hit a triple. God gave us a good set of cards, and we should be grateful for that. So part of today is just encouraging us that we should praise God for our good families. If you come from a good family, if you have a mom and a daddy who took this seriously, who modeled God's love for you and who taught you their faith, will you text them today? Will you call them? Will you tell them that you're grateful for that? Will you acknowledge the goodness that you come from? Because as I talk about this, what a family should do, how God designed the family, how he purposed it, I know that there are plenty of people in this room who feel bad because they weren't that. Who feel angry because my family didn't do this for me. Yeah, that's what a family's supposed to do. That's what a dad's supposed to do. My dad, he walked out that door when I was eight, so I didn't get this, man. I didn't get that idyllic childhood. I'm not looking forward to Christmas. It's going to be tense. It's going to be difficult. Sometimes we have families that let us down. We come to church, and everything's good, and everything smiles, and everybody's buddy-buddy, and behind the scenes, the wife knows and the kids know, he is heck to deal with. The husband knows and the kids know, man, mom's not the same person when she's not at church. Well, we come from broken families. We come from abusive families. We come from addicted families. And we feel like spiritual orphans because we just don't have somebody pouring into us like God designed family to do. And others of us, we had a great family. And then there was the diagnosis. Or the accident. And then there was loss. And we don't have that family that we used to have. We don't have that person to look to like we need to. And so I think the real question becomes, yeah, this is what God designed family to do, to be the divine delivery system of his goodness and his grace and his truth and his love. But for many of us, our families have fallen short of that. So the question becomes, what do we do when our family hasn't done what it's supposed to do? What are we supposed to do when our family has left some gaps? My parents didn't teach me their faith. My dad left. My mom left. My childhood was not good. I love my dad. He taught me faith, but he's gone now, and I don't know who to ask. I love my mom. She taught me faith, but she's gone now, and I don't know who to talk to or who to go to, and I don't know how I'm going to navigate these adult years on my own. What do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? And our situation is less than idyllic. To that question, I began to think about the New Testament. We talked about what the Old Testament has to say about family. What does the New Testament have to say about family? What's the language around family after Jesus comes on the scene? Once Christmas arrives, how does that impact family? And when I thought about the New Testament, I can't think of anywhere in the New Testament that specifically addresses family and family behavior. There's stuff about children honoring parents. There's stuff about gender roles within a family, but there's not anything about family dynamics in the Bible where it's specifically addressed in the New Testament that I'm aware of. But I began to think through the times where family is mentioned in the New Testament. And do you know that most of the time that family is mentioned in the New Testament, it's mentioned as imagery for how the church ought to behave? It's mentioned to help us understand how we, the church, should behave towards each other and begin to understand one another. That most of the family language in the New Testament is not actually about physical family. It's imagery about our spiritual family. I'll show you what I'm talking about so that you know that I'm not making this up. On your notes, there's a list of references there. We're not going to put all of them up on the screen. I just want you to know that if you want to go back and open up your Bible and double check me on this, there you go. There's the footnotes. You can do that. But in Ephesians 2, Paul talks about, he introduces this idea of a spiritual family. He says that we're no longer aliens and sojourners. We're no longer spiritual orphans, but that we are now, we now have membership in this heavenly family. And so he introduces to us this idea of an additional family. And then in 1 Timothy, I like this passage, in 1 Timothy chapter 5, Paul is writing to his disciple Timothy, who he's sent off to Ephesus to be the pastor there, the church in Ephesus, where we see the book of Ephesians. Timothy was the pastor pastor there trained by Paul. And 1 and 2 Timothy are letters of advice to him as he leads this church. And in chapter 5 of the first letter, he says, when you have conflicts with people, let me tell you how I want you to handle it. If you need to confront a man who's older than you, confront him as a father. If you need to talk to a woman who's older than you, confront her as a mother. If you need to talk to a younger man, one of your peers, talk to him as a brother. A younger woman, talk to her as a sister. And so what it tells me as a pastor is that when I talk to you in meetings and conversation, on Sunday morning, when I preach, I preach to you as if I'm preaching to my own family. I treat you like I would my own family. And I do not think that that instruction, though it's not explicit in the text, I do not think that that instruction is limited to just pastors and elders, but all of God's children. That you would regard men who are older than you as fathers, women who are older than you as mothers, and then your peers as brothers and sisters. That we should treat each other as family. And I'm going to get to it in a minute as to why I think this. But I think that is such a profoundly good teaching that we should treat each other like that. Then in Matthew chapter 12, Jesus says this really interesting thing where he's preaching to some people and he's talking with a crowd and somebody kind of cuts through and says, hey, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here to see you. And Jesus just says, my mother and my brothers are the ones who obey the will of God. Like they're family, this is family too. And then in Galatians, we see Paul again talk about this concept of family and how we've been adopted into God's family and we are heirs to the throne of God. And this is locked in for us most in Romans chapter 8. So I'm going to read this to you here. Romans chapter 8 verses 14 through 17 really tells us a lot about our spiritual family. Paul writes this, for all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. And that really should say sons and daughters of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but have received the spirit of adoption as sons and daughters by whom we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs, we are Christians, and again, to be a Christian, you simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you believe those things, then the Bible teaches that God has given you the Spirit as a down payment on your salvation in heaven. And what Paul tells us is when we receive the Spirit, then we are adopted into God's family, that we are heirs to God and co-heirs with Christ. We are brothers and sisters, and Christ is our brother. And so as you think through what the New Testament has to say about family, and you try to answer that question, what do we do when my family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? I think we accept the reality from the New Testament that through the gift of Jesus, we also receive the gift of a new supplemental family. And I meant to change that word supplemental to spiritual. But through the gift of Jesus, through the arrival of Christ, once Jesus shows up in the gospels, the Bible starts to talk differently about family. It's God's way of acknowledging, just like he did the rest of the world, yes, I intended for each and every boy and girl who is born to grow up in a family with parents who love them, who teach them about God, who show them God's love, who model for them maturity in their faith, and who surround them with other people and kind of create this incubator, this safe space for kids to grow up where they know they're loved and they know that God is proud of them. Yeah, that's the design. But God also acknowledges that when sin enters the world, things start to break down and the family is not immune from that. And so what do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We take solace in the fact that we are given a new supplemental spiritual family. And this is probably my favorite thing about grace. It's how much grace feels like my family. It's how much when the power goes out, we don't care, we're going to keep singing. Can I just tell you, I wasn't one bit worried. I wasn't like, oh gosh, what are we going to do if the power went out? You know what we're going to do? We're going to cut the fourth song and I was going to come up here and yell at you. That's what we're going to do. And you know what you guys were going to do? You're going to be totally cool with it. Nobody would leave and be like, that place stinks. And if you did, okay. Sorry. Nothing we can do about it. There wasn't one ounce of stress because you guys are family. Because we love each other. Because we show up for each other. And I was thinking about this reality in just mine and Jen's life. Six years ago, we moved away from our families. And though we have great families, that move created a void for us. Lily and John, our kids, they have great grandparents, but they didn't get to see them as often as we'd like. And so you know what God and his goodness did? He put us in a church that has people that are a generation older than us who love us and who love our children and who we consider to be our Raleigh grandparents, who we can call and say, gosh, something came up. Will you come sit with the kids? And they love to do it. We were given, you know what I was given? I think about this a lot, and I don't think those of you who fit into this category, I don't think you know how grateful I am for you. I have a really good dad. But when I came to this church, I was given a bunch of spiritual fathers who are older than me, who have walked through seasons that I haven't, who pour into me, who love me, who advise me, who befriend me, and who encourage me. And it has become my spiritual family. Jen has women in the church who are a generation older than her, who love on her, who we can go to, who we can ask questions to, who have become our Raleigh mamas and daddies. We have brothers and sisters in this church, in our small group, who we walk through the same seasons of life together, and we can lean on each other, and we're not alone. And that spiritual family here doesn't for one second replace our genetic family. It doesn't for one second replace the families that we were born into, but it supplements those families. And sometimes, even in the loss that we've experienced, sometimes we can get such joy out of our church family that just for a second, we don't think about that as much. So I want you to know that in grace you have a faith family. You have brothers and sisters who want to watch out for you. You have mamas and daddies who want to pour into you. There are children in this church who need your love. There are children in this church who need your direction that you can get involved with and turn around and pour into the younger generations. But this church needs to, according to Scripture, operate as a supplemental family that fills in the gaps that are left behind by the families that we were born into. So what do we do if our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We allow the church to be the place that is the primary delivery system of God's love and of God's grace and of God's truth. We're not just the children, but everybody who's here knows that they are loved. They're loved by their brothers and sisters. They're cared for by their brothers and sisters. They are cared for by their spiritual moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas. And that we believe in them and in who God created them to be and in watching them grow up to become those people. And when I say grow up, I don't just mean 10-year-olds becoming 25-year-olds. I mean someone who is 50, but spiritually they're two, and we get to watch them grow into their faith. So first, know that grace is your family. That's what we are here for. Second, as a family, we want to share the love that we have with everybody who comes in here. We want people to feel like family as soon as they walk in the doors. One of my favorite movies at the holiday season is Family Stone. And it's not, I'm not going to get into the plot of it, but one of the underlying themes of that movie, and they don't address it directly, but I think one of the reasons I love it so much is that that family is set up and you can just tell that everybody who walks in that door is loved and everybody they bring home with them is loved too. And I want Grace to feel like that. That everybody who walks in those doors is loved and is part of our family as soon as they wanna be. And everybody that you invite, we're gonna love them too. No matter who they are, no matter where they've been, no matter what they've done, we're gonna love on them. But I know that some of us have families that have let us down. Some of us had families that don't feel the same. Let God's family of faith be your supplemental family that fills in the gaps. And then that way, we can love each other, encourage each other, and continue to push each other towards Christ. And then once we feel that sense of family here, let's look out and see who God is bringing in and love on them too. I'm going to continue to use grace, faith, family in my language moving forward. And this overview of family in the Bible is exactly why I'm going to do that. I'm going to pray and then we've got some instructions for you after the service. Father, we love you. We thank you for being our heavenly Father. God, we thank you for our good families. Those of us that have them, we're so grateful for them. We thank you for good moms and dads that aren't perfect but love you well and love us too. God, I pray for those walking into Christmas who are walking into stressful situations or hurtful situations. I just pray that you would be with them, that they would see you, that they would know that you were loved, that you would show up in those spaces. And God, I pray that grace can be a place that fills in the gaps for those who are a part of us that were left by the families that they were born into. Give us good, rich, deep relationships, God, that push us towards you and that help us grow and help us know that we're loved by those around us and by you. Let us be a faithful family of faith. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. And I actually am kind of laughing to myself because this morning's sermon is about family. And during that worship set, I think we got some good illustrations of family. Power goes out, it goes wrong. You guys kept singing. It was actually really beautiful. And I was proud of you in that moment. I just want it to be stated for the record that there was a surge back there, and there's a button that turns on all of the equipment that the sound comes through, and I remembered that and hit the button. That's right. I saved Christmas. The other really funny thing that happened up here that I just want to share with you guys because families have inside jokes, and this is a good one one for us. In the song, Hark the Herald, I'm going to do it, Aaron. In the song, Hark the Herald, Angels Sing, there's a verse where it said there's a line that says, like, hail incarnate deity. But that's a tough line to sing, and Aaron can't quite get it. So when he says it, he sings hail incarnate deity, like carne asada, like tacos, right? And you can't hear him sing the song and not hail the incarnate deity, which is pretty great because he is also the God of carne asada. And so I swore I wasn't going to look at him. We were laughing before the service about it in rehearsal. I swore I wasn't going to look at him. I didn't want to throw him off. So I didn't, but then he backs off. You know, he does the thing where he backs off the mic, right? and everybody sings, and it's a spiritual moment. It was not spiritual in Hark the Herald. He had to compose himself. So then I lean over to Jen and tell her what he's doing, and then he sees me talking to her. I'm sorry. And so then he starts laughing again. So then he gives you guys a spiritual chance to sing the song again while he composes himself. So anyways, that's what happened during Hark the Herald. But yeah, this morning is about family because when we think of Christmas, we think of family, right? It's inevitably a part of the Christmas season. And that means different things to different people. For some of us, it means really good things. For some of us, when we think about Christmas and we think about the holidays and we think about seeing our families, our moms and our dads, our grandparents, our brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, all that stuff, it's a good, sweet time. We're really excited about it. We're really looking forward to it. And if that's you, that's fantastic. For others of us, it's stressful. I talked to a couple people this morning. You got big Christmas plans? And they go, yeah, we got to get lots of places, you know, or we got lots of people coming over, lots of big stuff to do. And for those who say, gosh, it feels stressful because there's so many people coming over, there's going to be so many folks there, or I've got so many people to go see, like, man, there's a lot of folks who'd be pretty jealous of that. Those are the golden years, man. Soak those up. For others of us, when we think about family at Christmas, it's stressful. We know we're going to be stepping into an environment, we're going to be sitting around a dinner table, where there's certain landmines that are going to be laid for us, and we better not step on them. And some of you want to step on them real bad, right? And your wife's like, please don't do it. Please don't say the thing. The conversation gets political. You want to say your thing. You know you shouldn't. Some of us are stepping into stressful situations, and not even just in a silly way, but family's just tense. Family's hard right now. And then there are others and these are the people that I think about the most. And if this is you, just know that I may not be praying for you by name, but I'm praying for you in general and your situation as often as I can remember to do it. There are others for whom thinking about family during Christmas is hard because either there's loss or there's loneliness, right? Christmas is hard because this is the first Christmas with that empty seat where someone's not where they're supposed to be and everything's going to feel different. Or it's been five years since the loss, but it still hurts the same when you sit around. I know that when my family lost my papa, Christmases were just, they just were never the same. They just weren't. I haven't had that much joy in a Christmas since we lost him. For others in our body, Christmas is a time of loneliness. It's a time when everybody else goes to their families and we might not have ours around us or at all. And if that's you, I pray for you often because I hate that for you. But I think that no matter where we are on that spectrum of good, dreading, where it just hurts no matter where we are, and for many of us, for most of us, we're probably a Venn diagram of all of those, right? As we approach, I doubt anyone's only good and anyone's only bad. There's just a good mix in there. But I think that the principles that come out of the Bible around family can actually encourage and inspire us no matter where we sit on the spectrum. And I've actually been really excited and looking forward to sharing this sermon with you because this sermon is one that kind of came through a little aha moment in my office. I knew that I was going to be preaching about family, and I didn't really know what I wanted to preach. I had no great inspiration. None of the ideas that I had sounded any good to me. And so I was just kind of sitting in my office thinking, and I do, when I don't know what to preach about, I do what I would assume most pastors do or should do, is I just kind of sit down with the Bible and I'm like, all right, God, what does your Bible say about this thing? And I just go through passages or I open up the Bible and I read passages until one catches me and I go, oh, that's the thing. That's what grace needs this week. And then I preach the Bible. And so I wasn't sure what to preach about. And Aaron Gibson happened to be in my office at the time. So he was my guinea pig that morning. And I said, hey, man, I got to preach about family. Here's what I'm thinking. Can you kind of help me make sense of this? Does anything click with you? What should I pursue? And so we started talking back and forth about this idea of family. And I started thinking through, well, how does the Bible address family? Where does it talk about family? And to be honest with you, the Bible is pretty scant in terms of passages that directly address family and tell parents how to parents and kids how to kid and grandparents how to grandparent. Like it doesn't have a lot of that in there. So I'm trying to figure out what is God, what does your word say about family and how does that apply to grace? And Aaron said something that triggered a thought in my head, and as often goes in these conversations when I'm trying to figure out what to preach, and I'm just talking to whoever is closest that I can grab and will listen to me. He said something that triggered a thought, and I started going through scripture in my head, and he was still, he was, he at that point became Charlie Brown's mom. Like, there was words coming out, but I'm looking out the window window and I said, I got it, man. Thanks so much. I'm excited. And so I just thought about family over the course of scripture and what it's supposed to be and what it's supposed to do and how God designed it. So if we look in the Old Testament, where we do have more directives about family, one of the first things we see is that family makes the top 10 list, which is actually pretty cool. It's in the 10 commandments, right? One of the commandments, honor your father and mother and the Lord for this is right. And that commandment looks different for different people at different ages. It looks different for me to honor my parents now than it did when I was 11, and it'll look different in 20 years than it does right now. And it has different implications in different family scenarios, right? Blended families and stuff like that. And so honor your father and mother is this just profound principle that comes out of the Old Testament where God prioritizes it enough to put it in the Ten Commandments. And implicit within that commandment to the parents is, hey, act in a way that's worthy of honor, right? Earn the honor of your children if they're going to be commanded to give it to you. And then there's other places in Scripture. Proverbs has some things to say that if we obey, our parents will live a long and fruitful life and that parents are told to raise a child up in the way they must go and they will not depart from it. So we raise them up by teaching them God's principles. But there is one passage, it's actually two different passages in the same book that say the same thing that really kind of outline for us or show us, depict for us the purpose of family as God intended it. So we can find this in Deuteronomy 6 or Deuteronomy 11. They say the same things. I just like the way Deuteronomy 11 is worded just a little bit better. So I'm going to read that to you now so we can see God's design for family. He's just taught them his law, told them how to live, basically giving them what their version of the Bible was, and this is what he says as a result of it. You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, listen, parents, I just taught you my law. I just shared with you my love and my truth. Now, I want you to put those all over your home. I want you to bind them on your hands. I want you to bind them on your forehead. I want you to write them on your walls. I want you to write them on your doorpost. And I want you to talk about them with your children when you're waking and before you sleep, as you come and you go, as you sit down for mealtimes, talk about my word with your children. And so what we see, and this is a profound thing, what we see is that God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his gospel. God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his love and for his truth. Now, they wouldn't have called it the gospel in the Old Testament, but we call it the gospel. The gospel is the story of the good news of Jesus. It's God's love and God's truth. And we can see from Deuteronomy and from the way the family is structured in the Old Testament that it is God's design for the family, that it would be the primary delivery system of his love and his truth in the life of children as they grow up. That the purpose of family from a spiritual perspective is to create the safe space to incubate the faith of our children so that they can grow up knowing who their God is. And then there's a generational implication in this where we do it for our children and for their children and for the children's children. And there's a responsibility forever to turn around and teach the previous generation the faith that you inherited from your mother and father. That the divine design for families is that a mama and a daddy would impart their faith on their children. You can't overstate how important this is. That our children, listen, if you have kids in your house, listen, that our children would grow up looking at our faith and knowing that this is the faith that they can learn. This is the faith that they can mimic. This is the faith that they can follow. They ought to grow up in our home looking at a godly marriage and knowing this is what I want one day. What I want one day is the way my father loves my mother. What I want one day is the way my mom loves my dad. That's what I want one day. Our kids should grow up in homes and be able to say that. They should grow up in homes where they are discipled, where we parents take it as our responsibility to impart what we know about our faith onto our children. Can I tell you that now that I have two kids, you know what keeps me up at night theologically when I think through difficult questions or truths of scripture or realities of walking with God? Do you know who I'm thinking about when I'm trying to figure those things out for myself? Because it ain't you. It's not my church, it's my children. I want to impart a good faith onto them so that when they enter into adulthood, they have a firm foundation. That they encounter less hiccups than I did. That's our job, parents. Our job in the home is to create a safe space for our kids to grow up where they know that they are loved by their God and by their parents and that their God and their parents are proud of them. We create that incubator in the home so they grow up in this safe space and they have a good family and then they turn around and they do that to their kids. That's clearly the divine design of family in the Bible and it's clearly what our families are supposed to do for us is to be God's delivery system of his grace and truth and love in our lives. We should be able to look at the generations that came before us and see what it is to have a heart for God and walk in that. And grandparents, you're not off the hook, okay? You might be thinking, well, my kids are, that ship has sailed, my kids are grown, they're out, what happened happened, and now we have to live in that reality, and that may be true. But this commandment in Deuteronomy was given to a culture of people that lived intergenerationally. They lived as clans. They lived together. So this isn't just for parents and children. This is for grandparents and adult children and grandchildren. And those of you who have adult kids, can I just tell you something? I don't care how old they are. They'd be 41, like me. They'd be 31 or 21. We still need mamas and daddies, okay? We still need parents. We still need people that we can look at and ask questions to. We still need an older generation that we can be vulnerable with, that can have grace with us, that can watch some of the mistakes that we're about to make and say, hey, hey, brother, I love you. Don't do that. Older generations in this room, my generation, we still need mamas and daddies. You never get too old for that. And those of you who are older than me and you have parents who are still alive, you know you still need them too. And you know you still miss them. This responsibility never fades. It's our job to love on and demonstrate to the generations that come. And my generation, it's going to sound like I'm making jokes because I make jokes because I'm a dummy sometimes, but I'm not making jokes right now. We need to watch people age gracefully so that we know what it is to do that. We need to watch people care for their aging parents so we know how to do that with tenderness and grace when it's our turn. We need to watch how you interact with your adult children who don't make some of the choices you want them to make or who do. We need to see how that's done. We need to watch that. We need that in our lives. And so this family, as the delivery system for God's grace and goodness and truth and instruction in our life, that never fades. And we never graduate out of that need. And now some of you, as I say this, you have good families. You're like these couples that I get to marry sometimes. I do a fair amount of weddings every year, and one of my favorite things that I get to do on occasion within a wedding ceremony is when the couple will talk to me. I always talk to them in premarital counseling about their families, and what was it like growing up in your home? How are your mamas and your daddies and that kind of thing? And every now and again, I'll be working with a couple and they will say, we had great families. We had great parents growing up. I loved growing up in my home. We want our home to look like their home. They were wonderful and yada, yada, yada. And I'll say, well, do you want to honor them in the service? And they're like, yeah, that would be great. And so what I do is after the exchanging of rings, I always pray over the couple. And what we'll do sometimes is we'll surprise the parents and I'll invite them up in the ceremony and I'll have some words written about how they understand that they're standing on shoulders of their parents who gave them this great upbringing and they're so grateful for it and they want to do the same thing in their home. So they want to acknowledge their parents in the wedding ceremony as they create a new family and their parents come up and lay hands on them and I get to pray over all of them. And that's just a sweet moment to see that generational love and faith, to see parents who took this seriously and kids who realize that their parents did that for them. So some of us come from good families. And those of us that do, Jen and I come from great families. We should acknowledge that we were born on third base. We did not hit a triple. God gave us a good set of cards, and we should be grateful for that. So part of today is just encouraging us that we should praise God for our good families. If you come from a good family, if you have a mom and a daddy who took this seriously, who modeled God's love for you and who taught you their faith, will you text them today? Will you call them? Will you tell them that you're grateful for that? Will you acknowledge the goodness that you come from? Because as I talk about this, what a family should do, how God designed the family, how he purposed it, I know that there are plenty of people in this room who feel bad because they weren't that. Who feel angry because my family didn't do this for me. Yeah, that's what a family's supposed to do. That's what a dad's supposed to do. My dad, he walked out that door when I was eight, so I didn't get this, man. I didn't get that idyllic childhood. I'm not looking forward to Christmas. It's going to be tense. It's going to be difficult. Sometimes we have families that let us down. We come to church, and everything's good, and everything smiles, and everybody's buddy-buddy, and behind the scenes, the wife knows and the kids know, he is heck to deal with. The husband knows and the kids know, man, mom's not the same person when she's not at church. Well, we come from broken families. We come from abusive families. We come from addicted families. And we feel like spiritual orphans because we just don't have somebody pouring into us like God designed family to do. And others of us, we had a great family. And then there was the diagnosis. Or the accident. And then there was loss. And we don't have that family that we used to have. We don't have that person to look to like we need to. And so I think the real question becomes, yeah, this is what God designed family to do, to be the divine delivery system of his goodness and his grace and his truth and his love. But for many of us, our families have fallen short of that. So the question becomes, what do we do when our family hasn't done what it's supposed to do? What are we supposed to do when our family has left some gaps? My parents didn't teach me their faith. My dad left. My mom left. My childhood was not good. I love my dad. He taught me faith, but he's gone now, and I don't know who to ask. I love my mom. She taught me faith, but she's gone now, and I don't know who to talk to or who to go to, and I don't know how I'm going to navigate these adult years on my own. What do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? And our situation is less than idyllic. To that question, I began to think about the New Testament. We talked about what the Old Testament has to say about family. What does the New Testament have to say about family? What's the language around family after Jesus comes on the scene? Once Christmas arrives, how does that impact family? And when I thought about the New Testament, I can't think of anywhere in the New Testament that specifically addresses family and family behavior. There's stuff about children honoring parents. There's stuff about gender roles within a family, but there's not anything about family dynamics in the Bible where it's specifically addressed in the New Testament that I'm aware of. But I began to think through the times where family is mentioned in the New Testament. And do you know that most of the time that family is mentioned in the New Testament, it's mentioned as imagery for how the church ought to behave? It's mentioned to help us understand how we, the church, should behave towards each other and begin to understand one another. That most of the family language in the New Testament is not actually about physical family. It's imagery about our spiritual family. I'll show you what I'm talking about so that you know that I'm not making this up. On your notes, there's a list of references there. We're not going to put all of them up on the screen. I just want you to know that if you want to go back and open up your Bible and double check me on this, there you go. There's the footnotes. You can do that. But in Ephesians 2, Paul talks about, he introduces this idea of a spiritual family. He says that we're no longer aliens and sojourners. We're no longer spiritual orphans, but that we are now, we now have membership in this heavenly family. And so he introduces to us this idea of an additional family. And then in 1 Timothy, I like this passage, in 1 Timothy chapter 5, Paul is writing to his disciple Timothy, who he's sent off to Ephesus to be the pastor there, the church in Ephesus, where we see the book of Ephesians. Timothy was the pastor pastor there trained by Paul. And 1 and 2 Timothy are letters of advice to him as he leads this church. And in chapter 5 of the first letter, he says, when you have conflicts with people, let me tell you how I want you to handle it. If you need to confront a man who's older than you, confront him as a father. If you need to talk to a woman who's older than you, confront her as a mother. If you need to talk to a younger man, one of your peers, talk to him as a brother. A younger woman, talk to her as a sister. And so what it tells me as a pastor is that when I talk to you in meetings and conversation, on Sunday morning, when I preach, I preach to you as if I'm preaching to my own family. I treat you like I would my own family. And I do not think that that instruction, though it's not explicit in the text, I do not think that that instruction is limited to just pastors and elders, but all of God's children. That you would regard men who are older than you as fathers, women who are older than you as mothers, and then your peers as brothers and sisters. That we should treat each other as family. And I'm going to get to it in a minute as to why I think this. But I think that is such a profoundly good teaching that we should treat each other like that. Then in Matthew chapter 12, Jesus says this really interesting thing where he's preaching to some people and he's talking with a crowd and somebody kind of cuts through and says, hey, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here to see you. And Jesus just says, my mother and my brothers are the ones who obey the will of God. Like they're family, this is family too. And then in Galatians, we see Paul again talk about this concept of family and how we've been adopted into God's family and we are heirs to the throne of God. And this is locked in for us most in Romans chapter 8. So I'm going to read this to you here. Romans chapter 8 verses 14 through 17 really tells us a lot about our spiritual family. Paul writes this, for all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. And that really should say sons and daughters of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but have received the spirit of adoption as sons and daughters by whom we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs, we are Christians, and again, to be a Christian, you simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you believe those things, then the Bible teaches that God has given you the Spirit as a down payment on your salvation in heaven. And what Paul tells us is when we receive the Spirit, then we are adopted into God's family, that we are heirs to God and co-heirs with Christ. We are brothers and sisters, and Christ is our brother. And so as you think through what the New Testament has to say about family, and you try to answer that question, what do we do when my family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? I think we accept the reality from the New Testament that through the gift of Jesus, we also receive the gift of a new supplemental family. And I meant to change that word supplemental to spiritual. But through the gift of Jesus, through the arrival of Christ, once Jesus shows up in the gospels, the Bible starts to talk differently about family. It's God's way of acknowledging, just like he did the rest of the world, yes, I intended for each and every boy and girl who is born to grow up in a family with parents who love them, who teach them about God, who show them God's love, who model for them maturity in their faith, and who surround them with other people and kind of create this incubator, this safe space for kids to grow up where they know they're loved and they know that God is proud of them. Yeah, that's the design. But God also acknowledges that when sin enters the world, things start to break down and the family is not immune from that. And so what do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We take solace in the fact that we are given a new supplemental spiritual family. And this is probably my favorite thing about grace. It's how much grace feels like my family. It's how much when the power goes out, we don't care, we're going to keep singing. Can I just tell you, I wasn't one bit worried. I wasn't like, oh gosh, what are we going to do if the power went out? You know what we're going to do? We're going to cut the fourth song and I was going to come up here and yell at you. That's what we're going to do. And you know what you guys were going to do? You're going to be totally cool with it. Nobody would leave and be like, that place stinks. And if you did, okay. Sorry. Nothing we can do about it. There wasn't one ounce of stress because you guys are family. Because we love each other. Because we show up for each other. And I was thinking about this reality in just mine and Jen's life. Six years ago, we moved away from our families. And though we have great families, that move created a void for us. Lily and John, our kids, they have great grandparents, but they didn't get to see them as often as we'd like. And so you know what God and his goodness did? He put us in a church that has people that are a generation older than us who love us and who love our children and who we consider to be our Raleigh grandparents, who we can call and say, gosh, something came up. Will you come sit with the kids? And they love to do it. We were given, you know what I was given? I think about this a lot, and I don't think those of you who fit into this category, I don't think you know how grateful I am for you. I have a really good dad. But when I came to this church, I was given a bunch of spiritual fathers who are older than me, who have walked through seasons that I haven't, who pour into me, who love me, who advise me, who befriend me, and who encourage me. And it has become my spiritual family. Jen has women in the church who are a generation older than her, who love on her, who we can go to, who we can ask questions to, who have become our Raleigh mamas and daddies. We have brothers and sisters in this church, in our small group, who we walk through the same seasons of life together, and we can lean on each other, and we're not alone. And that spiritual family here doesn't for one second replace our genetic family. It doesn't for one second replace the families that we were born into, but it supplements those families. And sometimes, even in the loss that we've experienced, sometimes we can get such joy out of our church family that just for a second, we don't think about that as much. So I want you to know that in grace you have a faith family. You have brothers and sisters who want to watch out for you. You have mamas and daddies who want to pour into you. There are children in this church who need your love. There are children in this church who need your direction that you can get involved with and turn around and pour into the younger generations. But this church needs to, according to Scripture, operate as a supplemental family that fills in the gaps that are left behind by the families that we were born into. So what do we do if our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We allow the church to be the place that is the primary delivery system of God's love and of God's grace and of God's truth. We're not just the children, but everybody who's here knows that they are loved. They're loved by their brothers and sisters. They're cared for by their brothers and sisters. They are cared for by their spiritual moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas. And that we believe in them and in who God created them to be and in watching them grow up to become those people. And when I say grow up, I don't just mean 10-year-olds becoming 25-year-olds. I mean someone who is 50, but spiritually they're two, and we get to watch them grow into their faith. So first, know that grace is your family. That's what we are here for. Second, as a family, we want to share the love that we have with everybody who comes in here. We want people to feel like family as soon as they walk in the doors. One of my favorite movies at the holiday season is Family Stone. And it's not, I'm not going to get into the plot of it, but one of the underlying themes of that movie, and they don't address it directly, but I think one of the reasons I love it so much is that that family is set up and you can just tell that everybody who walks in that door is loved and everybody they bring home with them is loved too. And I want Grace to feel like that. That everybody who walks in those doors is loved and is part of our family as soon as they wanna be. And everybody that you invite, we're gonna love them too. No matter who they are, no matter where they've been, no matter what they've done, we're gonna love on them. But I know that some of us have families that have let us down. Some of us had families that don't feel the same. Let God's family of faith be your supplemental family that fills in the gaps. And then that way, we can love each other, encourage each other, and continue to push each other towards Christ. And then once we feel that sense of family here, let's look out and see who God is bringing in and love on them too. I'm going to continue to use grace, faith, family in my language moving forward. And this overview of family in the Bible is exactly why I'm going to do that. I'm going to pray and then we've got some instructions for you after the service. Father, we love you. We thank you for being our heavenly Father. God, we thank you for our good families. Those of us that have them, we're so grateful for them. We thank you for good moms and dads that aren't perfect but love you well and love us too. God, I pray for those walking into Christmas who are walking into stressful situations or hurtful situations. I just pray that you would be with them, that they would see you, that they would know that you were loved, that you would show up in those spaces. And God, I pray that grace can be a place that fills in the gaps for those who are a part of us that were left by the families that they were born into. Give us good, rich, deep relationships, God, that push us towards you and that help us grow and help us know that we're loved by those around us and by you. Let us be a faithful family of faith. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. And I actually am kind of laughing to myself because this morning's sermon is about family. And during that worship set, I think we got some good illustrations of family. Power goes out, it goes wrong. You guys kept singing. It was actually really beautiful. And I was proud of you in that moment. I just want it to be stated for the record that there was a surge back there, and there's a button that turns on all of the equipment that the sound comes through, and I remembered that and hit the button. That's right. I saved Christmas. The other really funny thing that happened up here that I just want to share with you guys because families have inside jokes, and this is a good one one for us. In the song, Hark the Herald, I'm going to do it, Aaron. In the song, Hark the Herald, Angels Sing, there's a verse where it said there's a line that says, like, hail incarnate deity. But that's a tough line to sing, and Aaron can't quite get it. So when he says it, he sings hail incarnate deity, like carne asada, like tacos, right? And you can't hear him sing the song and not hail the incarnate deity, which is pretty great because he is also the God of carne asada. And so I swore I wasn't going to look at him. We were laughing before the service about it in rehearsal. I swore I wasn't going to look at him. I didn't want to throw him off. So I didn't, but then he backs off. You know, he does the thing where he backs off the mic, right? and everybody sings, and it's a spiritual moment. It was not spiritual in Hark the Herald. He had to compose himself. So then I lean over to Jen and tell her what he's doing, and then he sees me talking to her. I'm sorry. And so then he starts laughing again. So then he gives you guys a spiritual chance to sing the song again while he composes himself. So anyways, that's what happened during Hark the Herald. But yeah, this morning is about family because when we think of Christmas, we think of family, right? It's inevitably a part of the Christmas season. And that means different things to different people. For some of us, it means really good things. For some of us, when we think about Christmas and we think about the holidays and we think about seeing our families, our moms and our dads, our grandparents, our brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, all that stuff, it's a good, sweet time. We're really excited about it. We're really looking forward to it. And if that's you, that's fantastic. For others of us, it's stressful. I talked to a couple people this morning. You got big Christmas plans? And they go, yeah, we got to get lots of places, you know, or we got lots of people coming over, lots of big stuff to do. And for those who say, gosh, it feels stressful because there's so many people coming over, there's going to be so many folks there, or I've got so many people to go see, like, man, there's a lot of folks who'd be pretty jealous of that. Those are the golden years, man. Soak those up. For others of us, when we think about family at Christmas, it's stressful. We know we're going to be stepping into an environment, we're going to be sitting around a dinner table, where there's certain landmines that are going to be laid for us, and we better not step on them. And some of you want to step on them real bad, right? And your wife's like, please don't do it. Please don't say the thing. The conversation gets political. You want to say your thing. You know you shouldn't. Some of us are stepping into stressful situations, and not even just in a silly way, but family's just tense. Family's hard right now. And then there are others and these are the people that I think about the most. And if this is you, just know that I may not be praying for you by name, but I'm praying for you in general and your situation as often as I can remember to do it. There are others for whom thinking about family during Christmas is hard because either there's loss or there's loneliness, right? Christmas is hard because this is the first Christmas with that empty seat where someone's not where they're supposed to be and everything's going to feel different. Or it's been five years since the loss, but it still hurts the same when you sit around. I know that when my family lost my papa, Christmases were just, they just were never the same. They just weren't. I haven't had that much joy in a Christmas since we lost him. For others in our body, Christmas is a time of loneliness. It's a time when everybody else goes to their families and we might not have ours around us or at all. And if that's you, I pray for you often because I hate that for you. But I think that no matter where we are on that spectrum of good, dreading, where it just hurts no matter where we are, and for many of us, for most of us, we're probably a Venn diagram of all of those, right? As we approach, I doubt anyone's only good and anyone's only bad. There's just a good mix in there. But I think that the principles that come out of the Bible around family can actually encourage and inspire us no matter where we sit on the spectrum. And I've actually been really excited and looking forward to sharing this sermon with you because this sermon is one that kind of came through a little aha moment in my office. I knew that I was going to be preaching about family, and I didn't really know what I wanted to preach. I had no great inspiration. None of the ideas that I had sounded any good to me. And so I was just kind of sitting in my office thinking, and I do, when I don't know what to preach about, I do what I would assume most pastors do or should do, is I just kind of sit down with the Bible and I'm like, all right, God, what does your Bible say about this thing? And I just go through passages or I open up the Bible and I read passages until one catches me and I go, oh, that's the thing. That's what grace needs this week. And then I preach the Bible. And so I wasn't sure what to preach about. And Aaron Gibson happened to be in my office at the time. So he was my guinea pig that morning. And I said, hey, man, I got to preach about family. Here's what I'm thinking. Can you kind of help me make sense of this? Does anything click with you? What should I pursue? And so we started talking back and forth about this idea of family. And I started thinking through, well, how does the Bible address family? Where does it talk about family? And to be honest with you, the Bible is pretty scant in terms of passages that directly address family and tell parents how to parents and kids how to kid and grandparents how to grandparent. Like it doesn't have a lot of that in there. So I'm trying to figure out what is God, what does your word say about family and how does that apply to grace? And Aaron said something that triggered a thought in my head, and as often goes in these conversations when I'm trying to figure out what to preach, and I'm just talking to whoever is closest that I can grab and will listen to me. He said something that triggered a thought, and I started going through scripture in my head, and he was still, he was, he at that point became Charlie Brown's mom. Like, there was words coming out, but I'm looking out the window window and I said, I got it, man. Thanks so much. I'm excited. And so I just thought about family over the course of scripture and what it's supposed to be and what it's supposed to do and how God designed it. So if we look in the Old Testament, where we do have more directives about family, one of the first things we see is that family makes the top 10 list, which is actually pretty cool. It's in the 10 commandments, right? One of the commandments, honor your father and mother and the Lord for this is right. And that commandment looks different for different people at different ages. It looks different for me to honor my parents now than it did when I was 11, and it'll look different in 20 years than it does right now. And it has different implications in different family scenarios, right? Blended families and stuff like that. And so honor your father and mother is this just profound principle that comes out of the Old Testament where God prioritizes it enough to put it in the Ten Commandments. And implicit within that commandment to the parents is, hey, act in a way that's worthy of honor, right? Earn the honor of your children if they're going to be commanded to give it to you. And then there's other places in Scripture. Proverbs has some things to say that if we obey, our parents will live a long and fruitful life and that parents are told to raise a child up in the way they must go and they will not depart from it. So we raise them up by teaching them God's principles. But there is one passage, it's actually two different passages in the same book that say the same thing that really kind of outline for us or show us, depict for us the purpose of family as God intended it. So we can find this in Deuteronomy 6 or Deuteronomy 11. They say the same things. I just like the way Deuteronomy 11 is worded just a little bit better. So I'm going to read that to you now so we can see God's design for family. He's just taught them his law, told them how to live, basically giving them what their version of the Bible was, and this is what he says as a result of it. You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, listen, parents, I just taught you my law. I just shared with you my love and my truth. Now, I want you to put those all over your home. I want you to bind them on your hands. I want you to bind them on your forehead. I want you to write them on your walls. I want you to write them on your doorpost. And I want you to talk about them with your children when you're waking and before you sleep, as you come and you go, as you sit down for mealtimes, talk about my word with your children. And so what we see, and this is a profound thing, what we see is that God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his gospel. God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his love and for his truth. Now, they wouldn't have called it the gospel in the Old Testament, but we call it the gospel. The gospel is the story of the good news of Jesus. It's God's love and God's truth. And we can see from Deuteronomy and from the way the family is structured in the Old Testament that it is God's design for the family, that it would be the primary delivery system of his love and his truth in the life of children as they grow up. That the purpose of family from a spiritual perspective is to create the safe space to incubate the faith of our children so that they can grow up knowing who their God is. And then there's a generational implication in this where we do it for our children and for their children and for the children's children. And there's a responsibility forever to turn around and teach the previous generation the faith that you inherited from your mother and father. That the divine design for families is that a mama and a daddy would impart their faith on their children. You can't overstate how important this is. That our children, listen, if you have kids in your house, listen, that our children would grow up looking at our faith and knowing that this is the faith that they can learn. This is the faith that they can mimic. This is the faith that they can follow. They ought to grow up in our home looking at a godly marriage and knowing this is what I want one day. What I want one day is the way my father loves my mother. What I want one day is the way my mom loves my dad. That's what I want one day. Our kids should grow up in homes and be able to say that. They should grow up in homes where they are discipled, where we parents take it as our responsibility to impart what we know about our faith onto our children. Can I tell you that now that I have two kids, you know what keeps me up at night theologically when I think through difficult questions or truths of scripture or realities of walking with God? Do you know who I'm thinking about when I'm trying to figure those things out for myself? Because it ain't you. It's not my church, it's my children. I want to impart a good faith onto them so that when they enter into adulthood, they have a firm foundation. That they encounter less hiccups than I did. That's our job, parents. Our job in the home is to create a safe space for our kids to grow up where they know that they are loved by their God and by their parents and that their God and their parents are proud of them. We create that incubator in the home so they grow up in this safe space and they have a good family and then they turn around and they do that to their kids. That's clearly the divine design of family in the Bible and it's clearly what our families are supposed to do for us is to be God's delivery system of his grace and truth and love in our lives. We should be able to look at the generations that came before us and see what it is to have a heart for God and walk in that. And grandparents, you're not off the hook, okay? You might be thinking, well, my kids are, that ship has sailed, my kids are grown, they're out, what happened happened, and now we have to live in that reality, and that may be true. But this commandment in Deuteronomy was given to a culture of people that lived intergenerationally. They lived as clans. They lived together. So this isn't just for parents and children. This is for grandparents and adult children and grandchildren. And those of you who have adult kids, can I just tell you something? I don't care how old they are. They'd be 41, like me. They'd be 31 or 21. We still need mamas and daddies, okay? We still need parents. We still need people that we can look at and ask questions to. We still need an older generation that we can be vulnerable with, that can have grace with us, that can watch some of the mistakes that we're about to make and say, hey, hey, brother, I love you. Don't do that. Older generations in this room, my generation, we still need mamas and daddies. You never get too old for that. And those of you who are older than me and you have parents who are still alive, you know you still need them too. And you know you still miss them. This responsibility never fades. It's our job to love on and demonstrate to the generations that come. And my generation, it's going to sound like I'm making jokes because I make jokes because I'm a dummy sometimes, but I'm not making jokes right now. We need to watch people age gracefully so that we know what it is to do that. We need to watch people care for their aging parents so we know how to do that with tenderness and grace when it's our turn. We need to watch how you interact with your adult children who don't make some of the choices you want them to make or who do. We need to see how that's done. We need to watch that. We need that in our lives. And so this family, as the delivery system for God's grace and goodness and truth and instruction in our life, that never fades. And we never graduate out of that need. And now some of you, as I say this, you have good families. You're like these couples that I get to marry sometimes. I do a fair amount of weddings every year, and one of my favorite things that I get to do on occasion within a wedding ceremony is when the couple will talk to me. I always talk to them in premarital counseling about their families, and what was it like growing up in your home? How are your mamas and your daddies and that kind of thing? And every now and again, I'll be working with a couple and they will say, we had great families. We had great parents growing up. I loved growing up in my home. We want our home to look like their home. They were wonderful and yada, yada, yada. And I'll say, well, do you want to honor them in the service? And they're like, yeah, that would be great. And so what I do is after the exchanging of rings, I always pray over the couple. And what we'll do sometimes is we'll surprise the parents and I'll invite them up in the ceremony and I'll have some words written about how they understand that they're standing on shoulders of their parents who gave them this great upbringing and they're so grateful for it and they want to do the same thing in their home. So they want to acknowledge their parents in the wedding ceremony as they create a new family and their parents come up and lay hands on them and I get to pray over all of them. And that's just a sweet moment to see that generational love and faith, to see parents who took this seriously and kids who realize that their parents did that for them. So some of us come from good families. And those of us that do, Jen and I come from great families. We should acknowledge that we were born on third base. We did not hit a triple. God gave us a good set of cards, and we should be grateful for that. So part of today is just encouraging us that we should praise God for our good families. If you come from a good family, if you have a mom and a daddy who took this seriously, who modeled God's love for you and who taught you their faith, will you text them today? Will you call them? Will you tell them that you're grateful for that? Will you acknowledge the goodness that you come from? Because as I talk about this, what a family should do, how God designed the family, how he purposed it, I know that there are plenty of people in this room who feel bad because they weren't that. Who feel angry because my family didn't do this for me. Yeah, that's what a family's supposed to do. That's what a dad's supposed to do. My dad, he walked out that door when I was eight, so I didn't get this, man. I didn't get that idyllic childhood. I'm not looking forward to Christmas. It's going to be tense. It's going to be difficult. Sometimes we have families that let us down. We come to church, and everything's good, and everything smiles, and everybody's buddy-buddy, and behind the scenes, the wife knows and the kids know, he is heck to deal with. The husband knows and the kids know, man, mom's not the same person when she's not at church. Well, we come from broken families. We come from abusive families. We come from addicted families. And we feel like spiritual orphans because we just don't have somebody pouring into us like God designed family to do. And others of us, we had a great family. And then there was the diagnosis. Or the accident. And then there was loss. And we don't have that family that we used to have. We don't have that person to look to like we need to. And so I think the real question becomes, yeah, this is what God designed family to do, to be the divine delivery system of his goodness and his grace and his truth and his love. But for many of us, our families have fallen short of that. So the question becomes, what do we do when our family hasn't done what it's supposed to do? What are we supposed to do when our family has left some gaps? My parents didn't teach me their faith. My dad left. My mom left. My childhood was not good. I love my dad. He taught me faith, but he's gone now, and I don't know who to ask. I love my mom. She taught me faith, but she's gone now, and I don't know who to talk to or who to go to, and I don't know how I'm going to navigate these adult years on my own. What do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? And our situation is less than idyllic. To that question, I began to think about the New Testament. We talked about what the Old Testament has to say about family. What does the New Testament have to say about family? What's the language around family after Jesus comes on the scene? Once Christmas arrives, how does that impact family? And when I thought about the New Testament, I can't think of anywhere in the New Testament that specifically addresses family and family behavior. There's stuff about children honoring parents. There's stuff about gender roles within a family, but there's not anything about family dynamics in the Bible where it's specifically addressed in the New Testament that I'm aware of. But I began to think through the times where family is mentioned in the New Testament. And do you know that most of the time that family is mentioned in the New Testament, it's mentioned as imagery for how the church ought to behave? It's mentioned to help us understand how we, the church, should behave towards each other and begin to understand one another. That most of the family language in the New Testament is not actually about physical family. It's imagery about our spiritual family. I'll show you what I'm talking about so that you know that I'm not making this up. On your notes, there's a list of references there. We're not going to put all of them up on the screen. I just want you to know that if you want to go back and open up your Bible and double check me on this, there you go. There's the footnotes. You can do that. But in Ephesians 2, Paul talks about, he introduces this idea of a spiritual family. He says that we're no longer aliens and sojourners. We're no longer spiritual orphans, but that we are now, we now have membership in this heavenly family. And so he introduces to us this idea of an additional family. And then in 1 Timothy, I like this passage, in 1 Timothy chapter 5, Paul is writing to his disciple Timothy, who he's sent off to Ephesus to be the pastor there, the church in Ephesus, where we see the book of Ephesians. Timothy was the pastor pastor there trained by Paul. And 1 and 2 Timothy are letters of advice to him as he leads this church. And in chapter 5 of the first letter, he says, when you have conflicts with people, let me tell you how I want you to handle it. If you need to confront a man who's older than you, confront him as a father. If you need to talk to a woman who's older than you, confront her as a mother. If you need to talk to a younger man, one of your peers, talk to him as a brother. A younger woman, talk to her as a sister. And so what it tells me as a pastor is that when I talk to you in meetings and conversation, on Sunday morning, when I preach, I preach to you as if I'm preaching to my own family. I treat you like I would my own family. And I do not think that that instruction, though it's not explicit in the text, I do not think that that instruction is limited to just pastors and elders, but all of God's children. That you would regard men who are older than you as fathers, women who are older than you as mothers, and then your peers as brothers and sisters. That we should treat each other as family. And I'm going to get to it in a minute as to why I think this. But I think that is such a profoundly good teaching that we should treat each other like that. Then in Matthew chapter 12, Jesus says this really interesting thing where he's preaching to some people and he's talking with a crowd and somebody kind of cuts through and says, hey, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here to see you. And Jesus just says, my mother and my brothers are the ones who obey the will of God. Like they're family, this is family too. And then in Galatians, we see Paul again talk about this concept of family and how we've been adopted into God's family and we are heirs to the throne of God. And this is locked in for us most in Romans chapter 8. So I'm going to read this to you here. Romans chapter 8 verses 14 through 17 really tells us a lot about our spiritual family. Paul writes this, for all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. And that really should say sons and daughters of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but have received the spirit of adoption as sons and daughters by whom we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs, we are Christians, and again, to be a Christian, you simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you believe those things, then the Bible teaches that God has given you the Spirit as a down payment on your salvation in heaven. And what Paul tells us is when we receive the Spirit, then we are adopted into God's family, that we are heirs to God and co-heirs with Christ. We are brothers and sisters, and Christ is our brother. And so as you think through what the New Testament has to say about family, and you try to answer that question, what do we do when my family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? I think we accept the reality from the New Testament that through the gift of Jesus, we also receive the gift of a new supplemental family. And I meant to change that word supplemental to spiritual. But through the gift of Jesus, through the arrival of Christ, once Jesus shows up in the gospels, the Bible starts to talk differently about family. It's God's way of acknowledging, just like he did the rest of the world, yes, I intended for each and every boy and girl who is born to grow up in a family with parents who love them, who teach them about God, who show them God's love, who model for them maturity in their faith, and who surround them with other people and kind of create this incubator, this safe space for kids to grow up where they know they're loved and they know that God is proud of them. Yeah, that's the design. But God also acknowledges that when sin enters the world, things start to break down and the family is not immune from that. And so what do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We take solace in the fact that we are given a new supplemental spiritual family. And this is probably my favorite thing about grace. It's how much grace feels like my family. It's how much when the power goes out, we don't care, we're going to keep singing. Can I just tell you, I wasn't one bit worried. I wasn't like, oh gosh, what are we going to do if the power went out? You know what we're going to do? We're going to cut the fourth song and I was going to come up here and yell at you. That's what we're going to do. And you know what you guys were going to do? You're going to be totally cool with it. Nobody would leave and be like, that place stinks. And if you did, okay. Sorry. Nothing we can do about it. There wasn't one ounce of stress because you guys are family. Because we love each other. Because we show up for each other. And I was thinking about this reality in just mine and Jen's life. Six years ago, we moved away from our families. And though we have great families, that move created a void for us. Lily and John, our kids, they have great grandparents, but they didn't get to see them as often as we'd like. And so you know what God and his goodness did? He put us in a church that has people that are a generation older than us who love us and who love our children and who we consider to be our Raleigh grandparents, who we can call and say, gosh, something came up. Will you come sit with the kids? And they love to do it. We were given, you know what I was given? I think about this a lot, and I don't think those of you who fit into this category, I don't think you know how grateful I am for you. I have a really good dad. But when I came to this church, I was given a bunch of spiritual fathers who are older than me, who have walked through seasons that I haven't, who pour into me, who love me, who advise me, who befriend me, and who encourage me. And it has become my spiritual family. Jen has women in the church who are a generation older than her, who love on her, who we can go to, who we can ask questions to, who have become our Raleigh mamas and daddies. We have brothers and sisters in this church, in our small group, who we walk through the same seasons of life together, and we can lean on each other, and we're not alone. And that spiritual family here doesn't for one second replace our genetic family. It doesn't for one second replace the families that we were born into, but it supplements those families. And sometimes, even in the loss that we've experienced, sometimes we can get such joy out of our church family that just for a second, we don't think about that as much. So I want you to know that in grace you have a faith family. You have brothers and sisters who want to watch out for you. You have mamas and daddies who want to pour into you. There are children in this church who need your love. There are children in this church who need your direction that you can get involved with and turn around and pour into the younger generations. But this church needs to, according to Scripture, operate as a supplemental family that fills in the gaps that are left behind by the families that we were born into. So what do we do if our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We allow the church to be the place that is the primary delivery system of God's love and of God's grace and of God's truth. We're not just the children, but everybody who's here knows that they are loved. They're loved by their brothers and sisters. They're cared for by their brothers and sisters. They are cared for by their spiritual moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas. And that we believe in them and in who God created them to be and in watching them grow up to become those people. And when I say grow up, I don't just mean 10-year-olds becoming 25-year-olds. I mean someone who is 50, but spiritually they're two, and we get to watch them grow into their faith. So first, know that grace is your family. That's what we are here for. Second, as a family, we want to share the love that we have with everybody who comes in here. We want people to feel like family as soon as they walk in the doors. One of my favorite movies at the holiday season is Family Stone. And it's not, I'm not going to get into the plot of it, but one of the underlying themes of that movie, and they don't address it directly, but I think one of the reasons I love it so much is that that family is set up and you can just tell that everybody who walks in that door is loved and everybody they bring home with them is loved too. And I want Grace to feel like that. That everybody who walks in those doors is loved and is part of our family as soon as they wanna be. And everybody that you invite, we're gonna love them too. No matter who they are, no matter where they've been, no matter what they've done, we're gonna love on them. But I know that some of us have families that have let us down. Some of us had families that don't feel the same. Let God's family of faith be your supplemental family that fills in the gaps. And then that way, we can love each other, encourage each other, and continue to push each other towards Christ. And then once we feel that sense of family here, let's look out and see who God is bringing in and love on them too. I'm going to continue to use grace, faith, family in my language moving forward. And this overview of family in the Bible is exactly why I'm going to do that. I'm going to pray and then we've got some instructions for you after the service. Father, we love you. We thank you for being our heavenly Father. God, we thank you for our good families. Those of us that have them, we're so grateful for them. We thank you for good moms and dads that aren't perfect but love you well and love us too. God, I pray for those walking into Christmas who are walking into stressful situations or hurtful situations. I just pray that you would be with them, that they would see you, that they would know that you were loved, that you would show up in those spaces. And God, I pray that grace can be a place that fills in the gaps for those who are a part of us that were left by the families that they were born into. Give us good, rich, deep relationships, God, that push us towards you and that help us grow and help us know that we're loved by those around us and by you. Let us be a faithful family of faith. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. And I actually am kind of laughing to myself because this morning's sermon is about family. And during that worship set, I think we got some good illustrations of family. Power goes out, it goes wrong. You guys kept singing. It was actually really beautiful. And I was proud of you in that moment. I just want it to be stated for the record that there was a surge back there, and there's a button that turns on all of the equipment that the sound comes through, and I remembered that and hit the button. That's right. I saved Christmas. The other really funny thing that happened up here that I just want to share with you guys because families have inside jokes, and this is a good one one for us. In the song, Hark the Herald, I'm going to do it, Aaron. In the song, Hark the Herald, Angels Sing, there's a verse where it said there's a line that says, like, hail incarnate deity. But that's a tough line to sing, and Aaron can't quite get it. So when he says it, he sings hail incarnate deity, like carne asada, like tacos, right? And you can't hear him sing the song and not hail the incarnate deity, which is pretty great because he is also the God of carne asada. And so I swore I wasn't going to look at him. We were laughing before the service about it in rehearsal. I swore I wasn't going to look at him. I didn't want to throw him off. So I didn't, but then he backs off. You know, he does the thing where he backs off the mic, right? and everybody sings, and it's a spiritual moment. It was not spiritual in Hark the Herald. He had to compose himself. So then I lean over to Jen and tell her what he's doing, and then he sees me talking to her. I'm sorry. And so then he starts laughing again. So then he gives you guys a spiritual chance to sing the song again while he composes himself. So anyways, that's what happened during Hark the Herald. But yeah, this morning is about family because when we think of Christmas, we think of family, right? It's inevitably a part of the Christmas season. And that means different things to different people. For some of us, it means really good things. For some of us, when we think about Christmas and we think about the holidays and we think about seeing our families, our moms and our dads, our grandparents, our brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, all that stuff, it's a good, sweet time. We're really excited about it. We're really looking forward to it. And if that's you, that's fantastic. For others of us, it's stressful. I talked to a couple people this morning. You got big Christmas plans? And they go, yeah, we got to get lots of places, you know, or we got lots of people coming over, lots of big stuff to do. And for those who say, gosh, it feels stressful because there's so many people coming over, there's going to be so many folks there, or I've got so many people to go see, like, man, there's a lot of folks who'd be pretty jealous of that. Those are the golden years, man. Soak those up. For others of us, when we think about family at Christmas, it's stressful. We know we're going to be stepping into an environment, we're going to be sitting around a dinner table, where there's certain landmines that are going to be laid for us, and we better not step on them. And some of you want to step on them real bad, right? And your wife's like, please don't do it. Please don't say the thing. The conversation gets political. You want to say your thing. You know you shouldn't. Some of us are stepping into stressful situations, and not even just in a silly way, but family's just tense. Family's hard right now. And then there are others and these are the people that I think about the most. And if this is you, just know that I may not be praying for you by name, but I'm praying for you in general and your situation as often as I can remember to do it. There are others for whom thinking about family during Christmas is hard because either there's loss or there's loneliness, right? Christmas is hard because this is the first Christmas with that empty seat where someone's not where they're supposed to be and everything's going to feel different. Or it's been five years since the loss, but it still hurts the same when you sit around. I know that when my family lost my papa, Christmases were just, they just were never the same. They just weren't. I haven't had that much joy in a Christmas since we lost him. For others in our body, Christmas is a time of loneliness. It's a time when everybody else goes to their families and we might not have ours around us or at all. And if that's you, I pray for you often because I hate that for you. But I think that no matter where we are on that spectrum of good, dreading, where it just hurts no matter where we are, and for many of us, for most of us, we're probably a Venn diagram of all of those, right? As we approach, I doubt anyone's only good and anyone's only bad. There's just a good mix in there. But I think that the principles that come out of the Bible around family can actually encourage and inspire us no matter where we sit on the spectrum. And I've actually been really excited and looking forward to sharing this sermon with you because this sermon is one that kind of came through a little aha moment in my office. I knew that I was going to be preaching about family, and I didn't really know what I wanted to preach. I had no great inspiration. None of the ideas that I had sounded any good to me. And so I was just kind of sitting in my office thinking, and I do, when I don't know what to preach about, I do what I would assume most pastors do or should do, is I just kind of sit down with the Bible and I'm like, all right, God, what does your Bible say about this thing? And I just go through passages or I open up the Bible and I read passages until one catches me and I go, oh, that's the thing. That's what grace needs this week. And then I preach the Bible. And so I wasn't sure what to preach about. And Aaron Gibson happened to be in my office at the time. So he was my guinea pig that morning. And I said, hey, man, I got to preach about family. Here's what I'm thinking. Can you kind of help me make sense of this? Does anything click with you? What should I pursue? And so we started talking back and forth about this idea of family. And I started thinking through, well, how does the Bible address family? Where does it talk about family? And to be honest with you, the Bible is pretty scant in terms of passages that directly address family and tell parents how to parents and kids how to kid and grandparents how to grandparent. Like it doesn't have a lot of that in there. So I'm trying to figure out what is God, what does your word say about family and how does that apply to grace? And Aaron said something that triggered a thought in my head, and as often goes in these conversations when I'm trying to figure out what to preach, and I'm just talking to whoever is closest that I can grab and will listen to me. He said something that triggered a thought, and I started going through scripture in my head, and he was still, he was, he at that point became Charlie Brown's mom. Like, there was words coming out, but I'm looking out the window window and I said, I got it, man. Thanks so much. I'm excited. And so I just thought about family over the course of scripture and what it's supposed to be and what it's supposed to do and how God designed it. So if we look in the Old Testament, where we do have more directives about family, one of the first things we see is that family makes the top 10 list, which is actually pretty cool. It's in the 10 commandments, right? One of the commandments, honor your father and mother and the Lord for this is right. And that commandment looks different for different people at different ages. It looks different for me to honor my parents now than it did when I was 11, and it'll look different in 20 years than it does right now. And it has different implications in different family scenarios, right? Blended families and stuff like that. And so honor your father and mother is this just profound principle that comes out of the Old Testament where God prioritizes it enough to put it in the Ten Commandments. And implicit within that commandment to the parents is, hey, act in a way that's worthy of honor, right? Earn the honor of your children if they're going to be commanded to give it to you. And then there's other places in Scripture. Proverbs has some things to say that if we obey, our parents will live a long and fruitful life and that parents are told to raise a child up in the way they must go and they will not depart from it. So we raise them up by teaching them God's principles. But there is one passage, it's actually two different passages in the same book that say the same thing that really kind of outline for us or show us, depict for us the purpose of family as God intended it. So we can find this in Deuteronomy 6 or Deuteronomy 11. They say the same things. I just like the way Deuteronomy 11 is worded just a little bit better. So I'm going to read that to you now so we can see God's design for family. He's just taught them his law, told them how to live, basically giving them what their version of the Bible was, and this is what he says as a result of it. You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, listen, parents, I just taught you my law. I just shared with you my love and my truth. Now, I want you to put those all over your home. I want you to bind them on your hands. I want you to bind them on your forehead. I want you to write them on your walls. I want you to write them on your doorpost. And I want you to talk about them with your children when you're waking and before you sleep, as you come and you go, as you sit down for mealtimes, talk about my word with your children. And so what we see, and this is a profound thing, what we see is that God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his gospel. God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his love and for his truth. Now, they wouldn't have called it the gospel in the Old Testament, but we call it the gospel. The gospel is the story of the good news of Jesus. It's God's love and God's truth. And we can see from Deuteronomy and from the way the family is structured in the Old Testament that it is God's design for the family, that it would be the primary delivery system of his love and his truth in the life of children as they grow up. That the purpose of family from a spiritual perspective is to create the safe space to incubate the faith of our children so that they can grow up knowing who their God is. And then there's a generational implication in this where we do it for our children and for their children and for the children's children. And there's a responsibility forever to turn around and teach the previous generation the faith that you inherited from your mother and father. That the divine design for families is that a mama and a daddy would impart their faith on their children. You can't overstate how important this is. That our children, listen, if you have kids in your house, listen, that our children would grow up looking at our faith and knowing that this is the faith that they can learn. This is the faith that they can mimic. This is the faith that they can follow. They ought to grow up in our home looking at a godly marriage and knowing this is what I want one day. What I want one day is the way my father loves my mother. What I want one day is the way my mom loves my dad. That's what I want one day. Our kids should grow up in homes and be able to say that. They should grow up in homes where they are discipled, where we parents take it as our responsibility to impart what we know about our faith onto our children. Can I tell you that now that I have two kids, you know what keeps me up at night theologically when I think through difficult questions or truths of scripture or realities of walking with God? Do you know who I'm thinking about when I'm trying to figure those things out for myself? Because it ain't you. It's not my church, it's my children. I want to impart a good faith onto them so that when they enter into adulthood, they have a firm foundation. That they encounter less hiccups than I did. That's our job, parents. Our job in the home is to create a safe space for our kids to grow up where they know that they are loved by their God and by their parents and that their God and their parents are proud of them. We create that incubator in the home so they grow up in this safe space and they have a good family and then they turn around and they do that to their kids. That's clearly the divine design of family in the Bible and it's clearly what our families are supposed to do for us is to be God's delivery system of his grace and truth and love in our lives. We should be able to look at the generations that came before us and see what it is to have a heart for God and walk in that. And grandparents, you're not off the hook, okay? You might be thinking, well, my kids are, that ship has sailed, my kids are grown, they're out, what happened happened, and now we have to live in that reality, and that may be true. But this commandment in Deuteronomy was given to a culture of people that lived intergenerationally. They lived as clans. They lived together. So this isn't just for parents and children. This is for grandparents and adult children and grandchildren. And those of you who have adult kids, can I just tell you something? I don't care how old they are. They'd be 41, like me. They'd be 31 or 21. We still need mamas and daddies, okay? We still need parents. We still need people that we can look at and ask questions to. We still need an older generation that we can be vulnerable with, that can have grace with us, that can watch some of the mistakes that we're about to make and say, hey, hey, brother, I love you. Don't do that. Older generations in this room, my generation, we still need mamas and daddies. You never get too old for that. And those of you who are older than me and you have parents who are still alive, you know you still need them too. And you know you still miss them. This responsibility never fades. It's our job to love on and demonstrate to the generations that come. And my generation, it's going to sound like I'm making jokes because I make jokes because I'm a dummy sometimes, but I'm not making jokes right now. We need to watch people age gracefully so that we know what it is to do that. We need to watch people care for their aging parents so we know how to do that with tenderness and grace when it's our turn. We need to watch how you interact with your adult children who don't make some of the choices you want them to make or who do. We need to see how that's done. We need to watch that. We need that in our lives. And so this family, as the delivery system for God's grace and goodness and truth and instruction in our life, that never fades. And we never graduate out of that need. And now some of you, as I say this, you have good families. You're like these couples that I get to marry sometimes. I do a fair amount of weddings every year, and one of my favorite things that I get to do on occasion within a wedding ceremony is when the couple will talk to me. I always talk to them in premarital counseling about their families, and what was it like growing up in your home? How are your mamas and your daddies and that kind of thing? And every now and again, I'll be working with a couple and they will say, we had great families. We had great parents growing up. I loved growing up in my home. We want our home to look like their home. They were wonderful and yada, yada, yada. And I'll say, well, do you want to honor them in the service? And they're like, yeah, that would be great. And so what I do is after the exchanging of rings, I always pray over the couple. And what we'll do sometimes is we'll surprise the parents and I'll invite them up in the ceremony and I'll have some words written about how they understand that they're standing on shoulders of their parents who gave them this great upbringing and they're so grateful for it and they want to do the same thing in their home. So they want to acknowledge their parents in the wedding ceremony as they create a new family and their parents come up and lay hands on them and I get to pray over all of them. And that's just a sweet moment to see that generational love and faith, to see parents who took this seriously and kids who realize that their parents did that for them. So some of us come from good families. And those of us that do, Jen and I come from great families. We should acknowledge that we were born on third base. We did not hit a triple. God gave us a good set of cards, and we should be grateful for that. So part of today is just encouraging us that we should praise God for our good families. If you come from a good family, if you have a mom and a daddy who took this seriously, who modeled God's love for you and who taught you their faith, will you text them today? Will you call them? Will you tell them that you're grateful for that? Will you acknowledge the goodness that you come from? Because as I talk about this, what a family should do, how God designed the family, how he purposed it, I know that there are plenty of people in this room who feel bad because they weren't that. Who feel angry because my family didn't do this for me. Yeah, that's what a family's supposed to do. That's what a dad's supposed to do. My dad, he walked out that door when I was eight, so I didn't get this, man. I didn't get that idyllic childhood. I'm not looking forward to Christmas. It's going to be tense. It's going to be difficult. Sometimes we have families that let us down. We come to church, and everything's good, and everything smiles, and everybody's buddy-buddy, and behind the scenes, the wife knows and the kids know, he is heck to deal with. The husband knows and the kids know, man, mom's not the same person when she's not at church. Well, we come from broken families. We come from abusive families. We come from addicted families. And we feel like spiritual orphans because we just don't have somebody pouring into us like God designed family to do. And others of us, we had a great family. And then there was the diagnosis. Or the accident. And then there was loss. And we don't have that family that we used to have. We don't have that person to look to like we need to. And so I think the real question becomes, yeah, this is what God designed family to do, to be the divine delivery system of his goodness and his grace and his truth and his love. But for many of us, our families have fallen short of that. So the question becomes, what do we do when our family hasn't done what it's supposed to do? What are we supposed to do when our family has left some gaps? My parents didn't teach me their faith. My dad left. My mom left. My childhood was not good. I love my dad. He taught me faith, but he's gone now, and I don't know who to ask. I love my mom. She taught me faith, but she's gone now, and I don't know who to talk to or who to go to, and I don't know how I'm going to navigate these adult years on my own. What do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? And our situation is less than idyllic. To that question, I began to think about the New Testament. We talked about what the Old Testament has to say about family. What does the New Testament have to say about family? What's the language around family after Jesus comes on the scene? Once Christmas arrives, how does that impact family? And when I thought about the New Testament, I can't think of anywhere in the New Testament that specifically addresses family and family behavior. There's stuff about children honoring parents. There's stuff about gender roles within a family, but there's not anything about family dynamics in the Bible where it's specifically addressed in the New Testament that I'm aware of. But I began to think through the times where family is mentioned in the New Testament. And do you know that most of the time that family is mentioned in the New Testament, it's mentioned as imagery for how the church ought to behave? It's mentioned to help us understand how we, the church, should behave towards each other and begin to understand one another. That most of the family language in the New Testament is not actually about physical family. It's imagery about our spiritual family. I'll show you what I'm talking about so that you know that I'm not making this up. On your notes, there's a list of references there. We're not going to put all of them up on the screen. I just want you to know that if you want to go back and open up your Bible and double check me on this, there you go. There's the footnotes. You can do that. But in Ephesians 2, Paul talks about, he introduces this idea of a spiritual family. He says that we're no longer aliens and sojourners. We're no longer spiritual orphans, but that we are now, we now have membership in this heavenly family. And so he introduces to us this idea of an additional family. And then in 1 Timothy, I like this passage, in 1 Timothy chapter 5, Paul is writing to his disciple Timothy, who he's sent off to Ephesus to be the pastor there, the church in Ephesus, where we see the book of Ephesians. Timothy was the pastor pastor there trained by Paul. And 1 and 2 Timothy are letters of advice to him as he leads this church. And in chapter 5 of the first letter, he says, when you have conflicts with people, let me tell you how I want you to handle it. If you need to confront a man who's older than you, confront him as a father. If you need to talk to a woman who's older than you, confront her as a mother. If you need to talk to a younger man, one of your peers, talk to him as a brother. A younger woman, talk to her as a sister. And so what it tells me as a pastor is that when I talk to you in meetings and conversation, on Sunday morning, when I preach, I preach to you as if I'm preaching to my own family. I treat you like I would my own family. And I do not think that that instruction, though it's not explicit in the text, I do not think that that instruction is limited to just pastors and elders, but all of God's children. That you would regard men who are older than you as fathers, women who are older than you as mothers, and then your peers as brothers and sisters. That we should treat each other as family. And I'm going to get to it in a minute as to why I think this. But I think that is such a profoundly good teaching that we should treat each other like that. Then in Matthew chapter 12, Jesus says this really interesting thing where he's preaching to some people and he's talking with a crowd and somebody kind of cuts through and says, hey, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here to see you. And Jesus just says, my mother and my brothers are the ones who obey the will of God. Like they're family, this is family too. And then in Galatians, we see Paul again talk about this concept of family and how we've been adopted into God's family and we are heirs to the throne of God. And this is locked in for us most in Romans chapter 8. So I'm going to read this to you here. Romans chapter 8 verses 14 through 17 really tells us a lot about our spiritual family. Paul writes this, for all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. And that really should say sons and daughters of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but have received the spirit of adoption as sons and daughters by whom we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs, we are Christians, and again, to be a Christian, you simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you believe those things, then the Bible teaches that God has given you the Spirit as a down payment on your salvation in heaven. And what Paul tells us is when we receive the Spirit, then we are adopted into God's family, that we are heirs to God and co-heirs with Christ. We are brothers and sisters, and Christ is our brother. And so as you think through what the New Testament has to say about family, and you try to answer that question, what do we do when my family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? I think we accept the reality from the New Testament that through the gift of Jesus, we also receive the gift of a new supplemental family. And I meant to change that word supplemental to spiritual. But through the gift of Jesus, through the arrival of Christ, once Jesus shows up in the gospels, the Bible starts to talk differently about family. It's God's way of acknowledging, just like he did the rest of the world, yes, I intended for each and every boy and girl who is born to grow up in a family with parents who love them, who teach them about God, who show them God's love, who model for them maturity in their faith, and who surround them with other people and kind of create this incubator, this safe space for kids to grow up where they know they're loved and they know that God is proud of them. Yeah, that's the design. But God also acknowledges that when sin enters the world, things start to break down and the family is not immune from that. And so what do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We take solace in the fact that we are given a new supplemental spiritual family. And this is probably my favorite thing about grace. It's how much grace feels like my family. It's how much when the power goes out, we don't care, we're going to keep singing. Can I just tell you, I wasn't one bit worried. I wasn't like, oh gosh, what are we going to do if the power went out? You know what we're going to do? We're going to cut the fourth song and I was going to come up here and yell at you. That's what we're going to do. And you know what you guys were going to do? You're going to be totally cool with it. Nobody would leave and be like, that place stinks. And if you did, okay. Sorry. Nothing we can do about it. There wasn't one ounce of stress because you guys are family. Because we love each other. Because we show up for each other. And I was thinking about this reality in just mine and Jen's life. Six years ago, we moved away from our families. And though we have great families, that move created a void for us. Lily and John, our kids, they have great grandparents, but they didn't get to see them as often as we'd like. And so you know what God and his goodness did? He put us in a church that has people that are a generation older than us who love us and who love our children and who we consider to be our Raleigh grandparents, who we can call and say, gosh, something came up. Will you come sit with the kids? And they love to do it. We were given, you know what I was given? I think about this a lot, and I don't think those of you who fit into this category, I don't think you know how grateful I am for you. I have a really good dad. But when I came to this church, I was given a bunch of spiritual fathers who are older than me, who have walked through seasons that I haven't, who pour into me, who love me, who advise me, who befriend me, and who encourage me. And it has become my spiritual family. Jen has women in the church who are a generation older than her, who love on her, who we can go to, who we can ask questions to, who have become our Raleigh mamas and daddies. We have brothers and sisters in this church, in our small group, who we walk through the same seasons of life together, and we can lean on each other, and we're not alone. And that spiritual family here doesn't for one second replace our genetic family. It doesn't for one second replace the families that we were born into, but it supplements those families. And sometimes, even in the loss that we've experienced, sometimes we can get such joy out of our church family that just for a second, we don't think about that as much. So I want you to know that in grace you have a faith family. You have brothers and sisters who want to watch out for you. You have mamas and daddies who want to pour into you. There are children in this church who need your love. There are children in this church who need your direction that you can get involved with and turn around and pour into the younger generations. But this church needs to, according to Scripture, operate as a supplemental family that fills in the gaps that are left behind by the families that we were born into. So what do we do if our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We allow the church to be the place that is the primary delivery system of God's love and of God's grace and of God's truth. We're not just the children, but everybody who's here knows that they are loved. They're loved by their brothers and sisters. They're cared for by their brothers and sisters. They are cared for by their spiritual moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas. And that we believe in them and in who God created them to be and in watching them grow up to become those people. And when I say grow up, I don't just mean 10-year-olds becoming 25-year-olds. I mean someone who is 50, but spiritually they're two, and we get to watch them grow into their faith. So first, know that grace is your family. That's what we are here for. Second, as a family, we want to share the love that we have with everybody who comes in here. We want people to feel like family as soon as they walk in the doors. One of my favorite movies at the holiday season is Family Stone. And it's not, I'm not going to get into the plot of it, but one of the underlying themes of that movie, and they don't address it directly, but I think one of the reasons I love it so much is that that family is set up and you can just tell that everybody who walks in that door is loved and everybody they bring home with them is loved too. And I want Grace to feel like that. That everybody who walks in those doors is loved and is part of our family as soon as they wanna be. And everybody that you invite, we're gonna love them too. No matter who they are, no matter where they've been, no matter what they've done, we're gonna love on them. But I know that some of us have families that have let us down. Some of us had families that don't feel the same. Let God's family of faith be your supplemental family that fills in the gaps. And then that way, we can love each other, encourage each other, and continue to push each other towards Christ. And then once we feel that sense of family here, let's look out and see who God is bringing in and love on them too. I'm going to continue to use grace, faith, family in my language moving forward. And this overview of family in the Bible is exactly why I'm going to do that. I'm going to pray and then we've got some instructions for you after the service. Father, we love you. We thank you for being our heavenly Father. God, we thank you for our good families. Those of us that have them, we're so grateful for them. We thank you for good moms and dads that aren't perfect but love you well and love us too. God, I pray for those walking into Christmas who are walking into stressful situations or hurtful situations. I just pray that you would be with them, that they would see you, that they would know that you were loved, that you would show up in those spaces. And God, I pray that grace can be a place that fills in the gaps for those who are a part of us that were left by the families that they were born into. Give us good, rich, deep relationships, God, that push us towards you and that help us grow and help us know that we're loved by those around us and by you. Let us be a faithful family of faith. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, good morning. Good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. And I actually am kind of laughing to myself because this morning's sermon is about family. And during that worship set, I think we got some good illustrations of family. Power goes out, it goes wrong. You guys kept singing. It was actually really beautiful. And I was proud of you in that moment. I just want it to be stated for the record that there was a surge back there, and there's a button that turns on all of the equipment that the sound comes through, and I remembered that and hit the button. That's right. I saved Christmas. The other really funny thing that happened up here that I just want to share with you guys because families have inside jokes, and this is a good one one for us. In the song, Hark the Herald, I'm going to do it, Aaron. In the song, Hark the Herald, Angels Sing, there's a verse where it said there's a line that says, like, hail incarnate deity. But that's a tough line to sing, and Aaron can't quite get it. So when he says it, he sings hail incarnate deity, like carne asada, like tacos, right? And you can't hear him sing the song and not hail the incarnate deity, which is pretty great because he is also the God of carne asada. And so I swore I wasn't going to look at him. We were laughing before the service about it in rehearsal. I swore I wasn't going to look at him. I didn't want to throw him off. So I didn't, but then he backs off. You know, he does the thing where he backs off the mic, right? and everybody sings, and it's a spiritual moment. It was not spiritual in Hark the Herald. He had to compose himself. So then I lean over to Jen and tell her what he's doing, and then he sees me talking to her. I'm sorry. And so then he starts laughing again. So then he gives you guys a spiritual chance to sing the song again while he composes himself. So anyways, that's what happened during Hark the Herald. But yeah, this morning is about family because when we think of Christmas, we think of family, right? It's inevitably a part of the Christmas season. And that means different things to different people. For some of us, it means really good things. For some of us, when we think about Christmas and we think about the holidays and we think about seeing our families, our moms and our dads, our grandparents, our brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces, nephews, all that stuff, it's a good, sweet time. We're really excited about it. We're really looking forward to it. And if that's you, that's fantastic. For others of us, it's stressful. I talked to a couple people this morning. You got big Christmas plans? And they go, yeah, we got to get lots of places, you know, or we got lots of people coming over, lots of big stuff to do. And for those who say, gosh, it feels stressful because there's so many people coming over, there's going to be so many folks there, or I've got so many people to go see, like, man, there's a lot of folks who'd be pretty jealous of that. Those are the golden years, man. Soak those up. For others of us, when we think about family at Christmas, it's stressful. We know we're going to be stepping into an environment, we're going to be sitting around a dinner table, where there's certain landmines that are going to be laid for us, and we better not step on them. And some of you want to step on them real bad, right? And your wife's like, please don't do it. Please don't say the thing. The conversation gets political. You want to say your thing. You know you shouldn't. Some of us are stepping into stressful situations, and not even just in a silly way, but family's just tense. Family's hard right now. And then there are others and these are the people that I think about the most. And if this is you, just know that I may not be praying for you by name, but I'm praying for you in general and your situation as often as I can remember to do it. There are others for whom thinking about family during Christmas is hard because either there's loss or there's loneliness, right? Christmas is hard because this is the first Christmas with that empty seat where someone's not where they're supposed to be and everything's going to feel different. Or it's been five years since the loss, but it still hurts the same when you sit around. I know that when my family lost my papa, Christmases were just, they just were never the same. They just weren't. I haven't had that much joy in a Christmas since we lost him. For others in our body, Christmas is a time of loneliness. It's a time when everybody else goes to their families and we might not have ours around us or at all. And if that's you, I pray for you often because I hate that for you. But I think that no matter where we are on that spectrum of good, dreading, where it just hurts no matter where we are, and for many of us, for most of us, we're probably a Venn diagram of all of those, right? As we approach, I doubt anyone's only good and anyone's only bad. There's just a good mix in there. But I think that the principles that come out of the Bible around family can actually encourage and inspire us no matter where we sit on the spectrum. And I've actually been really excited and looking forward to sharing this sermon with you because this sermon is one that kind of came through a little aha moment in my office. I knew that I was going to be preaching about family, and I didn't really know what I wanted to preach. I had no great inspiration. None of the ideas that I had sounded any good to me. And so I was just kind of sitting in my office thinking, and I do, when I don't know what to preach about, I do what I would assume most pastors do or should do, is I just kind of sit down with the Bible and I'm like, all right, God, what does your Bible say about this thing? And I just go through passages or I open up the Bible and I read passages until one catches me and I go, oh, that's the thing. That's what grace needs this week. And then I preach the Bible. And so I wasn't sure what to preach about. And Aaron Gibson happened to be in my office at the time. So he was my guinea pig that morning. And I said, hey, man, I got to preach about family. Here's what I'm thinking. Can you kind of help me make sense of this? Does anything click with you? What should I pursue? And so we started talking back and forth about this idea of family. And I started thinking through, well, how does the Bible address family? Where does it talk about family? And to be honest with you, the Bible is pretty scant in terms of passages that directly address family and tell parents how to parents and kids how to kid and grandparents how to grandparent. Like it doesn't have a lot of that in there. So I'm trying to figure out what is God, what does your word say about family and how does that apply to grace? And Aaron said something that triggered a thought in my head, and as often goes in these conversations when I'm trying to figure out what to preach, and I'm just talking to whoever is closest that I can grab and will listen to me. He said something that triggered a thought, and I started going through scripture in my head, and he was still, he was, he at that point became Charlie Brown's mom. Like, there was words coming out, but I'm looking out the window window and I said, I got it, man. Thanks so much. I'm excited. And so I just thought about family over the course of scripture and what it's supposed to be and what it's supposed to do and how God designed it. So if we look in the Old Testament, where we do have more directives about family, one of the first things we see is that family makes the top 10 list, which is actually pretty cool. It's in the 10 commandments, right? One of the commandments, honor your father and mother and the Lord for this is right. And that commandment looks different for different people at different ages. It looks different for me to honor my parents now than it did when I was 11, and it'll look different in 20 years than it does right now. And it has different implications in different family scenarios, right? Blended families and stuff like that. And so honor your father and mother is this just profound principle that comes out of the Old Testament where God prioritizes it enough to put it in the Ten Commandments. And implicit within that commandment to the parents is, hey, act in a way that's worthy of honor, right? Earn the honor of your children if they're going to be commanded to give it to you. And then there's other places in Scripture. Proverbs has some things to say that if we obey, our parents will live a long and fruitful life and that parents are told to raise a child up in the way they must go and they will not depart from it. So we raise them up by teaching them God's principles. But there is one passage, it's actually two different passages in the same book that say the same thing that really kind of outline for us or show us, depict for us the purpose of family as God intended it. So we can find this in Deuteronomy 6 or Deuteronomy 11. They say the same things. I just like the way Deuteronomy 11 is worded just a little bit better. So I'm going to read that to you now so we can see God's design for family. He's just taught them his law, told them how to live, basically giving them what their version of the Bible was, and this is what he says as a result of it. You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, listen, parents, I just taught you my law. I just shared with you my love and my truth. Now, I want you to put those all over your home. I want you to bind them on your hands. I want you to bind them on your forehead. I want you to write them on your walls. I want you to write them on your doorpost. And I want you to talk about them with your children when you're waking and before you sleep, as you come and you go, as you sit down for mealtimes, talk about my word with your children. And so what we see, and this is a profound thing, what we see is that God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his gospel. God has designed the family as the primary delivery system for his love and for his truth. Now, they wouldn't have called it the gospel in the Old Testament, but we call it the gospel. The gospel is the story of the good news of Jesus. It's God's love and God's truth. And we can see from Deuteronomy and from the way the family is structured in the Old Testament that it is God's design for the family, that it would be the primary delivery system of his love and his truth in the life of children as they grow up. That the purpose of family from a spiritual perspective is to create the safe space to incubate the faith of our children so that they can grow up knowing who their God is. And then there's a generational implication in this where we do it for our children and for their children and for the children's children. And there's a responsibility forever to turn around and teach the previous generation the faith that you inherited from your mother and father. That the divine design for families is that a mama and a daddy would impart their faith on their children. You can't overstate how important this is. That our children, listen, if you have kids in your house, listen, that our children would grow up looking at our faith and knowing that this is the faith that they can learn. This is the faith that they can mimic. This is the faith that they can follow. They ought to grow up in our home looking at a godly marriage and knowing this is what I want one day. What I want one day is the way my father loves my mother. What I want one day is the way my mom loves my dad. That's what I want one day. Our kids should grow up in homes and be able to say that. They should grow up in homes where they are discipled, where we parents take it as our responsibility to impart what we know about our faith onto our children. Can I tell you that now that I have two kids, you know what keeps me up at night theologically when I think through difficult questions or truths of scripture or realities of walking with God? Do you know who I'm thinking about when I'm trying to figure those things out for myself? Because it ain't you. It's not my church, it's my children. I want to impart a good faith onto them so that when they enter into adulthood, they have a firm foundation. That they encounter less hiccups than I did. That's our job, parents. Our job in the home is to create a safe space for our kids to grow up where they know that they are loved by their God and by their parents and that their God and their parents are proud of them. We create that incubator in the home so they grow up in this safe space and they have a good family and then they turn around and they do that to their kids. That's clearly the divine design of family in the Bible and it's clearly what our families are supposed to do for us is to be God's delivery system of his grace and truth and love in our lives. We should be able to look at the generations that came before us and see what it is to have a heart for God and walk in that. And grandparents, you're not off the hook, okay? You might be thinking, well, my kids are, that ship has sailed, my kids are grown, they're out, what happened happened, and now we have to live in that reality, and that may be true. But this commandment in Deuteronomy was given to a culture of people that lived intergenerationally. They lived as clans. They lived together. So this isn't just for parents and children. This is for grandparents and adult children and grandchildren. And those of you who have adult kids, can I just tell you something? I don't care how old they are. They'd be 41, like me. They'd be 31 or 21. We still need mamas and daddies, okay? We still need parents. We still need people that we can look at and ask questions to. We still need an older generation that we can be vulnerable with, that can have grace with us, that can watch some of the mistakes that we're about to make and say, hey, hey, brother, I love you. Don't do that. Older generations in this room, my generation, we still need mamas and daddies. You never get too old for that. And those of you who are older than me and you have parents who are still alive, you know you still need them too. And you know you still miss them. This responsibility never fades. It's our job to love on and demonstrate to the generations that come. And my generation, it's going to sound like I'm making jokes because I make jokes because I'm a dummy sometimes, but I'm not making jokes right now. We need to watch people age gracefully so that we know what it is to do that. We need to watch people care for their aging parents so we know how to do that with tenderness and grace when it's our turn. We need to watch how you interact with your adult children who don't make some of the choices you want them to make or who do. We need to see how that's done. We need to watch that. We need that in our lives. And so this family, as the delivery system for God's grace and goodness and truth and instruction in our life, that never fades. And we never graduate out of that need. And now some of you, as I say this, you have good families. You're like these couples that I get to marry sometimes. I do a fair amount of weddings every year, and one of my favorite things that I get to do on occasion within a wedding ceremony is when the couple will talk to me. I always talk to them in premarital counseling about their families, and what was it like growing up in your home? How are your mamas and your daddies and that kind of thing? And every now and again, I'll be working with a couple and they will say, we had great families. We had great parents growing up. I loved growing up in my home. We want our home to look like their home. They were wonderful and yada, yada, yada. And I'll say, well, do you want to honor them in the service? And they're like, yeah, that would be great. And so what I do is after the exchanging of rings, I always pray over the couple. And what we'll do sometimes is we'll surprise the parents and I'll invite them up in the ceremony and I'll have some words written about how they understand that they're standing on shoulders of their parents who gave them this great upbringing and they're so grateful for it and they want to do the same thing in their home. So they want to acknowledge their parents in the wedding ceremony as they create a new family and their parents come up and lay hands on them and I get to pray over all of them. And that's just a sweet moment to see that generational love and faith, to see parents who took this seriously and kids who realize that their parents did that for them. So some of us come from good families. And those of us that do, Jen and I come from great families. We should acknowledge that we were born on third base. We did not hit a triple. God gave us a good set of cards, and we should be grateful for that. So part of today is just encouraging us that we should praise God for our good families. If you come from a good family, if you have a mom and a daddy who took this seriously, who modeled God's love for you and who taught you their faith, will you text them today? Will you call them? Will you tell them that you're grateful for that? Will you acknowledge the goodness that you come from? Because as I talk about this, what a family should do, how God designed the family, how he purposed it, I know that there are plenty of people in this room who feel bad because they weren't that. Who feel angry because my family didn't do this for me. Yeah, that's what a family's supposed to do. That's what a dad's supposed to do. My dad, he walked out that door when I was eight, so I didn't get this, man. I didn't get that idyllic childhood. I'm not looking forward to Christmas. It's going to be tense. It's going to be difficult. Sometimes we have families that let us down. We come to church, and everything's good, and everything smiles, and everybody's buddy-buddy, and behind the scenes, the wife knows and the kids know, he is heck to deal with. The husband knows and the kids know, man, mom's not the same person when she's not at church. Well, we come from broken families. We come from abusive families. We come from addicted families. And we feel like spiritual orphans because we just don't have somebody pouring into us like God designed family to do. And others of us, we had a great family. And then there was the diagnosis. Or the accident. And then there was loss. And we don't have that family that we used to have. We don't have that person to look to like we need to. And so I think the real question becomes, yeah, this is what God designed family to do, to be the divine delivery system of his goodness and his grace and his truth and his love. But for many of us, our families have fallen short of that. So the question becomes, what do we do when our family hasn't done what it's supposed to do? What are we supposed to do when our family has left some gaps? My parents didn't teach me their faith. My dad left. My mom left. My childhood was not good. I love my dad. He taught me faith, but he's gone now, and I don't know who to ask. I love my mom. She taught me faith, but she's gone now, and I don't know who to talk to or who to go to, and I don't know how I'm going to navigate these adult years on my own. What do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? And our situation is less than idyllic. To that question, I began to think about the New Testament. We talked about what the Old Testament has to say about family. What does the New Testament have to say about family? What's the language around family after Jesus comes on the scene? Once Christmas arrives, how does that impact family? And when I thought about the New Testament, I can't think of anywhere in the New Testament that specifically addresses family and family behavior. There's stuff about children honoring parents. There's stuff about gender roles within a family, but there's not anything about family dynamics in the Bible where it's specifically addressed in the New Testament that I'm aware of. But I began to think through the times where family is mentioned in the New Testament. And do you know that most of the time that family is mentioned in the New Testament, it's mentioned as imagery for how the church ought to behave? It's mentioned to help us understand how we, the church, should behave towards each other and begin to understand one another. That most of the family language in the New Testament is not actually about physical family. It's imagery about our spiritual family. I'll show you what I'm talking about so that you know that I'm not making this up. On your notes, there's a list of references there. We're not going to put all of them up on the screen. I just want you to know that if you want to go back and open up your Bible and double check me on this, there you go. There's the footnotes. You can do that. But in Ephesians 2, Paul talks about, he introduces this idea of a spiritual family. He says that we're no longer aliens and sojourners. We're no longer spiritual orphans, but that we are now, we now have membership in this heavenly family. And so he introduces to us this idea of an additional family. And then in 1 Timothy, I like this passage, in 1 Timothy chapter 5, Paul is writing to his disciple Timothy, who he's sent off to Ephesus to be the pastor there, the church in Ephesus, where we see the book of Ephesians. Timothy was the pastor pastor there trained by Paul. And 1 and 2 Timothy are letters of advice to him as he leads this church. And in chapter 5 of the first letter, he says, when you have conflicts with people, let me tell you how I want you to handle it. If you need to confront a man who's older than you, confront him as a father. If you need to talk to a woman who's older than you, confront her as a mother. If you need to talk to a younger man, one of your peers, talk to him as a brother. A younger woman, talk to her as a sister. And so what it tells me as a pastor is that when I talk to you in meetings and conversation, on Sunday morning, when I preach, I preach to you as if I'm preaching to my own family. I treat you like I would my own family. And I do not think that that instruction, though it's not explicit in the text, I do not think that that instruction is limited to just pastors and elders, but all of God's children. That you would regard men who are older than you as fathers, women who are older than you as mothers, and then your peers as brothers and sisters. That we should treat each other as family. And I'm going to get to it in a minute as to why I think this. But I think that is such a profoundly good teaching that we should treat each other like that. Then in Matthew chapter 12, Jesus says this really interesting thing where he's preaching to some people and he's talking with a crowd and somebody kind of cuts through and says, hey, Jesus, your mother and your brothers are here to see you. And Jesus just says, my mother and my brothers are the ones who obey the will of God. Like they're family, this is family too. And then in Galatians, we see Paul again talk about this concept of family and how we've been adopted into God's family and we are heirs to the throne of God. And this is locked in for us most in Romans chapter 8. So I'm going to read this to you here. Romans chapter 8 verses 14 through 17 really tells us a lot about our spiritual family. Paul writes this, for all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. And that really should say sons and daughters of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but have received the spirit of adoption as sons and daughters by whom we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. And if children, then heirs, we are Christians, and again, to be a Christian, you simply believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you believe those things, then the Bible teaches that God has given you the Spirit as a down payment on your salvation in heaven. And what Paul tells us is when we receive the Spirit, then we are adopted into God's family, that we are heirs to God and co-heirs with Christ. We are brothers and sisters, and Christ is our brother. And so as you think through what the New Testament has to say about family, and you try to answer that question, what do we do when my family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? I think we accept the reality from the New Testament that through the gift of Jesus, we also receive the gift of a new supplemental family. And I meant to change that word supplemental to spiritual. But through the gift of Jesus, through the arrival of Christ, once Jesus shows up in the gospels, the Bible starts to talk differently about family. It's God's way of acknowledging, just like he did the rest of the world, yes, I intended for each and every boy and girl who is born to grow up in a family with parents who love them, who teach them about God, who show them God's love, who model for them maturity in their faith, and who surround them with other people and kind of create this incubator, this safe space for kids to grow up where they know they're loved and they know that God is proud of them. Yeah, that's the design. But God also acknowledges that when sin enters the world, things start to break down and the family is not immune from that. And so what do we do when our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We take solace in the fact that we are given a new supplemental spiritual family. And this is probably my favorite thing about grace. It's how much grace feels like my family. It's how much when the power goes out, we don't care, we're going to keep singing. Can I just tell you, I wasn't one bit worried. I wasn't like, oh gosh, what are we going to do if the power went out? You know what we're going to do? We're going to cut the fourth song and I was going to come up here and yell at you. That's what we're going to do. And you know what you guys were going to do? You're going to be totally cool with it. Nobody would leave and be like, that place stinks. And if you did, okay. Sorry. Nothing we can do about it. There wasn't one ounce of stress because you guys are family. Because we love each other. Because we show up for each other. And I was thinking about this reality in just mine and Jen's life. Six years ago, we moved away from our families. And though we have great families, that move created a void for us. Lily and John, our kids, they have great grandparents, but they didn't get to see them as often as we'd like. And so you know what God and his goodness did? He put us in a church that has people that are a generation older than us who love us and who love our children and who we consider to be our Raleigh grandparents, who we can call and say, gosh, something came up. Will you come sit with the kids? And they love to do it. We were given, you know what I was given? I think about this a lot, and I don't think those of you who fit into this category, I don't think you know how grateful I am for you. I have a really good dad. But when I came to this church, I was given a bunch of spiritual fathers who are older than me, who have walked through seasons that I haven't, who pour into me, who love me, who advise me, who befriend me, and who encourage me. And it has become my spiritual family. Jen has women in the church who are a generation older than her, who love on her, who we can go to, who we can ask questions to, who have become our Raleigh mamas and daddies. We have brothers and sisters in this church, in our small group, who we walk through the same seasons of life together, and we can lean on each other, and we're not alone. And that spiritual family here doesn't for one second replace our genetic family. It doesn't for one second replace the families that we were born into, but it supplements those families. And sometimes, even in the loss that we've experienced, sometimes we can get such joy out of our church family that just for a second, we don't think about that as much. So I want you to know that in grace you have a faith family. You have brothers and sisters who want to watch out for you. You have mamas and daddies who want to pour into you. There are children in this church who need your love. There are children in this church who need your direction that you can get involved with and turn around and pour into the younger generations. But this church needs to, according to Scripture, operate as a supplemental family that fills in the gaps that are left behind by the families that we were born into. So what do we do if our family doesn't do what it's supposed to do? We allow the church to be the place that is the primary delivery system of God's love and of God's grace and of God's truth. We're not just the children, but everybody who's here knows that they are loved. They're loved by their brothers and sisters. They're cared for by their brothers and sisters. They are cared for by their spiritual moms and dads and grandmas and grandpas. And that we believe in them and in who God created them to be and in watching them grow up to become those people. And when I say grow up, I don't just mean 10-year-olds becoming 25-year-olds. I mean someone who is 50, but spiritually they're two, and we get to watch them grow into their faith. So first, know that grace is your family. That's what we are here for. Second, as a family, we want to share the love that we have with everybody who comes in here. We want people to feel like family as soon as they walk in the doors. One of my favorite movies at the holiday season is Family Stone. And it's not, I'm not going to get into the plot of it, but one of the underlying themes of that movie, and they don't address it directly, but I think one of the reasons I love it so much is that that family is set up and you can just tell that everybody who walks in that door is loved and everybody they bring home with them is loved too. And I want Grace to feel like that. That everybody who walks in those doors is loved and is part of our family as soon as they wanna be. And everybody that you invite, we're gonna love them too. No matter who they are, no matter where they've been, no matter what they've done, we're gonna love on them. But I know that some of us have families that have let us down. Some of us had families that don't feel the same. Let God's family of faith be your supplemental family that fills in the gaps. And then that way, we can love each other, encourage each other, and continue to push each other towards Christ. And then once we feel that sense of family here, let's look out and see who God is bringing in and love on them too. I'm going to continue to use grace, faith, family in my language moving forward. And this overview of family in the Bible is exactly why I'm going to do that. I'm going to pray and then we've got some instructions for you after the service. Father, we love you. We thank you for being our heavenly Father. God, we thank you for our good families. Those of us that have them, we're so grateful for them. We thank you for good moms and dads that aren't perfect but love you well and love us too. God, I pray for those walking into Christmas who are walking into stressful situations or hurtful situations. I just pray that you would be with them, that they would see you, that they would know that you were loved, that you would show up in those spaces. And God, I pray that grace can be a place that fills in the gaps for those who are a part of us that were left by the families that they were born into. Give us good, rich, deep relationships, God, that push us towards you and that help us grow and help us know that we're loved by those around us and by you. Let us be a faithful family of faith. In Jesus' name, amen.

Have you ever wondered if it was all worth it? All the emails and phone calls, special projects, late meetings, early mornings and out-of-town trips? Frantically shuttling bodies back and forth and cobbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be with you in person. It's good to be with you online. Thank you for continuing to join us in that way. As Michelle just said, it is nice to have faces. They're hidden behind masks, which gives me the benefit of pretending like you're all just smiling at me the whole time. So that's how I'm picturing you. It's just nice and friendly and kind, so I appreciate that. Last week, we started our series called Vapor, which is a study through the book of Ecclesiastes. So I would actually say this, if you're catching up later this week, if you're listening to this on like a Tuesday, or you're watching online and you didn't catch last week, stop. I would encourage you to stop and go back and listen to last week. Do it on double speed, or if you really want a good laugh, listen to my voice on half speed, because that sounds funny. But listen to the last one and then catch up with this week. Because again, this is a series and it's not really made to stand independently of one another. We kind of need all of the parts to understand the four separate parts. And so last week was a downer. Last week was a bummer. I warned you ahead of time that you're not going to feel good at the end of that sermon. This one is not much different, all right? So just buckle up. This is Ecclesiastes, and I think it's good and ecclesiastical for us to sit in the difficult sometimes, for us to sit in hard reality sometimes. And what we said is that this is the bleakest book for the bleakest month. And I don't think I need much of a backup. This winter has been terrible, just gray and dark and rainy. It's the perfect time to go through Ecclesiastes. Solomon is the author of Ecclesiastes, and he writes it towards the end of his life and just hits us with some stark realities. And I continue to contend that on the other side of these realities, if we can accept the reality that we talked about last week, which is the idea that most Americans, most people in our culture are wasting our lives. He calls it vanity of vanities of striving after the wind. It's vapor. That's why the series is called Vapor. It's that Hebrew word, a hevel, that means vapor or smoke. Here one minute, gone the next. Seems like you can reach out and grab success or grab happiness or grab something worth pursuing and that when you get to it, it's gone. It slips through your fingers and we don't have it anymore. So the difficult reality that we confronted last week was just that, that most of life is vapor. Most pursuits, when we get to the end of them, we will find them to be empty. That's a difficult reality, but it's an essential one. We're going to face another reality this week, and I continue to believe if we will face these bravely, that what we'll find on the other end of them is this immutable joy, this joy that can be untouched by circumstance. I believe that we'll find the satisfaction on the other side of these realities that really is abiding. I think that we'll become more grateful for God and more desirous of Jesus for him to come and for our relationship with him. And so we're going to wade through these things as a church. Now, I ended last week with that thought, that it's my belief that Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes, would tell most Americans, a vast majority of people in our culture, that you're wasting your life. You're chasing vapor. And then I said, well, God gives us something that is worth chasing. What is that? And I said, we're going to talk about it next week. And then I prayed and we went home. Or, well, I went home. You guys just stayed where you were. So this week we want to start off by answering that question that we left off with. What is the thing worth pursuing? If it's not ambition, if it's not career, if it's not pleasures, if it's not monuments to ourselves, if it's not security, if it's not the book knowledge and general wisdom, what is it that's worth investing our life in? Well, I think that Solomon would answer that question like this. He concludes, based on my reading of Ecclesiastes, Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. The best investment of your life, the best way to spend your days and get to the end of your years and not wonder, did I waste my life, is to spend those days pleasing God. The best way to reach joy, to grab onto something that's not vapor, that is substantive, is to spend your days pleasing God. That's what he says. And I believe that he intends that because he says it multiple times throughout the book. Look with me at what he writes in Ecclesiastes. We'll start in chapter 8 and then we'll be in chapter 12. He says, And then in chapter 8, And then he ends the book this way, Ecclesiastes 12, 13. He sums up all the teachings and he says this, Fear God, keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. If you were to go to Solomon, the author of Ecclesiastes, and say, what's worth it? What should I do? He would say, fear God and keep his commands. We can talk about everything. We can talk about all the different pursuits. We can talk about all the different realities. We can be confronted with all the difficult things in life. We can accept the problem of pain and the vexation of wisdom. We can do all of that. But at the end of the day, here's what matters. Pursue God, keep his commands. This is the whole duty of man. That's what we are to do. That's what he has tasked us with. And this is Solomon's, I think, tip of the cap. It's his acknowledgement of what's called in theological circles, proverbial wisdom. Solomon also wrote the book of Proverbs. And in the book of Proverbs, there's a lot of if-then statements. If you do these good things, God will bless you with these good things. If you make choices like this, you will reap blessings like this. If you do dumb things, you will reap a bad harvest. If you choose folly, if you choose foolishness, if you choose sin and indulgence, then you will reap a harvest that is equitable to those indulgences. One of the ones that I think of is there is a verse in Proverbs that I've always loved because I truly believe in that phrase, you show me your friends and I'll show you your future. We're the average of the five people that we spend our most time around, all of that stuff. There's a verse in Proverbs that says that the companion of the wise will become wise and the companion of fools will suffer harm. And that's generally true, isn't it? If you hang out with people who are wise, who make good choices, eventually you're going to start making good choices like them. If you hang out with knuckleheads who make bad choices and have bad priorities, eventually you're going to start making bad choices like them. And the result of their bad choices and the result of your bad choices is going to be the harm that you suffer. And so in general, that's true, isn't it? That if we hang around with good people who we want to be like, we look at them and they have things in our life that we want, we'll begin to adopt their values and we'll take on some of their characteristics. Similarly, if we spend our time with people that don't share our priorities and make bad decisions, we're going to continue to make those bad decisions. Some of you guys have lived this out in your life, right? I mean, for some of you, your story is you were hanging out with people who are not bad people. They just have different priorities than someone who's just become a believer. And you become a believer, and now you have different priorities in your life, and you come to the painful realization of, gosh, I need another set of friends. I don't want to just walk away from these people. I love these people, but I need other folks speaking into my life who share the priorities that I do. For many of you, that's why you found church. Not that your friends are bad people. They just no longer share your priorities. And so you want to hang out with other people who do share your priorities. And Proverbs tells us that if you'll be the companion of wise people, that you'll be wise. If you'll be the companion of foolish people who make bad choices, then you're going to suffer the consequences of those choices. Likewise, all throughout Proverbs, another one of those if-then transactions is. I don't have a specific verse. I should be a better pastor who looks one up, but I didn't, so just go with me. It says in plenty of places the idea that if you work hard, if you put your head down and work hard and be humble, then at the end of your life, you will reap a harvest of wealth and security. If you work hard, you do your job, consider the ant that works even when it doesn't have to. If you'll do that, then by the end of your life, you will have amassed and built up, and God will honor your good work and your toil. Likewise, if you are lazy, a little sleeping, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come on you like an armed man, okay, says Proverbs. So if you're lazy and you just kind of want money to come to you, you just feel entitled and you deserve all this stuff, then you're never going to reap the benefit of wealth and security. And so here's what Solomon is saying in Ecclesiastes. That proverbial wisdom, if you please God, your life will go better for you. If you surround yourself with wise people, then you're more likely to prosper. If you do work hard and put your head down, then you're likely to build up. You're likely to be successful. Solomon acknowledges that. The end of the matter is this. Fear God, keep his commandments. Pursue him, do the right things. Honor that proverbial wisdom. But then he gives us this other reality. Then he gives us this caveat to that. Because what we know is that we need a caveat there. Because plenty of us know people who have hung around good friends, who are surrounded with wise folks, and have made terrible choices. Plenty of us know good people who are surrounded with other good people who have experienced what we would consider an unfair amount of pain, pain that seems like it would be waiting on folks who invest their lives around bad people. Likewise, we all know people who spend their time around knuckleheads and seem to be doing great. We also know people who have worked really hard, who have kept their head down, who have done their part. They get to the end of their life and they're still living hand to mouth because of a bad deal or because of a child that costs a lot of money or because of difficult diagnosis or whatever it is. And we know people who have been lazy and do seem prosperous. And that causes us to go, what gives? What do we do when proverbial wisdom doesn't ring true to us? We turn to Ecclesiastes, where I think Solomon writes this book later in his life. And what he says is, yeah, proverbial wisdom, those traditional accepted teachings of living a moral life and God honoring that and us being honored for it, that's true. But he wants us to know something. Even if you live that life. There's a whole section in my Bible where it says the vexation of wisdom, where he says, I even pursued wisdom. I did the right things. I honored God. I kept my nose clean. I walked the straight and narrow. I pursued purity. And even in that, you know what I found? A degree of vanity, a degree of vapor, a degree of chasing after the wind. And so the other reality that I want us to confront this morning in Ecclesiastes is this. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Somewhere in our faith and in our churches, we've gotten this idea that the more I clean, I keep my nose, the more God will protect me from pain in my life. The more I walk the straight and narrow, the agreement is, God, I'm gonna follow your rules and you're gonna offer me protection. This is why when someone who is good and is wonderful and is loving and seems to be all the things that maybe we feel like we're not, when we watch them get sick or we watch them pass away or we watch bad things happen to them, we kind of feel this sense of unfairness, right? We kind of feel this sense of, why is that allowed to happen? Well, Solomon says it happens because our obedience does not protect us from pain. It doesn't opt us out of it. It doesn't opt us out of struggle. I think one of the most dangerous, pernicious lies in Christendom is that the more I honor God with my life, the more He'll protect me with His sovereignty. And it is not true. We do not get that idea anywhere in the Bible. As a matter of fact, this is what Solomon says. This is what he has to say. And this is why I believe that that's his point. He makes this point that obedience will not protect us from pain multiple times in the book. He says it over in chapter 5. I'm sorry, chapter 9, verse 11. He says, You think you're really smart and that's why you're successful. No. You think you're dumb and and that's why you can't seem to make a way. No. Time and chance happen to us all. No one dodges the raindrops of tragedy and pain in their life. He says it over and over again in the book, but the best way he says it, the most profound way he says it, in chapter three, the first eight verses of chapter three. If you have a Bible, I would encourage you to look at that passage with me. And normally I don't read eight verses in a row in church service because I find it disengaging sometimes when pastors do that. But this is so beautiful and so poignant and so important that it felt unfair to you guys to pick out one as a synopsis. So we're going to read it all together. Not aloud, that would be weird. I don't do that kind of weird stuff, but we're going to read it together as I read. Ready? For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to break down and a time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to cast stones away and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, like pandemics. A time to seek and a time to refrain from embracing like pandemics, a time to seek and a time to lose, a time to keep and a time to cast away, a time to tear and a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. It's such a beautiful, elegant truth that he details out for us there. And there is a place where I want us to land, but there is another takeaway from there. It's not the point of the sermon, but I thought I would be remiss if I didn't make this point as we go through this beautiful passage together. There's a time for everything, and we ought to let those seasons have their time. We shouldn't jump from one to another. What makes me think of this is this. This last fall, I had a bunch of buddies come in town, and we all kind of took a weekend and just hung out. It's just a guy's weekend. We were supposed to golf most of the time, and it rained, so we just sat around. But it was fun. My friends and I, that's what we like to do anyways. We're just old men. But I have one friend named Dan, and Dan, he is the opposite of me. He is enthusiastic. He is on fire all the time. He loves to yell and be loud and celebrate things and cheer and be happy. He never meets a stranger. Dan is a weirdo that talks to people in elevators and I'll never understand it. He'll just chat up whoever is around him, right? And I love Dan. I had lunch with Dan the other day, but on that particular trip, Dan at the time had a pregnant wife and three small children and had just moved across the country. And both he and his wife were looking for jobs, and they're looking for houses, and they're trying to figure out how to get their kids in school. So when he came to that weekend, his life had been a pressure cooker, and he needed to release, right? So Dan wanted to dance, and he wanted to yell, and he wanted to scream, and he wanted to be be excited and I didn't want to do any of that. I just wanted to sit there and be quiet and have no one ask me any questions. And Dan's like, Nate, come on, let's go. And we're watching some dumb game and he wants me to be invested in it and I don't care. And there was a tension there. And I felt in my soul, as I frequently do, my grumpiness well up. And all I wanted to do was say, Dan, why don't you shut up for like maybe 30 minutes, dude? Can we just chill out? But I kept talking myself out of doing that. Because what I realized is, Dan's my buddy. And what he needs is to blow off some steam. It's his time to dance. It's his time to yell and be boisterous. It's his time to be loud and to laugh and to be joyful. That's his time. And if I rain on that parade, I am the worst of friends. If I don't recognize in myself that it's his soul's time for those things, and I don't allow him that time, I am the jerk of all jerks. So I just sucked it up, and now we joke around about it. Likewise, when someone around us is sad, when someone around us is mourning, when someone around us needs to cry, shame on us for robbing them of that time too. And shame on you for attempting to rob yourself of that time. You guys know that we just walked through something pretty difficult as a family, and that we lost Jen's dad. And there were days when she would just look at me and she would say, I'm sad. I'm just sad. And I would say, then be sad. Then today's the day to be sad. And that's all right. And there will be more days when we're sad. Our souls need those days. They're cathartic for us. They're required by us. And shame on us if we try to rob our friends and our loved ones of the sad days that they need too. Those ought to take their time and have their season. I think what we try to do is we try to skip the bad ones, right? We try to skip past, I don't like this time of mourning. I want to skip to my time of laughter. I don't like this time of stillness. I want to skip to the time of dancing. I don't like this time of sadness. I want to skip to my time of joy. And what Solomon is saying is, no, there's a time for both. You can't experience true joy if you don't let yourself walk through true grief. The dancing isn't as joyful if you haven't set in pensive silence. Right? So I didn't want to move past this passage without making the point to you guys, without imploring you, let the seasons have their time. When it's a time for dying, let it be a time for dying. When it's a time for birth, let it be that. If someone you love needs to be sad, let them be sad. Don't be the clumsy moron that tries to convince them that what they're going through is not that sad. Our souls need the good times and the hard times, and we shouldn't skip them. But what I really want you to see from this passage today is that if what he writes is true, there's a time for mourning, and there's a time for joy, and there's a time for gladness, and there's a time for sorrow true, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for joy and there's a time for gladness and there's a time for sorrow and there's a time for dancing and there's a time for stillness. If that's true, then all of those times are coming for all of us. Do you understand? It doesn't say for the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous there are more times to laugh. For the righteous there are more times to build things up. For the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous, there are more times to laugh. For the righteous, there are more times to build things up. For the righteous, there are more times for embracing. No, it just says that this is objectively true. Everybody walks through these seasons. The righteous and the unrighteous. The godly and the ungodly. The devout Christian and the militant atheist. All of us walk through these seasons. And it may feel weird to you that I'm hammering this point home that like, hey, guess what, guys? At some point or another, life is cruddy for everybody. But it is. It's also joyful for everybody. But no one dodges the raindrops of pain and tragedy in their life. Nobody. And if we will accept that, then what we can learn and see from this passage is pain is not punitive. Pain, hurt, struggle, hardship, that's not punitive. That's not God exacting revenge on you for a failure in your morality somewhere. That's not God punishing you. Pain is not punitive. It is the result of brokenness. We don't experience pain and hardship in our life because at some point in our past, we displeased God with the choices that we make, and now he's exacting his revenge on us. That's not how it works. Pain is not punitive. Pain is a result of brokenness. We've talked about this before, but God created heaven and earth, and he created it perfect, and then sin ruined that perfection. And ever since then, the world is broken. And in a broken world, divorces happen and abuse happens and people get cancer and we have to watch Parkinson's and all these other diseases eat away at people that we love. In a broken world, cruddy things happen. And what Solomon is acknowledging is not only do they happen, but they happen to everybody. And yes, in general, proverbial wisdom is true. In general, if you honor God in the way that you make your choices, then you will be honored as well. But just understand that that isn't a blanket insurance policy against pain because time and chance happen to us all. And we walk through all these seasons equally. And it's important to know when we get there that that pain is not punitive. That pain isn't something that we warrant with our behavior. This actually shows up in the New Testament. Someone is blind, and the disciples look at the blind man, and they say, what happened to him? What did his parents do that he's been blinded like this way? They thought pain was punitive. They thought his actions warranted, or his parents' actions warranted what he did. And Jesus says, now this world is just broken. He says what Solomon says. In this world where we wait for Jesus to come back, like Romans 8 talks about all of creation groans for the return of the Savior, for the return of the King, for Jesus to come and make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And spoiler alert, this is where we're going to finish the series. But while we wait, we all walk through these seasons. And it's so important for us to understand that pain is not punitive. Here's why I think this. I don't know if I have permission to share her story. If I don't, I'm sorry. Kay Gamble also sits on our finance committee and approves my expenses on a monthly basis. So, you know, she has a way to nail me if she doesn't appreciate me sharing this story. But Kay is a wonderful lady who goes here and a few months ago was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctor looked at the breast cancer and said, I think it's offerable. I think we can get it. I think it's going to be okay. She went in. She got it. And Kay, if you know her, she's quiet. Of course, she doesn't tell anybody about this. I only hear about this after the fact. They go in. They get it. Everything's good. Doctor says, we got it all. I think you're going to be in good shape. You don't have to do chemo or anything like that. We're going to give you a pill to kind of be on the safe side. You'll take that for five years, but you're good. You can go on with life as normal. So there's some pain and then a relief. Everything's good. Then she gets a call a couple of days later. The doctor said, hey, we took another look at that cancer, and it's the kind that likes to spread a lot. So we're going to have to be pretty aggressive with this, and we're going to need you to start doing chemo. Man, we're all old enough to know what chemo is. We know what that does. We know what that looks like. And we know the kinds of days that Kay is facing. And that stinks because Kay's good. And I want her to know that those cruddy days that she has to walk through are not God punishing her. That's not punitive. She doesn't have to search her soul and say, God, what have I done in the last 10, 20 years of my life to warrant this pain? What have I done to warrant this bad news? How did I disappoint you? How did I displease you? What would you like me to do now, God? Would you like me to give more, serve more, or love more? Which the answer is always yes to that. He would always like us to give and love and serve more. But not as a shield to pain. And how crushing would it be to go through life thinking that every time we experience some form of difficulty, some form of grief, that that was somehow God turning the screws on us so that we learned our lesson better. What I want Kay to understand in this season of cruddiness amidst the chemo is that it's just simply her turn. It's her turn. Her life stinks for a little bit. And guess what? All of our lives stink for a little bit sometimes. They have before, and here's the fun thing, they're going to again. It just will. It's Kay's turn. Recently, it was our turn. For some of you, it's still your turn. I know stories of people and loss and tragedy that we've experienced just in this church. And I just think that there is something tremendously comforting about looking at a season of grief with the understanding of, it's my turn right now. It's my time to mourn. But what I know is, eventually it'll be my time to sing. It's my time to tear things down. But eventually, if I put my head down, it'll be my time to build things up. And in this way, and I think that this is beautiful, Ecclesiastes empathizes with our experiences. It actually empathizes with us. It's a brave, bold thing to say. To admit, yeah, we should obey God. We should pursue the proverbial wisdom. But what a wonderful admission in the Bible that actually syncs up with our experience to say sometimes bad things happen to good people. I've told you before, I had a roommate in college who was a better person than me in every way possible. He graduated. He became a pastor. He was leading churches before I was, and I always admired him more than I cared to admit, and he dropped dead at 30 of a widow-maker heart attack playing ultimate frisbee with his friends. It will never make any sense to me how he left and I stayed, and how his wife Carla and his boys had to walk through that. I remember his five-year-old knocking on his coffin wondering when he was going to wake up. But what Ecclesiastes says is, it was Chris's time to die. It was Carla's turn to walk that hard road. Sometimes bad things happen. And even though the best possible investment of our life is to pursue God and godliness, we need to do it eyes wide open knowing that that does not protect us from tragedy. We're never told that it does. That time and chance happen to us all. What a difficult thing it would be to have to try to sync up my faith to somehow explain away Chris's death as deserved. What a difficult thing it would be to try to help Carla find a path back to faith, which she has found, if part of that explanation would be, well, you guys deserve this because of your behavior. Ecclesiastes looks around and goes, yeah, sometimes life doesn't make sense. Sometimes it seems unfair. And sometimes it's just our turn. And we understand that everybody takes a turn. But here's the thing. I have been kind of sitting in that reality for a while in my personal life. It's been our turn recently. Our turn's still not over. And I've been studying this book, which is stark, man. But somehow, despite all of that, in thinking about what awaits us in the next two weeks and allowing my life to sit in that. And we're going to come back next week. Next week's going to be happy, I promise. Next week's going to be great, all right? We're going to cry some happy tears next week. It's going to feel better than this. In the midst of everything that we have been walking through, because of the promises that are in Ecclesiastes and because of the encouraging things that he writes that we're going to talk about next week. I can honestly tell you that for me personally, I am sitting in the middle of a time of more profound joy than I think I've ever experienced in my life, of more gratitude for my God, more gratitude for my Savior, more of a desire for Him. And I want you guys to experience that joy too. And so next week we're going to come back and I'm going to tell you all about it. Let's pray. Father, life's hard sometimes. We are so thankful that you gave your servant Solomon the courage to admit that. Father, we all have to hurt sometimes. We are thankful that we have a Jesus who weeps with us in our pain. Lord, if it is someone's season to be sad right now, I pray that they would just be sad. And that that would run the course that it needs to run. God, if it is someone's time for joy right now, let them be joyful. Let them be exuberant. Let them feel your presence and your joy. For those of us who are walking through a hard time, Lord, I pray that we would be comforted by this stark knowledge that sometimes it's just our turn. And I know there are folks who feel like, gosh, it feels like it's been my turn a lot lately. Lord, I pray that you would give them lots of turns of joy too. Let all of this, our pain, our triumph, our struggle, and our joy, draw us near to you. Either in gratitude or in need, Father, draw us near to you. And Father, I pray that in that drawing that we would find what David describes as the fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. Help us see more and more our gratitude for you and our need for you. It's in your son's name that we pray. Amen.

Have you ever wondered if it was all worth it? All the emails and phone calls, special projects, late meetings, early mornings and out-of-town trips? Frantically shuttling bodies back and forth and cobbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be with you in person. It's good to be with you online. Thank you for continuing to join us in that way. As Michelle just said, it is nice to have faces. They're hidden behind masks, which gives me the benefit of pretending like you're all just smiling at me the whole time. So that's how I'm picturing you. It's just nice and friendly and kind, so I appreciate that. Last week, we started our series called Vapor, which is a study through the book of Ecclesiastes. So I would actually say this, if you're catching up later this week, if you're listening to this on like a Tuesday, or you're watching online and you didn't catch last week, stop. I would encourage you to stop and go back and listen to last week. Do it on double speed, or if you really want a good laugh, listen to my voice on half speed, because that sounds funny. But listen to the last one and then catch up with this week. Because again, this is a series and it's not really made to stand independently of one another. We kind of need all of the parts to understand the four separate parts. And so last week was a downer. Last week was a bummer. I warned you ahead of time that you're not going to feel good at the end of that sermon. This one is not much different, all right? So just buckle up. This is Ecclesiastes, and I think it's good and ecclesiastical for us to sit in the difficult sometimes, for us to sit in hard reality sometimes. And what we said is that this is the bleakest book for the bleakest month. And I don't think I need much of a backup. This winter has been terrible, just gray and dark and rainy. It's the perfect time to go through Ecclesiastes. Solomon is the author of Ecclesiastes, and he writes it towards the end of his life and just hits us with some stark realities. And I continue to contend that on the other side of these realities, if we can accept the reality that we talked about last week, which is the idea that most Americans, most people in our culture are wasting our lives. He calls it vanity of vanities of striving after the wind. It's vapor. That's why the series is called Vapor. It's that Hebrew word, a hevel, that means vapor or smoke. Here one minute, gone the next. Seems like you can reach out and grab success or grab happiness or grab something worth pursuing and that when you get to it, it's gone. It slips through your fingers and we don't have it anymore. So the difficult reality that we confronted last week was just that, that most of life is vapor. Most pursuits, when we get to the end of them, we will find them to be empty. That's a difficult reality, but it's an essential one. We're going to face another reality this week, and I continue to believe if we will face these bravely, that what we'll find on the other end of them is this immutable joy, this joy that can be untouched by circumstance. I believe that we'll find the satisfaction on the other side of these realities that really is abiding. I think that we'll become more grateful for God and more desirous of Jesus for him to come and for our relationship with him. And so we're going to wade through these things as a church. Now, I ended last week with that thought, that it's my belief that Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes, would tell most Americans, a vast majority of people in our culture, that you're wasting your life. You're chasing vapor. And then I said, well, God gives us something that is worth chasing. What is that? And I said, we're going to talk about it next week. And then I prayed and we went home. Or, well, I went home. You guys just stayed where you were. So this week we want to start off by answering that question that we left off with. What is the thing worth pursuing? If it's not ambition, if it's not career, if it's not pleasures, if it's not monuments to ourselves, if it's not security, if it's not the book knowledge and general wisdom, what is it that's worth investing our life in? Well, I think that Solomon would answer that question like this. He concludes, based on my reading of Ecclesiastes, Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. The best investment of your life, the best way to spend your days and get to the end of your years and not wonder, did I waste my life, is to spend those days pleasing God. The best way to reach joy, to grab onto something that's not vapor, that is substantive, is to spend your days pleasing God. That's what he says. And I believe that he intends that because he says it multiple times throughout the book. Look with me at what he writes in Ecclesiastes. We'll start in chapter 8 and then we'll be in chapter 12. He says, And then in chapter 8, And then he ends the book this way, Ecclesiastes 12, 13. He sums up all the teachings and he says this, Fear God, keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. If you were to go to Solomon, the author of Ecclesiastes, and say, what's worth it? What should I do? He would say, fear God and keep his commands. We can talk about everything. We can talk about all the different pursuits. We can talk about all the different realities. We can be confronted with all the difficult things in life. We can accept the problem of pain and the vexation of wisdom. We can do all of that. But at the end of the day, here's what matters. Pursue God, keep his commands. This is the whole duty of man. That's what we are to do. That's what he has tasked us with. And this is Solomon's, I think, tip of the cap. It's his acknowledgement of what's called in theological circles, proverbial wisdom. Solomon also wrote the book of Proverbs. And in the book of Proverbs, there's a lot of if-then statements. If you do these good things, God will bless you with these good things. If you make choices like this, you will reap blessings like this. If you do dumb things, you will reap a bad harvest. If you choose folly, if you choose foolishness, if you choose sin and indulgence, then you will reap a harvest that is equitable to those indulgences. One of the ones that I think of is there is a verse in Proverbs that I've always loved because I truly believe in that phrase, you show me your friends and I'll show you your future. We're the average of the five people that we spend our most time around, all of that stuff. There's a verse in Proverbs that says that the companion of the wise will become wise and the companion of fools will suffer harm. And that's generally true, isn't it? If you hang out with people who are wise, who make good choices, eventually you're going to start making good choices like them. If you hang out with knuckleheads who make bad choices and have bad priorities, eventually you're going to start making bad choices like them. And the result of their bad choices and the result of your bad choices is going to be the harm that you suffer. And so in general, that's true, isn't it? That if we hang around with good people who we want to be like, we look at them and they have things in our life that we want, we'll begin to adopt their values and we'll take on some of their characteristics. Similarly, if we spend our time with people that don't share our priorities and make bad decisions, we're going to continue to make those bad decisions. Some of you guys have lived this out in your life, right? I mean, for some of you, your story is you were hanging out with people who are not bad people. They just have different priorities than someone who's just become a believer. And you become a believer, and now you have different priorities in your life, and you come to the painful realization of, gosh, I need another set of friends. I don't want to just walk away from these people. I love these people, but I need other folks speaking into my life who share the priorities that I do. For many of you, that's why you found church. Not that your friends are bad people. They just no longer share your priorities. And so you want to hang out with other people who do share your priorities. And Proverbs tells us that if you'll be the companion of wise people, that you'll be wise. If you'll be the companion of foolish people who make bad choices, then you're going to suffer the consequences of those choices. Likewise, all throughout Proverbs, another one of those if-then transactions is. I don't have a specific verse. I should be a better pastor who looks one up, but I didn't, so just go with me. It says in plenty of places the idea that if you work hard, if you put your head down and work hard and be humble, then at the end of your life, you will reap a harvest of wealth and security. If you work hard, you do your job, consider the ant that works even when it doesn't have to. If you'll do that, then by the end of your life, you will have amassed and built up, and God will honor your good work and your toil. Likewise, if you are lazy, a little sleeping, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come on you like an armed man, okay, says Proverbs. So if you're lazy and you just kind of want money to come to you, you just feel entitled and you deserve all this stuff, then you're never going to reap the benefit of wealth and security. And so here's what Solomon is saying in Ecclesiastes. That proverbial wisdom, if you please God, your life will go better for you. If you surround yourself with wise people, then you're more likely to prosper. If you do work hard and put your head down, then you're likely to build up. You're likely to be successful. Solomon acknowledges that. The end of the matter is this. Fear God, keep his commandments. Pursue him, do the right things. Honor that proverbial wisdom. But then he gives us this other reality. Then he gives us this caveat to that. Because what we know is that we need a caveat there. Because plenty of us know people who have hung around good friends, who are surrounded with wise folks, and have made terrible choices. Plenty of us know good people who are surrounded with other good people who have experienced what we would consider an unfair amount of pain, pain that seems like it would be waiting on folks who invest their lives around bad people. Likewise, we all know people who spend their time around knuckleheads and seem to be doing great. We also know people who have worked really hard, who have kept their head down, who have done their part. They get to the end of their life and they're still living hand to mouth because of a bad deal or because of a child that costs a lot of money or because of difficult diagnosis or whatever it is. And we know people who have been lazy and do seem prosperous. And that causes us to go, what gives? What do we do when proverbial wisdom doesn't ring true to us? We turn to Ecclesiastes, where I think Solomon writes this book later in his life. And what he says is, yeah, proverbial wisdom, those traditional accepted teachings of living a moral life and God honoring that and us being honored for it, that's true. But he wants us to know something. Even if you live that life. There's a whole section in my Bible where it says the vexation of wisdom, where he says, I even pursued wisdom. I did the right things. I honored God. I kept my nose clean. I walked the straight and narrow. I pursued purity. And even in that, you know what I found? A degree of vanity, a degree of vapor, a degree of chasing after the wind. And so the other reality that I want us to confront this morning in Ecclesiastes is this. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Somewhere in our faith and in our churches, we've gotten this idea that the more I clean, I keep my nose, the more God will protect me from pain in my life. The more I walk the straight and narrow, the agreement is, God, I'm gonna follow your rules and you're gonna offer me protection. This is why when someone who is good and is wonderful and is loving and seems to be all the things that maybe we feel like we're not, when we watch them get sick or we watch them pass away or we watch bad things happen to them, we kind of feel this sense of unfairness, right? We kind of feel this sense of, why is that allowed to happen? Well, Solomon says it happens because our obedience does not protect us from pain. It doesn't opt us out of it. It doesn't opt us out of struggle. I think one of the most dangerous, pernicious lies in Christendom is that the more I honor God with my life, the more He'll protect me with His sovereignty. And it is not true. We do not get that idea anywhere in the Bible. As a matter of fact, this is what Solomon says. This is what he has to say. And this is why I believe that that's his point. He makes this point that obedience will not protect us from pain multiple times in the book. He says it over in chapter 5. I'm sorry, chapter 9, verse 11. He says, You think you're really smart and that's why you're successful. No. You think you're dumb and and that's why you can't seem to make a way. No. Time and chance happen to us all. No one dodges the raindrops of tragedy and pain in their life. He says it over and over again in the book, but the best way he says it, the most profound way he says it, in chapter three, the first eight verses of chapter three. If you have a Bible, I would encourage you to look at that passage with me. And normally I don't read eight verses in a row in church service because I find it disengaging sometimes when pastors do that. But this is so beautiful and so poignant and so important that it felt unfair to you guys to pick out one as a synopsis. So we're going to read it all together. Not aloud, that would be weird. I don't do that kind of weird stuff, but we're going to read it together as I read. Ready? For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to break down and a time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to cast stones away and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, like pandemics. A time to seek and a time to refrain from embracing like pandemics, a time to seek and a time to lose, a time to keep and a time to cast away, a time to tear and a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. It's such a beautiful, elegant truth that he details out for us there. And there is a place where I want us to land, but there is another takeaway from there. It's not the point of the sermon, but I thought I would be remiss if I didn't make this point as we go through this beautiful passage together. There's a time for everything, and we ought to let those seasons have their time. We shouldn't jump from one to another. What makes me think of this is this. This last fall, I had a bunch of buddies come in town, and we all kind of took a weekend and just hung out. It's just a guy's weekend. We were supposed to golf most of the time, and it rained, so we just sat around. But it was fun. My friends and I, that's what we like to do anyways. We're just old men. But I have one friend named Dan, and Dan, he is the opposite of me. He is enthusiastic. He is on fire all the time. He loves to yell and be loud and celebrate things and cheer and be happy. He never meets a stranger. Dan is a weirdo that talks to people in elevators and I'll never understand it. He'll just chat up whoever is around him, right? And I love Dan. I had lunch with Dan the other day, but on that particular trip, Dan at the time had a pregnant wife and three small children and had just moved across the country. And both he and his wife were looking for jobs, and they're looking for houses, and they're trying to figure out how to get their kids in school. So when he came to that weekend, his life had been a pressure cooker, and he needed to release, right? So Dan wanted to dance, and he wanted to yell, and he wanted to scream, and he wanted to be be excited and I didn't want to do any of that. I just wanted to sit there and be quiet and have no one ask me any questions. And Dan's like, Nate, come on, let's go. And we're watching some dumb game and he wants me to be invested in it and I don't care. And there was a tension there. And I felt in my soul, as I frequently do, my grumpiness well up. And all I wanted to do was say, Dan, why don't you shut up for like maybe 30 minutes, dude? Can we just chill out? But I kept talking myself out of doing that. Because what I realized is, Dan's my buddy. And what he needs is to blow off some steam. It's his time to dance. It's his time to yell and be boisterous. It's his time to be loud and to laugh and to be joyful. That's his time. And if I rain on that parade, I am the worst of friends. If I don't recognize in myself that it's his soul's time for those things, and I don't allow him that time, I am the jerk of all jerks. So I just sucked it up, and now we joke around about it. Likewise, when someone around us is sad, when someone around us is mourning, when someone around us needs to cry, shame on us for robbing them of that time too. And shame on you for attempting to rob yourself of that time. You guys know that we just walked through something pretty difficult as a family, and that we lost Jen's dad. And there were days when she would just look at me and she would say, I'm sad. I'm just sad. And I would say, then be sad. Then today's the day to be sad. And that's all right. And there will be more days when we're sad. Our souls need those days. They're cathartic for us. They're required by us. And shame on us if we try to rob our friends and our loved ones of the sad days that they need too. Those ought to take their time and have their season. I think what we try to do is we try to skip the bad ones, right? We try to skip past, I don't like this time of mourning. I want to skip to my time of laughter. I don't like this time of stillness. I want to skip to the time of dancing. I don't like this time of sadness. I want to skip to my time of joy. And what Solomon is saying is, no, there's a time for both. You can't experience true joy if you don't let yourself walk through true grief. The dancing isn't as joyful if you haven't set in pensive silence. Right? So I didn't want to move past this passage without making the point to you guys, without imploring you, let the seasons have their time. When it's a time for dying, let it be a time for dying. When it's a time for birth, let it be that. If someone you love needs to be sad, let them be sad. Don't be the clumsy moron that tries to convince them that what they're going through is not that sad. Our souls need the good times and the hard times, and we shouldn't skip them. But what I really want you to see from this passage today is that if what he writes is true, there's a time for mourning, and there's a time for joy, and there's a time for gladness, and there's a time for sorrow true, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for joy and there's a time for gladness and there's a time for sorrow and there's a time for dancing and there's a time for stillness. If that's true, then all of those times are coming for all of us. Do you understand? It doesn't say for the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous there are more times to laugh. For the righteous there are more times to build things up. For the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous, there are more times to laugh. For the righteous, there are more times to build things up. For the righteous, there are more times for embracing. No, it just says that this is objectively true. Everybody walks through these seasons. The righteous and the unrighteous. The godly and the ungodly. The devout Christian and the militant atheist. All of us walk through these seasons. And it may feel weird to you that I'm hammering this point home that like, hey, guess what, guys? At some point or another, life is cruddy for everybody. But it is. It's also joyful for everybody. But no one dodges the raindrops of pain and tragedy in their life. Nobody. And if we will accept that, then what we can learn and see from this passage is pain is not punitive. Pain, hurt, struggle, hardship, that's not punitive. That's not God exacting revenge on you for a failure in your morality somewhere. That's not God punishing you. Pain is not punitive. It is the result of brokenness. We don't experience pain and hardship in our life because at some point in our past, we displeased God with the choices that we make, and now he's exacting his revenge on us. That's not how it works. Pain is not punitive. Pain is a result of brokenness. We've talked about this before, but God created heaven and earth, and he created it perfect, and then sin ruined that perfection. And ever since then, the world is broken. And in a broken world, divorces happen and abuse happens and people get cancer and we have to watch Parkinson's and all these other diseases eat away at people that we love. In a broken world, cruddy things happen. And what Solomon is acknowledging is not only do they happen, but they happen to everybody. And yes, in general, proverbial wisdom is true. In general, if you honor God in the way that you make your choices, then you will be honored as well. But just understand that that isn't a blanket insurance policy against pain because time and chance happen to us all. And we walk through all these seasons equally. And it's important to know when we get there that that pain is not punitive. That pain isn't something that we warrant with our behavior. This actually shows up in the New Testament. Someone is blind, and the disciples look at the blind man, and they say, what happened to him? What did his parents do that he's been blinded like this way? They thought pain was punitive. They thought his actions warranted, or his parents' actions warranted what he did. And Jesus says, now this world is just broken. He says what Solomon says. In this world where we wait for Jesus to come back, like Romans 8 talks about all of creation groans for the return of the Savior, for the return of the King, for Jesus to come and make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And spoiler alert, this is where we're going to finish the series. But while we wait, we all walk through these seasons. And it's so important for us to understand that pain is not punitive. Here's why I think this. I don't know if I have permission to share her story. If I don't, I'm sorry. Kay Gamble also sits on our finance committee and approves my expenses on a monthly basis. So, you know, she has a way to nail me if she doesn't appreciate me sharing this story. But Kay is a wonderful lady who goes here and a few months ago was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctor looked at the breast cancer and said, I think it's offerable. I think we can get it. I think it's going to be okay. She went in. She got it. And Kay, if you know her, she's quiet. Of course, she doesn't tell anybody about this. I only hear about this after the fact. They go in. They get it. Everything's good. Doctor says, we got it all. I think you're going to be in good shape. You don't have to do chemo or anything like that. We're going to give you a pill to kind of be on the safe side. You'll take that for five years, but you're good. You can go on with life as normal. So there's some pain and then a relief. Everything's good. Then she gets a call a couple of days later. The doctor said, hey, we took another look at that cancer, and it's the kind that likes to spread a lot. So we're going to have to be pretty aggressive with this, and we're going to need you to start doing chemo. Man, we're all old enough to know what chemo is. We know what that does. We know what that looks like. And we know the kinds of days that Kay is facing. And that stinks because Kay's good. And I want her to know that those cruddy days that she has to walk through are not God punishing her. That's not punitive. She doesn't have to search her soul and say, God, what have I done in the last 10, 20 years of my life to warrant this pain? What have I done to warrant this bad news? How did I disappoint you? How did I displease you? What would you like me to do now, God? Would you like me to give more, serve more, or love more? Which the answer is always yes to that. He would always like us to give and love and serve more. But not as a shield to pain. And how crushing would it be to go through life thinking that every time we experience some form of difficulty, some form of grief, that that was somehow God turning the screws on us so that we learned our lesson better. What I want Kay to understand in this season of cruddiness amidst the chemo is that it's just simply her turn. It's her turn. Her life stinks for a little bit. And guess what? All of our lives stink for a little bit sometimes. They have before, and here's the fun thing, they're going to again. It just will. It's Kay's turn. Recently, it was our turn. For some of you, it's still your turn. I know stories of people and loss and tragedy that we've experienced just in this church. And I just think that there is something tremendously comforting about looking at a season of grief with the understanding of, it's my turn right now. It's my time to mourn. But what I know is, eventually it'll be my time to sing. It's my time to tear things down. But eventually, if I put my head down, it'll be my time to build things up. And in this way, and I think that this is beautiful, Ecclesiastes empathizes with our experiences. It actually empathizes with us. It's a brave, bold thing to say. To admit, yeah, we should obey God. We should pursue the proverbial wisdom. But what a wonderful admission in the Bible that actually syncs up with our experience to say sometimes bad things happen to good people. I've told you before, I had a roommate in college who was a better person than me in every way possible. He graduated. He became a pastor. He was leading churches before I was, and I always admired him more than I cared to admit, and he dropped dead at 30 of a widow-maker heart attack playing ultimate frisbee with his friends. It will never make any sense to me how he left and I stayed, and how his wife Carla and his boys had to walk through that. I remember his five-year-old knocking on his coffin wondering when he was going to wake up. But what Ecclesiastes says is, it was Chris's time to die. It was Carla's turn to walk that hard road. Sometimes bad things happen. And even though the best possible investment of our life is to pursue God and godliness, we need to do it eyes wide open knowing that that does not protect us from tragedy. We're never told that it does. That time and chance happen to us all. What a difficult thing it would be to have to try to sync up my faith to somehow explain away Chris's death as deserved. What a difficult thing it would be to try to help Carla find a path back to faith, which she has found, if part of that explanation would be, well, you guys deserve this because of your behavior. Ecclesiastes looks around and goes, yeah, sometimes life doesn't make sense. Sometimes it seems unfair. And sometimes it's just our turn. And we understand that everybody takes a turn. But here's the thing. I have been kind of sitting in that reality for a while in my personal life. It's been our turn recently. Our turn's still not over. And I've been studying this book, which is stark, man. But somehow, despite all of that, in thinking about what awaits us in the next two weeks and allowing my life to sit in that. And we're going to come back next week. Next week's going to be happy, I promise. Next week's going to be great, all right? We're going to cry some happy tears next week. It's going to feel better than this. In the midst of everything that we have been walking through, because of the promises that are in Ecclesiastes and because of the encouraging things that he writes that we're going to talk about next week. I can honestly tell you that for me personally, I am sitting in the middle of a time of more profound joy than I think I've ever experienced in my life, of more gratitude for my God, more gratitude for my Savior, more of a desire for Him. And I want you guys to experience that joy too. And so next week we're going to come back and I'm going to tell you all about it. Let's pray. Father, life's hard sometimes. We are so thankful that you gave your servant Solomon the courage to admit that. Father, we all have to hurt sometimes. We are thankful that we have a Jesus who weeps with us in our pain. Lord, if it is someone's season to be sad right now, I pray that they would just be sad. And that that would run the course that it needs to run. God, if it is someone's time for joy right now, let them be joyful. Let them be exuberant. Let them feel your presence and your joy. For those of us who are walking through a hard time, Lord, I pray that we would be comforted by this stark knowledge that sometimes it's just our turn. And I know there are folks who feel like, gosh, it feels like it's been my turn a lot lately. Lord, I pray that you would give them lots of turns of joy too. Let all of this, our pain, our triumph, our struggle, and our joy, draw us near to you. Either in gratitude or in need, Father, draw us near to you. And Father, I pray that in that drawing that we would find what David describes as the fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. Help us see more and more our gratitude for you and our need for you. It's in your son's name that we pray. Amen.

Have you ever wondered if it was all worth it? All the emails and phone calls, special projects, late meetings, early mornings and out-of-town trips? Frantically shuttling bodies back and forth and cobbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be with you in person. It's good to be with you online. Thank you for continuing to join us in that way. As Michelle just said, it is nice to have faces. They're hidden behind masks, which gives me the benefit of pretending like you're all just smiling at me the whole time. So that's how I'm picturing you. It's just nice and friendly and kind, so I appreciate that. Last week, we started our series called Vapor, which is a study through the book of Ecclesiastes. So I would actually say this, if you're catching up later this week, if you're listening to this on like a Tuesday, or you're watching online and you didn't catch last week, stop. I would encourage you to stop and go back and listen to last week. Do it on double speed, or if you really want a good laugh, listen to my voice on half speed, because that sounds funny. But listen to the last one and then catch up with this week. Because again, this is a series and it's not really made to stand independently of one another. We kind of need all of the parts to understand the four separate parts. And so last week was a downer. Last week was a bummer. I warned you ahead of time that you're not going to feel good at the end of that sermon. This one is not much different, all right? So just buckle up. This is Ecclesiastes, and I think it's good and ecclesiastical for us to sit in the difficult sometimes, for us to sit in hard reality sometimes. And what we said is that this is the bleakest book for the bleakest month. And I don't think I need much of a backup. This winter has been terrible, just gray and dark and rainy. It's the perfect time to go through Ecclesiastes. Solomon is the author of Ecclesiastes, and he writes it towards the end of his life and just hits us with some stark realities. And I continue to contend that on the other side of these realities, if we can accept the reality that we talked about last week, which is the idea that most Americans, most people in our culture are wasting our lives. He calls it vanity of vanities of striving after the wind. It's vapor. That's why the series is called Vapor. It's that Hebrew word, a hevel, that means vapor or smoke. Here one minute, gone the next. Seems like you can reach out and grab success or grab happiness or grab something worth pursuing and that when you get to it, it's gone. It slips through your fingers and we don't have it anymore. So the difficult reality that we confronted last week was just that, that most of life is vapor. Most pursuits, when we get to the end of them, we will find them to be empty. That's a difficult reality, but it's an essential one. We're going to face another reality this week, and I continue to believe if we will face these bravely, that what we'll find on the other end of them is this immutable joy, this joy that can be untouched by circumstance. I believe that we'll find the satisfaction on the other side of these realities that really is abiding. I think that we'll become more grateful for God and more desirous of Jesus for him to come and for our relationship with him. And so we're going to wade through these things as a church. Now, I ended last week with that thought, that it's my belief that Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes, would tell most Americans, a vast majority of people in our culture, that you're wasting your life. You're chasing vapor. And then I said, well, God gives us something that is worth chasing. What is that? And I said, we're going to talk about it next week. And then I prayed and we went home. Or, well, I went home. You guys just stayed where you were. So this week we want to start off by answering that question that we left off with. What is the thing worth pursuing? If it's not ambition, if it's not career, if it's not pleasures, if it's not monuments to ourselves, if it's not security, if it's not the book knowledge and general wisdom, what is it that's worth investing our life in? Well, I think that Solomon would answer that question like this. He concludes, based on my reading of Ecclesiastes, Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. The best investment of your life, the best way to spend your days and get to the end of your years and not wonder, did I waste my life, is to spend those days pleasing God. The best way to reach joy, to grab onto something that's not vapor, that is substantive, is to spend your days pleasing God. That's what he says. And I believe that he intends that because he says it multiple times throughout the book. Look with me at what he writes in Ecclesiastes. We'll start in chapter 8 and then we'll be in chapter 12. He says, And then in chapter 8, And then he ends the book this way, Ecclesiastes 12, 13. He sums up all the teachings and he says this, Fear God, keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. If you were to go to Solomon, the author of Ecclesiastes, and say, what's worth it? What should I do? He would say, fear God and keep his commands. We can talk about everything. We can talk about all the different pursuits. We can talk about all the different realities. We can be confronted with all the difficult things in life. We can accept the problem of pain and the vexation of wisdom. We can do all of that. But at the end of the day, here's what matters. Pursue God, keep his commands. This is the whole duty of man. That's what we are to do. That's what he has tasked us with. And this is Solomon's, I think, tip of the cap. It's his acknowledgement of what's called in theological circles, proverbial wisdom. Solomon also wrote the book of Proverbs. And in the book of Proverbs, there's a lot of if-then statements. If you do these good things, God will bless you with these good things. If you make choices like this, you will reap blessings like this. If you do dumb things, you will reap a bad harvest. If you choose folly, if you choose foolishness, if you choose sin and indulgence, then you will reap a harvest that is equitable to those indulgences. One of the ones that I think of is there is a verse in Proverbs that I've always loved because I truly believe in that phrase, you show me your friends and I'll show you your future. We're the average of the five people that we spend our most time around, all of that stuff. There's a verse in Proverbs that says that the companion of the wise will become wise and the companion of fools will suffer harm. And that's generally true, isn't it? If you hang out with people who are wise, who make good choices, eventually you're going to start making good choices like them. If you hang out with knuckleheads who make bad choices and have bad priorities, eventually you're going to start making bad choices like them. And the result of their bad choices and the result of your bad choices is going to be the harm that you suffer. And so in general, that's true, isn't it? That if we hang around with good people who we want to be like, we look at them and they have things in our life that we want, we'll begin to adopt their values and we'll take on some of their characteristics. Similarly, if we spend our time with people that don't share our priorities and make bad decisions, we're going to continue to make those bad decisions. Some of you guys have lived this out in your life, right? I mean, for some of you, your story is you were hanging out with people who are not bad people. They just have different priorities than someone who's just become a believer. And you become a believer, and now you have different priorities in your life, and you come to the painful realization of, gosh, I need another set of friends. I don't want to just walk away from these people. I love these people, but I need other folks speaking into my life who share the priorities that I do. For many of you, that's why you found church. Not that your friends are bad people. They just no longer share your priorities. And so you want to hang out with other people who do share your priorities. And Proverbs tells us that if you'll be the companion of wise people, that you'll be wise. If you'll be the companion of foolish people who make bad choices, then you're going to suffer the consequences of those choices. Likewise, all throughout Proverbs, another one of those if-then transactions is. I don't have a specific verse. I should be a better pastor who looks one up, but I didn't, so just go with me. It says in plenty of places the idea that if you work hard, if you put your head down and work hard and be humble, then at the end of your life, you will reap a harvest of wealth and security. If you work hard, you do your job, consider the ant that works even when it doesn't have to. If you'll do that, then by the end of your life, you will have amassed and built up, and God will honor your good work and your toil. Likewise, if you are lazy, a little sleeping, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come on you like an armed man, okay, says Proverbs. So if you're lazy and you just kind of want money to come to you, you just feel entitled and you deserve all this stuff, then you're never going to reap the benefit of wealth and security. And so here's what Solomon is saying in Ecclesiastes. That proverbial wisdom, if you please God, your life will go better for you. If you surround yourself with wise people, then you're more likely to prosper. If you do work hard and put your head down, then you're likely to build up. You're likely to be successful. Solomon acknowledges that. The end of the matter is this. Fear God, keep his commandments. Pursue him, do the right things. Honor that proverbial wisdom. But then he gives us this other reality. Then he gives us this caveat to that. Because what we know is that we need a caveat there. Because plenty of us know people who have hung around good friends, who are surrounded with wise folks, and have made terrible choices. Plenty of us know good people who are surrounded with other good people who have experienced what we would consider an unfair amount of pain, pain that seems like it would be waiting on folks who invest their lives around bad people. Likewise, we all know people who spend their time around knuckleheads and seem to be doing great. We also know people who have worked really hard, who have kept their head down, who have done their part. They get to the end of their life and they're still living hand to mouth because of a bad deal or because of a child that costs a lot of money or because of difficult diagnosis or whatever it is. And we know people who have been lazy and do seem prosperous. And that causes us to go, what gives? What do we do when proverbial wisdom doesn't ring true to us? We turn to Ecclesiastes, where I think Solomon writes this book later in his life. And what he says is, yeah, proverbial wisdom, those traditional accepted teachings of living a moral life and God honoring that and us being honored for it, that's true. But he wants us to know something. Even if you live that life. There's a whole section in my Bible where it says the vexation of wisdom, where he says, I even pursued wisdom. I did the right things. I honored God. I kept my nose clean. I walked the straight and narrow. I pursued purity. And even in that, you know what I found? A degree of vanity, a degree of vapor, a degree of chasing after the wind. And so the other reality that I want us to confront this morning in Ecclesiastes is this. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Somewhere in our faith and in our churches, we've gotten this idea that the more I clean, I keep my nose, the more God will protect me from pain in my life. The more I walk the straight and narrow, the agreement is, God, I'm gonna follow your rules and you're gonna offer me protection. This is why when someone who is good and is wonderful and is loving and seems to be all the things that maybe we feel like we're not, when we watch them get sick or we watch them pass away or we watch bad things happen to them, we kind of feel this sense of unfairness, right? We kind of feel this sense of, why is that allowed to happen? Well, Solomon says it happens because our obedience does not protect us from pain. It doesn't opt us out of it. It doesn't opt us out of struggle. I think one of the most dangerous, pernicious lies in Christendom is that the more I honor God with my life, the more He'll protect me with His sovereignty. And it is not true. We do not get that idea anywhere in the Bible. As a matter of fact, this is what Solomon says. This is what he has to say. And this is why I believe that that's his point. He makes this point that obedience will not protect us from pain multiple times in the book. He says it over in chapter 5. I'm sorry, chapter 9, verse 11. He says, You think you're really smart and that's why you're successful. No. You think you're dumb and and that's why you can't seem to make a way. No. Time and chance happen to us all. No one dodges the raindrops of tragedy and pain in their life. He says it over and over again in the book, but the best way he says it, the most profound way he says it, in chapter three, the first eight verses of chapter three. If you have a Bible, I would encourage you to look at that passage with me. And normally I don't read eight verses in a row in church service because I find it disengaging sometimes when pastors do that. But this is so beautiful and so poignant and so important that it felt unfair to you guys to pick out one as a synopsis. So we're going to read it all together. Not aloud, that would be weird. I don't do that kind of weird stuff, but we're going to read it together as I read. Ready? For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to break down and a time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to cast stones away and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, like pandemics. A time to seek and a time to refrain from embracing like pandemics, a time to seek and a time to lose, a time to keep and a time to cast away, a time to tear and a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. It's such a beautiful, elegant truth that he details out for us there. And there is a place where I want us to land, but there is another takeaway from there. It's not the point of the sermon, but I thought I would be remiss if I didn't make this point as we go through this beautiful passage together. There's a time for everything, and we ought to let those seasons have their time. We shouldn't jump from one to another. What makes me think of this is this. This last fall, I had a bunch of buddies come in town, and we all kind of took a weekend and just hung out. It's just a guy's weekend. We were supposed to golf most of the time, and it rained, so we just sat around. But it was fun. My friends and I, that's what we like to do anyways. We're just old men. But I have one friend named Dan, and Dan, he is the opposite of me. He is enthusiastic. He is on fire all the time. He loves to yell and be loud and celebrate things and cheer and be happy. He never meets a stranger. Dan is a weirdo that talks to people in elevators and I'll never understand it. He'll just chat up whoever is around him, right? And I love Dan. I had lunch with Dan the other day, but on that particular trip, Dan at the time had a pregnant wife and three small children and had just moved across the country. And both he and his wife were looking for jobs, and they're looking for houses, and they're trying to figure out how to get their kids in school. So when he came to that weekend, his life had been a pressure cooker, and he needed to release, right? So Dan wanted to dance, and he wanted to yell, and he wanted to scream, and he wanted to be be excited and I didn't want to do any of that. I just wanted to sit there and be quiet and have no one ask me any questions. And Dan's like, Nate, come on, let's go. And we're watching some dumb game and he wants me to be invested in it and I don't care. And there was a tension there. And I felt in my soul, as I frequently do, my grumpiness well up. And all I wanted to do was say, Dan, why don't you shut up for like maybe 30 minutes, dude? Can we just chill out? But I kept talking myself out of doing that. Because what I realized is, Dan's my buddy. And what he needs is to blow off some steam. It's his time to dance. It's his time to yell and be boisterous. It's his time to be loud and to laugh and to be joyful. That's his time. And if I rain on that parade, I am the worst of friends. If I don't recognize in myself that it's his soul's time for those things, and I don't allow him that time, I am the jerk of all jerks. So I just sucked it up, and now we joke around about it. Likewise, when someone around us is sad, when someone around us is mourning, when someone around us needs to cry, shame on us for robbing them of that time too. And shame on you for attempting to rob yourself of that time. You guys know that we just walked through something pretty difficult as a family, and that we lost Jen's dad. And there were days when she would just look at me and she would say, I'm sad. I'm just sad. And I would say, then be sad. Then today's the day to be sad. And that's all right. And there will be more days when we're sad. Our souls need those days. They're cathartic for us. They're required by us. And shame on us if we try to rob our friends and our loved ones of the sad days that they need too. Those ought to take their time and have their season. I think what we try to do is we try to skip the bad ones, right? We try to skip past, I don't like this time of mourning. I want to skip to my time of laughter. I don't like this time of stillness. I want to skip to the time of dancing. I don't like this time of sadness. I want to skip to my time of joy. And what Solomon is saying is, no, there's a time for both. You can't experience true joy if you don't let yourself walk through true grief. The dancing isn't as joyful if you haven't set in pensive silence. Right? So I didn't want to move past this passage without making the point to you guys, without imploring you, let the seasons have their time. When it's a time for dying, let it be a time for dying. When it's a time for birth, let it be that. If someone you love needs to be sad, let them be sad. Don't be the clumsy moron that tries to convince them that what they're going through is not that sad. Our souls need the good times and the hard times, and we shouldn't skip them. But what I really want you to see from this passage today is that if what he writes is true, there's a time for mourning, and there's a time for joy, and there's a time for gladness, and there's a time for sorrow true, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for joy and there's a time for gladness and there's a time for sorrow and there's a time for dancing and there's a time for stillness. If that's true, then all of those times are coming for all of us. Do you understand? It doesn't say for the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous there are more times to laugh. For the righteous there are more times to build things up. For the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous, there are more times to laugh. For the righteous, there are more times to build things up. For the righteous, there are more times for embracing. No, it just says that this is objectively true. Everybody walks through these seasons. The righteous and the unrighteous. The godly and the ungodly. The devout Christian and the militant atheist. All of us walk through these seasons. And it may feel weird to you that I'm hammering this point home that like, hey, guess what, guys? At some point or another, life is cruddy for everybody. But it is. It's also joyful for everybody. But no one dodges the raindrops of pain and tragedy in their life. Nobody. And if we will accept that, then what we can learn and see from this passage is pain is not punitive. Pain, hurt, struggle, hardship, that's not punitive. That's not God exacting revenge on you for a failure in your morality somewhere. That's not God punishing you. Pain is not punitive. It is the result of brokenness. We don't experience pain and hardship in our life because at some point in our past, we displeased God with the choices that we make, and now he's exacting his revenge on us. That's not how it works. Pain is not punitive. Pain is a result of brokenness. We've talked about this before, but God created heaven and earth, and he created it perfect, and then sin ruined that perfection. And ever since then, the world is broken. And in a broken world, divorces happen and abuse happens and people get cancer and we have to watch Parkinson's and all these other diseases eat away at people that we love. In a broken world, cruddy things happen. And what Solomon is acknowledging is not only do they happen, but they happen to everybody. And yes, in general, proverbial wisdom is true. In general, if you honor God in the way that you make your choices, then you will be honored as well. But just understand that that isn't a blanket insurance policy against pain because time and chance happen to us all. And we walk through all these seasons equally. And it's important to know when we get there that that pain is not punitive. That pain isn't something that we warrant with our behavior. This actually shows up in the New Testament. Someone is blind, and the disciples look at the blind man, and they say, what happened to him? What did his parents do that he's been blinded like this way? They thought pain was punitive. They thought his actions warranted, or his parents' actions warranted what he did. And Jesus says, now this world is just broken. He says what Solomon says. In this world where we wait for Jesus to come back, like Romans 8 talks about all of creation groans for the return of the Savior, for the return of the King, for Jesus to come and make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And spoiler alert, this is where we're going to finish the series. But while we wait, we all walk through these seasons. And it's so important for us to understand that pain is not punitive. Here's why I think this. I don't know if I have permission to share her story. If I don't, I'm sorry. Kay Gamble also sits on our finance committee and approves my expenses on a monthly basis. So, you know, she has a way to nail me if she doesn't appreciate me sharing this story. But Kay is a wonderful lady who goes here and a few months ago was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctor looked at the breast cancer and said, I think it's offerable. I think we can get it. I think it's going to be okay. She went in. She got it. And Kay, if you know her, she's quiet. Of course, she doesn't tell anybody about this. I only hear about this after the fact. They go in. They get it. Everything's good. Doctor says, we got it all. I think you're going to be in good shape. You don't have to do chemo or anything like that. We're going to give you a pill to kind of be on the safe side. You'll take that for five years, but you're good. You can go on with life as normal. So there's some pain and then a relief. Everything's good. Then she gets a call a couple of days later. The doctor said, hey, we took another look at that cancer, and it's the kind that likes to spread a lot. So we're going to have to be pretty aggressive with this, and we're going to need you to start doing chemo. Man, we're all old enough to know what chemo is. We know what that does. We know what that looks like. And we know the kinds of days that Kay is facing. And that stinks because Kay's good. And I want her to know that those cruddy days that she has to walk through are not God punishing her. That's not punitive. She doesn't have to search her soul and say, God, what have I done in the last 10, 20 years of my life to warrant this pain? What have I done to warrant this bad news? How did I disappoint you? How did I displease you? What would you like me to do now, God? Would you like me to give more, serve more, or love more? Which the answer is always yes to that. He would always like us to give and love and serve more. But not as a shield to pain. And how crushing would it be to go through life thinking that every time we experience some form of difficulty, some form of grief, that that was somehow God turning the screws on us so that we learned our lesson better. What I want Kay to understand in this season of cruddiness amidst the chemo is that it's just simply her turn. It's her turn. Her life stinks for a little bit. And guess what? All of our lives stink for a little bit sometimes. They have before, and here's the fun thing, they're going to again. It just will. It's Kay's turn. Recently, it was our turn. For some of you, it's still your turn. I know stories of people and loss and tragedy that we've experienced just in this church. And I just think that there is something tremendously comforting about looking at a season of grief with the understanding of, it's my turn right now. It's my time to mourn. But what I know is, eventually it'll be my time to sing. It's my time to tear things down. But eventually, if I put my head down, it'll be my time to build things up. And in this way, and I think that this is beautiful, Ecclesiastes empathizes with our experiences. It actually empathizes with us. It's a brave, bold thing to say. To admit, yeah, we should obey God. We should pursue the proverbial wisdom. But what a wonderful admission in the Bible that actually syncs up with our experience to say sometimes bad things happen to good people. I've told you before, I had a roommate in college who was a better person than me in every way possible. He graduated. He became a pastor. He was leading churches before I was, and I always admired him more than I cared to admit, and he dropped dead at 30 of a widow-maker heart attack playing ultimate frisbee with his friends. It will never make any sense to me how he left and I stayed, and how his wife Carla and his boys had to walk through that. I remember his five-year-old knocking on his coffin wondering when he was going to wake up. But what Ecclesiastes says is, it was Chris's time to die. It was Carla's turn to walk that hard road. Sometimes bad things happen. And even though the best possible investment of our life is to pursue God and godliness, we need to do it eyes wide open knowing that that does not protect us from tragedy. We're never told that it does. That time and chance happen to us all. What a difficult thing it would be to have to try to sync up my faith to somehow explain away Chris's death as deserved. What a difficult thing it would be to try to help Carla find a path back to faith, which she has found, if part of that explanation would be, well, you guys deserve this because of your behavior. Ecclesiastes looks around and goes, yeah, sometimes life doesn't make sense. Sometimes it seems unfair. And sometimes it's just our turn. And we understand that everybody takes a turn. But here's the thing. I have been kind of sitting in that reality for a while in my personal life. It's been our turn recently. Our turn's still not over. And I've been studying this book, which is stark, man. But somehow, despite all of that, in thinking about what awaits us in the next two weeks and allowing my life to sit in that. And we're going to come back next week. Next week's going to be happy, I promise. Next week's going to be great, all right? We're going to cry some happy tears next week. It's going to feel better than this. In the midst of everything that we have been walking through, because of the promises that are in Ecclesiastes and because of the encouraging things that he writes that we're going to talk about next week. I can honestly tell you that for me personally, I am sitting in the middle of a time of more profound joy than I think I've ever experienced in my life, of more gratitude for my God, more gratitude for my Savior, more of a desire for Him. And I want you guys to experience that joy too. And so next week we're going to come back and I'm going to tell you all about it. Let's pray. Father, life's hard sometimes. We are so thankful that you gave your servant Solomon the courage to admit that. Father, we all have to hurt sometimes. We are thankful that we have a Jesus who weeps with us in our pain. Lord, if it is someone's season to be sad right now, I pray that they would just be sad. And that that would run the course that it needs to run. God, if it is someone's time for joy right now, let them be joyful. Let them be exuberant. Let them feel your presence and your joy. For those of us who are walking through a hard time, Lord, I pray that we would be comforted by this stark knowledge that sometimes it's just our turn. And I know there are folks who feel like, gosh, it feels like it's been my turn a lot lately. Lord, I pray that you would give them lots of turns of joy too. Let all of this, our pain, our triumph, our struggle, and our joy, draw us near to you. Either in gratitude or in need, Father, draw us near to you. And Father, I pray that in that drawing that we would find what David describes as the fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. Help us see more and more our gratitude for you and our need for you. It's in your son's name that we pray. Amen.