Thank you, Steve and the band. I don't know if you guys realize this, but that's the first time we've had a full band since like March the 1st. So that was really great to get to have them. For those of you that I haven't gotten to meet, my name is Nate. I am the pastor here. Thank you for joining us online. Thank you for being here in person. Every week I get to see a few more new faces, folks brave enough to return, and it's always so, so good. And if you've been watching Faithfully Online, we are so, so grateful for you, and you're continuing to do that. This is the first Sunday of a new series called With. We're looking at a book called With, written by a pastor named Sky Jethani. I first encountered this book in 2013 and I have never read a book that caused me to pause, stop, put the book down, literally get on my knees and repent more than this book did. I identified with so much of it. So we've been encouraging you guys for a couple of weeks to pick it up. Normally, we'd buy a bunch of copies and we'd leave them here, but that's a lot of touching and handling of money and the whole deal, so we can't do that right now. So hopefully you've ordered your copy online. If you haven't done that, just Google With and Sky, S-K-Y-E. It'll come up. I've sent out email links. You can email me. I'll send you another link. I believe in you, okay? It's 2020. You can all find things online. Get the book. Read along with us. Speaking of reading along with us, we have a reading plan that will help pace you through the series. Kyle Tolbert, our great student pastor, comes up with reading plans for the church. If you don't know about those, they're on our live page, and we actually have new plans that are on the information table kind of spread out for you so you can grab them on the way out if you'd like to do that. Those give you a portion of the Bible to read every day. We talk about how important that is all the time, but in this particular reading plan, Kyle has paced out for you the chapters that you can read in with to keep up with and be ready for the upcoming sermon as we go through it together. This series, more than any other series I've ever done, is one that you really need to see all the Sundays. The first four weeks are going to be invested largely in talking about what we shouldn't do. And the last two weeks are going to be invested in talking about what we should do. So if today you leave and you feel beat up with no resolution, that's all right. Come back in four more weeks and we'll give you some resolution, okay? Because we're moving through the book together. So this is going to feel a little bit different. As we begin, I want to help you see why I believe you should be interested in the contents of this book. I'm going to take you through an exercise that I do with all the couples that I do premarital counseling with. When I do premarital counseling with a couple, I tell them that we're going to do three sessions of 60 to 90 minutes. They think I'm going to counsel them about their marriage. I'm not. I'm not a counselor. I don't know how to do that. I just disciple them for about three hours, talk to them about spiritual things, and try to get them prepared for marriage in that way. And so the first question I ask them is, granted, it's silly, okay? There's all kinds of theological issues with this question, but I just want to ask you to play along and play along there at home. Let me ask you this question, okay? On a scale of one to ten, one being completely apathetic or maybe even adversarial towards God, and ten being apex Christian, super spiritual, ten is Elijah on Mount Carmel calling down the fire to defeat the prophets of Baal, okay? One to 10, where are you spiritually? Spiritually speaking, in your walk with God, your walk, your relationship with Jesus, your spiritual health, however you phrase that, where are you on a scale of one to 10? Where would you place yourself right now on that scale, okay? You figure out your answer. Now, let me ask you this question. Where would you say you'd like to be five years from now? Five years from right now, today, you get to make decisions, you get to project forward, and hopefully you've progressed a little bit. Five years from now, what do you want your number to be? Now, with the couple that's going to get married, I usually at this point talk about, okay, well, what's the gap between where you are now? Most people will do four to six. No one's going to cop to a two or a three, and no one's going to claim or a seven or an eight. So most people's first answer is four to six, okay? So you're a five now. What do you want to be? And then most people say seven or eight. I've never had anybody say 10. I don't know why, nobody wants to be a 10. Nobody's like, I don't wanna be that spiritual. That's too much. Nobody wants that, I don't know why. I think that's an issue. It's another sermon that I need to do. It's probably a failing of their pastor to not paint a great enough picture of ultimate spiritual help. And I asked them, okay, how do we get from like a five to an eight? What are the gaps? What are the things in the way? And we kind of plot a course for spiritual growth for them. Really, it's an exercise to help them prioritize spiritual growth. But to you, I would ask this question. You have your answer now. Here's what I am now. I'm a five. What do you want to be in five? I wanna be an eight. Okay, great, you have your two numbers. Let me ask you this question. If I could have talked to you five years ago, how would you have answered that question? If I could right now go back to five years ago you, what are you now, what do you wanna be in five years? What would your answer have been? Probably the same as the answer you just gave, right? Yeah? To be a Christian is to know what it is to be stagnant. To be a Christian is to know what it is to see other people who seem like, they seem like they're flourishing. They seem like they know Jesus in a way that I don't. They seem like they respond to worship in ways that my soul doesn't. They are able to get up and read their Bible every day. I can't seem to do that. They pray all the time. I can't seem to pray. They have this spirituality that I'm not sure I'll ever understand. To be a Christian, I believe, is to be frustrated with our spiritual walk. It's to feel stagnant and discouraged, like we should be further along than we are. Now, some of you five years ago, you were a totally different human. You didn't know Jesus. You weren't saved. So maybe for you, the question is, where were you two years ago? But I think that to be a believer is to be very familiar with that feeling of inadequacy, with that feeling of I should be further along. Because if I asked you five years ago, what are you? And you said five, and the answer is eight, then today you should have said eight, and I want to be a 10. But I think that to be a Christian is to sometimes be discouraged about our spiritual lives. And this is directly what this book speaks to. This is why if you can relate to what I just said at all, if your answers were the same five years ago and now, then I think this book can help you tremendously. And I want to begin this series by simply making this statement for you to consider. And we're going to talk about what this means. Maybe your walk isn't what it could be because your posture isn't what it should be. Maybe your walk with God, your relationship with God, isn't what it could be because your posture before God isn't what it should be. We're going to talk about what postures are, but in this book with, Sky takes five postures before the Lord. He calls them postures. I kind of think about them as motivations. He takes five postures before the Lord. If you haven't figured this out yet, four of them are bad. One is good. If you haven't figured out what the good posture is yet, just stick around. You'll pick it up with context clues. I believe in you. So the next four weeks, we're going to go over these postures that we often assume without necessarily knowing it and try to understand why these aren't helpful. And in the last two weeks, we're going to look at what the right posture is before the Lord, and I hope help us find ways to begin walking in a depth that we've never experienced before, so that five years from now, you would answer that question totally differently. This morning, we're going to look at the first posture called life under God. Very simply, to understand this posture, life under God is this. Life under God says, I offer you obedience, and you offer me protection. Life under God says, I offer you obedience, and you offer me protection. I forgot there in your notes, there's a spot that says, what do you really want from your relationship with God? That's a good diagnostic question. If I ask myself this, what do I want from my relationship with God? That's a good way to figure out what our posture is as we go through these. But the life under God posture says, I offer you obedience and you offer me protection. This is a posture that's present in every religion ever because this is what this posture acknowledges. The world is big. The world's crazy. Sometimes there's pandemics. There's things outside of my control. There's school shootings and there's cancer and there's illness and there's difficult phone calls and there's loss and there's undue pain and there's all kinds of crazy things that happen in this world that are outside my control, that are beyond my control. This posture acknowledges that and it acknowledges and there's a God in heaven who's controlled none of these things are outside of. There's a God in heaven who's sovereign and he's in control of everything. So I'm going to figure out how to get that God on my side so that he will protect me. This is the life under God posture. I said this was every religion ever, right? This is, think about the ancient Mayans performing sacrifices to try to appease the gods to get them on their side for a good crop or for a good war or for a good rain or whatever it is. We know that things in this world are outside our control. We know that there is a sovereign God who can control them. And so we orchestrate our lives in such a way to please the God so that he will look out for us. The life under God posture assumes that if things are going well for you, if you're blessed, then you must have behaved. If you are going through difficult times, you must not be right with God. And though none of us would admit readily that this is our posture before the Father, this attitude and mindset shows up all the time in everything that we do. I hear it every time I golf. Every time I go golfing, on the tee box, someone hits a drive that is going very clearly into the woods. This is never me. I strike mine 275 down the middle every time. But if you're golfing with like Harris Winston or something like that, it's definitely going to go really far into the woods. And as it goes really far into the woods, it's clearly going to be lost. You'll hear the solid sound. It will have bounced off a tree miraculously and bounced back into the fairway. And someone will say, it's total luck. And someone will always quip. Someone's been living clean. That's clean living. Someone had their quiet time this morning. As if you have been following God's rules, so now on the golf course, he's going to throw you a bone and a squirrel's going to kick it out there for you. You're in a parking lot. It's crowded. It's Walmart. It's Sunday afternoon. In the middle of COVID, there's only one entrance and everything's so far away. And then this one spot opens up. God is looking out for me. You must be living right. That's life under God. Life under God is an exchange. It says, I'll follow your rules and you protect me. And we laugh about it, but it shows up in far more insidious ways than that. And see, there's issues with this posture, with this exchange, with this transactional relationship that we would engage in with God. And I want to point out to you three big ones this morning. The first real issue with this posture is it inevitably leads to disillusionment. It leads to disillusionment every time. If you adopt this posture and your posture before God is, I'm going to follow your rules and you're going to protect me. It's this transactional contract that we enter into with him. 100% of the times, it will make you feel like I felt standing in the middle of Papa Murphy's pizza. I went a couple years ago. A couple years ago, Jen and I decided that we wanted pizza. It was once a year that we eat pizza. We're very healthy people. We don't do this a lot. We went to Jets. There was a Jets close to our house. Love Jets pizza. Love their thick crust with pepperoni. It's so good. And so I went to Jets. I'm so excited. I was just all in on fat day. Let's just go. I'm going to have it. I'm going to eat it all. And I get to Jets and there's a sign that it's closed. They moved to Creedmoor. I like Jets. I don't like Jets that far away. I don't like it that much. So there's another place that opened up in that same shopping center called Papa Murphy's Pizza. And I'm like, all right, pizza's pizza. I'll go to Papa Murphy's. So I go over there and I'm looking at the menu and this is just like an old man, angry old man rant. It has nothing to do with the sermon. But I at the menu, and there's no like proper names. I want like, I need like Supreme and Meat Lovers and Pepperoni. Like I need just normal pizza names that we all agree on, and they're getting cute with it. It's like Papa's Favorite, Mama's Best, and I'm like, I don't want to read all the ingredients. I just want a Supreme, you know, like just name it Supreme. Anyways, I get up to the front. The girl says, what do you want? And I said, do you have just like a supreme pizza? I don't want to read all the things. And she goes, yeah, that's mama's best. I'm like, great, give me that. So she goes, okay. I said, take a large. And I said, I'm going to go get some groceries. I'll come back and pick it up. She said, that's great. So I go, here's Teeter, get my stuff, put it in the car, go back in, Papa Murphy's, I'm sitting down looking at Twitter or something like that and just messing around. And then they say, hey, your order's ready. So I get up and go, okay, I walk over to the girl and she hands me this thing. And it's cold. It's in like this foil pan with cellophane on the top. And I go, this isn't my order. And she goes, you're Nate, right? I said, yeah. She goes, mama's best? I'm like, yeah. She goes, yeah, that's it. And I go, what, do I have to cook it? What are you talking about? What? And everybody in the store turns and looks at me and starts giggling. The manager looks at me and just starts laughing. I go, I can cook this? And I'm about to say, here, you take it. Like, just give me my money back. I don't agree to this deal. You just take the chore that you just put in my hands. You take that back. And the girl, she was so sweet, she's laughing and she says, sir, I promise you it's really good. Just put it in the oven for like 12 minutes. It's gonna be great. Okay, fine. So I take it home. I'm so angry that they violated the pizza contract. I go home, I put it in the oven, I get it out. I don't have a way to remove the foil from this large pizza, so I've got like a knife and fork situation where I'm sweating now, I need a towel. And I'm trying to get this pizza out of the thing. And then I realized I don't have a pizza cutter and I don't have a stone big enough to cut this pizza. So I have to put it on the countertop with like paper underneath it with a butcher knife, like burning my knuckles as I try to cut this pizza. They handed me a chore, man. I was so angry because what they did is they violated the unwritten American pizza contract. The American pizza contract is simply, listen, I give you $12. You give me a hot pizza cut in a box. That's it. I'm going to take that pizza home. I'm going to put those pieces on paper plates, and I'm going to throw it all away, and I'm going to sit in my shame after I'm done. That's the deal. And you violated this. You gave me a chore. I don't want to cook. If I wanted to cook, I would have gone there and gotten the ingredients and cooked, but clearly that's not what I want to do. You broke the contract, man. I want my money back. When we adopt the life under God posture, we will have a moment just like that. Where we sit before God and we think, this isn't the deal. You broke the contract. I gave you my obedience. Now you give me protection. That's the deal. And God says, I never made that deal with you. I won't be reduced to that. If you've been a Christian for any amount of time and you've adopted this posture, and I believe we all have at different points, you've experienced that disillusionment. You know exactly what that is. That disillusionment almost always comes at unwarranted pain. When you experience a time in life where you feel like you are enduring unfair pain, unfair stress, you lose a loved one, someone gets sick, you get a difficult diagnosis, you face a tough loss, you watch a relationship in shambles, you don't have the job that you identified with anymore. When your life sits in shambles, that is usually when we have our moment of disillusionment and we look at God and we felt like I felt in the middle of that pizzeria that day, this isn't the deal, I want my money back. For some of you, that disillusionment wrecked your faith years ago and you're still recovering. If you haven't had this moment, you will. And the life under God posture sets us up to be disillusioned and frustrated. It sets us up to shipwreck our faith. There's no better example of someone who had this mindset and had to be set straight than Job in the Bible. Job is actually, he perfectly illustrates not only this first problem, but the second problem as well. The second problem with this life under God posture is it reduces and seeks to control God. It looks like we're following the rules. It looks like we're submitted. It looks like we're being obedient, doing everything that we're supposed to do. But in our hearts is this motivation, this murkiness that's pushing us to seek to control God. I can't control the universe, so I'm going to appease the God that can, and then you owe me. I've behaved well, now you owe me protection. It seeks to control God. And we see this posture all over the story of Job. Job is the first wisdom book in the Bible. It was the first book of the Bible ever written. The Monday Night Men's group is actually going over the book of Job this semester. So if I say something in here that interests you or that sparks you, I would encourage you to sign up for that. But some of you are familiar with the story of Job. Others may have forgotten and some may not have heard it yet. So just as a primer, I'll tell you what's happening. Job is the most righteous man that's alive at the time. And God allows Satan to torment him. And he torments him in devastating ways. Job is a very wealthy man. He loses all of his wealth. He loses all of his real estate holdings. He loses all of his servants and employees. He even loses his children. He has boils on his skin. His wife's advice to him is curse God and die. You want to talk about someone that experienced unwarranted and unfair pain? Job. And the first 36 chapters of the book are his friends giving him advice in three different cycles. And this advice is riddled with the life under God posture. They come to him and they say, Job, what have you done? What have you done to deserve this kind of punishment from God? You've lost your real estate. You've lost all your buildings. What did you do? Certainly you are hiding some secret sin, Job. And Job says, no, I'm not. Like, I'm not doing that. I promise I'm not. And then they come back a second time. They're like, no, no, no, Job, you're not listening to us. What is it that you're doing? What have you done? Because clearly you have sinned against the Lord, and that's why you're being punished in this way. Clearly you violated your side of the contract, and that's why God's not keeping up his end of the deal. It's this life under God posture. And after three cycles of this, where they become really pointed with him, Job still refuses and says, no, that's not what I'm doing. I don't have some secret unrepented sin. So he demands an audience with God. And he goes to God to shake his fist at him and to say, hey, this isn't fair, man. This isn't part of the deal. I've always honored you. I've always worshiped you. I raised my kids to follow you and love you. I offer you everything and you're letting this happen to me. This isn't fair, God. And any of us that have ever experienced that moment of disillusion where we would look at God and we would go, this isn't fair. I've shared with you before, mine and Jen's struggle to have kids. With every new young couple that would so easily have two and three and five children, I would look at God and go, what gives, man? This isn't fair. This isn't the deal. I think we've all said that to God at one point or another in our own ways. God's response to Job is profound. And it is not at all what you would expect. Job asks for an audience with God to say, hey God, what's the deal? This isn't fair. And God's response is one of anger and frustration. Look at what God says to Job. This is amazing to me. It's one of the most profound things in the Bible. Chapter 38, then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man. I will question you and you will make it known to me. Does that sound like a God who's about to go, yeah, my bad, I didn't keep up my end of the deal. Here's why I broke contract. Sounds like God is angry. I had a professor one time say, Job wanted a man-to-man conversation with God. The problem was he was one man short. God says, who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? You want to talk to me like a man? Okay, dress yourself like a man. It angers God. And then God, for two chapters, proceeds to ask him questions. He says, where were you, Job, when I laid the foundations of the world? Surely you know. Surely you understand, Job, the inner workings of the universe. If you're asking me this question, you want to understand how I orchestrate everything, how I run the universe, you're questioning my leadership, then maybe you can explain to me how the Leviathan and the behemoth came into being. Maybe you can explain to me how the world works. Surely you were there when I told the oceans that they can go this far and no further. When I drew the boundaries of the continents, surely you know Job. And God's response is very clear to Job. Job, most righteous man to ever live, who in the season of his life adopted the life under God posture. God says, hey man, you've forgotten your place. I'm the creator. You're the creation. I won't be reduced to your contracts. I will not be reduced to your control. You don't get to follow the rules like I'm some pagan God and then hold my feet to the fire about the contract that I didn't enter into. That's not the deal. I'm God. You're not going to understand me. And I think one of the most difficult things about the Christian life is to understand there are going to be parts of God that we can't understand. God's point here with Job is, even if I explained it to you, even if I set you down and told me everything that I was thinking with what's going on in your life, even if I told you everything that I could, it would be like you trying to explain yourself to a six-month-old. It's just not going to work. We don't have the capacity to understand. And when we adopt this life under God posture, it seeks to reduce God to our level and it seeks to control him and it angers God because he's not gonna enter into our contracts with us. The last problem is highlighted by Jesus himself. The last problem with this posture that we wanna look at this morning is that it turns us into legalistic hypocrites. If we adopt this life under God posture, I'm going to obey you and you protect me, it turns us into legalistic hypocrites. Because in this posture, what we assume is those who are blessed are obedient and those who are struggling are disobedient. This attitude was around when Jesus walked the earth. They came upon a blind man one day and the disciples, his disciples looked at him and they said, what did he do or his parents do that made him blind? What's their sin? That's life under God posture. And what this does is it reduces relationship to a set of rules. It takes the relationship that Jesus wants with us, that he created us for, to be in relation with him, and it reduces it to a set of rules. And it makes it, this posture makes it entirely possible to appear outwardly spiritual because you follow the rules and your life seems blessed when inside you're rotting away because there's no relationship at all. It robs the relationship of all emotions and the actual relationship that it should be. It's kind of like church over the summer. The thing that broke my heart about church during COVID is that church is a fundamentally communal institution. And I had to get up in this room and preach. And it felt like a performance to an empty room. And hope that you guys would watch it three days later. And I don't know about you. But church got to feeling pretty empty for me over the summer. Because there was no community in the church. And that's what makes the church the church. From a human standpoint. And we do the same thing with our relationship with Jesus. If we reduce it to a set of rules, things I have to do to be right with God, we remove the relationship from it and it becomes empty. There's no better example of this than the Pharisees. The religious leaders in Jesus's day were experts at this. Outwardly, they looked great. They were living the blessed life. They were good. Everyone looked to them and tried to get on their level. If I asked the Pharisees, where's your relationship with God and where do you want it to be? They'd be like, I'm currently at a 10. I would like it to remain at a 10. That's the Pharisees because they have it all together on the outside. But here's what Jesus says to this group of people in Matthew 23. In Matthew 23, verse 27, he says, you're like a dirty cup that's been cleaned on the outside, but inside you're filthy. He looks at the religious leaders of the day, the ones who are supposed to know better. And he says, you're hypocrites. You're whitewashed tombs. It's a pretty tombstone with a rotting carcass underneath it. When we adopt this life under God posture and we reduce our relationship to a set of rules, it turns us into legalistic hypocrites who on the outside can look like they have their life together and on the inside are rotting away. This incidentally is how someone can know more Bible than anyone you've ever known in your life and be a jerk. So I would ask you as we finish, and I warned you, I'm not giving you a resolution here. I'm not saying, so this is the right way to do it. I'm just saying that's bad. And I would end this week by asking you this question, and this is what caused me repentance. And if this resonated with you, I would really encourage you to read the chapter and follow along with it. But I would ask you this week, as you're introspective and look at yourself, how much of this posture do you see in you? How much of this do you see in you? How much over the years have you followed God because somehow by following him, I'm going to appease him and win favor? Have you ever had something big in your life coming up and so all of a sudden you get real spiritual? You ever had something super bad happen and then you get really spiritual? I don't want this to happen again. That's a life under God posture. And when we adopt this posture, it will lead to disillusionment. We reduce God and we try to control him. And ultimately, we end up legalistic hypocrites who have removed the relational part from the relationship with Jesus and replaced it with rules. And we become whitewashed tombs. So how much of this exists in you? Let's pray and then Steve's going to come and introduce to us a new song for the series. Father, we love you. We're grateful for you. Lord, I know that within us, those of us who know you, is a desire to know you more. I know that within us is a desire to grow. Within us is a holy dissatisfaction with where we are and a divine yearning to know you better. God, I pray that you would make a path for us. Would you give us the honesty in our hearts and in our minds to be honest with you and with ourselves about where we stand and how we've approached you? God, if we have come to you simply because we want you to protect us, simply because we want you to bless us, and not because we want you, would you convict us of that? And would you show us a better way? It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.