Romans

It's good to see you guys. My name is Nate. I'm the pastor here, believe it or not. And I'm so excited about 2019. I feel like 2018 was such a wonderful year for grace, was such a wonderful year for the church. And we've enumerated all the things that God did for us last year. But I feel like, gosh, we are just poised to do really good things this year. We have a solid staff team, a good, great folks around us, and we are really ready to push this year. So I'm excited to see what the Lord does in the church this year. And I've already been praying for you a little bit, been praying for you as you enter into 2019. And my prayer for all of us, me included, is that when we leave this year, we will leave it closer to God than we are right now. My prayer for you is that 2019 will be a year of marked spiritual change and health in your life, and Jesus will draw you closer to him. That's my prayer and my hope. So we're launching with this series, Thoughts from the Gym, because we kind of felt like it fit into the beginning of the year, New Year's resolutions, and things like that. And a lot of us, like I did this week, are having day one in the gym again, right? The genesis of this series is we moved here in April of 2007. And so entering into the summer, we didn't know anybody. And so Jen said, well, Jen is my wife and we have a little girl named Lily. And so we wanted to join a pool so they could have something to do during the day because they make me work office hours here. It's ridiculous. So they wanted something to do during the day when I wasn't around. And so we ended up joining a pool and we joined a pool at a gym. And I thought, well, as long as I'm paying for this thing, I should try to go, right? And so I went, and it was pretty fun, and as I would go and watch other people work out, I was thinking about things, and there's some thoughts that occurred to me like, man, there's so many parallels here that apply to church and spiritual health, and I just kind of filed them away, and then one day, and I didn't know what I was going to do with them. And then one day I shared them with staff and they said, well, that should be a series. You should do that in January. So here we are. And the first one that we're going to do is called day one. And it's the first thing that occurred to me. That day, whenever it was, when I got ready to go to the gym, I put on whatever ratty clothes I had, and I go there, and I'm going to work out. I'm going to do the thing, right? Like you guys have had day ones, right? And I'm going to do the thing. And I don't like admitting this, okay, because I like to think of myself as mentally tough. I don't get easily intimidated, or at least maybe my unearned confidence has told me that. But I don't think I get intimidated a lot, but I was intimidated going to the gym. I don't like to admit that, but I was. Because, you know, if you've been there and you look like me, like there was a season, I got real consistent in the gym. There was a season where I would even be bold enough as to call myself in shape. But due to my affinity for baked goods and sitting, I'm back in like normal shape. All right. So I've got a long road to glory ahead of me this year. But I go and as I'm going, like I walk in and everybody's got on the matching clothes. All the dudes are wearing tight shirts by choice. I'm wearing tight shirts like not by choice. You know, they look good in theirs. I want to look better in mine. I get up on the treadmill and there's all these buttons and, and three of them say start. I'm like, what are you doing to me, Lifetime? I don't know what to do or which buttons to push. I'm pretty sure everyone around me is staring at me going, look at this clown. I'm starting to sweat. I haven't even done anything yet because I'm just nervous that everybody's judging me. Then I go over. I don't even know what. I literally, I'm just there. I have just like, I'm just, I don't, I have no workout plan. I'm just going to pick up some heavy things. Then I'm going to go home and I'm sweaty. And so I like curls, I know how to do curls. So I go over there and I grab a, you know, a barbell and a dumbbell and I, and I'm like looking at the other dudes to make sure that my form is good. And I'm hoping that they don't catch me looking at them and think I'm creepy or weird or something. And it's just the whole thing, I was just nerve wracked the whole time. And that's really not in my character to do that. I just was intimidated. And I realized I was intimidated because I felt like I was an outsider. I don't belong here. All the other people who are like gym people that nobody likes, they are, and I'm just playing around, but the people who are in good shape that we're jealous of, like they are going to look at me and they're going to know, oh man, this guy doesn't belong here. He won't last till February, you know? And so, like, I felt like I was an imposter. And at some point or another, everybody around me was going to know he doesn't belong. And what I realized is, man, this must be the way that people feel when they come back to church for the first time or go to church for the first time. This must be the way they feel. And I was actually glad to have that experience where I kind of felt insecure, even though I feel like I'm a pretty reasonably secure guy. I didn't like the way that felt. And so I was glad I had the experience as, oh my gosh, this must be what it feels like to come to church for the first time after a while. Because if I'm honest with you, I don't have that experience. I have no memory in my life of ever not being in church. I grew up in church. I could go to any church and feel pretty comfortable. And people who are in really good shape, they can go to any gym and they'll feel pretty good. They won't feel like I did on that first day. But if you haven't been to church in a while or you haven't ever been to church that you can remember, when you go that first day, it has to feel a lot like I felt at the gym that day. And I just remember thinking, man, if someone, as I thought about that and ruminated on it more, I thought, man, if one of the trainers or somebody who looks like they know what they're doing could come up to me and put their arm around me and just kind of give me some pointers like, hey, bro, let me show you how to set this treadmill up, you know? Let me show you how to do some of these exercises. Like these are the machines you want to do so you don't wander around looking like a dummy. Like just go to these things and you'll fit in. And I wish they could put their arm around me and just been like, dude, we've all had a day one. Like it's all right. It's good for you that you're here. And so what I wanted to do this morning, the first Sunday in January, is acknowledge that there's a lot of people here who your New Year's resolution is spiritual in nature. And maybe you're here on the very first Sunday in January because you decided, you know what, I'm going to church this year. I'm going to take my walk with God seriously. I've been meaning to prioritize my faith. This is the year I'm going to do that. I'm all in. I'm going to church this year. That's what I'm going to do. Somebody between services says you guys are resolutioners. If you're the resolutioners that are here and you said, I want to be back in church, then this is what you're doing. And what I want to do is take the first Sunday and address you and say, hey, listen, if this is your first Sunday back in church in a long time, there's five things that I want you to know. Now, this sermon is going to look a little bit different than all my other sermons. I'm really kind of anti-listy sermons. I don't like it when pastors make lists because this is just kind of like a behind the scenes thing a little bit. Lists tend to be lazy. It's super easy to be like, what are five things that are true about that verse? These five things. Okay, I'm just going to talk about them for a while. That's easy. To me, it's harder to make one point. And so that's what I try to do because I think it's best to ruminate on one scripture and move through it. But I thought this topic was so important and there's so many messages that I want to share with those of you who are coming back to church for the first time that I wanted to make a list of those things this morning. Now, here's the thing. A lot of the people in the room, y'all are grace people. You're church people. You're comfortable here. This isn't your first day. This is your first day this year. And you're kind of thinking like, well, this isn't for me. Wrong, pal. It is. Because if I'm saying that this is the message that we want to deliver to people who come to grace for the first time. Who is it that delivers this message? It's you. So these are the things that we want to say to folks who are coming into the fold for the first time or for the first time in a while. So if you're new, these are directly for you. If you are not new, then consider these your marching orders. These are the messages I want you to communicate with your actions and with your words, okay? So the first thing that I would love to say to you on your first visit back to church and in the midst of your intimidation is simply this. We know those feels, man. We know those feels. Now listen, some of y'all don't know what that means. You hired a young, attractive, hip senior pastor from Atlanta, okay? And I know the lingo. This is probably like eight years old. I'm so outdated in my lingo. There's people here who actually know the lingo going, no, you don't. But feels, I know those feels is the way that millennials tell you that they have empathy for you, okay? That's the word that you recognize. It's, I understand that feeling. I've been there before. I have empathy for that. I empathize with you. We've all had day ones and they're hard. It takes a lot of courage to come to church for the first time. As a matter of fact, on your bulletin, if you got one, when you came in on the front of it, there's a note from me. And the first thing I do is welcome people who are new and acknowledge that it was a difficult thing for you to do to get here. Okay. A lot of you have never seen that before because you've been here forever, and no one who goes to church consistently reads the note from the pastor on the bulletin. So that's not even for you. That's for them. We acknowledge that it is difficult. As a matter of fact, I had an interesting conversation with somebody just this last year, a guy who is a longtime partner here, been going to the church for forever. I love and respect this guy mostly because of the free golf he offers me, but I really do like him as a person. And one day we were golfing and he shared with me that he's one of the leaders of our men's Monday night Bible study. And he was telling me about the first time he went. And he said the first time he went, he was intimidated and scared. He kind of had been around church. He was a successful guy, sharp guy, smart guy. But he was going to Bible study for the first time and he was intimidated because he felt like they were going to ask him a question that he couldn't answer or that they were going to start talking about like insider stuff that he didn't know what it was. He felt like the knowledge gap was so wide that he was going to be exposed like he didn't belong there. But he knew in his heart that this was something that he needed to do. It was a step that he needed to take for his own health, and so he did it. And gradually, he was assimilated into the group. He didn't need to be near as intimidated as he was, and now he's a leader of the group. And so I want you to know that we've been there before. We understand how you feel. And to those of us who have been here for a while, understanding what it is to come to a new place for the first time, I would like for you guys to begin to run new people through a grid. Okay, so when you bring friends to church for the first time, when you have friends that bring friends to church for the first time, or when you see somebody here that maybe you don't recognize, I want you to have a grid or a question that you ask them, okay? And this question comes from the biblical imperative to be hospitable. This isn't just a thing that we do to be nice. Did you know that hospitality is actually one of the spiritual gifts? See, Christians believe, the Bible teaches that once you become a Christian, that the Holy Spirit, part of God, gives you a gift or a propensity in a certain area that you may not have had before or heightens it in you. And one of those gifts is the gift of hospitality. And you can tell who has the gift of hospitality because when you go to their house for something that's not even a big deal, they have like all the trays and all the platters set out. They're the ones that own the cupcake towers. They usually have the folded piece of paper in front of everything. Like you haven't seen cupcakes before. Like these are the chocolate ones. And you think to yourself, I'm never inviting them to my house because they're going to know what a degenerate I am, that I only have plates, right? Like those people are wonderful and I love them and they have the gift of hospitality. It's a gift. It's a thing. And if we as a church, as God instructs us to do in scripture, are going to express that gift of hospitality to folks who are with us for the first time, then I think the question that hospitality asks is, what can I do to make this person as comfortable as possible? Right? Isn't that the question? And listen, when you bring your friends or your loved ones to church and you say, I like it so far. It's pretty good. Worship's great. Sermons are all right. You should come and check it out. And you bring them, and you're hoping that there's a good experience for them, right? Don't you want everybody around you to be thinking, what can I do to make this experience as comfortable as possible? Which, by the way, I don't know if you realize this, that's our only growth strategy, all right? We don't do mailers. We don't send things out. We don't fleece the community with invite cards. We thought about over Christmas getting a bunch of, a big stack of invite cards and going to the apartment complexes right down the road and handing them out, going door to door and just giving them to people and putting a banner out in front of the church and inviting everybody in. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, that's not us. The point is not to get rear ends and seats. The point is not to fill up rooms. It's to bring people closer to Jesus. And the best chance we have at bringing people closer to Jesus is to bring in people who have relationships with you. So our entire growth strategy is to do things on Sunday morning that add value to your life and excite you so that you bring your friends to come see it too. That's it. And then we want to take good care of them once they get here. So when you bring those people, I want the filter that we view them through to be, what can I do to make this person as comfortable as possible here? And that looks like different things for different people, right? We've got to be savvy about this. Sometimes an extrovert visits and they want to meet everybody, right? Like last service, a new guy came. His name was Stuart. And I got introduced to Stuart. And Stuart chatted me up and he clearly wanted to meet everybody else. And so what Stuart wanted is for everybody to get to meet him. And that's great. But sometimes people aren't like him. Sometimes they're like me. I haven't had to visit a new church in a while, but if I did visit a new church, here's the experience I would want. I would want to go there and have one person acknowledge my existence and then leave me alone, right? Let me sit in the back. Let me take it in. I have to decide if y'all are crazy. Don't talk to me, right? And so when people come here for the first time, true story, they're coming in and they're going, are these people weird? Are these people normal? Do they make me laugh? I don't know about that video. That guy's a weirdo. Right? They're kicking the tires and sometimes they just want to sit in the back and take it in. And the thing we can do to be most hospitable is to give them their space to be introverted and assess. And that's what we need to have the wisdom to do. Sometimes it means showing them where the coffee is. Sometimes it means showing them where the restrooms are since we tuck them away in the kids' hallway by choice. And then sometimes we show them how to check in their children, right? Or we tell the kids to get out of the way so we have a room for everybody to sit down. That's the kinds of things we have to do. So I want us this year to begin to think as we see people that we don't recognize at church, what can I do to make them as comfortable as possible? That's what hospitality asks. Okay, that's the first thing. The second thing is this. This is important. If you're here, if you're here and you have resolved, I'm going to go to church, I'm going to do the thing, I'm going to take my walk more seriously, whatever your New Year's resolution is, I hope that you've made a spiritual New Year's resolution. If you haven't, I would highly encourage you to do that. You can just call it like a January 15th resolution or something like that. It would be great. But listen, if you made a resolution, particularly spiritually, I just want you to hear me say this, okay? You're going to mess up, and that's okay. You're going to spit the bit, man. You're going to blow it, and that's all right. If you made a New Year's resolution to come to church more often, three Sundays, four Sundays a month, whatever it is, you're going to do something on a Saturday that makes you feel like maybe I shouldn't go to church on Sunday. It's going to happen. You're going to wake up late. You're going to have a reason to not prioritize it. You're going to miss a couple of weeks in a row, and then you're going to feel like, man, I fell off the wagon. That's going to happen. If you made a New Year's resolution to watch your mouth, like, you're going to cuss in traffic. Like, eventually, that's going to happen. Try not to flip anybody off when it does. Make sure your windows are up. Like, it'll happen. We are going to mess up our New Year's resolutions. Like, we're going to fail. And that's okay because I can make a long list for you of people in the Bible who were heroes of the faith but failed miserably. Moses is a hero of the faith. He led the people out of Egypt. He's the dude that carried the Ten Commandments down the hill. He's a big deal. He messed up so badly late in life that God didn't even allow him to enter into the promised land that he led God's people to. Abraham, the man to whom we trace all of our spiritual lineage, he committed a sin so bad when he slept with another woman that was not his wife and had a child that we still feel the ramifications of that sin today. David, the greatest king Israel ever had, the one from whom Jesus came, the throne that Jesus will sit on, messed up so bad that he became a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer and God took his child as a result of his sin. Samson messed up so bad that many theologians don't even know if he ever even really knew the Lord. Peter in the New Testament, the leader of the disciples, messed up so badly that he denied even knowing Jesus three times in one night. If they messed up, you will too. And so will I. But here's the thing I want you to know. Spiritual progress is brought about by perseverance, not perfection. You hear me? Spiritual progress, spiritual success is not brought about by perfection. It's brought about by perseverance. The difference between spiritually healthy people and spiritually distant people is not some sort of moral fiber where one exceeds the other. It's simply perseverance. It's the willingness to, when I mess up, to get myself to stand back up, to dust myself off, and make the next decision of faith that I said I was going to make. It's to get up, refuse to listen to the voices in your head that tell you, here you go again, you've messed it up again. It's a refusal to listen to those and to get back on the horse and to make the next decision of faith in front of you. This is such a biblical idea. Perseverance is so important in the Christian life that many of the New Testament authors wrote about it. Paul wrote two-thirds in the New Testament. He was one of the most influential Christians to ever live. And over and over and over again in his letters that he wrote to the churches that we now read that make up our Bible, he encourages perseverance. He says to run the race, run to win the race. He says at the end of his life, he says, I have fought the good fight. I have kept the faith. I have finished the race. And he says that as an example for us, he says that we should be poured out like a drink offering, okay? He encourages us to persevere in our faith. James, the brother of Jesus, holds perseverance so high in his economy that he says that we should consider suffering pure joy because it rots within us perseverance. It brings about within us perseverance and the ability to stick to things and to be steadfast. Peter, the leader of the disciples, values it so highly that in one of my favorite passages in the first chapter of 2 Peter, he makes a list of the attributes that Christians should seek out in their life. And in the middle of that list, he puts perseverance there. And it's a building list. And what Peter says is, perseverance is so important that you cannot experience brotherly kindness or godliness or love until you learn perseverance. It's a building block to the rest of the faith. Perseverance is the key to progress in spiritual health, not perfection. If you allow yourself to be discouraged and quit the first time you mess up, it's going to be really hard to see any progress. But if you will acknowledge that this happens to everybody, even heroes in the Bible, and you give yourself the grace to get back up and take the next step of faith in your life, regardless of what you did yesterday, that's perseverance. And that will bring about a spiritual progress. So you're going to mess up, and that's all right, as long as you get back up. Number three, the third thing I want you to know on your visit back to church, we love your questions. We love your questions. They're great. And I say that because we get intimidated about asking questions, right? We get in our own head. We don't want to ask questions. Questions show vulnerability and they admit that I don't know something and that you might be better than me at it and I don't want to feel dumb. So we don't ask questions and we just continue being dumb, right? That's what we do. I was at the gym and I'm working out. I'm doing, I think I was doing some tricep thing. And there's a dude like there, he's just a couple of feet away from me and he is just a bear of a man. He's just, he's been working out for 12 hours a day for the past 10 years of his life. Like he's just, he's just huge and intimidating. And he's got his, he's got his hat on backwards and he's got his, he's got his earphones on and the whole, the whole deal. And he's just going and he's like, he's lifting like three of me as he does the thing that he's doing. And I, but he was doing an exercise that I did not recognize. Like I've never seen this before. I don't know what that is. And my curiosity got the best of my good sense, as it often does. And so I decided I'm going to ask him what he's doing. And so I go to him, and I'm like, excuse me, sir. You know, scrawny white guy, excuse me, sir. And he pulls his headphones on, and he looks at me and goes, what? And I'm like, oh, I wanted to be like, my bad, nothing. I'll talk to you later. And I said, you want me to spot you? No, I said, I said, dude, I don't mean to be weird, but I've never seen anybody do that exercise before. And I'm just curious, like, what muscle is that working? And he kind of laughed and he pulled his headphones off and he goes, here, man, let me show you. And it was, he said, it's this, like, you got to do this. It's working. I don't know what that's called. The lat, we'll call it. I don't know what it is. And he says, do this, you know? And he kind of like, he showed me, he's like, can you feel it back there? I'm like, yeah. And like, we like joked around, we exchanged names. We grabbed coffee later and I was just messing around about that. But like, we were kind of buddies. And like, now I see him. I'm like, hey man, how you doing? And we'll do the little fist pound every now and again. I'll ask him a question or whatever. But like, that question broke down that wall. And I didn't know. And I would have never known. But I asked the question. And if you're new to the faith, you should ask your questions. If you're old to the faith, you should ask your questions. Do you know that before I was a senior pastor, if you can't already tell, I worked with youth for a long time. And I got to sit in a bunch of rooms with students, and I still love hanging out with students. And one of the big reasons I love hanging out with students is they haven't developed the fear that you have about asking questions. So they'll ask whatever they want. But now when I do adult Bible studies, sometimes people lean forward and they ask me questions about scripture and what it says and yada, yada, yada. Can I tell you that adults ask the same questions that students do? They don't get any better or smarter. The only difference is you sat on yours for 30 years and they just had the guts to go ahead and ask it. I was in a men's Bible study. I do a men's Bible study on Wednesday mornings at 6 o'clock. That keeps out the riffraff. People don't come kick the tires at 6 a.m. You've got to want it. Everybody's welcome. You've just got to be there on time. I'll lock the door and wave at you. So they come in. They come in, they sit down, and we're going to the book of John. And in the book of John, there's two Johns. There's John the Baptist and the Apostle John. And one of them says, hey, there's some Johns in the Bible. Are they the same or is that two different dudes? And that's a hard question to ask because if you've been around church for any time at all, you feel like you should know that question, right? Except like three or four other dudes in the circle, their eyebrows go up and they're like, yo, like what's the answer to this? Because they didn't know either. But because that one guy had the guts to ask a perfectly reasonable question, why in the world would you be expected to know that there's two Johns in the book of John if you haven't spent your life looking at it? Why in the world would you be expected to know that? Because he had the guts to ask the question, everybody got to learn, right? And listen, I don't want you to feel remotely intimidated about not knowing anything about the Bible. If you don't, that's great. If I tell you one Sunday, hey guys, listen, we're going to be in the book of Mark. You can go ahead and turn there if you want to. If you don't know where that is, please lean over to your neighbor and go, where's Mark? That's fine. Why in the world would you be expected to know that Mark is the second book in the New Testament if you haven't been around church in a long time? I try my best to not leave anybody behind, to not assume any knowledge on your behalf, to bring everybody up to speed. But sometimes I mess up. And when I do, man, you should have the courage to ask questions. In Bible studies, ask questions. Long-time church people, ask your questions. Don't be scared of them. They are good, and they are positive, and they follow this biblical model that I love of the Ethiopian eunuch. There's a guy in Acts. He's an Ethiopian governmental official, essentially, and he's on a chariot, and this guy, Philip, sees him reading from the book of Isaiah, and he walks up to him, and he says, hey, that's Isaiah. Do you understand what you're reading? And the eunuch responds in such an incredibly bold way. He says, how can I unless someone explains it to me? Isn't that refreshing honesty? Someone comes up to us, hey, you're reading Isaiah. You understand what that means? Yeah, you want some tips? And in our head, we're like, I don't know anything. Please don't ask me any questions. This doesn't make any sense. Have the boldness to be like that guy from Ethiopia and say, how can I know this unless someone explains it to me? Ask your questions. The fourth thing that I want you to know is that we are rooting for you. We're rooting for you. We believe in you. There is this thing in our culture, and I'm sure it's in all cultures. Whenever you start a new initiative, everybody around you doubts you, right? Like when I go into the gym on day one, I've had a lot of day ones, I feel the same way every time, that everybody's looking at me in their matching clothes and in their good shape, and they're looking at me going, yeah, it'll be nice seeing you in January because because you ain't making it to February, pal. And then I can have my treadmill back, and you'll be out of the way, right? Then we can keep the weights like where they need to go instead of on your level, you know? People tend to look at you with skepticism, and they don't believe in you. Spouses are the best at this, right? Like, if I tell Jen, like, I'm going to start some new initiative in my life, like, hey, I think I'm going to journal. He's like, all right. Let me know how that goes for you, buddy. You know? Don't they, like our people who know us the best are sometimes the worst at this. I think I'm going to pray 30 minutes every day. Good luck. Why do we do that to one another? So I want you to know that that attitude doesn't make it into here. If you're here and you've been wandering from God for a long time, but you've decided, you know what, I want to get serious about my faith. I believe that Jesus worked in your heart to bring you here. I believe that Jesus has been slowly working on your heart and drawing you near to him for months and years leading you into this day. And I don't believe it's on accident. And I don't for a second doubt the sincerity of the decision that brought you in here. So I want you to know that we believe in you. If you made a spiritual resolution this year, you've been coming to church for a long time, but you've resolved to do this. I want you to know that I believe in you. I don't look at you with a bit of skepticism. We don't look at you with a bit of skepticism. We only look at you with hope. Man, it would thrill my soul to know and to hear the story years from now of somebody who wandered in here in January of 2019 and had known God or had been around church, but for some reason, when I came here this month, something clicked and I just felt God's presence like I never had before. And my life has been different ever since. I would love to know that story. I would love for someone right here, in here right now, who is far from God to become one of our elders or one of our leaders in the children's ministry or one of our volunteers or small group leaders one day. I believe that story is possible and I believe that you are here on purpose. And so there is no doubt here. We believe in you. This is such an important idea that in the middle of the most theological, theologically technical book in the New Testament, Paul, the author of Romans, stops in chapter 14 and he makes it about encouraging more mature believers, encouraging those who are less experienced. He says this over and over in his writings. He says that we should constantly in Thessalonians, that we should build one another up. The author of Hebrews says that we should outdo one another in kindness and that we should spur one another on to good works. And Paul in chapter 14 of Romans devotes an entire chapter where he's talking to the more experienced believer, and he says over and over and over again, don't pass judgment. Don't judge them. Encourage them. Don't do anything that would cause them to stumble. Don't do anything that would cause them not to grow. Do everything you can to encourage other people as they seek to grow closer to God. And so that's what we do here. We believe in you. And I'm going to ask the grace people, if you're a partner, you've been coming here for a while, I'm going to give you a homework assignment and just ask you to be willing to do this. Will you, every day this week when you pray, will you pray for those people who have made a decision to get back into church in 2019? Will you please just remember to do that? And let's together pray for those folks every day this week. And you guys know that if you're here for the first time in a while, like we're praying for you. And the other thing is, if you've made a spiritual resolution, I want to pray for that too. I would love for you to write that on your communication card and hand that to somebody after the service and make sure it gets to me. I want to make a list, and once a week I'm going to sit down, and I'm going to pray for all the resolutions in the church that have to do with becoming more healthy spiritually. I'm going to do that every week until you tell me to stop, because we want to encourage one another. We believe in each other here. And if you say you're serious about this, then we believe you. The last thing I want you to know this morning, the fifth thing that I would love to be able to say to everybody is this. God is the only reason that any of us are here. God is the only reason that any of us are here. And here's what I mean. Again, at the gym, when I see other people who are really healthy and really fit, honestly, I admire that. I admire that because I know what goes into that. Having failed so many times, I understand the discipline it takes to be in shape and to be healthy because it's not just the time you spend at the gym. It's what you eat and how you sleep. And it's a whole lifestyle thing. And so I look at people who are in shape and honestly, I admire them and I admire them for their character. I admire them for their discipline, for their stick-to-itiveness. When people are disciplined in their profession, when they're successful in their profession, I admire that. I look at the way that they work hard. They wake up before everybody else. They work harder than everybody else. And they put in time when nobody else is putting in time. And I admire that. And in our culture, we have a culture of success that admires success. And we all tend to believe that that success was brought about by personal disciplines that accelerated you beyond your peers, right? And so what do we do when we come into church? We apply the same metric. We come into church and we see somebody who looks spiritually healthy to us, who sets a good example, who may be a leader somewhere or seems godly, or we like the way they interact with people, we like the way that they interact with their family or whatever it is, and we admire them spiritually. And what we tend to do is attribute to them some sort of discipline that won that for them, and then we try to duplicate that discipline in our own lives. And when we attribute discipline to other people in different arenas outside of church, I think that that is a good and fair thing to do. But when you attribute discipline to people inside of church, I don't think that that's right at all, and here's why. If you were to go to the person that you admire spiritually, and you to learn more about them and you were to somehow tell them, man, I wish I could have your discipline. I wish I could grow like you. I wish I was as self-disciplined as you are. They would tell you, listen, if there is anything in me that you admire, it has nothing to do with my discipline. I promise you that. It has everything to do with a God that loves me enough to continue to stick with me even when I don't stick with him. It has everything to do with a God working in my heart even when I don't know he's working. Being spiritually healthy has nothing to do with our white-knuckle discipline. And if that's what you are relying on this year to bring you spiritual health and closer to Jesus, let me tell you something, you're going to fail and that's not all right. Because this is the one arena where it's not about you and it's not about your discipline. It's about getting out of the way and accepting the free love that the Father offers so graciously. The author of Hebrews sums this up well in Hebrews chapter 12, some of my favorite verses in the Bible. Hebrews 12, 1 says, That's what they tell us to do. And that's a great verse. It's an inspirational verse. But the problem with that verse is it makes it seem like the impetus is on us to run it well, right? Because the direction is throw off the sin and get everything out of your life that does not help you run the race, that doesn't help you live the life that God has for you to live. Get rid of everything in your life that doesn't make you spiritually healthy so that you can run the race that you need to run. That's the implication of that verse until you get to the second verse, which says, How do we run the race that we're supposed to run? How do we live the life that we're supposed to live? How do we achieve spiritual health in 2019? Not by focusing on the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. Not by focusing on the behaviors that we want to be done with, but by focusing on Christ and falling more in love with Him and allowing Him to work more in our hearts as He draws us near to Him. Can I just tell you that if you're seeking spiritual health this year and you're doing it by identifying some behaviors in your life that aren't good, that shouldn't be there, that we would probably call sin, and you look at this group of things and you go, I'm not going to do these things anymore, and your focus is on the behaviors and not on Jesus, can I tell you that you're going to fail? Because spiritual health is not wrought by white-knuckle discipline. No one has ever in the history of mankind besides Jesus himself gotten themselves closer to God by focusing on their behaviors and trying to be perfect. The only spiritual health anybody in this church or any other church has is as a result of figuring out that we need to focus on God. We focus on God. There's this great verse in Psalms that says, delight yourselves in the laws of the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. And how it works is the more I focus on Jesus, the more I follow the advice of the author of Hebrews and fix my eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of my faith, the more my heart begins to beat in sync with his, the more I want the things that he wants, the, I want you to know that that was not won by their discipline and it being better than yours. It was won by them realizing the only thing that matters is how I relate to God. John 15, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. All that matters is following Jesus, is allowing him to draw me closer to him. Don't focus on the behaviors this year. Focus on what you can do to draw yourself closer to the Father and allow that drawing to happen to you. Pray more, read the Bible more, come to church more, be around other believers more, but let Jesus draw yourself into him. Fix your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. There's actually one more thing that I would love to tell people on their first visit at church, but it's such a big deal that I'm going to devote a whole Sunday to it next week, and that's you can't do this alone. There is no such thing as a John Wayne Christian. You cannot do this alone. It was designed to be done around other people. So next week, that's what we're going to come back and we're going to talk about. The weeks following, we're going to talk about spiritual health as a lifestyle, as a lifestyle, and then we're going to talk about how long it takes to get spiritually healthy and the stick-to-itiveness that it requires. So I hope that you'll join us for the rest of those in this series as I continue to share with you my thoughts from the gym. I'm really looking forward to this January. I hope you are too. All right, I'm going to pray, and then Steve and the band are going to come up, and they're going to close us out. Father, thank you so much for today. Thank you for this year. Thank you for this Sunday. God, I thank you for the way that I believe you are drawing everybody in here closer to you in just the subtle and gentle way that you do it. Lord, let us know that we are loved by you, that we are cherished by you, that we are pursued by you. I lift up all those here who have resolved this year to do something that they believe will draw them closer to you. Give them the courage to get up when they fail. Give them the faith to lean on you when they don't find strength. And God, let 2019 be a year of marked spiritual health and change for us. Lord, we love you. We pray these things in your son's name. Amen.

It's good to see you guys. My name is Nate. I'm the pastor here, believe it or not. And I'm so excited about 2019. I feel like 2018 was such a wonderful year for grace, was such a wonderful year for the church. And we've enumerated all the things that God did for us last year. But I feel like, gosh, we are just poised to do really good things this year. We have a solid staff team, a good, great folks around us, and we are really ready to push this year. So I'm excited to see what the Lord does in the church this year. And I've already been praying for you a little bit, been praying for you as you enter into 2019. And my prayer for all of us, me included, is that when we leave this year, we will leave it closer to God than we are right now. My prayer for you is that 2019 will be a year of marked spiritual change and health in your life, and Jesus will draw you closer to him. That's my prayer and my hope. So we're launching with this series, Thoughts from the Gym, because we kind of felt like it fit into the beginning of the year, New Year's resolutions, and things like that. And a lot of us, like I did this week, are having day one in the gym again, right? The genesis of this series is we moved here in April of 2007. And so entering into the summer, we didn't know anybody. And so Jen said, well, Jen is my wife and we have a little girl named Lily. And so we wanted to join a pool so they could have something to do during the day because they make me work office hours here. It's ridiculous. So they wanted something to do during the day when I wasn't around. And so we ended up joining a pool and we joined a pool at a gym. And I thought, well, as long as I'm paying for this thing, I should try to go, right? And so I went, and it was pretty fun, and as I would go and watch other people work out, I was thinking about things, and there's some thoughts that occurred to me like, man, there's so many parallels here that apply to church and spiritual health, and I just kind of filed them away, and then one day, and I didn't know what I was going to do with them. And then one day I shared them with staff and they said, well, that should be a series. You should do that in January. So here we are. And the first one that we're going to do is called day one. And it's the first thing that occurred to me. That day, whenever it was, when I got ready to go to the gym, I put on whatever ratty clothes I had, and I go there, and I'm going to work out. I'm going to do the thing, right? Like you guys have had day ones, right? And I'm going to do the thing. And I don't like admitting this, okay, because I like to think of myself as mentally tough. I don't get easily intimidated, or at least maybe my unearned confidence has told me that. But I don't think I get intimidated a lot, but I was intimidated going to the gym. I don't like to admit that, but I was. Because, you know, if you've been there and you look like me, like there was a season, I got real consistent in the gym. There was a season where I would even be bold enough as to call myself in shape. But due to my affinity for baked goods and sitting, I'm back in like normal shape. All right. So I've got a long road to glory ahead of me this year. But I go and as I'm going, like I walk in and everybody's got on the matching clothes. All the dudes are wearing tight shirts by choice. I'm wearing tight shirts like not by choice. You know, they look good in theirs. I want to look better in mine. I get up on the treadmill and there's all these buttons and, and three of them say start. I'm like, what are you doing to me, Lifetime? I don't know what to do or which buttons to push. I'm pretty sure everyone around me is staring at me going, look at this clown. I'm starting to sweat. I haven't even done anything yet because I'm just nervous that everybody's judging me. Then I go over. I don't even know what. I literally, I'm just there. I have just like, I'm just, I don't, I have no workout plan. I'm just going to pick up some heavy things. Then I'm going to go home and I'm sweaty. And so I like curls, I know how to do curls. So I go over there and I grab a, you know, a barbell and a dumbbell and I, and I'm like looking at the other dudes to make sure that my form is good. And I'm hoping that they don't catch me looking at them and think I'm creepy or weird or something. And it's just the whole thing, I was just nerve wracked the whole time. And that's really not in my character to do that. I just was intimidated. And I realized I was intimidated because I felt like I was an outsider. I don't belong here. All the other people who are like gym people that nobody likes, they are, and I'm just playing around, but the people who are in good shape that we're jealous of, like they are going to look at me and they're going to know, oh man, this guy doesn't belong here. He won't last till February, you know? And so, like, I felt like I was an imposter. And at some point or another, everybody around me was going to know he doesn't belong. And what I realized is, man, this must be the way that people feel when they come back to church for the first time or go to church for the first time. This must be the way they feel. And I was actually glad to have that experience where I kind of felt insecure, even though I feel like I'm a pretty reasonably secure guy. I didn't like the way that felt. And so I was glad I had the experience as, oh my gosh, this must be what it feels like to come to church for the first time after a while. Because if I'm honest with you, I don't have that experience. I have no memory in my life of ever not being in church. I grew up in church. I could go to any church and feel pretty comfortable. And people who are in really good shape, they can go to any gym and they'll feel pretty good. They won't feel like I did on that first day. But if you haven't been to church in a while or you haven't ever been to church that you can remember, when you go that first day, it has to feel a lot like I felt at the gym that day. And I just remember thinking, man, if someone, as I thought about that and ruminated on it more, I thought, man, if one of the trainers or somebody who looks like they know what they're doing could come up to me and put their arm around me and just kind of give me some pointers like, hey, bro, let me show you how to set this treadmill up, you know? Let me show you how to do some of these exercises. Like these are the machines you want to do so you don't wander around looking like a dummy. Like just go to these things and you'll fit in. And I wish they could put their arm around me and just been like, dude, we've all had a day one. Like it's all right. It's good for you that you're here. And so what I wanted to do this morning, the first Sunday in January, is acknowledge that there's a lot of people here who your New Year's resolution is spiritual in nature. And maybe you're here on the very first Sunday in January because you decided, you know what, I'm going to church this year. I'm going to take my walk with God seriously. I've been meaning to prioritize my faith. This is the year I'm going to do that. I'm all in. I'm going to church this year. That's what I'm going to do. Somebody between services says you guys are resolutioners. If you're the resolutioners that are here and you said, I want to be back in church, then this is what you're doing. And what I want to do is take the first Sunday and address you and say, hey, listen, if this is your first Sunday back in church in a long time, there's five things that I want you to know. Now, this sermon is going to look a little bit different than all my other sermons. I'm really kind of anti-listy sermons. I don't like it when pastors make lists because this is just kind of like a behind the scenes thing a little bit. Lists tend to be lazy. It's super easy to be like, what are five things that are true about that verse? These five things. Okay, I'm just going to talk about them for a while. That's easy. To me, it's harder to make one point. And so that's what I try to do because I think it's best to ruminate on one scripture and move through it. But I thought this topic was so important and there's so many messages that I want to share with those of you who are coming back to church for the first time that I wanted to make a list of those things this morning. Now, here's the thing. A lot of the people in the room, y'all are grace people. You're church people. You're comfortable here. This isn't your first day. This is your first day this year. And you're kind of thinking like, well, this isn't for me. Wrong, pal. It is. Because if I'm saying that this is the message that we want to deliver to people who come to grace for the first time. Who is it that delivers this message? It's you. So these are the things that we want to say to folks who are coming into the fold for the first time or for the first time in a while. So if you're new, these are directly for you. If you are not new, then consider these your marching orders. These are the messages I want you to communicate with your actions and with your words, okay? So the first thing that I would love to say to you on your first visit back to church and in the midst of your intimidation is simply this. We know those feels, man. We know those feels. Now listen, some of y'all don't know what that means. You hired a young, attractive, hip senior pastor from Atlanta, okay? And I know the lingo. This is probably like eight years old. I'm so outdated in my lingo. There's people here who actually know the lingo going, no, you don't. But feels, I know those feels is the way that millennials tell you that they have empathy for you, okay? That's the word that you recognize. It's, I understand that feeling. I've been there before. I have empathy for that. I empathize with you. We've all had day ones and they're hard. It takes a lot of courage to come to church for the first time. As a matter of fact, on your bulletin, if you got one, when you came in on the front of it, there's a note from me. And the first thing I do is welcome people who are new and acknowledge that it was a difficult thing for you to do to get here. Okay. A lot of you have never seen that before because you've been here forever, and no one who goes to church consistently reads the note from the pastor on the bulletin. So that's not even for you. That's for them. We acknowledge that it is difficult. As a matter of fact, I had an interesting conversation with somebody just this last year, a guy who is a longtime partner here, been going to the church for forever. I love and respect this guy mostly because of the free golf he offers me, but I really do like him as a person. And one day we were golfing and he shared with me that he's one of the leaders of our men's Monday night Bible study. And he was telling me about the first time he went. And he said the first time he went, he was intimidated and scared. He kind of had been around church. He was a successful guy, sharp guy, smart guy. But he was going to Bible study for the first time and he was intimidated because he felt like they were going to ask him a question that he couldn't answer or that they were going to start talking about like insider stuff that he didn't know what it was. He felt like the knowledge gap was so wide that he was going to be exposed like he didn't belong there. But he knew in his heart that this was something that he needed to do. It was a step that he needed to take for his own health, and so he did it. And gradually, he was assimilated into the group. He didn't need to be near as intimidated as he was, and now he's a leader of the group. And so I want you to know that we've been there before. We understand how you feel. And to those of us who have been here for a while, understanding what it is to come to a new place for the first time, I would like for you guys to begin to run new people through a grid. Okay, so when you bring friends to church for the first time, when you have friends that bring friends to church for the first time, or when you see somebody here that maybe you don't recognize, I want you to have a grid or a question that you ask them, okay? And this question comes from the biblical imperative to be hospitable. This isn't just a thing that we do to be nice. Did you know that hospitality is actually one of the spiritual gifts? See, Christians believe, the Bible teaches that once you become a Christian, that the Holy Spirit, part of God, gives you a gift or a propensity in a certain area that you may not have had before or heightens it in you. And one of those gifts is the gift of hospitality. And you can tell who has the gift of hospitality because when you go to their house for something that's not even a big deal, they have like all the trays and all the platters set out. They're the ones that own the cupcake towers. They usually have the folded piece of paper in front of everything. Like you haven't seen cupcakes before. Like these are the chocolate ones. And you think to yourself, I'm never inviting them to my house because they're going to know what a degenerate I am, that I only have plates, right? Like those people are wonderful and I love them and they have the gift of hospitality. It's a gift. It's a thing. And if we as a church, as God instructs us to do in scripture, are going to express that gift of hospitality to folks who are with us for the first time, then I think the question that hospitality asks is, what can I do to make this person as comfortable as possible? Right? Isn't that the question? And listen, when you bring your friends or your loved ones to church and you say, I like it so far. It's pretty good. Worship's great. Sermons are all right. You should come and check it out. And you bring them, and you're hoping that there's a good experience for them, right? Don't you want everybody around you to be thinking, what can I do to make this experience as comfortable as possible? Which, by the way, I don't know if you realize this, that's our only growth strategy, all right? We don't do mailers. We don't send things out. We don't fleece the community with invite cards. We thought about over Christmas getting a bunch of, a big stack of invite cards and going to the apartment complexes right down the road and handing them out, going door to door and just giving them to people and putting a banner out in front of the church and inviting everybody in. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, that's not us. The point is not to get rear ends and seats. The point is not to fill up rooms. It's to bring people closer to Jesus. And the best chance we have at bringing people closer to Jesus is to bring in people who have relationships with you. So our entire growth strategy is to do things on Sunday morning that add value to your life and excite you so that you bring your friends to come see it too. That's it. And then we want to take good care of them once they get here. So when you bring those people, I want the filter that we view them through to be, what can I do to make this person as comfortable as possible here? And that looks like different things for different people, right? We've got to be savvy about this. Sometimes an extrovert visits and they want to meet everybody, right? Like last service, a new guy came. His name was Stuart. And I got introduced to Stuart. And Stuart chatted me up and he clearly wanted to meet everybody else. And so what Stuart wanted is for everybody to get to meet him. And that's great. But sometimes people aren't like him. Sometimes they're like me. I haven't had to visit a new church in a while, but if I did visit a new church, here's the experience I would want. I would want to go there and have one person acknowledge my existence and then leave me alone, right? Let me sit in the back. Let me take it in. I have to decide if y'all are crazy. Don't talk to me, right? And so when people come here for the first time, true story, they're coming in and they're going, are these people weird? Are these people normal? Do they make me laugh? I don't know about that video. That guy's a weirdo. Right? They're kicking the tires and sometimes they just want to sit in the back and take it in. And the thing we can do to be most hospitable is to give them their space to be introverted and assess. And that's what we need to have the wisdom to do. Sometimes it means showing them where the coffee is. Sometimes it means showing them where the restrooms are since we tuck them away in the kids' hallway by choice. And then sometimes we show them how to check in their children, right? Or we tell the kids to get out of the way so we have a room for everybody to sit down. That's the kinds of things we have to do. So I want us this year to begin to think as we see people that we don't recognize at church, what can I do to make them as comfortable as possible? That's what hospitality asks. Okay, that's the first thing. The second thing is this. This is important. If you're here, if you're here and you have resolved, I'm going to go to church, I'm going to do the thing, I'm going to take my walk more seriously, whatever your New Year's resolution is, I hope that you've made a spiritual New Year's resolution. If you haven't, I would highly encourage you to do that. You can just call it like a January 15th resolution or something like that. It would be great. But listen, if you made a resolution, particularly spiritually, I just want you to hear me say this, okay? You're going to mess up, and that's okay. You're going to spit the bit, man. You're going to blow it, and that's all right. If you made a New Year's resolution to come to church more often, three Sundays, four Sundays a month, whatever it is, you're going to do something on a Saturday that makes you feel like maybe I shouldn't go to church on Sunday. It's going to happen. You're going to wake up late. You're going to have a reason to not prioritize it. You're going to miss a couple of weeks in a row, and then you're going to feel like, man, I fell off the wagon. That's going to happen. If you made a New Year's resolution to watch your mouth, like, you're going to cuss in traffic. Like, eventually, that's going to happen. Try not to flip anybody off when it does. Make sure your windows are up. Like, it'll happen. We are going to mess up our New Year's resolutions. Like, we're going to fail. And that's okay because I can make a long list for you of people in the Bible who were heroes of the faith but failed miserably. Moses is a hero of the faith. He led the people out of Egypt. He's the dude that carried the Ten Commandments down the hill. He's a big deal. He messed up so badly late in life that God didn't even allow him to enter into the promised land that he led God's people to. Abraham, the man to whom we trace all of our spiritual lineage, he committed a sin so bad when he slept with another woman that was not his wife and had a child that we still feel the ramifications of that sin today. David, the greatest king Israel ever had, the one from whom Jesus came, the throne that Jesus will sit on, messed up so bad that he became a lying, thieving, adulterous murderer and God took his child as a result of his sin. Samson messed up so bad that many theologians don't even know if he ever even really knew the Lord. Peter in the New Testament, the leader of the disciples, messed up so badly that he denied even knowing Jesus three times in one night. If they messed up, you will too. And so will I. But here's the thing I want you to know. Spiritual progress is brought about by perseverance, not perfection. You hear me? Spiritual progress, spiritual success is not brought about by perfection. It's brought about by perseverance. The difference between spiritually healthy people and spiritually distant people is not some sort of moral fiber where one exceeds the other. It's simply perseverance. It's the willingness to, when I mess up, to get myself to stand back up, to dust myself off, and make the next decision of faith that I said I was going to make. It's to get up, refuse to listen to the voices in your head that tell you, here you go again, you've messed it up again. It's a refusal to listen to those and to get back on the horse and to make the next decision of faith in front of you. This is such a biblical idea. Perseverance is so important in the Christian life that many of the New Testament authors wrote about it. Paul wrote two-thirds in the New Testament. He was one of the most influential Christians to ever live. And over and over and over again in his letters that he wrote to the churches that we now read that make up our Bible, he encourages perseverance. He says to run the race, run to win the race. He says at the end of his life, he says, I have fought the good fight. I have kept the faith. I have finished the race. And he says that as an example for us, he says that we should be poured out like a drink offering, okay? He encourages us to persevere in our faith. James, the brother of Jesus, holds perseverance so high in his economy that he says that we should consider suffering pure joy because it rots within us perseverance. It brings about within us perseverance and the ability to stick to things and to be steadfast. Peter, the leader of the disciples, values it so highly that in one of my favorite passages in the first chapter of 2 Peter, he makes a list of the attributes that Christians should seek out in their life. And in the middle of that list, he puts perseverance there. And it's a building list. And what Peter says is, perseverance is so important that you cannot experience brotherly kindness or godliness or love until you learn perseverance. It's a building block to the rest of the faith. Perseverance is the key to progress in spiritual health, not perfection. If you allow yourself to be discouraged and quit the first time you mess up, it's going to be really hard to see any progress. But if you will acknowledge that this happens to everybody, even heroes in the Bible, and you give yourself the grace to get back up and take the next step of faith in your life, regardless of what you did yesterday, that's perseverance. And that will bring about a spiritual progress. So you're going to mess up, and that's all right, as long as you get back up. Number three, the third thing I want you to know on your visit back to church, we love your questions. We love your questions. They're great. And I say that because we get intimidated about asking questions, right? We get in our own head. We don't want to ask questions. Questions show vulnerability and they admit that I don't know something and that you might be better than me at it and I don't want to feel dumb. So we don't ask questions and we just continue being dumb, right? That's what we do. I was at the gym and I'm working out. I'm doing, I think I was doing some tricep thing. And there's a dude like there, he's just a couple of feet away from me and he is just a bear of a man. He's just, he's been working out for 12 hours a day for the past 10 years of his life. Like he's just, he's just huge and intimidating. And he's got his, he's got his hat on backwards and he's got his, he's got his earphones on and the whole, the whole deal. And he's just going and he's like, he's lifting like three of me as he does the thing that he's doing. And I, but he was doing an exercise that I did not recognize. Like I've never seen this before. I don't know what that is. And my curiosity got the best of my good sense, as it often does. And so I decided I'm going to ask him what he's doing. And so I go to him, and I'm like, excuse me, sir. You know, scrawny white guy, excuse me, sir. And he pulls his headphones on, and he looks at me and goes, what? And I'm like, oh, I wanted to be like, my bad, nothing. I'll talk to you later. And I said, you want me to spot you? No, I said, I said, dude, I don't mean to be weird, but I've never seen anybody do that exercise before. And I'm just curious, like, what muscle is that working? And he kind of laughed and he pulled his headphones off and he goes, here, man, let me show you. And it was, he said, it's this, like, you got to do this. It's working. I don't know what that's called. The lat, we'll call it. I don't know what it is. And he says, do this, you know? And he kind of like, he showed me, he's like, can you feel it back there? I'm like, yeah. And like, we like joked around, we exchanged names. We grabbed coffee later and I was just messing around about that. But like, we were kind of buddies. And like, now I see him. I'm like, hey man, how you doing? And we'll do the little fist pound every now and again. I'll ask him a question or whatever. But like, that question broke down that wall. And I didn't know. And I would have never known. But I asked the question. And if you're new to the faith, you should ask your questions. If you're old to the faith, you should ask your questions. Do you know that before I was a senior pastor, if you can't already tell, I worked with youth for a long time. And I got to sit in a bunch of rooms with students, and I still love hanging out with students. And one of the big reasons I love hanging out with students is they haven't developed the fear that you have about asking questions. So they'll ask whatever they want. But now when I do adult Bible studies, sometimes people lean forward and they ask me questions about scripture and what it says and yada, yada, yada. Can I tell you that adults ask the same questions that students do? They don't get any better or smarter. The only difference is you sat on yours for 30 years and they just had the guts to go ahead and ask it. I was in a men's Bible study. I do a men's Bible study on Wednesday mornings at 6 o'clock. That keeps out the riffraff. People don't come kick the tires at 6 a.m. You've got to want it. Everybody's welcome. You've just got to be there on time. I'll lock the door and wave at you. So they come in. They come in, they sit down, and we're going to the book of John. And in the book of John, there's two Johns. There's John the Baptist and the Apostle John. And one of them says, hey, there's some Johns in the Bible. Are they the same or is that two different dudes? And that's a hard question to ask because if you've been around church for any time at all, you feel like you should know that question, right? Except like three or four other dudes in the circle, their eyebrows go up and they're like, yo, like what's the answer to this? Because they didn't know either. But because that one guy had the guts to ask a perfectly reasonable question, why in the world would you be expected to know that there's two Johns in the book of John if you haven't spent your life looking at it? Why in the world would you be expected to know that? Because he had the guts to ask the question, everybody got to learn, right? And listen, I don't want you to feel remotely intimidated about not knowing anything about the Bible. If you don't, that's great. If I tell you one Sunday, hey guys, listen, we're going to be in the book of Mark. You can go ahead and turn there if you want to. If you don't know where that is, please lean over to your neighbor and go, where's Mark? That's fine. Why in the world would you be expected to know that Mark is the second book in the New Testament if you haven't been around church in a long time? I try my best to not leave anybody behind, to not assume any knowledge on your behalf, to bring everybody up to speed. But sometimes I mess up. And when I do, man, you should have the courage to ask questions. In Bible studies, ask questions. Long-time church people, ask your questions. Don't be scared of them. They are good, and they are positive, and they follow this biblical model that I love of the Ethiopian eunuch. There's a guy in Acts. He's an Ethiopian governmental official, essentially, and he's on a chariot, and this guy, Philip, sees him reading from the book of Isaiah, and he walks up to him, and he says, hey, that's Isaiah. Do you understand what you're reading? And the eunuch responds in such an incredibly bold way. He says, how can I unless someone explains it to me? Isn't that refreshing honesty? Someone comes up to us, hey, you're reading Isaiah. You understand what that means? Yeah, you want some tips? And in our head, we're like, I don't know anything. Please don't ask me any questions. This doesn't make any sense. Have the boldness to be like that guy from Ethiopia and say, how can I know this unless someone explains it to me? Ask your questions. The fourth thing that I want you to know is that we are rooting for you. We're rooting for you. We believe in you. There is this thing in our culture, and I'm sure it's in all cultures. Whenever you start a new initiative, everybody around you doubts you, right? Like when I go into the gym on day one, I've had a lot of day ones, I feel the same way every time, that everybody's looking at me in their matching clothes and in their good shape, and they're looking at me going, yeah, it'll be nice seeing you in January because because you ain't making it to February, pal. And then I can have my treadmill back, and you'll be out of the way, right? Then we can keep the weights like where they need to go instead of on your level, you know? People tend to look at you with skepticism, and they don't believe in you. Spouses are the best at this, right? Like, if I tell Jen, like, I'm going to start some new initiative in my life, like, hey, I think I'm going to journal. He's like, all right. Let me know how that goes for you, buddy. You know? Don't they, like our people who know us the best are sometimes the worst at this. I think I'm going to pray 30 minutes every day. Good luck. Why do we do that to one another? So I want you to know that that attitude doesn't make it into here. If you're here and you've been wandering from God for a long time, but you've decided, you know what, I want to get serious about my faith. I believe that Jesus worked in your heart to bring you here. I believe that Jesus has been slowly working on your heart and drawing you near to him for months and years leading you into this day. And I don't believe it's on accident. And I don't for a second doubt the sincerity of the decision that brought you in here. So I want you to know that we believe in you. If you made a spiritual resolution this year, you've been coming to church for a long time, but you've resolved to do this. I want you to know that I believe in you. I don't look at you with a bit of skepticism. We don't look at you with a bit of skepticism. We only look at you with hope. Man, it would thrill my soul to know and to hear the story years from now of somebody who wandered in here in January of 2019 and had known God or had been around church, but for some reason, when I came here this month, something clicked and I just felt God's presence like I never had before. And my life has been different ever since. I would love to know that story. I would love for someone right here, in here right now, who is far from God to become one of our elders or one of our leaders in the children's ministry or one of our volunteers or small group leaders one day. I believe that story is possible and I believe that you are here on purpose. And so there is no doubt here. We believe in you. This is such an important idea that in the middle of the most theological, theologically technical book in the New Testament, Paul, the author of Romans, stops in chapter 14 and he makes it about encouraging more mature believers, encouraging those who are less experienced. He says this over and over in his writings. He says that we should constantly in Thessalonians, that we should build one another up. The author of Hebrews says that we should outdo one another in kindness and that we should spur one another on to good works. And Paul in chapter 14 of Romans devotes an entire chapter where he's talking to the more experienced believer, and he says over and over and over again, don't pass judgment. Don't judge them. Encourage them. Don't do anything that would cause them to stumble. Don't do anything that would cause them not to grow. Do everything you can to encourage other people as they seek to grow closer to God. And so that's what we do here. We believe in you. And I'm going to ask the grace people, if you're a partner, you've been coming here for a while, I'm going to give you a homework assignment and just ask you to be willing to do this. Will you, every day this week when you pray, will you pray for those people who have made a decision to get back into church in 2019? Will you please just remember to do that? And let's together pray for those folks every day this week. And you guys know that if you're here for the first time in a while, like we're praying for you. And the other thing is, if you've made a spiritual resolution, I want to pray for that too. I would love for you to write that on your communication card and hand that to somebody after the service and make sure it gets to me. I want to make a list, and once a week I'm going to sit down, and I'm going to pray for all the resolutions in the church that have to do with becoming more healthy spiritually. I'm going to do that every week until you tell me to stop, because we want to encourage one another. We believe in each other here. And if you say you're serious about this, then we believe you. The last thing I want you to know this morning, the fifth thing that I would love to be able to say to everybody is this. God is the only reason that any of us are here. God is the only reason that any of us are here. And here's what I mean. Again, at the gym, when I see other people who are really healthy and really fit, honestly, I admire that. I admire that because I know what goes into that. Having failed so many times, I understand the discipline it takes to be in shape and to be healthy because it's not just the time you spend at the gym. It's what you eat and how you sleep. And it's a whole lifestyle thing. And so I look at people who are in shape and honestly, I admire them and I admire them for their character. I admire them for their discipline, for their stick-to-itiveness. When people are disciplined in their profession, when they're successful in their profession, I admire that. I look at the way that they work hard. They wake up before everybody else. They work harder than everybody else. And they put in time when nobody else is putting in time. And I admire that. And in our culture, we have a culture of success that admires success. And we all tend to believe that that success was brought about by personal disciplines that accelerated you beyond your peers, right? And so what do we do when we come into church? We apply the same metric. We come into church and we see somebody who looks spiritually healthy to us, who sets a good example, who may be a leader somewhere or seems godly, or we like the way they interact with people, we like the way that they interact with their family or whatever it is, and we admire them spiritually. And what we tend to do is attribute to them some sort of discipline that won that for them, and then we try to duplicate that discipline in our own lives. And when we attribute discipline to other people in different arenas outside of church, I think that that is a good and fair thing to do. But when you attribute discipline to people inside of church, I don't think that that's right at all, and here's why. If you were to go to the person that you admire spiritually, and you to learn more about them and you were to somehow tell them, man, I wish I could have your discipline. I wish I could grow like you. I wish I was as self-disciplined as you are. They would tell you, listen, if there is anything in me that you admire, it has nothing to do with my discipline. I promise you that. It has everything to do with a God that loves me enough to continue to stick with me even when I don't stick with him. It has everything to do with a God working in my heart even when I don't know he's working. Being spiritually healthy has nothing to do with our white-knuckle discipline. And if that's what you are relying on this year to bring you spiritual health and closer to Jesus, let me tell you something, you're going to fail and that's not all right. Because this is the one arena where it's not about you and it's not about your discipline. It's about getting out of the way and accepting the free love that the Father offers so graciously. The author of Hebrews sums this up well in Hebrews chapter 12, some of my favorite verses in the Bible. Hebrews 12, 1 says, That's what they tell us to do. And that's a great verse. It's an inspirational verse. But the problem with that verse is it makes it seem like the impetus is on us to run it well, right? Because the direction is throw off the sin and get everything out of your life that does not help you run the race, that doesn't help you live the life that God has for you to live. Get rid of everything in your life that doesn't make you spiritually healthy so that you can run the race that you need to run. That's the implication of that verse until you get to the second verse, which says, How do we run the race that we're supposed to run? How do we live the life that we're supposed to live? How do we achieve spiritual health in 2019? Not by focusing on the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. Not by focusing on the behaviors that we want to be done with, but by focusing on Christ and falling more in love with Him and allowing Him to work more in our hearts as He draws us near to Him. Can I just tell you that if you're seeking spiritual health this year and you're doing it by identifying some behaviors in your life that aren't good, that shouldn't be there, that we would probably call sin, and you look at this group of things and you go, I'm not going to do these things anymore, and your focus is on the behaviors and not on Jesus, can I tell you that you're going to fail? Because spiritual health is not wrought by white-knuckle discipline. No one has ever in the history of mankind besides Jesus himself gotten themselves closer to God by focusing on their behaviors and trying to be perfect. The only spiritual health anybody in this church or any other church has is as a result of figuring out that we need to focus on God. We focus on God. There's this great verse in Psalms that says, delight yourselves in the laws of the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. And how it works is the more I focus on Jesus, the more I follow the advice of the author of Hebrews and fix my eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of my faith, the more my heart begins to beat in sync with his, the more I want the things that he wants, the, I want you to know that that was not won by their discipline and it being better than yours. It was won by them realizing the only thing that matters is how I relate to God. John 15, abide in me and I in you and you will bear much fruit. All that matters is following Jesus, is allowing him to draw me closer to him. Don't focus on the behaviors this year. Focus on what you can do to draw yourself closer to the Father and allow that drawing to happen to you. Pray more, read the Bible more, come to church more, be around other believers more, but let Jesus draw yourself into him. Fix your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. There's actually one more thing that I would love to tell people on their first visit at church, but it's such a big deal that I'm going to devote a whole Sunday to it next week, and that's you can't do this alone. There is no such thing as a John Wayne Christian. You cannot do this alone. It was designed to be done around other people. So next week, that's what we're going to come back and we're going to talk about. The weeks following, we're going to talk about spiritual health as a lifestyle, as a lifestyle, and then we're going to talk about how long it takes to get spiritually healthy and the stick-to-itiveness that it requires. So I hope that you'll join us for the rest of those in this series as I continue to share with you my thoughts from the gym. I'm really looking forward to this January. I hope you are too. All right, I'm going to pray, and then Steve and the band are going to come up, and they're going to close us out. Father, thank you so much for today. Thank you for this year. Thank you for this Sunday. God, I thank you for the way that I believe you are drawing everybody in here closer to you in just the subtle and gentle way that you do it. Lord, let us know that we are loved by you, that we are cherished by you, that we are pursued by you. I lift up all those here who have resolved this year to do something that they believe will draw them closer to you. Give them the courage to get up when they fail. Give them the faith to lean on you when they don't find strength. And God, let 2019 be a year of marked spiritual health and change for us. Lord, we love you. We pray these things in your son's name. Amen.

All right, good morning, everyone. Happy Palm Sunday. Somebody asked me before the service who's got a Catholic background, they said, do Christians still do Palm Sunday or is that just a Catholic thing? Which I found to be a wonderful question and yeah, Christians do Palm Sunday. Okay, so just so we're all on the same page, it's Holy Week for us too. And we've been doing this whole series through Mark, asking God to prepare our hearts and minds to celebrate Easter and to reflect on and properly value the resurrection. And so this week we prepare to do that. We have our Good Friday service on Friday evening. If you are able to come, I would really encourage you to do that. That is on Friday. We intentionally sit in the heaviness of the crucifixion. We intentionally focus on the cross and on the reality that Friday was believing that when we do that, our hearts are prepared to celebrate the resurrection better on Sunday. So Friday, I will just tell you, is a heavy service. I would not recommend bringing children to it. We are somber and sober on purpose because it helps us appreciate Easter Sunday better. This morning, as we do celebrate Palm Sunday, we will focus on the reality of Jesus on the cross, and we'll finish with having communion at the end of the service. But this is really a continuation of the sermon I preached to you, or I even said that Sunday that it wasn't a sermon, it was me sharing. This is a continuation of what I want to share from Istanbul. Okay. When, when I was sharing about Istanbul and somebody said that they just listened to the sermon, uh, from that morning on the way over, um, which I'm so glad that people are doing that and keeping up. But I shared with you my two takeaways from the experience that I had in Istanbul. And for those of you who maybe this is your first time, this is totally out of context for you. A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to go to Turkey and sit in a room with persecuted Iranian pastors who were being trained by a friend of mine. And it was a really impactful week, such a privilege to be there. And so when I came, I got home on a Saturday and then I had to preach on a Sunday. I didn't even know where I was in space or time, and I thought, I'm just going to share what I took away and hope that that works. And you guys were gracious with me and said that that counted, and I got paid that week. But there was two things. There's two things that I took away. The first was just the chasm of difference in how the persecuted church thinks about church and how the secure church thinks about church. And there may be a series coming on that, which I'm sure you guys will be really thrilled about to come in every week and be made to feel terrible for how we think about church. But that may just be what we need. So I'm thinking about that. The other point that I made was out of this verse in Mark. This is the quintessential Mark verse. If you were to say what verse encapsulates the book of Mark that we've been going through all spring, it is this verse, chapter 9, verse 36. I'm sorry, verse 35. Sitting down, Jesus called the twelve and said, Anyone who wants to be first must be very last and the servant of all. That is the quintessential Marconian verse. That's the gospel of Mark. Whoever wants to be first must be the servant of all. It's a book about service. And I talked with you guys about a man that I met named Yahya who personified this type of service. And I described him as capturing the essence of that Colossians verse, that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession and through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God. That was the sense I got with him. And so the other takeaway was, let's lead and serve like Jesus does. Let's be inspired by the model of Yahya and lead and serve like him. But here's what I wanted to say after that. I wanted to make another point, but as I wrote that point in my notes and I was going through it that Sunday morning, I thought I can't just drop that at the end of a service and not talk about it and not give it adequate space. We need to be able to develop this idea and talk about this idea. That's like a whole separate sermon. And then I went, huh, I'm in charge of the sermons that we preach. I can just do that one later. So this is later. All right. I wanted to talk about what we talked about last week. Last week, I wanted to talk about this on Palm Sunday. I felt like it was more appropriate leading into communion, but this is really part two of that. This is what I wanted to say. When I say we should lead and love and serve like Christ. We should be inspired by the examples of holy people who lead and serve and love well. The point that I wanted to make is this. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. I'm going to spend the rest of the day talking about this so that I can make sure we have an adequate understanding of it. But we cannot love others as Jesus loved. That's a quintessential. I said Marconian, so now I will say Johannian. That is a quintessential verse in John to sum up that gospel is when Jesus says, go and love others as I have loved you. That is the gospel of John encapsulated. And so we take the gospel of Mark and we take the gospel of John and we say, yes, Lord, this is what we want to do. is we cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. And here's what I mean when I say that. We all have a sense of identity and value and worth that we get from something somewhere. This is universally true. We all have something that we measure ourselves by that makes us feel valuable or not valuable. We all have a sense of identity. I am blank. I am this. And this identity and our sense of identity and where we get our worth evolves over time, right? I remember when I was a kid in elementary school at Camp Creek Elementary, that my value and worth was based on my knowledge of SportsCenter that morning. Like when I would watch Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann. I would watch Stuart Scott and Scott Van Pelt. I would watch them and be ready with their catchphrases that morning at school. My ability to talk about sports and to argue with you that Georgia Tech was better than Georgia, that's where I grew up. Here, you don't really argue about anything. No one's good at football here at all. So it doesn't really matter. Oh, also I wanted to say this, uh, this is just an aside. This is just me for fun. Uh, I would never, ever use this platform to pray for a sports team or an athlete. But if I were going to, I would invite us to join in prayer for Rory McIlroy today. If you, if you need more reason to root against Bryson DeChambeau today, Alan has money on him. He told me before the service. So let's just double down on Rory today. Yes? Good. But when I was a kid, my ability to do that, to talk about sports, is where I got a sense of value and worth. And how fast you were is how valuable you were. How hard you could kick a ball, how far you could throw it, how good you were at sports. If a dude was better than you at sports, he was a more valuable human than you. That was just the nature of the beast. That was the jungle when I grew up. Then it evolved. In high school, I started learning that I could also get value from making people laugh. Every now and again, I could convince a girl to like me. And that makes you feel valuable. And then in college, it develops. Then I began to get a sense of value and worth out of my ability to be a pastor. And then I got hired as one. And my sense of value and worth came from my job performance. And God, in his goodness, has redeemed this. But anybody who would try to argue with you that they don't get a sense of value and worth from extrinsic things, from things on the outside, isn't being honest with you. And so I think we all have this sense of value that evolves over time. And what I want to press upon you this morning is for the Christian, the natural and right evolution of our identity is to rest in our identity in Christ. For the Christian, the natural and right evolution of that identity, as you progress through the years and you land in a place, is for that place to be rested in Christ. It's for us to find our identity in him. Because the world has all these messages about who we are and what we should do. But Christ does too. And I think one of the hardest things about being a Christian is to listen to that voice of Jesus that tells us who and what we are. Because the world is so loud and it is so convincing and it is so ever-present that you begin to listen to what the world says about you more than you listen to what your creator says about you. And we forget, I think, who we are in Christ. And we start to believe what the world says we are. So this morning, I want to remind you of who you are in Christ. I would encourage you to look, to Google who I am in Jesus. Look up all the verses that proclaim who you are. I don't have enough time to go through even 10% of them this morning. There's so many ways the Bible affirms you and who you are. But I've got four for you that I want to read to you this morning. The first is Romans, I think 15.1 or maybe 5.1. It says, you are accepted. Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We've been justified by Christ. We are accepted. We are accepted by him. And when I say this, I think that we just kind of mentally go, yeah, I know. But think about how hard you struggle for acceptance in your life. Think about how much you want the approval of others. Some of us can readily admit, yeah, the opinion of other people matters to me. Others of us like to say this stupid thing. I don't care what other people think. Yes, you do. You just care what some people think. But you don't care what nobody thinks. All right? Tough guy? I'm talking to me. We all of us struggle to be accepted. And what Jesus tells us is, you are accepted. You're never going to be more accepted than you are. You're never going to be more desired than you are. He tells us that we are chosen. John 15, 16, you did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go bear fruit, fruit that will last. And so that whatever you ask in my name, the Father will give you. This is my command, and I'm including it because I mentioned it earlier. Love each other. That's what Jesus says. You didn't choose me. I chose you. You were accepted by Christ. You are chosen by Christ. We've all had times in our lives when we didn't feel chosen. When we didn't feel picked. When we felt looked over. When we felt passed over. When we felt inadequate. Like maybe we didn't matter. And Jesus says, no, no, no, I accept you. And I choose you. 1 Corinthians 3.23 tells us that you belong to Jesus. Whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours and you are of Christ and Christ is of God. You belong to Jesus. You are of Christ. This is what the Bible says about you, and this is my favorite one. You are safe. Romans 8, 38, 39, the crescendo of the greatest chapter in the Bible. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. You are safe. You are kept. We're doing a series that we just got done planning. The next series coming up is FAQs. And we've sussed out some questions from our small groups to see what kinds of things y'all are thinking about and wondering about. And one of the questions that came up a couple of times is, once you're saved, are you always saved? If you ask that question, read Romans 8, verses 38 and 39. Read it to yourself again and again and again, and know that you are held in God's hand. And know that if Christ has saved you, Christ will keep you. If Christ has chosen you, he will protect you. If he has redeemed you, he will glorify you. Guys, I don't think that we sit in the reality of... I don't think that we sit clearly in the reality of these things, that we are accepted and that we are chosen and that we are loved and that we are safe. I don't think that we do that. I think that we still continue to trust what the world has to say about who we are. And here's the problem. These identities that we've built for ourselves, these ways that we gauge ourselves and our value, when they are not Christ, they will all fail us. They will all fail us. Every identity you build for yourself will eventually fail you. And sometimes it fails you because you've chosen to gauge your worth on a thing you're not good at. I have friends who are not, they're not career driven men and they feel like failures all the time because they get a sense in our society, men have to achieve. We have to do, what do you do for work? What's your next step? Where are you going? How many direct reports do you have? Or are you starting a company? How is that going? We get our sense of value and worth from how we are as professionals. But some of us are not wired to be professionals. And some of us are not wired for success. And we don't want to climb the corporate ladder. And we're very happy to put the thing down at 5 o'clock and go home and be with our family, and that's really what we want. But the world has told us that we are how successful we are, and so we walk through life feeling bad about not meeting a goal that we never wanted to meet. I talked with a mom this week who gets her sense of worth and value from her kids' behavior. And it made me sad because I know some moms, even in this church and in my circles of friends, that have uniquely challenging children. Not because those children are bad and not because they're bad moms. Because they have severe ADHD. Because they have different pressures on them that we don't understand. Because they have sensitivities to things that are hard. And these moms beat themselves up because their kids act out in church or at school or because they're the one to get the phone call. And when that is our sense of worth and value, we just get beat up over and over and over again. When we listen to what the world says we need to be, when what's true about those moms is they're incredible moms. They're wonderful and they love their children very much. But we let the world beat us up and tell us that we're not and that we're not valuable because we forget who we are in Christ. And we let that voice drown us out. But many of us in here don't feel as worthy as we should because we're not listening to Jesus. We're listening to the world and we've allowed the world to put us in a game that we can't win. That's not where we should get our value from. And here's another way that your identity will fail you. Maybe you've been fortunate in your life to move the target of your worth to something that you can actually hit. Maybe you've been fortunate and wise enough to go, you know what? I'm not really going to listen to the world. I'm going to choose my own path, and this is what's going to make me feel valuable. But even when you choose something you're good at, that will fail you too. I pride myself very much on being a good friend. I have told people on my tombstone, I simply wanted to say Nate was a friend. Friendship is so important to me. And I've always placed a high value on my ability to be a good friend. And in the last couple of months, I failed a friend. I was a bad friend to someone I love a lot. And when I realized that, it shook me for weeks. And I realized, my goodness, I've idolized this sense of my value. I haven't been finding it in Christ. I've been finding it in my ability to do this for other people. And this is actually a good thing. It's shaken me and helped me realize that I hold this in a disproportionate way. So even the things that we build in our life that we're good at, eventually that will fail us too. And we'll have to repent of that. But here's what I know is true of you and why we build our identities in this way. Because we, all of us, we all want to be accepted, chosen, safe, and to belong. We all want that. And I'll be honest with you. When I write sermons like this, they're a little touchy-feely. We all want to be safe and chosen. Sometimes I speak to this part of the room because this is where our young families are, and sometimes I talk to parents here. Today, I'm going to talk to that portion of the room, because that's where our stubborn, crusty men sit. And when they hear me talk like this, everyone wants to be chosen and accepted and loved. I always, in the back of my head, I think, how are they processing this? Because they probably think I'm a sissy, right? But even you guys want this. Even you guys struggle for this. Everybody wants to be accepted and chosen and loved and protected. And we have that in Christ. He gives it to you. He tells you through his word. He preaches it to you. He reminds you of it. We sing about it. And yet some of you will go from here and you will walk out those doors and choose to believe what the world says about you instead of what Jesus says about you. So I just want to remind you of it this morning. And we come full circle to what I said at the beginning. And hopefully now it makes sense and carries a weight for you. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. Do you have any idea how well you will love other people when you let Jesus love you? You'll be able to celebrate their success. You'll be able to celebrate their rise. You'll have an equanimity and a calmness of demeanor because you know who you are in Jesus. And you wake up every day knowing I am fully loved. I am fully protected. I am fully safe. I am fully chosen. The world can do to me what it wants, but I have Jesus and I have his love and I'm good. Can you imagine walking in that level of help? Walking in such an awareness of the love of Christ that he has for you. That from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace and now God's grace overflows from you onto the people around you. Can you imagine being an agent of that kind of love where you know every day God loves you so much that it literally oozes out of you onto the people around you that they feel God's love because you are present in their life. Can you imagine that? It's only possible when we let Jesus love us first. Grace, Jesus loves you. He died on the cross for you. This week we celebrate Holy Week. This is Palm Sunday, where they laid down the palm branches and the children said, Hosanna. And Jesus knowingly walked to his death for you. So please, when you go out these doors today, do not listen to what the world says you are. Do not listen to what you say you are. Listen to what Jesus says you are, to who he says you are, and how much he loves you, and how he has chosen you. And let's walk in that love and see how God uses us. Can we do that? Let me pray for you, then we're going to celebrate communion. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for how much you love us. Thank you for who you are and how you've provided for us. God, I pray that we would hear you, that we would accept and receive you. I pray that we would love and serve others well because we allow you to love and serve us. Help us to exist in the reality of your overwhelming love, of your acceptance and your affirmation. Father, if there's anyone here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would. If there's anyone here who has not received your love, I pray that they would receive it today. Help us to walk in light of the fact that we are chosen and accepted and safe. Help us to walk in light of your love. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, good morning, everyone. Happy Palm Sunday. Somebody asked me before the service who's got a Catholic background, they said, do Christians still do Palm Sunday or is that just a Catholic thing? Which I found to be a wonderful question and yeah, Christians do Palm Sunday. Okay, so just so we're all on the same page, it's Holy Week for us too. And we've been doing this whole series through Mark, asking God to prepare our hearts and minds to celebrate Easter and to reflect on and properly value the resurrection. And so this week we prepare to do that. We have our Good Friday service on Friday evening. If you are able to come, I would really encourage you to do that. That is on Friday. We intentionally sit in the heaviness of the crucifixion. We intentionally focus on the cross and on the reality that Friday was believing that when we do that, our hearts are prepared to celebrate the resurrection better on Sunday. So Friday, I will just tell you, is a heavy service. I would not recommend bringing children to it. We are somber and sober on purpose because it helps us appreciate Easter Sunday better. This morning, as we do celebrate Palm Sunday, we will focus on the reality of Jesus on the cross, and we'll finish with having communion at the end of the service. But this is really a continuation of the sermon I preached to you, or I even said that Sunday that it wasn't a sermon, it was me sharing. This is a continuation of what I want to share from Istanbul. Okay. When, when I was sharing about Istanbul and somebody said that they just listened to the sermon, uh, from that morning on the way over, um, which I'm so glad that people are doing that and keeping up. But I shared with you my two takeaways from the experience that I had in Istanbul. And for those of you who maybe this is your first time, this is totally out of context for you. A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to go to Turkey and sit in a room with persecuted Iranian pastors who were being trained by a friend of mine. And it was a really impactful week, such a privilege to be there. And so when I came, I got home on a Saturday and then I had to preach on a Sunday. I didn't even know where I was in space or time, and I thought, I'm just going to share what I took away and hope that that works. And you guys were gracious with me and said that that counted, and I got paid that week. But there was two things. There's two things that I took away. The first was just the chasm of difference in how the persecuted church thinks about church and how the secure church thinks about church. And there may be a series coming on that, which I'm sure you guys will be really thrilled about to come in every week and be made to feel terrible for how we think about church. But that may just be what we need. So I'm thinking about that. The other point that I made was out of this verse in Mark. This is the quintessential Mark verse. If you were to say what verse encapsulates the book of Mark that we've been going through all spring, it is this verse, chapter 9, verse 36. I'm sorry, verse 35. Sitting down, Jesus called the twelve and said, Anyone who wants to be first must be very last and the servant of all. That is the quintessential Marconian verse. That's the gospel of Mark. Whoever wants to be first must be the servant of all. It's a book about service. And I talked with you guys about a man that I met named Yahya who personified this type of service. And I described him as capturing the essence of that Colossians verse, that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession and through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God. That was the sense I got with him. And so the other takeaway was, let's lead and serve like Jesus does. Let's be inspired by the model of Yahya and lead and serve like him. But here's what I wanted to say after that. I wanted to make another point, but as I wrote that point in my notes and I was going through it that Sunday morning, I thought I can't just drop that at the end of a service and not talk about it and not give it adequate space. We need to be able to develop this idea and talk about this idea. That's like a whole separate sermon. And then I went, huh, I'm in charge of the sermons that we preach. I can just do that one later. So this is later. All right. I wanted to talk about what we talked about last week. Last week, I wanted to talk about this on Palm Sunday. I felt like it was more appropriate leading into communion, but this is really part two of that. This is what I wanted to say. When I say we should lead and love and serve like Christ. We should be inspired by the examples of holy people who lead and serve and love well. The point that I wanted to make is this. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. I'm going to spend the rest of the day talking about this so that I can make sure we have an adequate understanding of it. But we cannot love others as Jesus loved. That's a quintessential. I said Marconian, so now I will say Johannian. That is a quintessential verse in John to sum up that gospel is when Jesus says, go and love others as I have loved you. That is the gospel of John encapsulated. And so we take the gospel of Mark and we take the gospel of John and we say, yes, Lord, this is what we want to do. is we cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. And here's what I mean when I say that. We all have a sense of identity and value and worth that we get from something somewhere. This is universally true. We all have something that we measure ourselves by that makes us feel valuable or not valuable. We all have a sense of identity. I am blank. I am this. And this identity and our sense of identity and where we get our worth evolves over time, right? I remember when I was a kid in elementary school at Camp Creek Elementary, that my value and worth was based on my knowledge of SportsCenter that morning. Like when I would watch Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann. I would watch Stuart Scott and Scott Van Pelt. I would watch them and be ready with their catchphrases that morning at school. My ability to talk about sports and to argue with you that Georgia Tech was better than Georgia, that's where I grew up. Here, you don't really argue about anything. No one's good at football here at all. So it doesn't really matter. Oh, also I wanted to say this, uh, this is just an aside. This is just me for fun. Uh, I would never, ever use this platform to pray for a sports team or an athlete. But if I were going to, I would invite us to join in prayer for Rory McIlroy today. If you, if you need more reason to root against Bryson DeChambeau today, Alan has money on him. He told me before the service. So let's just double down on Rory today. Yes? Good. But when I was a kid, my ability to do that, to talk about sports, is where I got a sense of value and worth. And how fast you were is how valuable you were. How hard you could kick a ball, how far you could throw it, how good you were at sports. If a dude was better than you at sports, he was a more valuable human than you. That was just the nature of the beast. That was the jungle when I grew up. Then it evolved. In high school, I started learning that I could also get value from making people laugh. Every now and again, I could convince a girl to like me. And that makes you feel valuable. And then in college, it develops. Then I began to get a sense of value and worth out of my ability to be a pastor. And then I got hired as one. And my sense of value and worth came from my job performance. And God, in his goodness, has redeemed this. But anybody who would try to argue with you that they don't get a sense of value and worth from extrinsic things, from things on the outside, isn't being honest with you. And so I think we all have this sense of value that evolves over time. And what I want to press upon you this morning is for the Christian, the natural and right evolution of our identity is to rest in our identity in Christ. For the Christian, the natural and right evolution of that identity, as you progress through the years and you land in a place, is for that place to be rested in Christ. It's for us to find our identity in him. Because the world has all these messages about who we are and what we should do. But Christ does too. And I think one of the hardest things about being a Christian is to listen to that voice of Jesus that tells us who and what we are. Because the world is so loud and it is so convincing and it is so ever-present that you begin to listen to what the world says about you more than you listen to what your creator says about you. And we forget, I think, who we are in Christ. And we start to believe what the world says we are. So this morning, I want to remind you of who you are in Christ. I would encourage you to look, to Google who I am in Jesus. Look up all the verses that proclaim who you are. I don't have enough time to go through even 10% of them this morning. There's so many ways the Bible affirms you and who you are. But I've got four for you that I want to read to you this morning. The first is Romans, I think 15.1 or maybe 5.1. It says, you are accepted. Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We've been justified by Christ. We are accepted. We are accepted by him. And when I say this, I think that we just kind of mentally go, yeah, I know. But think about how hard you struggle for acceptance in your life. Think about how much you want the approval of others. Some of us can readily admit, yeah, the opinion of other people matters to me. Others of us like to say this stupid thing. I don't care what other people think. Yes, you do. You just care what some people think. But you don't care what nobody thinks. All right? Tough guy? I'm talking to me. We all of us struggle to be accepted. And what Jesus tells us is, you are accepted. You're never going to be more accepted than you are. You're never going to be more desired than you are. He tells us that we are chosen. John 15, 16, you did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go bear fruit, fruit that will last. And so that whatever you ask in my name, the Father will give you. This is my command, and I'm including it because I mentioned it earlier. Love each other. That's what Jesus says. You didn't choose me. I chose you. You were accepted by Christ. You are chosen by Christ. We've all had times in our lives when we didn't feel chosen. When we didn't feel picked. When we felt looked over. When we felt passed over. When we felt inadequate. Like maybe we didn't matter. And Jesus says, no, no, no, I accept you. And I choose you. 1 Corinthians 3.23 tells us that you belong to Jesus. Whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours and you are of Christ and Christ is of God. You belong to Jesus. You are of Christ. This is what the Bible says about you, and this is my favorite one. You are safe. Romans 8, 38, 39, the crescendo of the greatest chapter in the Bible. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. You are safe. You are kept. We're doing a series that we just got done planning. The next series coming up is FAQs. And we've sussed out some questions from our small groups to see what kinds of things y'all are thinking about and wondering about. And one of the questions that came up a couple of times is, once you're saved, are you always saved? If you ask that question, read Romans 8, verses 38 and 39. Read it to yourself again and again and again, and know that you are held in God's hand. And know that if Christ has saved you, Christ will keep you. If Christ has chosen you, he will protect you. If he has redeemed you, he will glorify you. Guys, I don't think that we sit in the reality of... I don't think that we sit clearly in the reality of these things, that we are accepted and that we are chosen and that we are loved and that we are safe. I don't think that we do that. I think that we still continue to trust what the world has to say about who we are. And here's the problem. These identities that we've built for ourselves, these ways that we gauge ourselves and our value, when they are not Christ, they will all fail us. They will all fail us. Every identity you build for yourself will eventually fail you. And sometimes it fails you because you've chosen to gauge your worth on a thing you're not good at. I have friends who are not, they're not career driven men and they feel like failures all the time because they get a sense in our society, men have to achieve. We have to do, what do you do for work? What's your next step? Where are you going? How many direct reports do you have? Or are you starting a company? How is that going? We get our sense of value and worth from how we are as professionals. But some of us are not wired to be professionals. And some of us are not wired for success. And we don't want to climb the corporate ladder. And we're very happy to put the thing down at 5 o'clock and go home and be with our family, and that's really what we want. But the world has told us that we are how successful we are, and so we walk through life feeling bad about not meeting a goal that we never wanted to meet. I talked with a mom this week who gets her sense of worth and value from her kids' behavior. And it made me sad because I know some moms, even in this church and in my circles of friends, that have uniquely challenging children. Not because those children are bad and not because they're bad moms. Because they have severe ADHD. Because they have different pressures on them that we don't understand. Because they have sensitivities to things that are hard. And these moms beat themselves up because their kids act out in church or at school or because they're the one to get the phone call. And when that is our sense of worth and value, we just get beat up over and over and over again. When we listen to what the world says we need to be, when what's true about those moms is they're incredible moms. They're wonderful and they love their children very much. But we let the world beat us up and tell us that we're not and that we're not valuable because we forget who we are in Christ. And we let that voice drown us out. But many of us in here don't feel as worthy as we should because we're not listening to Jesus. We're listening to the world and we've allowed the world to put us in a game that we can't win. That's not where we should get our value from. And here's another way that your identity will fail you. Maybe you've been fortunate in your life to move the target of your worth to something that you can actually hit. Maybe you've been fortunate and wise enough to go, you know what? I'm not really going to listen to the world. I'm going to choose my own path, and this is what's going to make me feel valuable. But even when you choose something you're good at, that will fail you too. I pride myself very much on being a good friend. I have told people on my tombstone, I simply wanted to say Nate was a friend. Friendship is so important to me. And I've always placed a high value on my ability to be a good friend. And in the last couple of months, I failed a friend. I was a bad friend to someone I love a lot. And when I realized that, it shook me for weeks. And I realized, my goodness, I've idolized this sense of my value. I haven't been finding it in Christ. I've been finding it in my ability to do this for other people. And this is actually a good thing. It's shaken me and helped me realize that I hold this in a disproportionate way. So even the things that we build in our life that we're good at, eventually that will fail us too. And we'll have to repent of that. But here's what I know is true of you and why we build our identities in this way. Because we, all of us, we all want to be accepted, chosen, safe, and to belong. We all want that. And I'll be honest with you. When I write sermons like this, they're a little touchy-feely. We all want to be safe and chosen. Sometimes I speak to this part of the room because this is where our young families are, and sometimes I talk to parents here. Today, I'm going to talk to that portion of the room, because that's where our stubborn, crusty men sit. And when they hear me talk like this, everyone wants to be chosen and accepted and loved. I always, in the back of my head, I think, how are they processing this? Because they probably think I'm a sissy, right? But even you guys want this. Even you guys struggle for this. Everybody wants to be accepted and chosen and loved and protected. And we have that in Christ. He gives it to you. He tells you through his word. He preaches it to you. He reminds you of it. We sing about it. And yet some of you will go from here and you will walk out those doors and choose to believe what the world says about you instead of what Jesus says about you. So I just want to remind you of it this morning. And we come full circle to what I said at the beginning. And hopefully now it makes sense and carries a weight for you. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. Do you have any idea how well you will love other people when you let Jesus love you? You'll be able to celebrate their success. You'll be able to celebrate their rise. You'll have an equanimity and a calmness of demeanor because you know who you are in Jesus. And you wake up every day knowing I am fully loved. I am fully protected. I am fully safe. I am fully chosen. The world can do to me what it wants, but I have Jesus and I have his love and I'm good. Can you imagine walking in that level of help? Walking in such an awareness of the love of Christ that he has for you. That from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace and now God's grace overflows from you onto the people around you. Can you imagine being an agent of that kind of love where you know every day God loves you so much that it literally oozes out of you onto the people around you that they feel God's love because you are present in their life. Can you imagine that? It's only possible when we let Jesus love us first. Grace, Jesus loves you. He died on the cross for you. This week we celebrate Holy Week. This is Palm Sunday, where they laid down the palm branches and the children said, Hosanna. And Jesus knowingly walked to his death for you. So please, when you go out these doors today, do not listen to what the world says you are. Do not listen to what you say you are. Listen to what Jesus says you are, to who he says you are, and how much he loves you, and how he has chosen you. And let's walk in that love and see how God uses us. Can we do that? Let me pray for you, then we're going to celebrate communion. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for how much you love us. Thank you for who you are and how you've provided for us. God, I pray that we would hear you, that we would accept and receive you. I pray that we would love and serve others well because we allow you to love and serve us. Help us to exist in the reality of your overwhelming love, of your acceptance and your affirmation. Father, if there's anyone here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would. If there's anyone here who has not received your love, I pray that they would receive it today. Help us to walk in light of the fact that we are chosen and accepted and safe. Help us to walk in light of your love. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, good morning, everyone. Happy Palm Sunday. Somebody asked me before the service who's got a Catholic background, they said, do Christians still do Palm Sunday or is that just a Catholic thing? Which I found to be a wonderful question and yeah, Christians do Palm Sunday. Okay, so just so we're all on the same page, it's Holy Week for us too. And we've been doing this whole series through Mark, asking God to prepare our hearts and minds to celebrate Easter and to reflect on and properly value the resurrection. And so this week we prepare to do that. We have our Good Friday service on Friday evening. If you are able to come, I would really encourage you to do that. That is on Friday. We intentionally sit in the heaviness of the crucifixion. We intentionally focus on the cross and on the reality that Friday was believing that when we do that, our hearts are prepared to celebrate the resurrection better on Sunday. So Friday, I will just tell you, is a heavy service. I would not recommend bringing children to it. We are somber and sober on purpose because it helps us appreciate Easter Sunday better. This morning, as we do celebrate Palm Sunday, we will focus on the reality of Jesus on the cross, and we'll finish with having communion at the end of the service. But this is really a continuation of the sermon I preached to you, or I even said that Sunday that it wasn't a sermon, it was me sharing. This is a continuation of what I want to share from Istanbul. Okay. When, when I was sharing about Istanbul and somebody said that they just listened to the sermon, uh, from that morning on the way over, um, which I'm so glad that people are doing that and keeping up. But I shared with you my two takeaways from the experience that I had in Istanbul. And for those of you who maybe this is your first time, this is totally out of context for you. A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to go to Turkey and sit in a room with persecuted Iranian pastors who were being trained by a friend of mine. And it was a really impactful week, such a privilege to be there. And so when I came, I got home on a Saturday and then I had to preach on a Sunday. I didn't even know where I was in space or time, and I thought, I'm just going to share what I took away and hope that that works. And you guys were gracious with me and said that that counted, and I got paid that week. But there was two things. There's two things that I took away. The first was just the chasm of difference in how the persecuted church thinks about church and how the secure church thinks about church. And there may be a series coming on that, which I'm sure you guys will be really thrilled about to come in every week and be made to feel terrible for how we think about church. But that may just be what we need. So I'm thinking about that. The other point that I made was out of this verse in Mark. This is the quintessential Mark verse. If you were to say what verse encapsulates the book of Mark that we've been going through all spring, it is this verse, chapter 9, verse 36. I'm sorry, verse 35. Sitting down, Jesus called the twelve and said, Anyone who wants to be first must be very last and the servant of all. That is the quintessential Marconian verse. That's the gospel of Mark. Whoever wants to be first must be the servant of all. It's a book about service. And I talked with you guys about a man that I met named Yahya who personified this type of service. And I described him as capturing the essence of that Colossians verse, that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession and through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God. That was the sense I got with him. And so the other takeaway was, let's lead and serve like Jesus does. Let's be inspired by the model of Yahya and lead and serve like him. But here's what I wanted to say after that. I wanted to make another point, but as I wrote that point in my notes and I was going through it that Sunday morning, I thought I can't just drop that at the end of a service and not talk about it and not give it adequate space. We need to be able to develop this idea and talk about this idea. That's like a whole separate sermon. And then I went, huh, I'm in charge of the sermons that we preach. I can just do that one later. So this is later. All right. I wanted to talk about what we talked about last week. Last week, I wanted to talk about this on Palm Sunday. I felt like it was more appropriate leading into communion, but this is really part two of that. This is what I wanted to say. When I say we should lead and love and serve like Christ. We should be inspired by the examples of holy people who lead and serve and love well. The point that I wanted to make is this. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. I'm going to spend the rest of the day talking about this so that I can make sure we have an adequate understanding of it. But we cannot love others as Jesus loved. That's a quintessential. I said Marconian, so now I will say Johannian. That is a quintessential verse in John to sum up that gospel is when Jesus says, go and love others as I have loved you. That is the gospel of John encapsulated. And so we take the gospel of Mark and we take the gospel of John and we say, yes, Lord, this is what we want to do. is we cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. And here's what I mean when I say that. We all have a sense of identity and value and worth that we get from something somewhere. This is universally true. We all have something that we measure ourselves by that makes us feel valuable or not valuable. We all have a sense of identity. I am blank. I am this. And this identity and our sense of identity and where we get our worth evolves over time, right? I remember when I was a kid in elementary school at Camp Creek Elementary, that my value and worth was based on my knowledge of SportsCenter that morning. Like when I would watch Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann. I would watch Stuart Scott and Scott Van Pelt. I would watch them and be ready with their catchphrases that morning at school. My ability to talk about sports and to argue with you that Georgia Tech was better than Georgia, that's where I grew up. Here, you don't really argue about anything. No one's good at football here at all. So it doesn't really matter. Oh, also I wanted to say this, uh, this is just an aside. This is just me for fun. Uh, I would never, ever use this platform to pray for a sports team or an athlete. But if I were going to, I would invite us to join in prayer for Rory McIlroy today. If you, if you need more reason to root against Bryson DeChambeau today, Alan has money on him. He told me before the service. So let's just double down on Rory today. Yes? Good. But when I was a kid, my ability to do that, to talk about sports, is where I got a sense of value and worth. And how fast you were is how valuable you were. How hard you could kick a ball, how far you could throw it, how good you were at sports. If a dude was better than you at sports, he was a more valuable human than you. That was just the nature of the beast. That was the jungle when I grew up. Then it evolved. In high school, I started learning that I could also get value from making people laugh. Every now and again, I could convince a girl to like me. And that makes you feel valuable. And then in college, it develops. Then I began to get a sense of value and worth out of my ability to be a pastor. And then I got hired as one. And my sense of value and worth came from my job performance. And God, in his goodness, has redeemed this. But anybody who would try to argue with you that they don't get a sense of value and worth from extrinsic things, from things on the outside, isn't being honest with you. And so I think we all have this sense of value that evolves over time. And what I want to press upon you this morning is for the Christian, the natural and right evolution of our identity is to rest in our identity in Christ. For the Christian, the natural and right evolution of that identity, as you progress through the years and you land in a place, is for that place to be rested in Christ. It's for us to find our identity in him. Because the world has all these messages about who we are and what we should do. But Christ does too. And I think one of the hardest things about being a Christian is to listen to that voice of Jesus that tells us who and what we are. Because the world is so loud and it is so convincing and it is so ever-present that you begin to listen to what the world says about you more than you listen to what your creator says about you. And we forget, I think, who we are in Christ. And we start to believe what the world says we are. So this morning, I want to remind you of who you are in Christ. I would encourage you to look, to Google who I am in Jesus. Look up all the verses that proclaim who you are. I don't have enough time to go through even 10% of them this morning. There's so many ways the Bible affirms you and who you are. But I've got four for you that I want to read to you this morning. The first is Romans, I think 15.1 or maybe 5.1. It says, you are accepted. Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We've been justified by Christ. We are accepted. We are accepted by him. And when I say this, I think that we just kind of mentally go, yeah, I know. But think about how hard you struggle for acceptance in your life. Think about how much you want the approval of others. Some of us can readily admit, yeah, the opinion of other people matters to me. Others of us like to say this stupid thing. I don't care what other people think. Yes, you do. You just care what some people think. But you don't care what nobody thinks. All right? Tough guy? I'm talking to me. We all of us struggle to be accepted. And what Jesus tells us is, you are accepted. You're never going to be more accepted than you are. You're never going to be more desired than you are. He tells us that we are chosen. John 15, 16, you did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go bear fruit, fruit that will last. And so that whatever you ask in my name, the Father will give you. This is my command, and I'm including it because I mentioned it earlier. Love each other. That's what Jesus says. You didn't choose me. I chose you. You were accepted by Christ. You are chosen by Christ. We've all had times in our lives when we didn't feel chosen. When we didn't feel picked. When we felt looked over. When we felt passed over. When we felt inadequate. Like maybe we didn't matter. And Jesus says, no, no, no, I accept you. And I choose you. 1 Corinthians 3.23 tells us that you belong to Jesus. Whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours and you are of Christ and Christ is of God. You belong to Jesus. You are of Christ. This is what the Bible says about you, and this is my favorite one. You are safe. Romans 8, 38, 39, the crescendo of the greatest chapter in the Bible. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. You are safe. You are kept. We're doing a series that we just got done planning. The next series coming up is FAQs. And we've sussed out some questions from our small groups to see what kinds of things y'all are thinking about and wondering about. And one of the questions that came up a couple of times is, once you're saved, are you always saved? If you ask that question, read Romans 8, verses 38 and 39. Read it to yourself again and again and again, and know that you are held in God's hand. And know that if Christ has saved you, Christ will keep you. If Christ has chosen you, he will protect you. If he has redeemed you, he will glorify you. Guys, I don't think that we sit in the reality of... I don't think that we sit clearly in the reality of these things, that we are accepted and that we are chosen and that we are loved and that we are safe. I don't think that we do that. I think that we still continue to trust what the world has to say about who we are. And here's the problem. These identities that we've built for ourselves, these ways that we gauge ourselves and our value, when they are not Christ, they will all fail us. They will all fail us. Every identity you build for yourself will eventually fail you. And sometimes it fails you because you've chosen to gauge your worth on a thing you're not good at. I have friends who are not, they're not career driven men and they feel like failures all the time because they get a sense in our society, men have to achieve. We have to do, what do you do for work? What's your next step? Where are you going? How many direct reports do you have? Or are you starting a company? How is that going? We get our sense of value and worth from how we are as professionals. But some of us are not wired to be professionals. And some of us are not wired for success. And we don't want to climb the corporate ladder. And we're very happy to put the thing down at 5 o'clock and go home and be with our family, and that's really what we want. But the world has told us that we are how successful we are, and so we walk through life feeling bad about not meeting a goal that we never wanted to meet. I talked with a mom this week who gets her sense of worth and value from her kids' behavior. And it made me sad because I know some moms, even in this church and in my circles of friends, that have uniquely challenging children. Not because those children are bad and not because they're bad moms. Because they have severe ADHD. Because they have different pressures on them that we don't understand. Because they have sensitivities to things that are hard. And these moms beat themselves up because their kids act out in church or at school or because they're the one to get the phone call. And when that is our sense of worth and value, we just get beat up over and over and over again. When we listen to what the world says we need to be, when what's true about those moms is they're incredible moms. They're wonderful and they love their children very much. But we let the world beat us up and tell us that we're not and that we're not valuable because we forget who we are in Christ. And we let that voice drown us out. But many of us in here don't feel as worthy as we should because we're not listening to Jesus. We're listening to the world and we've allowed the world to put us in a game that we can't win. That's not where we should get our value from. And here's another way that your identity will fail you. Maybe you've been fortunate in your life to move the target of your worth to something that you can actually hit. Maybe you've been fortunate and wise enough to go, you know what? I'm not really going to listen to the world. I'm going to choose my own path, and this is what's going to make me feel valuable. But even when you choose something you're good at, that will fail you too. I pride myself very much on being a good friend. I have told people on my tombstone, I simply wanted to say Nate was a friend. Friendship is so important to me. And I've always placed a high value on my ability to be a good friend. And in the last couple of months, I failed a friend. I was a bad friend to someone I love a lot. And when I realized that, it shook me for weeks. And I realized, my goodness, I've idolized this sense of my value. I haven't been finding it in Christ. I've been finding it in my ability to do this for other people. And this is actually a good thing. It's shaken me and helped me realize that I hold this in a disproportionate way. So even the things that we build in our life that we're good at, eventually that will fail us too. And we'll have to repent of that. But here's what I know is true of you and why we build our identities in this way. Because we, all of us, we all want to be accepted, chosen, safe, and to belong. We all want that. And I'll be honest with you. When I write sermons like this, they're a little touchy-feely. We all want to be safe and chosen. Sometimes I speak to this part of the room because this is where our young families are, and sometimes I talk to parents here. Today, I'm going to talk to that portion of the room, because that's where our stubborn, crusty men sit. And when they hear me talk like this, everyone wants to be chosen and accepted and loved. I always, in the back of my head, I think, how are they processing this? Because they probably think I'm a sissy, right? But even you guys want this. Even you guys struggle for this. Everybody wants to be accepted and chosen and loved and protected. And we have that in Christ. He gives it to you. He tells you through his word. He preaches it to you. He reminds you of it. We sing about it. And yet some of you will go from here and you will walk out those doors and choose to believe what the world says about you instead of what Jesus says about you. So I just want to remind you of it this morning. And we come full circle to what I said at the beginning. And hopefully now it makes sense and carries a weight for you. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. Do you have any idea how well you will love other people when you let Jesus love you? You'll be able to celebrate their success. You'll be able to celebrate their rise. You'll have an equanimity and a calmness of demeanor because you know who you are in Jesus. And you wake up every day knowing I am fully loved. I am fully protected. I am fully safe. I am fully chosen. The world can do to me what it wants, but I have Jesus and I have his love and I'm good. Can you imagine walking in that level of help? Walking in such an awareness of the love of Christ that he has for you. That from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace and now God's grace overflows from you onto the people around you. Can you imagine being an agent of that kind of love where you know every day God loves you so much that it literally oozes out of you onto the people around you that they feel God's love because you are present in their life. Can you imagine that? It's only possible when we let Jesus love us first. Grace, Jesus loves you. He died on the cross for you. This week we celebrate Holy Week. This is Palm Sunday, where they laid down the palm branches and the children said, Hosanna. And Jesus knowingly walked to his death for you. So please, when you go out these doors today, do not listen to what the world says you are. Do not listen to what you say you are. Listen to what Jesus says you are, to who he says you are, and how much he loves you, and how he has chosen you. And let's walk in that love and see how God uses us. Can we do that? Let me pray for you, then we're going to celebrate communion. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for how much you love us. Thank you for who you are and how you've provided for us. God, I pray that we would hear you, that we would accept and receive you. I pray that we would love and serve others well because we allow you to love and serve us. Help us to exist in the reality of your overwhelming love, of your acceptance and your affirmation. Father, if there's anyone here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would. If there's anyone here who has not received your love, I pray that they would receive it today. Help us to walk in light of the fact that we are chosen and accepted and safe. Help us to walk in light of your love. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, good morning, everyone. Happy Palm Sunday. Somebody asked me before the service who's got a Catholic background, they said, do Christians still do Palm Sunday or is that just a Catholic thing? Which I found to be a wonderful question and yeah, Christians do Palm Sunday. Okay, so just so we're all on the same page, it's Holy Week for us too. And we've been doing this whole series through Mark, asking God to prepare our hearts and minds to celebrate Easter and to reflect on and properly value the resurrection. And so this week we prepare to do that. We have our Good Friday service on Friday evening. If you are able to come, I would really encourage you to do that. That is on Friday. We intentionally sit in the heaviness of the crucifixion. We intentionally focus on the cross and on the reality that Friday was believing that when we do that, our hearts are prepared to celebrate the resurrection better on Sunday. So Friday, I will just tell you, is a heavy service. I would not recommend bringing children to it. We are somber and sober on purpose because it helps us appreciate Easter Sunday better. This morning, as we do celebrate Palm Sunday, we will focus on the reality of Jesus on the cross, and we'll finish with having communion at the end of the service. But this is really a continuation of the sermon I preached to you, or I even said that Sunday that it wasn't a sermon, it was me sharing. This is a continuation of what I want to share from Istanbul. Okay. When, when I was sharing about Istanbul and somebody said that they just listened to the sermon, uh, from that morning on the way over, um, which I'm so glad that people are doing that and keeping up. But I shared with you my two takeaways from the experience that I had in Istanbul. And for those of you who maybe this is your first time, this is totally out of context for you. A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to go to Turkey and sit in a room with persecuted Iranian pastors who were being trained by a friend of mine. And it was a really impactful week, such a privilege to be there. And so when I came, I got home on a Saturday and then I had to preach on a Sunday. I didn't even know where I was in space or time, and I thought, I'm just going to share what I took away and hope that that works. And you guys were gracious with me and said that that counted, and I got paid that week. But there was two things. There's two things that I took away. The first was just the chasm of difference in how the persecuted church thinks about church and how the secure church thinks about church. And there may be a series coming on that, which I'm sure you guys will be really thrilled about to come in every week and be made to feel terrible for how we think about church. But that may just be what we need. So I'm thinking about that. The other point that I made was out of this verse in Mark. This is the quintessential Mark verse. If you were to say what verse encapsulates the book of Mark that we've been going through all spring, it is this verse, chapter 9, verse 36. I'm sorry, verse 35. Sitting down, Jesus called the twelve and said, Anyone who wants to be first must be very last and the servant of all. That is the quintessential Marconian verse. That's the gospel of Mark. Whoever wants to be first must be the servant of all. It's a book about service. And I talked with you guys about a man that I met named Yahya who personified this type of service. And I described him as capturing the essence of that Colossians verse, that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession and through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God. That was the sense I got with him. And so the other takeaway was, let's lead and serve like Jesus does. Let's be inspired by the model of Yahya and lead and serve like him. But here's what I wanted to say after that. I wanted to make another point, but as I wrote that point in my notes and I was going through it that Sunday morning, I thought I can't just drop that at the end of a service and not talk about it and not give it adequate space. We need to be able to develop this idea and talk about this idea. That's like a whole separate sermon. And then I went, huh, I'm in charge of the sermons that we preach. I can just do that one later. So this is later. All right. I wanted to talk about what we talked about last week. Last week, I wanted to talk about this on Palm Sunday. I felt like it was more appropriate leading into communion, but this is really part two of that. This is what I wanted to say. When I say we should lead and love and serve like Christ. We should be inspired by the examples of holy people who lead and serve and love well. The point that I wanted to make is this. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. I'm going to spend the rest of the day talking about this so that I can make sure we have an adequate understanding of it. But we cannot love others as Jesus loved. That's a quintessential. I said Marconian, so now I will say Johannian. That is a quintessential verse in John to sum up that gospel is when Jesus says, go and love others as I have loved you. That is the gospel of John encapsulated. And so we take the gospel of Mark and we take the gospel of John and we say, yes, Lord, this is what we want to do. is we cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. And here's what I mean when I say that. We all have a sense of identity and value and worth that we get from something somewhere. This is universally true. We all have something that we measure ourselves by that makes us feel valuable or not valuable. We all have a sense of identity. I am blank. I am this. And this identity and our sense of identity and where we get our worth evolves over time, right? I remember when I was a kid in elementary school at Camp Creek Elementary, that my value and worth was based on my knowledge of SportsCenter that morning. Like when I would watch Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann. I would watch Stuart Scott and Scott Van Pelt. I would watch them and be ready with their catchphrases that morning at school. My ability to talk about sports and to argue with you that Georgia Tech was better than Georgia, that's where I grew up. Here, you don't really argue about anything. No one's good at football here at all. So it doesn't really matter. Oh, also I wanted to say this, uh, this is just an aside. This is just me for fun. Uh, I would never, ever use this platform to pray for a sports team or an athlete. But if I were going to, I would invite us to join in prayer for Rory McIlroy today. If you, if you need more reason to root against Bryson DeChambeau today, Alan has money on him. He told me before the service. So let's just double down on Rory today. Yes? Good. But when I was a kid, my ability to do that, to talk about sports, is where I got a sense of value and worth. And how fast you were is how valuable you were. How hard you could kick a ball, how far you could throw it, how good you were at sports. If a dude was better than you at sports, he was a more valuable human than you. That was just the nature of the beast. That was the jungle when I grew up. Then it evolved. In high school, I started learning that I could also get value from making people laugh. Every now and again, I could convince a girl to like me. And that makes you feel valuable. And then in college, it develops. Then I began to get a sense of value and worth out of my ability to be a pastor. And then I got hired as one. And my sense of value and worth came from my job performance. And God, in his goodness, has redeemed this. But anybody who would try to argue with you that they don't get a sense of value and worth from extrinsic things, from things on the outside, isn't being honest with you. And so I think we all have this sense of value that evolves over time. And what I want to press upon you this morning is for the Christian, the natural and right evolution of our identity is to rest in our identity in Christ. For the Christian, the natural and right evolution of that identity, as you progress through the years and you land in a place, is for that place to be rested in Christ. It's for us to find our identity in him. Because the world has all these messages about who we are and what we should do. But Christ does too. And I think one of the hardest things about being a Christian is to listen to that voice of Jesus that tells us who and what we are. Because the world is so loud and it is so convincing and it is so ever-present that you begin to listen to what the world says about you more than you listen to what your creator says about you. And we forget, I think, who we are in Christ. And we start to believe what the world says we are. So this morning, I want to remind you of who you are in Christ. I would encourage you to look, to Google who I am in Jesus. Look up all the verses that proclaim who you are. I don't have enough time to go through even 10% of them this morning. There's so many ways the Bible affirms you and who you are. But I've got four for you that I want to read to you this morning. The first is Romans, I think 15.1 or maybe 5.1. It says, you are accepted. Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We've been justified by Christ. We are accepted. We are accepted by him. And when I say this, I think that we just kind of mentally go, yeah, I know. But think about how hard you struggle for acceptance in your life. Think about how much you want the approval of others. Some of us can readily admit, yeah, the opinion of other people matters to me. Others of us like to say this stupid thing. I don't care what other people think. Yes, you do. You just care what some people think. But you don't care what nobody thinks. All right? Tough guy? I'm talking to me. We all of us struggle to be accepted. And what Jesus tells us is, you are accepted. You're never going to be more accepted than you are. You're never going to be more desired than you are. He tells us that we are chosen. John 15, 16, you did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go bear fruit, fruit that will last. And so that whatever you ask in my name, the Father will give you. This is my command, and I'm including it because I mentioned it earlier. Love each other. That's what Jesus says. You didn't choose me. I chose you. You were accepted by Christ. You are chosen by Christ. We've all had times in our lives when we didn't feel chosen. When we didn't feel picked. When we felt looked over. When we felt passed over. When we felt inadequate. Like maybe we didn't matter. And Jesus says, no, no, no, I accept you. And I choose you. 1 Corinthians 3.23 tells us that you belong to Jesus. Whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours and you are of Christ and Christ is of God. You belong to Jesus. You are of Christ. This is what the Bible says about you, and this is my favorite one. You are safe. Romans 8, 38, 39, the crescendo of the greatest chapter in the Bible. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. You are safe. You are kept. We're doing a series that we just got done planning. The next series coming up is FAQs. And we've sussed out some questions from our small groups to see what kinds of things y'all are thinking about and wondering about. And one of the questions that came up a couple of times is, once you're saved, are you always saved? If you ask that question, read Romans 8, verses 38 and 39. Read it to yourself again and again and again, and know that you are held in God's hand. And know that if Christ has saved you, Christ will keep you. If Christ has chosen you, he will protect you. If he has redeemed you, he will glorify you. Guys, I don't think that we sit in the reality of... I don't think that we sit clearly in the reality of these things, that we are accepted and that we are chosen and that we are loved and that we are safe. I don't think that we do that. I think that we still continue to trust what the world has to say about who we are. And here's the problem. These identities that we've built for ourselves, these ways that we gauge ourselves and our value, when they are not Christ, they will all fail us. They will all fail us. Every identity you build for yourself will eventually fail you. And sometimes it fails you because you've chosen to gauge your worth on a thing you're not good at. I have friends who are not, they're not career driven men and they feel like failures all the time because they get a sense in our society, men have to achieve. We have to do, what do you do for work? What's your next step? Where are you going? How many direct reports do you have? Or are you starting a company? How is that going? We get our sense of value and worth from how we are as professionals. But some of us are not wired to be professionals. And some of us are not wired for success. And we don't want to climb the corporate ladder. And we're very happy to put the thing down at 5 o'clock and go home and be with our family, and that's really what we want. But the world has told us that we are how successful we are, and so we walk through life feeling bad about not meeting a goal that we never wanted to meet. I talked with a mom this week who gets her sense of worth and value from her kids' behavior. And it made me sad because I know some moms, even in this church and in my circles of friends, that have uniquely challenging children. Not because those children are bad and not because they're bad moms. Because they have severe ADHD. Because they have different pressures on them that we don't understand. Because they have sensitivities to things that are hard. And these moms beat themselves up because their kids act out in church or at school or because they're the one to get the phone call. And when that is our sense of worth and value, we just get beat up over and over and over again. When we listen to what the world says we need to be, when what's true about those moms is they're incredible moms. They're wonderful and they love their children very much. But we let the world beat us up and tell us that we're not and that we're not valuable because we forget who we are in Christ. And we let that voice drown us out. But many of us in here don't feel as worthy as we should because we're not listening to Jesus. We're listening to the world and we've allowed the world to put us in a game that we can't win. That's not where we should get our value from. And here's another way that your identity will fail you. Maybe you've been fortunate in your life to move the target of your worth to something that you can actually hit. Maybe you've been fortunate and wise enough to go, you know what? I'm not really going to listen to the world. I'm going to choose my own path, and this is what's going to make me feel valuable. But even when you choose something you're good at, that will fail you too. I pride myself very much on being a good friend. I have told people on my tombstone, I simply wanted to say Nate was a friend. Friendship is so important to me. And I've always placed a high value on my ability to be a good friend. And in the last couple of months, I failed a friend. I was a bad friend to someone I love a lot. And when I realized that, it shook me for weeks. And I realized, my goodness, I've idolized this sense of my value. I haven't been finding it in Christ. I've been finding it in my ability to do this for other people. And this is actually a good thing. It's shaken me and helped me realize that I hold this in a disproportionate way. So even the things that we build in our life that we're good at, eventually that will fail us too. And we'll have to repent of that. But here's what I know is true of you and why we build our identities in this way. Because we, all of us, we all want to be accepted, chosen, safe, and to belong. We all want that. And I'll be honest with you. When I write sermons like this, they're a little touchy-feely. We all want to be safe and chosen. Sometimes I speak to this part of the room because this is where our young families are, and sometimes I talk to parents here. Today, I'm going to talk to that portion of the room, because that's where our stubborn, crusty men sit. And when they hear me talk like this, everyone wants to be chosen and accepted and loved. I always, in the back of my head, I think, how are they processing this? Because they probably think I'm a sissy, right? But even you guys want this. Even you guys struggle for this. Everybody wants to be accepted and chosen and loved and protected. And we have that in Christ. He gives it to you. He tells you through his word. He preaches it to you. He reminds you of it. We sing about it. And yet some of you will go from here and you will walk out those doors and choose to believe what the world says about you instead of what Jesus says about you. So I just want to remind you of it this morning. And we come full circle to what I said at the beginning. And hopefully now it makes sense and carries a weight for you. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. Do you have any idea how well you will love other people when you let Jesus love you? You'll be able to celebrate their success. You'll be able to celebrate their rise. You'll have an equanimity and a calmness of demeanor because you know who you are in Jesus. And you wake up every day knowing I am fully loved. I am fully protected. I am fully safe. I am fully chosen. The world can do to me what it wants, but I have Jesus and I have his love and I'm good. Can you imagine walking in that level of help? Walking in such an awareness of the love of Christ that he has for you. That from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace and now God's grace overflows from you onto the people around you. Can you imagine being an agent of that kind of love where you know every day God loves you so much that it literally oozes out of you onto the people around you that they feel God's love because you are present in their life. Can you imagine that? It's only possible when we let Jesus love us first. Grace, Jesus loves you. He died on the cross for you. This week we celebrate Holy Week. This is Palm Sunday, where they laid down the palm branches and the children said, Hosanna. And Jesus knowingly walked to his death for you. So please, when you go out these doors today, do not listen to what the world says you are. Do not listen to what you say you are. Listen to what Jesus says you are, to who he says you are, and how much he loves you, and how he has chosen you. And let's walk in that love and see how God uses us. Can we do that? Let me pray for you, then we're going to celebrate communion. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for how much you love us. Thank you for who you are and how you've provided for us. God, I pray that we would hear you, that we would accept and receive you. I pray that we would love and serve others well because we allow you to love and serve us. Help us to exist in the reality of your overwhelming love, of your acceptance and your affirmation. Father, if there's anyone here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would. If there's anyone here who has not received your love, I pray that they would receive it today. Help us to walk in light of the fact that we are chosen and accepted and safe. Help us to walk in light of your love. In Jesus' name, amen.

All right, good morning, everyone. Happy Palm Sunday. Somebody asked me before the service who's got a Catholic background, they said, do Christians still do Palm Sunday or is that just a Catholic thing? Which I found to be a wonderful question and yeah, Christians do Palm Sunday. Okay, so just so we're all on the same page, it's Holy Week for us too. And we've been doing this whole series through Mark, asking God to prepare our hearts and minds to celebrate Easter and to reflect on and properly value the resurrection. And so this week we prepare to do that. We have our Good Friday service on Friday evening. If you are able to come, I would really encourage you to do that. That is on Friday. We intentionally sit in the heaviness of the crucifixion. We intentionally focus on the cross and on the reality that Friday was believing that when we do that, our hearts are prepared to celebrate the resurrection better on Sunday. So Friday, I will just tell you, is a heavy service. I would not recommend bringing children to it. We are somber and sober on purpose because it helps us appreciate Easter Sunday better. This morning, as we do celebrate Palm Sunday, we will focus on the reality of Jesus on the cross, and we'll finish with having communion at the end of the service. But this is really a continuation of the sermon I preached to you, or I even said that Sunday that it wasn't a sermon, it was me sharing. This is a continuation of what I want to share from Istanbul. Okay. When, when I was sharing about Istanbul and somebody said that they just listened to the sermon, uh, from that morning on the way over, um, which I'm so glad that people are doing that and keeping up. But I shared with you my two takeaways from the experience that I had in Istanbul. And for those of you who maybe this is your first time, this is totally out of context for you. A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to go to Turkey and sit in a room with persecuted Iranian pastors who were being trained by a friend of mine. And it was a really impactful week, such a privilege to be there. And so when I came, I got home on a Saturday and then I had to preach on a Sunday. I didn't even know where I was in space or time, and I thought, I'm just going to share what I took away and hope that that works. And you guys were gracious with me and said that that counted, and I got paid that week. But there was two things. There's two things that I took away. The first was just the chasm of difference in how the persecuted church thinks about church and how the secure church thinks about church. And there may be a series coming on that, which I'm sure you guys will be really thrilled about to come in every week and be made to feel terrible for how we think about church. But that may just be what we need. So I'm thinking about that. The other point that I made was out of this verse in Mark. This is the quintessential Mark verse. If you were to say what verse encapsulates the book of Mark that we've been going through all spring, it is this verse, chapter 9, verse 36. I'm sorry, verse 35. Sitting down, Jesus called the twelve and said, Anyone who wants to be first must be very last and the servant of all. That is the quintessential Marconian verse. That's the gospel of Mark. Whoever wants to be first must be the servant of all. It's a book about service. And I talked with you guys about a man that I met named Yahya who personified this type of service. And I described him as capturing the essence of that Colossians verse, that we are led by Christ in triumphal procession and through us spreads the fragrance and the knowledge of God. That was the sense I got with him. And so the other takeaway was, let's lead and serve like Jesus does. Let's be inspired by the model of Yahya and lead and serve like him. But here's what I wanted to say after that. I wanted to make another point, but as I wrote that point in my notes and I was going through it that Sunday morning, I thought I can't just drop that at the end of a service and not talk about it and not give it adequate space. We need to be able to develop this idea and talk about this idea. That's like a whole separate sermon. And then I went, huh, I'm in charge of the sermons that we preach. I can just do that one later. So this is later. All right. I wanted to talk about what we talked about last week. Last week, I wanted to talk about this on Palm Sunday. I felt like it was more appropriate leading into communion, but this is really part two of that. This is what I wanted to say. When I say we should lead and love and serve like Christ. We should be inspired by the examples of holy people who lead and serve and love well. The point that I wanted to make is this. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. I'm going to spend the rest of the day talking about this so that I can make sure we have an adequate understanding of it. But we cannot love others as Jesus loved. That's a quintessential. I said Marconian, so now I will say Johannian. That is a quintessential verse in John to sum up that gospel is when Jesus says, go and love others as I have loved you. That is the gospel of John encapsulated. And so we take the gospel of Mark and we take the gospel of John and we say, yes, Lord, this is what we want to do. is we cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. And here's what I mean when I say that. We all have a sense of identity and value and worth that we get from something somewhere. This is universally true. We all have something that we measure ourselves by that makes us feel valuable or not valuable. We all have a sense of identity. I am blank. I am this. And this identity and our sense of identity and where we get our worth evolves over time, right? I remember when I was a kid in elementary school at Camp Creek Elementary, that my value and worth was based on my knowledge of SportsCenter that morning. Like when I would watch Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann. I would watch Stuart Scott and Scott Van Pelt. I would watch them and be ready with their catchphrases that morning at school. My ability to talk about sports and to argue with you that Georgia Tech was better than Georgia, that's where I grew up. Here, you don't really argue about anything. No one's good at football here at all. So it doesn't really matter. Oh, also I wanted to say this, uh, this is just an aside. This is just me for fun. Uh, I would never, ever use this platform to pray for a sports team or an athlete. But if I were going to, I would invite us to join in prayer for Rory McIlroy today. If you, if you need more reason to root against Bryson DeChambeau today, Alan has money on him. He told me before the service. So let's just double down on Rory today. Yes? Good. But when I was a kid, my ability to do that, to talk about sports, is where I got a sense of value and worth. And how fast you were is how valuable you were. How hard you could kick a ball, how far you could throw it, how good you were at sports. If a dude was better than you at sports, he was a more valuable human than you. That was just the nature of the beast. That was the jungle when I grew up. Then it evolved. In high school, I started learning that I could also get value from making people laugh. Every now and again, I could convince a girl to like me. And that makes you feel valuable. And then in college, it develops. Then I began to get a sense of value and worth out of my ability to be a pastor. And then I got hired as one. And my sense of value and worth came from my job performance. And God, in his goodness, has redeemed this. But anybody who would try to argue with you that they don't get a sense of value and worth from extrinsic things, from things on the outside, isn't being honest with you. And so I think we all have this sense of value that evolves over time. And what I want to press upon you this morning is for the Christian, the natural and right evolution of our identity is to rest in our identity in Christ. For the Christian, the natural and right evolution of that identity, as you progress through the years and you land in a place, is for that place to be rested in Christ. It's for us to find our identity in him. Because the world has all these messages about who we are and what we should do. But Christ does too. And I think one of the hardest things about being a Christian is to listen to that voice of Jesus that tells us who and what we are. Because the world is so loud and it is so convincing and it is so ever-present that you begin to listen to what the world says about you more than you listen to what your creator says about you. And we forget, I think, who we are in Christ. And we start to believe what the world says we are. So this morning, I want to remind you of who you are in Christ. I would encourage you to look, to Google who I am in Jesus. Look up all the verses that proclaim who you are. I don't have enough time to go through even 10% of them this morning. There's so many ways the Bible affirms you and who you are. But I've got four for you that I want to read to you this morning. The first is Romans, I think 15.1 or maybe 5.1. It says, you are accepted. Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We've been justified by Christ. We are accepted. We are accepted by him. And when I say this, I think that we just kind of mentally go, yeah, I know. But think about how hard you struggle for acceptance in your life. Think about how much you want the approval of others. Some of us can readily admit, yeah, the opinion of other people matters to me. Others of us like to say this stupid thing. I don't care what other people think. Yes, you do. You just care what some people think. But you don't care what nobody thinks. All right? Tough guy? I'm talking to me. We all of us struggle to be accepted. And what Jesus tells us is, you are accepted. You're never going to be more accepted than you are. You're never going to be more desired than you are. He tells us that we are chosen. John 15, 16, you did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go bear fruit, fruit that will last. And so that whatever you ask in my name, the Father will give you. This is my command, and I'm including it because I mentioned it earlier. Love each other. That's what Jesus says. You didn't choose me. I chose you. You were accepted by Christ. You are chosen by Christ. We've all had times in our lives when we didn't feel chosen. When we didn't feel picked. When we felt looked over. When we felt passed over. When we felt inadequate. Like maybe we didn't matter. And Jesus says, no, no, no, I accept you. And I choose you. 1 Corinthians 3.23 tells us that you belong to Jesus. Whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours and you are of Christ and Christ is of God. You belong to Jesus. You are of Christ. This is what the Bible says about you, and this is my favorite one. You are safe. Romans 8, 38, 39, the crescendo of the greatest chapter in the Bible. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. You are safe. You are kept. We're doing a series that we just got done planning. The next series coming up is FAQs. And we've sussed out some questions from our small groups to see what kinds of things y'all are thinking about and wondering about. And one of the questions that came up a couple of times is, once you're saved, are you always saved? If you ask that question, read Romans 8, verses 38 and 39. Read it to yourself again and again and again, and know that you are held in God's hand. And know that if Christ has saved you, Christ will keep you. If Christ has chosen you, he will protect you. If he has redeemed you, he will glorify you. Guys, I don't think that we sit in the reality of... I don't think that we sit clearly in the reality of these things, that we are accepted and that we are chosen and that we are loved and that we are safe. I don't think that we do that. I think that we still continue to trust what the world has to say about who we are. And here's the problem. These identities that we've built for ourselves, these ways that we gauge ourselves and our value, when they are not Christ, they will all fail us. They will all fail us. Every identity you build for yourself will eventually fail you. And sometimes it fails you because you've chosen to gauge your worth on a thing you're not good at. I have friends who are not, they're not career driven men and they feel like failures all the time because they get a sense in our society, men have to achieve. We have to do, what do you do for work? What's your next step? Where are you going? How many direct reports do you have? Or are you starting a company? How is that going? We get our sense of value and worth from how we are as professionals. But some of us are not wired to be professionals. And some of us are not wired for success. And we don't want to climb the corporate ladder. And we're very happy to put the thing down at 5 o'clock and go home and be with our family, and that's really what we want. But the world has told us that we are how successful we are, and so we walk through life feeling bad about not meeting a goal that we never wanted to meet. I talked with a mom this week who gets her sense of worth and value from her kids' behavior. And it made me sad because I know some moms, even in this church and in my circles of friends, that have uniquely challenging children. Not because those children are bad and not because they're bad moms. Because they have severe ADHD. Because they have different pressures on them that we don't understand. Because they have sensitivities to things that are hard. And these moms beat themselves up because their kids act out in church or at school or because they're the one to get the phone call. And when that is our sense of worth and value, we just get beat up over and over and over again. When we listen to what the world says we need to be, when what's true about those moms is they're incredible moms. They're wonderful and they love their children very much. But we let the world beat us up and tell us that we're not and that we're not valuable because we forget who we are in Christ. And we let that voice drown us out. But many of us in here don't feel as worthy as we should because we're not listening to Jesus. We're listening to the world and we've allowed the world to put us in a game that we can't win. That's not where we should get our value from. And here's another way that your identity will fail you. Maybe you've been fortunate in your life to move the target of your worth to something that you can actually hit. Maybe you've been fortunate and wise enough to go, you know what? I'm not really going to listen to the world. I'm going to choose my own path, and this is what's going to make me feel valuable. But even when you choose something you're good at, that will fail you too. I pride myself very much on being a good friend. I have told people on my tombstone, I simply wanted to say Nate was a friend. Friendship is so important to me. And I've always placed a high value on my ability to be a good friend. And in the last couple of months, I failed a friend. I was a bad friend to someone I love a lot. And when I realized that, it shook me for weeks. And I realized, my goodness, I've idolized this sense of my value. I haven't been finding it in Christ. I've been finding it in my ability to do this for other people. And this is actually a good thing. It's shaken me and helped me realize that I hold this in a disproportionate way. So even the things that we build in our life that we're good at, eventually that will fail us too. And we'll have to repent of that. But here's what I know is true of you and why we build our identities in this way. Because we, all of us, we all want to be accepted, chosen, safe, and to belong. We all want that. And I'll be honest with you. When I write sermons like this, they're a little touchy-feely. We all want to be safe and chosen. Sometimes I speak to this part of the room because this is where our young families are, and sometimes I talk to parents here. Today, I'm going to talk to that portion of the room, because that's where our stubborn, crusty men sit. And when they hear me talk like this, everyone wants to be chosen and accepted and loved. I always, in the back of my head, I think, how are they processing this? Because they probably think I'm a sissy, right? But even you guys want this. Even you guys struggle for this. Everybody wants to be accepted and chosen and loved and protected. And we have that in Christ. He gives it to you. He tells you through his word. He preaches it to you. He reminds you of it. We sing about it. And yet some of you will go from here and you will walk out those doors and choose to believe what the world says about you instead of what Jesus says about you. So I just want to remind you of it this morning. And we come full circle to what I said at the beginning. And hopefully now it makes sense and carries a weight for you. We cannot love and serve others until we allow Jesus to love and serve us. Do you have any idea how well you will love other people when you let Jesus love you? You'll be able to celebrate their success. You'll be able to celebrate their rise. You'll have an equanimity and a calmness of demeanor because you know who you are in Jesus. And you wake up every day knowing I am fully loved. I am fully protected. I am fully safe. I am fully chosen. The world can do to me what it wants, but I have Jesus and I have his love and I'm good. Can you imagine walking in that level of help? Walking in such an awareness of the love of Christ that he has for you. That from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace and now God's grace overflows from you onto the people around you. Can you imagine being an agent of that kind of love where you know every day God loves you so much that it literally oozes out of you onto the people around you that they feel God's love because you are present in their life. Can you imagine that? It's only possible when we let Jesus love us first. Grace, Jesus loves you. He died on the cross for you. This week we celebrate Holy Week. This is Palm Sunday, where they laid down the palm branches and the children said, Hosanna. And Jesus knowingly walked to his death for you. So please, when you go out these doors today, do not listen to what the world says you are. Do not listen to what you say you are. Listen to what Jesus says you are, to who he says you are, and how much he loves you, and how he has chosen you. And let's walk in that love and see how God uses us. Can we do that? Let me pray for you, then we're going to celebrate communion. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for how much you love us. Thank you for who you are and how you've provided for us. God, I pray that we would hear you, that we would accept and receive you. I pray that we would love and serve others well because we allow you to love and serve us. Help us to exist in the reality of your overwhelming love, of your acceptance and your affirmation. Father, if there's anyone here who doesn't know you, I pray that they would. If there's anyone here who has not received your love, I pray that they would receive it today. Help us to walk in light of the fact that we are chosen and accepted and safe. Help us to walk in light of your love. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, thank you very much to the band. You guys are doing a great job lifting your voices to the Father. I say it all the time, it's my favorite noise in the world to hear my church praising God together. In a few minutes, we're going to sing, the song is going to be sung over us and then we're going to have a chance to sing it together called The Blessing. The song is taken right out of Numbers chapter 6 and it reminds me of the cultural blessings that we have all over the world. A lot of different cultures have a lot of different traditional blessings. One of my favorite ones is the traditional Irish blessing. You guys may have heard this before, but it says, may the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face and the rain fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you in the hollow of his hand. I like blessings like that. I like traditions like that. I like hopes and prayers for one another like that. And so when I came across this song and I opened the scripture to find where it was, I loved it so much. I was actually talking with a friend of mine this week and was saying that we were going to be talking about the blessing this Sunday and it comes out in Numbers chapter 6 and he's like, oh yeah, I know it. I know it. He used to go to a church where a pastor would finish every sermon with this blessing. And I think it's so great because if you look at Numbers chapter six and we're going to leave the lights down so you don't have to pull out a Bible or try to participate. We don't have any notes to take this morning. I just want us to understand this song that we're about to sing together. But if you look in Numbers chapter 6, there's really no context for this. In the preceding verses, we're talking about what to do in a Nazaritic vow. So I know that some of you guys were wondering about that. It's in Numbers 6, so you can read that later this afternoon. And then chapter 7 is offering at the tabernacle for consecration. But sandwiched in between those two topics, really germane to nothing, is just this wonderful priests. So he says, go and tell the leaders of the people. Go and tell the spiritual leaders that when my people are blessed, when you would bless them, here's how I want you to do it. It is the traditional blessing of all traditional blessings. This is the one. And so the first little part there is very simple. The Lord bless you. It's okay to wish blessing upon one another. It's probably better for me to desire your blessing over my blessing, but it's okay for me as your pastor to pray that the Lord would bless you and your families, and I do. And so when we say that the Lord bless you, what does it mean to be blessed? May you sit in the Lord's favor. May you be prosperous physically and emotionally and spiritually and relationally in all the ways. Will the Lord bless you with rich friendships, with good family. May the Lord bless you with good health or quick healing. May the Lord bless you with peace and emotional stability and a life of kind of simmering joy. Would the Lord bless you? Would the Lord see favor on you? See you favorably and move you forward. And so it's right and good to pray for one another that our families, that your families would be blessed and would be prosperous in all the ways that are good and holy. And I love that next part, the Lord bless you and keep you. What does that mean? Well, to me, it reminds me of Psalm chapter 21, verses seven and eight. And it reminds me of this Psalm because this is something that my wife, Jen, prays over Lily every day before she goes to school. She prays out of these verses. Let's look at Psalms. The Lord will keep you from all evil. He will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forevermore. So this idea of the Lord keeping us means he's got us. He's going to protect us. He's going to walk with us. His presence will always be with us. And we love that phrase in our house, and you're going and then you're coming. And you're going out and then you're coming back in. And everything that you do and everywhere that you go and every place you arrive and every place you arrive back to, would the Lord be with you? Would he be walking with you? Would you feel his presence? Would you never feel alone? Would the Lord bless you and keep you? Would he hold you tight? And then we have that great phrase back in Numbers. If we look at the verse again, we have that great phrase, make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you and then the Lord lift up his countenance to you. So I thought a lot about what does that mean and why is it significant for the Lord to make his face shine upon us, for him to lift his countenance to us. And the image that kept coming back to my mind is what my face does when I see my two-year-old son, John. My face does it with Lily too, but there's something about a toddler that just brightens everything. There's also something about a toddler that ruins everything. So you take the good with the bad, right? But if you've ever been talking with me in the lobby or in here, and I hear his voice say, Daddy, or I turn and I see him, you know you just ceased to exist to me. It just happened right there. There's no one else in the room. There's nothing else happening. I turn and I smile and I crouch. He's everything. Everything else fades. If you have children, you've looked at them like that too. Where your countenance turns to them. Where you raise it up to them, where everything fades and they're the only thing in your universe. I can only imagine what that feeling is like with grandbabies. If you don't have children, but you have grandparents that you love, you have a mom or a dad that you love, you have a friend that you don't get to see all the time, it's the thing that your face does when you see them. It lifts and it brightens and everything fades and you're the only thing in the world. This is what it means when God lifts his countenance to us. When God turns his face to us. Everything else to God fades and it it's just you and him, and he's right there. So the Lord bless you. May he prosper you in all the ways that are important, in all the ways that are holy. May he keep you, be with you, and you're coming, and you're going, and walk beside you. And you're actually going to see Psalms, that phrase, show up in the song that we sing, in the blessing. The blessing is not just numbers. It's like a compilation of blessings from numbers and from psalms and from Deuteronomy. The Lord keep you. He go with you. He protect you as you go in your comings and in your goings. And then we pray that God would shine his countenance on you. To take it a step further, I would pray that you would feel the warmth of his face. That you would feel the warmth of his love. That you would believe that he turns to you and that his countenance delights and raises when he sees you and when you're brought to mind. And then this interesting thing happens in the song. So the first two, I don't know what they're called, verses or stanzas or whatever, I don't know songs, but the first two parts you'll see are just this two times. We'll sing it through. And then we start to move into other portions of the song. And there's a portion of the song where we sing out of Psalm 21. And we say, the Lord bless you and keep you. May his face shine upon you. But we're also going to say, in your coming and in your going, in your presence, he is with you, he is with you, he is with you. And then we're going to sing, he is for you, he is for you. He is for you. And that's from Romans chapter 8. If God is for us, then who can be against us? And then we're going to get to this part that we pull out of Deuteronomy that it says, well, He blessed you for generation and generation for your children and their children and their children. And this blessing is prayed not only over you, but over all of your descendants and over your family. So it really becomes this beautiful, powerful blessing. So I want to invite the band back up. If you guys can come get in place. We're going to do something with this song that I hope can be special to us. As we start the song, I want you to hear this song as a blessing over you. And I want you to sing this song as a prayer over those you love. So for the first part of the song, we're going to invite you to just remain seated. Sit there and let this song be sung over you as a blessing in the mode of God through Moses to Aaron. The way it was supposed to be spoken over God's people. Let it be sung over you and receive it and personalize it. Let it be sung over you that the Lord wants to bless you, that he wants to keep you, that his countenance is shining on you, that he is with you, that he is for you in your comings and in your goings. Make it personal. And then you're going to be invited to stand and sing. And when you sing it, make it a prayer. And think about those who come after you. Think about those that you love. And pray that God, as you sing, would bless them and keep them, that his face would shine upon them, that he would be with them, that they would know that he is for them. So let's hear it as a blessing and then let's stand when Jordan tells us to and sing it as a prayer.

Well, thank you very much to the band. You guys are doing a great job lifting your voices to the Father. I say it all the time, it's my favorite noise in the world to hear my church praising God together. In a few minutes, we're going to sing, the song is going to be sung over us and then we're going to have a chance to sing it together called The Blessing. The song is taken right out of Numbers chapter 6 and it reminds me of the cultural blessings that we have all over the world. A lot of different cultures have a lot of different traditional blessings. One of my favorite ones is the traditional Irish blessing. You guys may have heard this before, but it says, may the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face and the rain fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you in the hollow of his hand. I like blessings like that. I like traditions like that. I like hopes and prayers for one another like that. And so when I came across this song and I opened the scripture to find where it was, I loved it so much. I was actually talking with a friend of mine this week and was saying that we were going to be talking about the blessing this Sunday and it comes out in Numbers chapter 6 and he's like, oh yeah, I know it. I know it. He used to go to a church where a pastor would finish every sermon with this blessing. And I think it's so great because if you look at Numbers chapter six and we're going to leave the lights down so you don't have to pull out a Bible or try to participate. We don't have any notes to take this morning. I just want us to understand this song that we're about to sing together. But if you look in Numbers chapter 6, there's really no context for this. In the preceding verses, we're talking about what to do in a Nazaritic vow. So I know that some of you guys were wondering about that. It's in Numbers 6, so you can read that later this afternoon. And then chapter 7 is offering at the tabernacle for consecration. But sandwiched in between those two topics, really germane to nothing, is just this wonderful priests. So he says, go and tell the leaders of the people. Go and tell the spiritual leaders that when my people are blessed, when you would bless them, here's how I want you to do it. It is the traditional blessing of all traditional blessings. This is the one. And so the first little part there is very simple. The Lord bless you. It's okay to wish blessing upon one another. It's probably better for me to desire your blessing over my blessing, but it's okay for me as your pastor to pray that the Lord would bless you and your families, and I do. And so when we say that the Lord bless you, what does it mean to be blessed? May you sit in the Lord's favor. May you be prosperous physically and emotionally and spiritually and relationally in all the ways. Will the Lord bless you with rich friendships, with good family. May the Lord bless you with good health or quick healing. May the Lord bless you with peace and emotional stability and a life of kind of simmering joy. Would the Lord bless you? Would the Lord see favor on you? See you favorably and move you forward. And so it's right and good to pray for one another that our families, that your families would be blessed and would be prosperous in all the ways that are good and holy. And I love that next part, the Lord bless you and keep you. What does that mean? Well, to me, it reminds me of Psalm chapter 21, verses seven and eight. And it reminds me of this Psalm because this is something that my wife, Jen, prays over Lily every day before she goes to school. She prays out of these verses. Let's look at Psalms. The Lord will keep you from all evil. He will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forevermore. So this idea of the Lord keeping us means he's got us. He's going to protect us. He's going to walk with us. His presence will always be with us. And we love that phrase in our house, and you're going and then you're coming. And you're going out and then you're coming back in. And everything that you do and everywhere that you go and every place you arrive and every place you arrive back to, would the Lord be with you? Would he be walking with you? Would you feel his presence? Would you never feel alone? Would the Lord bless you and keep you? Would he hold you tight? And then we have that great phrase back in Numbers. If we look at the verse again, we have that great phrase, make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you and then the Lord lift up his countenance to you. So I thought a lot about what does that mean and why is it significant for the Lord to make his face shine upon us, for him to lift his countenance to us. And the image that kept coming back to my mind is what my face does when I see my two-year-old son, John. My face does it with Lily too, but there's something about a toddler that just brightens everything. There's also something about a toddler that ruins everything. So you take the good with the bad, right? But if you've ever been talking with me in the lobby or in here, and I hear his voice say, Daddy, or I turn and I see him, you know you just ceased to exist to me. It just happened right there. There's no one else in the room. There's nothing else happening. I turn and I smile and I crouch. He's everything. Everything else fades. If you have children, you've looked at them like that too. Where your countenance turns to them. Where you raise it up to them, where everything fades and they're the only thing in your universe. I can only imagine what that feeling is like with grandbabies. If you don't have children, but you have grandparents that you love, you have a mom or a dad that you love, you have a friend that you don't get to see all the time, it's the thing that your face does when you see them. It lifts and it brightens and everything fades and you're the only thing in the world. This is what it means when God lifts his countenance to us. When God turns his face to us. Everything else to God fades and it it's just you and him, and he's right there. So the Lord bless you. May he prosper you in all the ways that are important, in all the ways that are holy. May he keep you, be with you, and you're coming, and you're going, and walk beside you. And you're actually going to see Psalms, that phrase, show up in the song that we sing, in the blessing. The blessing is not just numbers. It's like a compilation of blessings from numbers and from psalms and from Deuteronomy. The Lord keep you. He go with you. He protect you as you go in your comings and in your goings. And then we pray that God would shine his countenance on you. To take it a step further, I would pray that you would feel the warmth of his face. That you would feel the warmth of his love. That you would believe that he turns to you and that his countenance delights and raises when he sees you and when you're brought to mind. And then this interesting thing happens in the song. So the first two, I don't know what they're called, verses or stanzas or whatever, I don't know songs, but the first two parts you'll see are just this two times. We'll sing it through. And then we start to move into other portions of the song. And there's a portion of the song where we sing out of Psalm 21. And we say, the Lord bless you and keep you. May his face shine upon you. But we're also going to say, in your coming and in your going, in your presence, he is with you, he is with you, he is with you. And then we're going to sing, he is for you, he is for you. He is for you. And that's from Romans chapter 8. If God is for us, then who can be against us? And then we're going to get to this part that we pull out of Deuteronomy that it says, well, He blessed you for generation and generation for your children and their children and their children. And this blessing is prayed not only over you, but over all of your descendants and over your family. So it really becomes this beautiful, powerful blessing. So I want to invite the band back up. If you guys can come get in place. We're going to do something with this song that I hope can be special to us. As we start the song, I want you to hear this song as a blessing over you. And I want you to sing this song as a prayer over those you love. So for the first part of the song, we're going to invite you to just remain seated. Sit there and let this song be sung over you as a blessing in the mode of God through Moses to Aaron. The way it was supposed to be spoken over God's people. Let it be sung over you and receive it and personalize it. Let it be sung over you that the Lord wants to bless you, that he wants to keep you, that his countenance is shining on you, that he is with you, that he is for you in your comings and in your goings. Make it personal. And then you're going to be invited to stand and sing. And when you sing it, make it a prayer. And think about those who come after you. Think about those that you love. And pray that God, as you sing, would bless them and keep them, that his face would shine upon them, that he would be with them, that they would know that he is for them. So let's hear it as a blessing and then let's stand when Jordan tells us to and sing it as a prayer.

Well, thank you very much to the band. You guys are doing a great job lifting your voices to the Father. I say it all the time, it's my favorite noise in the world to hear my church praising God together. In a few minutes, we're going to sing, the song is going to be sung over us and then we're going to have a chance to sing it together called The Blessing. The song is taken right out of Numbers chapter 6 and it reminds me of the cultural blessings that we have all over the world. A lot of different cultures have a lot of different traditional blessings. One of my favorite ones is the traditional Irish blessing. You guys may have heard this before, but it says, may the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face and the rain fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you in the hollow of his hand. I like blessings like that. I like traditions like that. I like hopes and prayers for one another like that. And so when I came across this song and I opened the scripture to find where it was, I loved it so much. I was actually talking with a friend of mine this week and was saying that we were going to be talking about the blessing this Sunday and it comes out in Numbers chapter 6 and he's like, oh yeah, I know it. I know it. He used to go to a church where a pastor would finish every sermon with this blessing. And I think it's so great because if you look at Numbers chapter six and we're going to leave the lights down so you don't have to pull out a Bible or try to participate. We don't have any notes to take this morning. I just want us to understand this song that we're about to sing together. But if you look in Numbers chapter 6, there's really no context for this. In the preceding verses, we're talking about what to do in a Nazaritic vow. So I know that some of you guys were wondering about that. It's in Numbers 6, so you can read that later this afternoon. And then chapter 7 is offering at the tabernacle for consecration. But sandwiched in between those two topics, really germane to nothing, is just this wonderful priests. So he says, go and tell the leaders of the people. Go and tell the spiritual leaders that when my people are blessed, when you would bless them, here's how I want you to do it. It is the traditional blessing of all traditional blessings. This is the one. And so the first little part there is very simple. The Lord bless you. It's okay to wish blessing upon one another. It's probably better for me to desire your blessing over my blessing, but it's okay for me as your pastor to pray that the Lord would bless you and your families, and I do. And so when we say that the Lord bless you, what does it mean to be blessed? May you sit in the Lord's favor. May you be prosperous physically and emotionally and spiritually and relationally in all the ways. Will the Lord bless you with rich friendships, with good family. May the Lord bless you with good health or quick healing. May the Lord bless you with peace and emotional stability and a life of kind of simmering joy. Would the Lord bless you? Would the Lord see favor on you? See you favorably and move you forward. And so it's right and good to pray for one another that our families, that your families would be blessed and would be prosperous in all the ways that are good and holy. And I love that next part, the Lord bless you and keep you. What does that mean? Well, to me, it reminds me of Psalm chapter 21, verses seven and eight. And it reminds me of this Psalm because this is something that my wife, Jen, prays over Lily every day before she goes to school. She prays out of these verses. Let's look at Psalms. The Lord will keep you from all evil. He will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forevermore. So this idea of the Lord keeping us means he's got us. He's going to protect us. He's going to walk with us. His presence will always be with us. And we love that phrase in our house, and you're going and then you're coming. And you're going out and then you're coming back in. And everything that you do and everywhere that you go and every place you arrive and every place you arrive back to, would the Lord be with you? Would he be walking with you? Would you feel his presence? Would you never feel alone? Would the Lord bless you and keep you? Would he hold you tight? And then we have that great phrase back in Numbers. If we look at the verse again, we have that great phrase, make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you and then the Lord lift up his countenance to you. So I thought a lot about what does that mean and why is it significant for the Lord to make his face shine upon us, for him to lift his countenance to us. And the image that kept coming back to my mind is what my face does when I see my two-year-old son, John. My face does it with Lily too, but there's something about a toddler that just brightens everything. There's also something about a toddler that ruins everything. So you take the good with the bad, right? But if you've ever been talking with me in the lobby or in here, and I hear his voice say, Daddy, or I turn and I see him, you know you just ceased to exist to me. It just happened right there. There's no one else in the room. There's nothing else happening. I turn and I smile and I crouch. He's everything. Everything else fades. If you have children, you've looked at them like that too. Where your countenance turns to them. Where you raise it up to them, where everything fades and they're the only thing in your universe. I can only imagine what that feeling is like with grandbabies. If you don't have children, but you have grandparents that you love, you have a mom or a dad that you love, you have a friend that you don't get to see all the time, it's the thing that your face does when you see them. It lifts and it brightens and everything fades and you're the only thing in the world. This is what it means when God lifts his countenance to us. When God turns his face to us. Everything else to God fades and it it's just you and him, and he's right there. So the Lord bless you. May he prosper you in all the ways that are important, in all the ways that are holy. May he keep you, be with you, and you're coming, and you're going, and walk beside you. And you're actually going to see Psalms, that phrase, show up in the song that we sing, in the blessing. The blessing is not just numbers. It's like a compilation of blessings from numbers and from psalms and from Deuteronomy. The Lord keep you. He go with you. He protect you as you go in your comings and in your goings. And then we pray that God would shine his countenance on you. To take it a step further, I would pray that you would feel the warmth of his face. That you would feel the warmth of his love. That you would believe that he turns to you and that his countenance delights and raises when he sees you and when you're brought to mind. And then this interesting thing happens in the song. So the first two, I don't know what they're called, verses or stanzas or whatever, I don't know songs, but the first two parts you'll see are just this two times. We'll sing it through. And then we start to move into other portions of the song. And there's a portion of the song where we sing out of Psalm 21. And we say, the Lord bless you and keep you. May his face shine upon you. But we're also going to say, in your coming and in your going, in your presence, he is with you, he is with you, he is with you. And then we're going to sing, he is for you, he is for you. He is for you. And that's from Romans chapter 8. If God is for us, then who can be against us? And then we're going to get to this part that we pull out of Deuteronomy that it says, well, He blessed you for generation and generation for your children and their children and their children. And this blessing is prayed not only over you, but over all of your descendants and over your family. So it really becomes this beautiful, powerful blessing. So I want to invite the band back up. If you guys can come get in place. We're going to do something with this song that I hope can be special to us. As we start the song, I want you to hear this song as a blessing over you. And I want you to sing this song as a prayer over those you love. So for the first part of the song, we're going to invite you to just remain seated. Sit there and let this song be sung over you as a blessing in the mode of God through Moses to Aaron. The way it was supposed to be spoken over God's people. Let it be sung over you and receive it and personalize it. Let it be sung over you that the Lord wants to bless you, that he wants to keep you, that his countenance is shining on you, that he is with you, that he is for you in your comings and in your goings. Make it personal. And then you're going to be invited to stand and sing. And when you sing it, make it a prayer. And think about those who come after you. Think about those that you love. And pray that God, as you sing, would bless them and keep them, that his face would shine upon them, that he would be with them, that they would know that he is for them. So let's hear it as a blessing and then let's stand when Jordan tells us to and sing it as a prayer.