Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Something that many of you know about me, but not everyone knows about me, is that I am saddled with being a Georgia Tech fan, which today doesn't feel like such a burden. I wanted to come up on stage to the fight song, but Jen told me that I couldn't because it says hell in it, and we're not allowed to say that at church unless we're actually talking about hell, then we can't. But anyways, for what it's worth, Go Jackets, I know that our demise is soon, and I'm squeezing all the juice out of this lemon that I possibly can. This is the last part in our series called 27, where we have been moving through the books of the New Testament. And it's our last, really, Sunday of the summer. So thank you for being a part of the summer. Thank you for being here now. Next week, as Michelle mentioned in the announcements, we've got Facelift Sunday, where we're just kind of touching things up and getting things ready for September. To me, in my mind, our ministry year runs from September to summer extreme in the second year of June. We push pretty hard during those months. And so to kick that off, we just want to get the church up and ready to go. And we're expecting visitors, so we want to get our house ready. So if you're in town next week and you'd like to participate in that, we'd love for you to do that. Just a quick note, if you're newer to Gray, so you don't feel very plugged in yet, things like that are a great way to get to know some folks. So I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. I had not wanted to do 1st and 2nd Corinthians together because I think these books often get short shrifted. They often get, they're misunderstood. They're not deeply appreciated enough because they're part of Paul's letters. And I think in our heads, those of us that know the Bible, we, some of us don't have any opinions at all on first and second Corinthians, but I think for those of us who are kind of familiar with the Bible, we can sometimes equate these books to like, like, like a shorter one, like Philippians or like an Ephesians or Galatians, like just something short and quick that makes a couple of points and we're good to study it. But that's really not the case with the books of 1 and 2 Corinthians. They're long books. They're more like Romans than they are like Ephesians. There's a lot of depth there. And so I had not wanted to do them both in one Sunday, but the schedule demanded that I did. And so I'm not going to do justice to them. But I do think that this morning, what I can give you is a good overview of 1 Corinthians and how it relates so much to us today in the questions and the problems facing our church. Because let's be honest, to be a church in 2024 is fraught with problems and questions, right? Being church, doing church, doing church well, doing church right, existing as a church is a challenge in 2024. What I want to assert this morning is, as a church, we face questions of divisions, standards, policies, and beliefs. As a church in 2024, we face questions of division, things that would seek to divide us, things of standards, personal standards for holiness, of policies, how should we carry out things in the gathering and how should we interact interpersonally, and in our beliefs, what's important to believe, where can we disagree. We face questions of that nature in our church today and have for years. When I say questions of division, I just mean things that would seek to kind of sneak into God's body and God's family and divide it against itself. Because we understand that we are unified in Christ, but that unification is threatened from within and from without constantly. I probably shouldn't tell you this story. I know that if I had asked Jen, hey, I think I'm going to tell a story. I know she would say, please don't do that. Um, so this John was up most of the night. So Jen, Jen, Jen, uh, is home with them. If your husband preached every week, you wouldn't keep up online either. Okay. So she's not going to watch this. All right. So we don't, she doesn't have to know what I'm about to say. All right. And, uh, and, and please don't mention this to Lily because she is embarrassed by this. It was something that happened this week that in some ways is objectively funny. At our house, me personally, I'm just very interested in politics. I'm pretty politically in tune. I consume a lot of news. And so it's something that from time to time is on the television in our house, and that'll cause Lily to ask questions about the different candidates in the election and things like that. And I'm very careful. Jen doesn't have to be very careful with this. I do. I'm very careful around, especially around Lily to never, ever talk down about any of the candidates running for any office or either of the political parties or people who vote for those parties. I'm very, very careful to always try to be as positive as I can and uplifting as I can, because by the way, this is just an aside. This is not part of the sermon. I'm just saying this in general. This is my opinion as a pastor that when we participate in the world's degradation of the opposing team, all we do is act like the world and model nothing that looks like Christianity to the people around us. Okay. So we talk about it sometimes, but I'm very careful to be aboveboard I don't because I don't want her parenting something clumsy and thoughtless to her classmates or to one of your kids over there or to one of you Okay, so I'm careful apparently the other parents that send their kids to Lily's school are not as careful. And so, at their desk or at lunch or something this week, the little girl that was sitting across from Lily said, Kamala Harris is stupid. Great. I don't know what Lily said. I do know that Lily has told me that if she could vote, she would vote for Kamala because Kamala's a girl and she's a girl. Fine. Fine. Don't care. You're eight. That'll get, needs to be more nuanced than that when you're 18, but that's, you're eight. So I don't know what she said, but apparently she defended Mrs. Harris. And that little girl, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, upon Lilly's defense of Kamala, went and told all the classmates that Lilly is a Democrat. And I know, it's particularly funny because I also grew up in a private Christian school where the word Democrat was a cuss word. And so like that got around, news got around the third grade and now Lilly is labeled, man. And it's funny. It's funny. But the more I thought about it, I thought I need to write an email. And I did. I wrote an email to the teacher and the administrator. And I was very kind in my email. I did not fault anyone for anything. As a matter of fact, the next day, Jen saw the principal in the car line. And the principal came over and told her how much she appreciated the email and tone up and whatever. So I was very nice. All right, don't worry. But what I said is, hey, maybe this year in particular, it would be good to have a policy in the classrooms that we don't talk about, we don't have political discussions that are not moderated by a teacher or a faculty member. Because maybe these kids don't need to be just parroting their parents' views back and forth to each other. And the reason is, the reason is, and here's why I was concerned. I said it would be a shame if we allowed the division of the world to slither into God's family of faith that is unified in Christ and allowed that division to begin to tear apart our unity in such a way that kids are isolated and mocked. If that's happening in the third grade at NRCA, it's happening everywhere. It's happening everywhere where the enemy is trying to sneak in and divide and sow discord and make us forget that we are unified in Christ first. So we face questions of division. We face questions of standards all the time. Should I drink this? Can I have one more? Is that bad? Is it bad to watch this thing? Is it bad to go to this place? It's a question that the church has asked through the centuries. Every generation of Christian has asked this question, is blank a sin? Is it okay to do this? Is it okay to go there? Is it okay to see this? Is it okay to stay there? We are always constantly asking, is this a sin? And when we're asking that, what we're really asking is, what should a Christian's standard of holiness be? That's what we're asking. So we face questions of standards of holiness, and we have throughout the generations. We face questions of policies. What should I do when I'm around other people? How should I handle myself? What kind of rules should we have in the church? Who's allowed to serve here and serve there? And when just this week I had what is essentially a policy conversation with someone when they said, hey, I don't have any problems with it, but I'm just wondering how did the church decide to do communion once a month? Why don't we do it more or less? And so we talked about that. That's a policy conversation. How do we make this decision about this thing? And then we face questions of belief. Just in the spring, I preached a sermon about unity in Christ, and that being Christ's prayer for us in John 17, the high priestly prayer. And I talked about the things that threaten that unity. And I talked about how Jesus, that was the primary thing that he wanted for us is, is that we would be unified. And I said that we cannot be unified if we insist on a homogeny of doctrinal thought, if we have to believe all the same things about all the same things, right? And so what we said is there's secondary and tertiary issues. And on those things, we don't have to agree to be in fellowship together, but there are primary issues on which we do need to agree if we're going to exist in fellowship together and move forward as a body of Christ. And so when we say that we have questions of belief, really it's okay, that's great. What are the primary issues? What are the non-negotiables? What do we absolutely have to believe and what are the things about which we can disagree and have conversations? So we have questions of belief. These same questions are the same questions that was facing the church in Corinth. They're the questions that Paul actually writes the letter to specifically address. Paul writes the letter to Corinth because he had heard some stuff was going on there. Paul spent about a year and a half in Corinth planting this church. That's more time, to my knowledge, than he spends anywhere else. For him to spend a year and a half during this season of his life in one place planting one church is a big deal. It was a lot of work and it was hard work. And so this church is near and dear to his heart. And as he goes and he's going around Asia Minor planting the other churches, he starts hearing that there's some stuff going on in Corinthians, in the church in Corinth. And so he writes this very long letter, this 15-chapter letter of 1 Corinthians back to the church in Corinth and says, hey, I've heard this stuff is going on. I heard that you're facing some questions. Let me tell you how I want you to address those things. And what I want us to see is that the answer to each question in the church in Corinth is the gospel. The answer to each question facing the church in Corinth is the gospel. No matter what they're dealing with, he takes their collective attention and he focuses it on the gospel. The first thing he does, the first thing he does is in chapters one through four, you can kind of break it out this way. In chapters one through four, they are facing questions of division. What had happened is after Paul left, other apostles came around and preached in Corinth. Peter came and preached. Apollos came and preached. And what he finds out is there is disunity amongst the body of the church in Corinth around which apostle they prefer. Some prefer Apollos. Apollos was an eloquent speaker. Paul was not a very good speaker. They said, Paul writes a heck of a letter, but his sermons aren't very good. And so they were arguing over who their favorite pastor was, is what they were doing, which is a very human thing to do. It's been happening since the church started. And so now we still do that. We go to this church because we like this pastor, that church because we like that pastor. And honestly, I think all of that is really silly. Whenever I'm talking to anybody who's looking for a church, I always tell them people vastly overemphasize the importance of the senior pastor. You can download the best sermons in the world every Wednesday. You cannot download worship and you cannot download community. So if the sermons are passable, but it feels like your people go there, which is really all we're going for here. They were choosing their favorite pastor and Paul writes back and he points them to the gospel. He says, Hey, that's not what you need to do. And so one of the reasons he points to the gospel is that, and what I want you to see is that we are unified by the gospel. Paul goes, you don't need to be doing this. You don't need to be having these divisions. We are unified in the gospel. I have these verses notated in your notes. So you see the references there, but I'm not going to pull them, put them up on the screen because we'd just be looking up and down for the next 10 minutes. But this is how Paul answers that question of division in 1 Corinthians 4, verse 1. He writes this, This, then, is how you ought to regard us, as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the mysteries God has revealed. So this is what he says. You prefer Apollos. You prefer Peter. You say you prefer me. You prefer this pastor or that pastor. Nobody cares. All of us. Me, Peter, Apollos, and anyone else that you might prefer. We are children of God. We are tools in the hands of the creator. We are instruments to bring you to him. We do not care who you follow. We do not care who you listen to. We care that you grow closer to Jesus. That's what we care about. I had an honest conversation with a pastor friend of mine this week who was meeting with someone who was, that person was trying to decide whether or not they wanted to come to his church, and so they wanted to meet with him. And when you do that, it's in some ways like a job interview. I'm visiting around, I'm interviewing different candidates for the role of being my pastor, and I'd like to see if you are going to fit the bill. Every now and again, you get into those, and my buddy said, I wish I could just tell him, come to Journey or don't. I know you're going to land somewhere. We'd love to have you, but I'm too exhausted to try to figure out what you want me to say. That's what Paul is saying. Listen to whomever you want to listen to. We are tools in the hands of our maker. It is our job to point you to Christ. It is not our job to be your favorite. And I'll tell you who does this really well week in and week out is Aaron, our worship pastor. Week in and week out as we worship, there are times, there are moments when he backs away and he lets you sing. And he doesn't put his voice over top of ours. He does this when he could belt it, when he could do solos, when he could carry on, when he could use this as an opportunity to show off and to show out and to show how talented he is. He backs up and he gets small because he understands that Sunday morning, his opportunity to lead worship is not about impressing you with his voice. It's about compelling you to raise your voice. And so he backs away because it's his job to bring you to Jesus. It's not his job to get in the way and impress you with what he does. This is what Paul says here. So he says, listen, it doesn't matter which pastor you prefer. We are all servants of Christ. So he takes the gospel and he puts that front and center and he says, think about who you follow in light of the gospel. And just so we're clear, when I say the gospel, because that's what we're talking about a lot this morning, the way that we define the gospel of grace, the way that I say it when I say it, is that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, believe that he did what he said he did, and believe that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. He's the son of God. He died and he rose again on the third day and he ascended into heaven and one day he's going to come back and he's going to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And he's going to take his family where we belong. That's what we believe. That's, that's the gospel. It's the, it's the, it's the miraculous work and reality of Jesus Christ. And so to the questions of division and disunity, Jesus take, or Paul takes our attention and he focuses it squarely on the gospel. You need the gospel to fix this situation. So that was the first time. That's divisions. Next is the standards of holiness. He heard that there was an issue going on in the church in Corinth. It's one of the more salacious passages in all the Bible where it comes to Paul's, it occurs to him, it came to his knowledge that there was a man in the church who was being intimate with his mother-in-law. And everybody just kind of knew that this was happening and nobody was correcting it. And he was just still in the back, shaking hands, collecting money every week, working as an usher. They were just cool with it. And Paul has to go, Hey, Hey, I know that you live in a city that has these standards of sexual purity that are incredibly low and that this doesn't seem like it's a big deal, but it's a big deal. You can't do that. You need to tell him that he can't do that. And so in questions of holiness, what we see is that we are compelled by the gospel. We are compelled towards holiness by the gospel. And here's what I mean. In chapter 6, verses 19 and 20, Paul says this, Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were bought with a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies. Paul says, I've heard that this sexual immorality, this impurity is going on in the church. We need to knock it off. And here's why we need to knock it off. Because your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It was bought with a price. It is not your own. And I want to pause and talk about what that verse means a little bit, because I think it's important. The temple in the Old Testament was the place of sacrifice and worship. You went there to worship your God. You went there to make sacrifices to your God. And so in the New Testament, when it says the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, that means that once you are a Christian, the Holy Spirit dwells in you. You are the primary dwelling place of the Spirit. And as such, it is your job to make sure that there is nothing that happens with your body that prevents you from worshiping and prevents you from living as a living sacrifice. Does that make sense? Your body is the primary vessel through which we worship and we sacrifice. And so what that verse means is that body no longer belongs to you. You can't do whatever you want to with it. You can't sully it however you want to. Wherever you go, you take the Holy Spirit. Whatever you watch, the Holy Spirit watches with you. When we do things that harm ourselves, we grieve the Spirit. We grieve Christ. Your bodies are bought with a price. That price is the gospel. It's the death of Christ. Reminds you that he did what he said he did. That he died for those sins. And now you belong to him. So you cannot use your bodies as recreational vehicles. They are the temples of the Holy Spirit. And so what Paul does in an issue of immorality and a lack of holiness, poor standards, is he takes the attention of the church and he focuses it on the cross, on the gospel, and he says, in light of the gospel, you cannot go on like that. I don't know what your standards are for your personal holiness. I don't know what you allow in your life and in your private thoughts. But I'd be willing to bet that most of us, if not all of us, could step it up a little bit in our standards of personal holiness. I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out. We need to tighten it up a little bit and our standards of personal holiness I bet I bet all of us are kind of letting a bit too much hang out when you tighten it up when we do that it's hard you guys have taken steps towards holding this before you've set new standards for yourself before you've said I'm not gonna do this I am gonna do this I'm not gonna think this I am gonna think this you, and then you've fallen short. Pursuing holiness is hard. And so what is it that gets us up and gets us focused and gets us willing to continue to pursue that holiness? By focusing ourselves on the gospel. By being overwhelmed with our gratitude for Christ that he died to save our sins. That he's fought that battle and he's already won that battle. Belting that song out loudly, reminding ourselves that Jesus has won this. We remind ourselves of the gospel and out of gratitude for the gospel, we pursue holiness. Then in chapters 8 through 14, Paul gets into some discourse. There's some different questions of policies happening. What should we do about this? What should our standards be about this? There's one about interpersonal relationships. There's one about standards of the church and of the gathering. The interpersonal relationship one is interesting because a portion of the congregation was made up of Jewish people. The rest of the congregation was made up of Gentiles. Well, Jews famously have much more restricting dietary laws and standards than Gentiles do. So the question came up in the church, what are we allowed to eat? Can we have bacon? And the Gentiles said, God's made everything. Everything's fine. We can eat it. And the Jews said, yeah, but that's still deeply offensive. Maybe not around us. And then other Jews said, no, no, no. You need to follow. You need to adopt our standards for holiness. You need to adopt our policies. And to this, Paul infuses this idea. He says, hey, listen. You need to act in ways where you love the other person more than yourself. And in this way, we are pointed to love by the gospel. When he answers this question with the gospel, we are pointed to love by the gospel. Here's what I mean in 1 Corinthians 9, 22. To the weak, I became weak to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel that I may share in its blessings. So Paul's going through this long diatribe. And he says, listen, those of you who say God made everything, I can eat everything, it's holy and blessed in his name, you're right. Bon appetit, live it up. But when you're around someone who will be offended or misled by your consumption of that thing, love them more than you love your freedom. Love them more than you love eating that thing. Love them more than you love yourself. Be all things to all people so that by all means you might win one. I've said many times from this stage, what is the only reason that the very second we are saved and accept Christ as our Savior and in God's family, what is the only reason that the very second we receive salvation, God doesn't immediately take us up to heaven so that we can be with him for all of eternity? The only reason you and I are still here on this side of Christendom and not yet in eternity is so that on our way to Jesus, we can bring as many people as we possibly can with us. It's the only reason we exist is to take people to the throne with us. And so what Paul is saying is, if your freedoms, if what you allow yourself, if your standards of holiness that you're fine with before the spirit, they don't prohibit your temple from being a place of worship and a place of sacrifice. If those standards, when you are around others, cause other people to stumble, cause other people to have issues in their hearts, to think of you as someone who is a sinner and possibly a hypocrite, then you need to raise your standards to their standards. If they're weak in their faith and this thing causes them to struggle, then you be weak with them. Love others to the idea of policies. How do we interact interpersonally with one another? Paul says, love other people more than you love yourself and more than you love your freedom. Love them as Jesus did, and he points this to the gospel. He also does it corporately because their worship was a little bit disheveled. They were having issues in their worship where people were talking over one another. I don't think just one person would get up and preach. You guys all know the drill. You come in, you sit down, you sing. Then you stand up, you sing, you sit down. Nate's going to talk for a while. It's rude to talk. I'm not going to talk while Nate's talking. No matter how bad or boring it gets, we just sit here and endure until we can go to lunch. Then we sing and we go home. They didn't have that order. They didn't know that. And so they had the gifts of tongues and people are standing up speaking in other languages or unidentifiable languages. They're teaching over one another. They're having faith movements and moments over one another, and it was very disordered. And so Paul, to address this problem of policy, what's our policy around the gathering? He says, listen, everybody has their part to play. This is famous chapter of 1 Corinthians 12 when he talks about the gifts of the Spirit and the body of Christ. Everybody has their parts to play. Everybody has their things to do. The body is made up of many parts and without those parts, the body cannot function. We just need to know our role and stay in our lane and do what we've been asked to do. And so he talks about order within the body. And then he caps off everything. He talks about the spiritual gifts and what they're for and how they should be used. And he caps off everything with this wonderful, wonderful discourse on love. And he says this in chapter 13, 13. And now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. Everything that happens on Sunday, everything that happens in the body, all the things that you experience, all the gifts, all the roles, all the things, it all boils down to these three things, faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these, the greatest of these virtues is love. And what is the single greatest act of love in the history of history? Christ's sacrifice on the cross. He again, to the question of policies, points us to the gospel. Love other people more than you love yourself. And then finally, in chapter 15, there's a question of beliefs. There was a group of people within the church who did not believe that the resurrection was a real thing. They thought it was a fable, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead, that people made it up and now they're evangelizing that truth, but that's not true, that Jesus didn't really rise from the dead. And Paul writes and addresses that. And he says, listen, listen, that can't be right because if that's true and the resurrection's not real and it didn't happen, then we may as well just be a glee club. We're totally wasting our time. And that's true. If we don't celebrate Easter every year, if Easter's not a real thing that acknowledges a real event that happened in real history, then we're wasting our time. And we should find something else to do on Sunday mornings. And that's what he told them. He said, no, the resurrection is a non-negotiable. It is a non-negotiable of our faith. We Jesus has already secured our future. Because Jesus is going to do what he says he's going to do. And he's going to come crashing down through the clouds with righteous and true written on his thigh. And he's going to rescue his bride, the church back up to heaven. He's going to do that. And that's impossible without the resurrection. So when we talk about these questions of what do we believe, what are the primary and secondary and tertiary issues? On what things are we allowed to disagree? Paul points them and us to the gospel. He says, here are the primary issues that you must agree upon in the church. That Jesus is who he says he is. He's the son of God. And because of the way he frames it up, we know that Jesus is the son of God. And when I say Son of God, I mean the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, creator God. John tells us at the beginning of his gospel that Jesus was the Word. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing is made. In the first three verses of the Bible, we see that the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, is hovering over the surface of the deep, and we see the words of God come in the form of Christ to bring about creation. So when I say Jesus is who he says he is, that's what I'm talking about, the Son of the Triune God. He did what he said he did. He came, he lived a perfect life, he died a perfect death, he rose again on the third day after offering propitiation for our sins. And he ascended into heaven where he exists and he waits until one day he's going to come back down to get us. Those are the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Every mainline Protestant church, every Catholic church agrees with those fundamentals of the Christian faith. They are the absolute non-negotiables. So when we talk about beliefs in our modern day church, what do we believe about this or about that? Here's what we believe. We believe in the gospel. We believe in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. That's what we believe. That's what we're centered on. That's what we're focused on. And it's true that every Sunday morning should bring your focus back to this. It's true that every time we read the Bible, our focus should be taken at some point or another to Christ. It's true that that is the central figure and moment and belief of the Christian life and of the Christian faith. And I love the consistency of Paul in all of these questions, all of the issues facing the ancient church, all of the issues facing the modern church. What do we do about this? How do we fix this? Here's an issue that's happening in our church or in our life. What's the answer? Jesus. Where do we look? The cross. What do we remind ourselves of? The gospel and the miraculous work that is. And I love that this is really the point of the letter to the church in 1 Corinthians. The point is to point them towards the gospel. And I love that we're ending our series on the New Testament with this message. Because the whole point of the New Testament is to point us towards the gospel. Really the whole point of the Bible is to point us towards the gospel. And what is true is that just like they were then, we are still unified, compelled, engendered, and reminded by the same marvelous, miraculous, and mysterious gospel today. The same truths to which Paul pointed the collective attention of the church in Corinth. He grabs our head and he points us towards those truths today. We are still walking in light of this beautiful gospel. And as we wrap up today, just a little touch on 2 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians really is a letter that shows the church what happens when they do and they do not live in light of the gospel. And one of the beautiful things that happens when we live our lives in light of the gospel, when we solve our problems in light and in view of the gospel, is this thing that Paul writes about in 2 Corinthians, I believe it's chapter 5, where he says, and I love this verse. He says, for we are led in triumphal procession by Christ, and through us, listen to this phrase, and through us is spread the fragrance of the knowledge of God. It's this idea that Jesus is a triumphant conqueror of us and of our souls, and he leads us through this life in procession behind him. And without our even saying a word, through us passively spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of God. That the people who interact with us in our life are somehow drawn closer, more nearly to Jesus because of our simple presence, because of the fragrance of the knowledge of God that our life and our love emits. Do you know how you live life emitting the fragrance of the knowledge of God? You view all questions and all problems and all your days and all reality through the lens of the gospel. And we live out of gratitude for the gospel. So I'm going to pray. And then Michelle's going to come up and lead us in communion as we continue to celebrate this miraculous gospel in our lives. Father, thank you for who you are. Thank you for how you've loved us. God, thank you for the gospel, for the truth of it. Thank you for sending your son to die for us, for being willing to watch him die. God, I pray that in every situation, in every moment, in every predicament, that we would ask how the gospel informs what our response or behavior or prayer should be. Help us live in light of that and fueled by gratitude for that incredible miracle. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.
Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for making grace a part of your Sunday morning. I just want to say up front, if I seem a little bit off my game this morning, it's because Greg and Liz Roberg took my seats, and I was very thrown off having to sit right there. I really don't know what to do with myself. Do not appreciate this at all. This is going to be a difficult Sunday, but we're going to get through it together. We are continuing our series called 27 from last summer and this summer, where we're moving through the 27 books of the New Testament. Next week, we will tackle 1st and 2nd Corinthians. I will not do them justice. I didn't want to do them together, but it's just the way the timing worked out. This week, we're going to focus on the book of Philemon, which handles this idea of talking a slave owner out of punishing a runaway slave. So it's super just easy content. I hope you brought your guests this morning. This is the perfect sermon for that. But as we approach Philemon together, I kind of wanted to frame it up like this. Can you think of a time in your life when you felt compelled to attempt to alter the thinking or the behavior of someone else? Typically in those situations, it's someone that we care about or someone that we interact with regularly. But can you think of a time in your life when you felt compelled to attempt to alter the thinking or the behavior of someone else in your life? Really, the question is, can you think of a time when you felt compelled to confront someone and you needed to have a hard conversation? You needed to try to convince them, hey, what you're doing is not good. You need to do this, not that. You need to think this way, not that way. Now, we do this in our house every day because we have a three-year-old and every day we sit down and we try to have lunch and we make for lunch something that we know he likes because we've seen him eat it before. He may even have the audacity to tell us in the preparation, I'd like to have this, and we'll make him that. And then we sit at the table, and he no longer wants that. And we engage in the painful negotiations of trying to get a three-year-old to eat his stupid lunch, right? It is very difficult to compel someone to change their thoughts and behavior. And on some levels, we do this often, particularly as parents. But there are other situations in life where we feel compelled to do that, and the stakes are much higher than whether or not they nap well after the meal. There are times in life when we notice a friend, maybe a co-worker, maybe a family member engaged in habits and patterns that are not good and we feel compelled to confront them and say, hey the way you're thinking about this is not right. The things you're doing are not best for you. We feel that it's our responsibility. We think about it, we pray about it, and we know we need to go to them. We need to have that hard conversation. There are times in life when we have to do that. Some of you, as I mentioned that, are thinking of a real life situation right now where you know you need to do that. So the question this morning is, how do we act? What do we do when we feel compelled to confront? And where I want us to start is with this idea of this is the way that the world does this. The way the world confronts, attempts to seek to change the mind and behaviors of individuals, is to demonize and degrade. The way the world confronts is to demonize and degrade. Now, if you don't think that's true, I would like to invite you to watch TV ever. Especially in 2024, an election year. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of highly paid strategists and highly skilled politicians who are trying to convince you how to think and how to behave and who you vote for. How do they go about doing that? By demonizing and degrading the opponent. That's how they do it. That's why we have the phrase attack ads. That's what the world does to try to convince people. We demonize and degrade. They immediately attack each other. And if you think about this interpersonally, when you're talking with someone who doesn't align with your political views, and you tell them who you think you might vote for in whatever race you might be thinking about, do they respond by talking to you about the issues or did they respond by immediately attacking your candidate, telling you why your candidate is a worse candidate than their candidate? This is what we do to try to change minds. We demonize and degrade. We talk down about the people that need to change and we degrade them and we make you feel guilt and shame to change your behavior. More pointedly, I have seen and am guilty of, I've seen parents do this. I've met with people who have adult kids. And they have, those kids are making decisions that they don't agree with. That they think are wrong. That are not good for them. And they'll sit and they'll tell me. I told them I'm disappointed in them. I told them that's not how I raised them. I told them that's not who you're supposed to be. I told them that they shouldn't do that, that you were raised better than this. You shouldn't be making those decisions. That's not how we taught you. And when we do that, not intentionally, not intentionally, but when we do that, we're falling into the pattern of the world and the way the world confronts by demonizing and degrading the person. Often, our default setting, when we are compelled to confront, because it's the pattern we've inherited from the world, often our default setting is to use guilt and shame to compel someone to change their behavior or their way of thinking. Isn't it? How often do we do that with our kids? How often do we do that with our peers, with our friends? How often do we do that with our spouses? When we get on to one another and we talk down to one another, trying to guilt and shame them into being who you think they need to be. I think this is the pattern of the world. And I bring that up because I think the letter to Philemon gives us a much better model of how to confront. Here's what's going on in the book of Philemon. It's a short book. It's one chapter. I bet very few in the room have a verse from Philemon that they love. All right? I don't have anybody, I've never been to any of your houses and seen a verse from Philemon on the wall. Okay. We often don't pay attention to it. We don't regard it. We don't think about it, but the message within it and the model that Paul gives us is critical and crucial to our lives and absolutely applicable to everyone in here. So what's happening in Philemon is Paul came into the company of a man named Onesimus. And Onesimus was a slave owned by Philemon. And sometimes you'll hear pastors or people or teachers try to talk about slavery in the New Testament as if that was really more like they were employees. It's not how we think of slavery. Bull hockey. Yes, it's exactly how we think of slavery. Whatever you think of the worst slavery, that's what this slavery was. That's what Roman slavery was. You are owned and you have no rights and your owner has all the rights there in charge of you. That's slavery, the bad kind, really the only kind. Onesimus had gotten separated from Philemon. It's unclear whether he ran away or there was maybe a shipwreck or an incident or something like that, but he had gotten away from Philemon, and he was in the company of Paul. And Paul is writing this letter to Philemon to be carried by Onesimus to request that Philemon would release Onesimus, receive him as a brother, and let him go back and continue his work with Paul. So Paul, listen, is writing to someone who's a slave owner, who's apparently also a believer. And we know from our country's past that it is entirely possible to be someone who ardently believes in Jesus Christ and someone who owns slaves without the cognitive dissonance that those things do not correlate. We know it is entirely possible as Christians to have a blind spot in our life to sins and moral ineptitude that we simply don't see, but we commit all the time. Philemon is in the middle of one of those situations. He's a slave owner and a Christian, and those things don't go together. So Paul is writing him to address that problem and to request Onesimus. And the way that he does it gives us a roadmap for how we are to confront people when we need to in our lives. So I'm not going to read the whole book. I could. It wouldn't take very long. I would highly encourage you to read it. I'm just going to highlight a couple of verses, but you should sit down and read this and follow the narrative all the way. But this kind of helps us follow along with his reasoning. If we start in verse 4 with the question of how does Paul confront a Christian brother who's got a moral blind spot and needs to change their thoughts or behavior, this is how sake of Christ. Now listen, if you had a friend who was a slave owner and you wrote them a letter to get them to knock it off, I don't think you would start your letter, I always thank my God whenever I remember you. It's a remarkably gracious opening for Paul to start this way. He immediately says to Philemon, this is, I'm grateful for you. I love you. Here's why I'm grateful for you. Here's our joint goal together. That's how he chooses to open. Then once he dignifies him, says, I love you. God loves you. We have this joint goal together. I'm grateful for you. I pray for you. Then he says this, and I think this is fascinating. Therefore, although in Christ, this is verse eight. Therefore, although in Christ, I could be bold and order you to do what you ought to do. Yet I prefer to appeal to you on the basis of love. Paul says it out loud. He says, hey, listen, I could be bold in Christ and tell you what you ought to do. And in our language and the way we're thinking about it this morning, what he's saying is I could do this the world's way and demonize and degrade you and tell you what you ought to do. And in our language and the way we're thinking about it this morning, what he's saying is I could do this the world's way and demonize and degrade you and tell you what you're doing wrong. I could bully you into what we're supposed to do right. I mean, this is the most influential church planter, pastor, Christian of all time who's not named Jesus. And he has every right and every authority to burn the face off of Philemon. Right? He's got every right to just let him have it. To get after him. And he acknowledges that he does. I could, in boldness, correct you in the name of Christ, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to choose to appeal to you, and I love this phrase, on the basis of love. And I think it's important to point out that I believe that there is a twofold love that Paul's talking about there. I think it's on the basis of love for Jesus and a basis of love for Philemon. Because Paul loves Jesus and he knows that Jesus loves Philemon. So he knows that he is approaching someone for whom Christ died, whom Christ is pursuing, whom Christ is shaping and molding and cultivating and sanctifying. And it is good to remind ourselves in moments of confrontation when someone's not behaving or thinking the way that they should, to first remind ourselves to appeal to them on the basis of love and allow that first love that we think about to be Christ's love for them. Remind ourselves, I am going to sit down and talk with someone that Jesus loves dearly, that Jesus gave his life for, that Jesus pursues and calls to and sanctifies and forgives and redeems. And this is what Paul does at the onset of the letter when he says, I thank my God when I remember you. He talks about this commonality that they have in Christ. So there's this two-fold love when we confront. First, we remind ourselves that this person is loved by Jesus. This person is saved and pursued by Jesus. Then we remind ourselves that we love them too. We love them. If we did not love them, we would not be in this situation. If we never confront them, we can't possibly love them. If we just allow people in our lives to be in patterns and habits that are not healthy for them and we don't say anything, then we're not truly loving them. So to love them sometimes is to address the issue. And when we do that, we should remember that they are loved by Christ and they are loved by me and I'm going to approach it in that way I'm going to appeal to them on the basis of love not guilt and shame so once he says that I could get after you I'm not going to do that I'm going to appeal to you on the basis of love. How does he do that? We see that in 15 and 16. This is Paul appealing. It's going to be fun. So he says, here's what I want you to do. I'm appealing to you on the basis of love. My hope is that you'll receive Onesimus back. Now, a slave returning to an owner that had run away and stayed separated is someone who is going to be punished. They're going to be punished in a really terrible way. And Paul is saying, don't do that. As a matter of fact, don't just not punish him, but receive him back, not as a slave, but as your brother. And then he continues to compel him. Once you do that, please send him back to me so he can continue the work with me. He's incredibly valuable to me and is helping me a great deal. Please basically free him and let me travel with him so that he and I can work together. This is the request that Paul is making of Philemon. And in this, we see the biblical and Christian model for confrontation, for how we should act and what we should do when we feel compelled to change the way someone behaves or thinks. And I'm summing that model up this way. The world says to demonize and degrade. Christians say dignify and direct. When we approach someone, how should we approach them? What does it mean to appeal on the basis of love beyond simply remembering that Jesus loves them and I love them? It means to dignify the person and direct the person. And I mean direct there in both ways. I mean be direct. Don't beat around the bush. Don't be unclear. Don't imply. Don't be subtle. When we are confronting a brother or sister because we feel compelled to do so, we feel convicted to do that, we need to have the courage and the love and the humility to be direct with them. Here is what I'm asking you to do. And that's exactly what Paul did. He was direct. I'm asking you to receive him as a brother, and then once you do, send him back to me. Release him to me so that he and I can work together. He was very direct in what he was asking. And when we confront, we should love people enough to have the honesty to be direct with them. But he also, before he's direct, he dignifies. I thank my God when I remember you. You are a child of Christ. We have done these things together. We have labored for the gospel together. Here are all the reasons I'm grateful that God was good enough to place you in my life. We dignify. This is the Christian model for confrontation. And just to contrast it a little bit, think about the power of this. And let's say that we have an adult child that's not doing, not making the choices that we think they should make. And we feel like we need to step in and confront them. If the world's way of demonizing and degrading them leads us to say things like, hey, I've noticed this in your life. I'm disappointed in those decisions. I'm disappointed in you, implying I'm not proud of you. And I think you need to change your behavior because your behavior is going to lead to this. And I don't want to see this happen. And we just use guilt and shame to try to compel them to see what we see. I'm disappointed in you. We didn't raise you like this. You need to do better. Let me help you do better. That's one way to do it. But if we do it Paul's way, the way that he confronts Philemon, if we dignify and direct, if we appeal on the basis of love, think about how much more powerful it could be in our lives if we confronted people this way. I love you. How can I better love you towards who you know you want to be and who God created you to be. What if we started confronting like that? How much better would you receive it if your spouse came to you and said, you're really bothering me. You're really annoying me. You're really doing this wrong. You need to do this better the way that spouses do. Except Jen, she never says that to me. How much better would you receive it if someone you love sat down with you and said, hey, I love you. How can I better love you towards who you know you want to be and who God created you to be? It's a simple question because here's the thing. We know in our own lives that when we're not being who we're supposed to be, when we're not being who we want to be, when we're not being who God created us to be because we're allowing habits and sins and patterns into our lives that are not good, we know that we know that. We carry it every day. When we're not walking with God and living the life that we're supposed to live and making the choices that we're supposed to make when we're in unhealthy patterns. We are aware of that all the time. We know that it's not good. We already feel guilt and shame. So I don't, no one needs to come to me to challenge me to be better, to point out all the things that I'm doing wrong. I know them. How much more effective would it be if someone were to point out the things that you're not doing well by simply, instead of denigrating you, making you feel more guilt and shame, heaping on what you already feel, if they actually came to you and said, hey, I love you dearly. You matter so much to me. I'm so grateful that you're in my life because of this and this and this. And right now, you're not living up. You're not living as the person that I know you want to be and you know God wants you to be. So how can I better love you towards that person? That's what Paul does. Paul is confronting a slave owner to free a slave, an egregious sin that none of us would ever consider. He has every right to attack him and demonize him and guilt and shame him, and he doesn't do that. That's not how Christians change minds. That's not how Christians confront. And it works in polar opposite. It sits in stark contrast and juxtaposition to how the world does. That defaults to demonizing and degrading and to belittling and to bemoaning and degradation and guilt and shame. The Christian model for confrontation operates in a very stark contrast to the worldly model of confrontation. We are to confront in those situations where we feel compelled to. Like Paul does, an appeal to our friends, our brothers and sisters, spouses, children, on the basis of love. How do we do that? We dignify them. We remember that Jesus loves them and that we love them. And we direct them. We be honest with them. And we point them in the way that God wants them to go. Think about how much more powerful it is to appeal to someone on the basis of love and equipping to become who God has made them to be rather than shame and guilting them into who we think they're supposed to be. And here's what I love about this book of Philemon. It's Paul practicing what he preaches. It's one thing to say it. It's another thing to do it. Because in Galatians chapter 6 verse 1, Paul's writing to the church in Galatia. He's giving them instructions about how to be a church and what they need to do. And one of his instructions in chapter six, verse one is this. Brothers and sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the spirit should restore that person gently, but watch yourselves or you also may be tempted. Paul tells the church in Galatia, and he tells all churches for all time, you who are spiritual, you who love Jesus, you who are mature in your faith, when you feel compelled to confront someone, do it gently. Raise them up with kindness. Do not be harsh in that confrontation. This is the instruction that he gives to the church in Galatia. And then, at another point in his life, Paul's in a situation where there is someone whom he loves caught in a sin and he feels compelled to confront. And how does he do it? He appeals to him on the basis of love. This is how the children of God are to confront one another. Be gentle with one another. Do it on the basis of love, reminding ourselves that Jesus loves them and I love them. And I am here to see them become who God created them to be, not denigrate them and guilt and shame them into better behavior. Now, here's the thing. I've felt like it was important for us as a church and as a family of faith to understand and be familiar with the book of Philemon. There's a reason God's included it in the Bible. We are edified to understand it and know it. And it is a model for us for how Christians ought to confront by dignifying and directing, appealing to people on the basis of love. But I also know that it's not very often in life that we feel compelled to do that, to use the lessons here. It's not very often that we're so compelled by the behavior of a friend or a spouse that we need to sit them down in a serious way and try to get them to change their mind or their behavior. We don't do that very regularly, and not everyone in the room has an instance they're thinking of in their life right now. I know that. So this is one of those sermons that sometimes I encourage you to tuck it away for later. Just be aware of this. And the next time you need to confront, hopefully the Holy Spirit will spark something in you. And you'll remember the message of Philemon. And you'll confront in love and appeal on the basis of love. But here's the other thing that I just want to mention as I close. We confront ourselves every day. We attack and accuse ourselves every day. We have a negative voice in our head that tells us that we're not who we're supposed to be. We're not who God created us to be. If people knew who you were, you would be ashamed. We have negative voices in our head from ourselves where we confront ourselves about our own behaviors and our own patterns every day. And we carry that guilt and shame every day. If you're willing to sit in a sermon and listen to how we should confront others and to know that we should do it with grace and love and dignity and kindness and gentleness. And that's what you would offer to every person in your life if you needed to confront them. Why would you not offer yourself the same love, the same gentleness, the same kindness? So tuck this away for when you do find yourself in a situation in life where you need to confront. Tuck this away. But also use it every day as you confront and convict yourself. Offer yourself the same grace, the same kindness, the same gentleness. Appeal to yourself on the basis of love. Remind yourself that Jesus loves you, he's grateful for you, and he is pursuing you. And when we do that, we will confront ourselves and others as Christ directs us to do it, not as the world does it. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for tucking the book of Philemon into the New Testament. Thank you for the lesson that it offers, for the model that it is of how to confront someone with gentleness. Lord, if there are people who have listened today and feel compelled to confront, I pray that you would give them the courage to do that, the humility to do it well, the love and the compassion to do it with gentleness. And I pray that the recipients would be restored and built up. Father, as we confront ourselves and experience our own convictions, first of all, God, I pray that we would listen and that we would allow you to love us towards health and towards who you created us to be. God, as we go, I pray that we would be more desirous of you when we leave than when we came. I pray that you would walk with us through this week. Bring yourself to our minds and to our consciences that we might focus on you this week and that we might grow closer to you. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, well, good morning, everybody. Thanks for being here. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Kyle, another one of the pastors here. We need to put out more chairs this week, all right? It's full. You guys didn't get the memo. It's summertime. You're not supposed to do this until September, but we are sure glad that you are here. We have been going through a series last summer and this summer called 27 that Mikey alluded to in the announcements, which were fantastic. Also, at the end, Mikey said, please rise. That's new. I like that language. A little courtroom drama in here. All rise. That's fantastic. Anyway, sorry, I got sidetracked. We've been going through last summer and this summer, 27, where we're going through the books of the New Testament. This morning, we arrive at the one that I've been avoiding for the duration of the series, last summer and this summer, because it's the book of Romans. Some of you know, others of you will, that Romans is the most theologically dense and rich book of the Bible that there is. You can make some arguments about some other stuff, but Romans is a, but I will do my best to give you a grasp of what it is to make it hopefully more approachable for those of us who have never read it before, to make it more approachable so we can know how we are reading it and what we are reading. And for those of us who know it well, to kind of think of it in this succinct way. Because here's one of the benefits of going through the whole book of Romans or the whole book of Philippians on a Sunday. And we're not going to hit all of the great details here. But here's one reason why it may actually be a helpful approach. Because when Paul wrote these letters, or when the other apostles wrote the other epistles, they wrote them to be read aloud to the church all at once in one sitting. These letters were not written by Paul to parse out and dissect and look at the Greek tense and the original meaning of this one particular word and have that compared to all the other times that word shows up in Scripture. Now listen, listen. That's good research. That's helpful knowledge. It's okay and good to dissect the Bible in that way. It's helpful to us, helps us understand. But please hear me when I say, it was not written for that to happen. It was written to be read at once to give us a big understanding of the large points that Paul or the other authors are attempting to make in the books or the letters that they wrote. So we need to be careful when we read scripture that we don't miss the forest for the trees. To that end, I would highly encourage you, if you've never done it, to sit down and read Romans from beginning to end. I would highly encourage you to sit down and read it all at once. I did it on a flight one time and not to be too whatever, but it was a really moving experience for me. I would really encourage you to read it from beginning to end. It takes about 45 minutes maybe, unless you're from Tennessee. It'll take a little longer. So it's difficult, it's difficult to synopsize all of Romans in a single verse or to point to a verse and go, this is the book of Romans. I'm going to open the argument with Romans chapter 12, verse 1. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you know your Bible well, you may be able to fabricate another argument from Romans. Maybe you think it's Romans 8.28. We could pull out other verses that I could anchor us in this morning, and they would be absolutely appropriate. But I'm going to anchor us in Romans chapter 12, verse 1, as kind of a synopsizing summary verse of the whole book. And this is what it says. Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your true and proper worship. I think this is a good encapsulating verse for the thrust of the book of Romans. Therefore, I urge you brothers, in view of God's mercy, and I memorized it this way, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship. Paul's encouragement, his pleading with us, is to live our lives as a living sacrifice. And this imagery of being a living sacrifice was very clear to the Jewish audience. Much of the early church was made up of people of Jewish heritage. They understood the sacrificial system. So they understood what it was to be a sacrifice. They had probably grown up sacrificing lambs and doves and bulls and goats and whatever. There's a whole book of the Old Testament, Leviticus, that details the sacrificial system. So they understood this language well. But that's why it would be striking to them, this concept of being a living sacrifice, because being a living sacrifice is a daily choice. In some ways, I don't mean to be too crass about it, but the goats got off easy in the Old Testament. Just one time, and that was it. Done. Forever. But Paul says that we are to be living sacrifices. Sacrificing ourselves every day. And when I think of what it means to be a living sacrifice, to live your life for the sake of others, I think right now, in my context, I think of moms of young children. Okay? I know that I'm biased. I know that that's my perspective right now. We have Lily, she's eight. John, he's three. And so our house takes a lot of energy to run right now. It is physically and emotionally draining. And I don't, listen, I don't have the experience of late elementary school, middle school kids, high school kids, so I'm not up here trying to play the suffering Olympics with you. I just, this is our perspective. And I just know from what I can see that Jen, as a stay-atat-home mom lives an exhausting life. Just yesterday, we spent the day, we're getting ready, we're going out to dinner with some friends and we spent the day getting the house cleaned because apparently you have to clean your house when a 17-year-old kid's coming over that's never cleaned a house in their life. I don't know why you have to do this. We have, you got to make sure the vacuum marks are upstairs, you know? So we're cleaning the house. We're scurrying around, you know, we're doing, we're doing things. And, uh, Johnny, we refer to him, uh, as Jen shadow, just her little buddy, just always right there with her all the time. Right. And so, and he's a lot, I was, uh, I was, I was telling somebody, I was watching some somebody I was watching some sprinting, some Olympics, I think yesterday. And I was locked into this particular race. They're doing the whole preamble. Sprinting races take forever to start, forever. It's absurd. So they're going through the whole preamble, and then it's the actual race, and it's like the 4x400 or whatever it is, and I'm watching the whole thing. And I realized, I'm standing in front of the TV just looking at it, and I realized when it ended that John had been talking to me the entire time. He had been talking the whole time. No idea what he said. We sat down yesterday at the end of the day to watch some more Olympics, and he sat on the couch next to me and sang a song about elephants and grass. He's just all day long. He's going, and Lily makes her presence known sometimes. So it's just all day, right? We get a little respite going to dinner. We come back after about a 90-minute reprieve, and as soon as we get home, both kids are awake, and they're waiting for mommy to get home. They have now got to this place where they just won't go to sleep until she tells them goodnight. They're not interested in me, and I'm fine with this for a couple reasons, because I can get right back to Olympic coverage, and if you lived in a house with Jen and two young kids, you wouldn't be their favorite either. Okay. I just admit defeat there. And it's fine. So John has gotten out of bed. He's turned his light on and his noisemaker off. And we lock it. We keep him locked in. So he doesn't wander in the night. He's banging the door. So she's got to go up there, get him to sleep. I leave, I read Lily, her devotional. Then Jen comes in and helps Lily get to bed. And then Jen comes downstairs, and we're watching TV, talking on the couch. And it was like maybe 15 minutes of quiet, right? And then we hear footsteps. Oh, no. So Lily comes down the stairs. She curls up on Jen's lap. She says, I don't feel well. Will you come lay down with me? And Jen looks at me over Lily's head and she goes, this started at 6.15 this morning. I am exhausted. She goes and she lays down with Lily. This morning, I get up. I get up early on Sundays, take a shower. Get out of the shower about 5.45, 6 o'clock. Jen's not in the bed anymore. I go in, check in John's room. She's in the seat holding John with a blanket over her. And I just kind of shook my head, kissed her on the head, came to church. That's exhausting. And that's what it is to be a living sacrifice. A living sacrifice organizes their life around the needs of others. That's what a living sacrifice does. A living sacrifice wakes up every day and says, I don't exist for me. I exist for them. My days are not my days. My days are their days. My resources are not my resources. They are their resources. My time, my quiet, my solitude, my needs are not my needs. They're their needs. And this is the life that God calls us to. It is, admittedly, a remarkably high bar that Paul would say you should live your lives as living sacrifices, sacrificing every day for the sake of God's kingdom, not your kingdom. In every meeting that you are in, in your workplace, this is an opportunity to minister and to pour Christ into the lives of the people around you. Every interaction with another customer or an employee at Harris Teeter is an opportunity. It is not your time to be quiet and put your head down and get out of there quickly. It is an opportunity for ministry that God is giving you. We are living our lives as living sacrifices. When the person calls you that you don't want to talk to, but you know you need to, you take that call with a smile on your face because we are living sacrifices. We are to live every day offering every moment to the service of God's kingdom. And that is a very tall order. But nobody demonstrated this better than Jesus himself. I am blown away every time I read through the gospels, noting how Jesus sacrificially loved everybody around him all the time. You read the Gospels and pay attention to all the times when Jesus just did a thing. He just performed a bunch of miracles. He just spoke to a big crowd. He just healed a bunch of people. He just taught the disciples. He just did a big thing that would be exhausting that we'd all want to rest from. as he's leaving it says he went to be in a quiet place alone and pray and people track him down and they ask him for more things and more teachings and more questions and it was just relentless but he lived his life. He lived and died and rose again as a living sacrifice and this is the standard to which all Christians are called. Now, how can God place such a tall order on us? Because if you're like me, you'll be lucky to live a third of your day as a living sacrifice. The other two thirds are going to my bank. If you're like me, you're lucky to be cognitively aware of your call to live as a living sacrifice every day. But we sang in the third song this morning that we worship God. I will worship you. I will worship you. I will worship you. Will you? Because your spiritual act of worship isn't to sit in church on Sunday and sing praise to God. That's part of it. But your spiritual act of worship, if you mean what you sing, is that we offer our lives as living sacrifices, living every moment for the service of God's kingdom, not ourselves. And so to me, the question becomes, how can God place that burden on us? What could possibly compel us to be obedient in that way? And historically, the answer to questions like this in church, at least to me, has been because God told you to. Because he told you to. Because you're supposed to. Because he's the boss. He is Lord and you are not. He's the he's the creator we are the creature we are the creation we have to do what he says because god made you created you destined you saved you now you should live your life in service to him out of a sense of ought but i just don't think that's a very satisfying answer. And I actually think that the book of Romans offers us in total a much better answer to that question. How can God, what should compel me to offer my life as a living sacrifice? Because that's a tall order. So here's what we're going to do. If you look at your notes, Shane grabbed me. Shane, a longtime Grace partner, grabbed me in the lobby, and he held up the notes. And he goes, what are you doing to us today, man? What's going on here? He goes, this feels like class. I know. I'm going to try to make this as not boring as possible, but I just thought, here's my thinking. If I can, in very simple language, tell you what each chapter means as we build to the back half of Romans, then you'll be able to follow the reasoning narrative that Paul is writing. It's like he's laying out a case to help us understand what salvation is, how it came into being, why it's so important, and what it means to us. And so he lays out over the course of eight chapters this doctrine of salvation and I think if I can explain to you basically the theme in every chapter that you may be able to leave here with a much better understanding of what the book of Romans is and how we can approach it so that if you want to read it on your own you can and you don't have to be intimidated by it so if it's's helpful at all to you, write these down. I'm going to go kind of quick through the chapters. We'll get you out of here by one o'clock. I promise. And you can keep this and it can help hopefully make Romans more approachable and understandable. And these are, listen, some of y'all know the Bible better than I do. And you're going to see my summaries of the chapters and you're going to think, that's dumb. That's not what I would have done. You're probably right. Okay. But these are mine. So I hope that they're true to scripture. But here's the flow of Romans and how it gives us an answer to the question, what compels us to live as living sacrifices? Romans chapter 1, you open it up, starts with some basic greetings and stuff like that, and then he gets into this discourse, and the point of the discourse is to say, hey, man has rejected God. Mankind, on the whole, has rejected God and is living as if God is not existent. Living as if God doesn't matter. Most of the world carries on agnostically, is what Paul is saying. And the culmination of this chapter is to say that not only does mankind, does everybody in our current culture and society, sin with freedom, but they encourage it when other people sin too. They embrace it and they love it. This, I think, is very relatable. It's hard to exist in our culture today and not see the idea that the trend over the last few decades has been moving, sometimes slowly, sometimes not, towards a godless society where society conducts itself as if God does not exist. So that's what he's saying in Romans chapter 1. Man has rejected God with the way that they live. Romans chapter 2, he follows that up. Because of that rejection, God is angry. The rejection has angered God. He created us. He purposed us. He provides us with life and sustenance. He sent His Son to die for us to make a path to reconciliation to Him. And what do we do with all of those gifts? We stomp on them and we reject them and we turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to them and we live as if He doesn't exist. So chapter 2 is about the earned wrath of God. He's ticked off that we have rejected him. That's the point that Paul is making. Then chapter three, he makes the point to a largely Jewish audience at the time. Hey, we cannot behave our way back into reconciliation. Our sin, that rejection of God, has broken our relationship with God, has severed it irrevocably, and we cannot white-knuckle or behave our way back into right relationship with God. We can't follow the rules well enough to make God okay with us again, to defer and overcome that wrath and that anger at our rejection, to make up for rejecting Him. We can't follow the rules well enough. That just, that can't happen. We're not going to behave our way into heaven. Chapter 4 moves through that, and he says what we can do, we cannot behave our way into reconciliation, and then chapter 4, for reconciliation, God requires our trust, not our behavior. That's why the first song we sang today was about believing in Christ. Because this is what God requires of us. He requires our trust, not our behavior. Chapter 5 tells us where to place that trust. Chapter 5, we placed that trust in Jesus Christ and what he did on the cross. There's this beautiful dissertation in 5 where he compares Adam to Jesus and he says, just as in Adam through one man sin entered the world, so now in Christ through one man salvation enters the world. And so we see Adam as a type Christ from the Old Testament reflecting to us who Jesus really is in the New Testament. He says we place our faith in Christ. And when I preach it, I always say that to be a Christian is to believe that Jesus is who he says he is, that he did what he said he did, and that he's going to do what he says he's going to do. And we're told what he does in chapter 5. In 6, then, we learn that we are not just delivered from God's anger, but into a new eternal life. In chapter 6, he introduces this idea of us being a new creature. And he paints this picture of baptism, where we are buried with Christ in death, and we are raised to walk in newness of life. We preach the gospel of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ when we physically, invisibly baptize people. That's why we do it in the service. That's why we go all the way under the water because it's a picture that he paints in Romans chapter 6. That because we are saved, we are reconciled with God, we are not just reconciled to heaven for eternity, but we are also reconciled from ourselves. We are no longer slaves to sin. We are rescued from sin and we are raised to walk in a newness of life. We can walk as a new creature where it is possible to sin no more. That brings up a really interesting pickle that we're all in because all of us still sin. And that's what Paul talks about in chapter 7. It's to me maybe the most human chapter in the whole Bible. And the way I would sum it up is to say this new life causes us to be at war with ourselves. We're told in scripture that we're a new creature. That we're not a slave to sin. I don't feel like that most days. I don't feel like this new creature that doesn't have to sin. I feel like this old creature that gets really disappointed in himself for how he carries on sometimes. And this is what Paul captures in the closing verses of chapter 7. Where he says essentially, the things I want to do, I do not do. The things I want to do, the things I do not want to do, I do. The things I do want to do, I do not do. And then exasperatedly cries out, oh wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? I don't have any tattoos, but if I were to get one, that would be in the running. O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Man, if you haven't come there in your Christian walk, you just got saved last week. Because I feel like to be a believer is to know the good that you ought to do, is to know the bad that you ought not do, and to still struggle so much with those things. And Paul cries out and says, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God who provided a way in Christ Jesus. And then that gives way, chapter 7, that war, because we're a new creature, we're going to be at war with ourselves, that gives way to chapter 8. Romans chapter 8 is the greatest chapter in the Bible. To give you a sense of how inadequately I am handling the book of Romans today. A few years ago, we did an eight-week-long series in Romans chapter 8 called The Greatest Chapter, and I could have made it 12. I just didn't want to wear you guys out. Romans chapter 8 is a soaring chapter, and it says Jesus has won the war, and nothing can ever change that. He's won the war that you fight in yourself, and he's won the war against sin and death, and there is nothing that can ever change that. Romans chapter 8 is a culmination and climax of certainty. It is a beacon of Christendom that declares the power of Christ, and it ends with such a flourish where Paul says, for I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor demons nor rulers nor principality nor things present nor things to come nor height nor depth nor anything in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. That's a powerful statement that Jesus loves you so much that he died for you, he's renewed your soul, he's reconciled you to Christ or to God and now he holds you in his grip so tightly that nothing in all creation, not even you, can separate yourself from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. It's magisterial when we look at it all the way through. And we see him build from Romans 1. We've rejected God. Romans 2, God's been angered by that rejection and hurt. Romans chapter 3, we cannot behave our way into fixing that. Romans chapter 4, we have to have faith, not behavior. Romans chapter 5, we place that faith in Christ. Romans chapter 6, because of our faith in Christ, we're a new creature. Romans chapter 7, that new creature wars with itself. Romans chapter 8, Jesus has won that war. Now and in eternity. And we can rest in that. Then we have the back half of Romans. Romans 9 through 16. And this is a gross oversimplification of those chapters. But the essential question that's being answered for the rest of the book is do we live in response to the first half of Romans? And I think Paul most succinctly answers that question in chapter 12, verse 1, when he says, therefore, my brothers. Now listen, when you're reading the Bible, especially Romans, and you see the word therefore, you have to ask, what's the therefore? Based on what? Therefore, what? Therefore, in view of God's mercy. Because of everything I just told you about in Romans 1 through 8, therefore, brothers, in view of God's mercy, in light of the rest of the message of this book and the glorious salvation offered to us by Christ, in light of that, in view of God's mercy, I urge you to live your lives as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual act of worship. You see, it is not a sense of ought that compels us to live our life for God's kingdom and not our own. It is an overwhelming sense of gratitude that drives us. Out of an overflow of gratitude, we live lives of sacrifice. Out of an overflow of the truths of gratitude of the truths of Romans chapters 1 through 8 we live lives of sacrifice we are so compelled by what that by what he has done for us that we spend the rest of our lives trying to help other people see what he has done for them. You understand? We steep ourselves in the gospel. We steep ourselves in the truth of scripture. We steep ourselves in the sacrifice of Christ with the daily awareness of what he does for us and that he's won the war for us and that he calls for us and that he loves us. He loves us. He really loves us. And he chases after us and he won't let us convince ourselves that he doesn't love us. He won't let us convince ourselves that we're not good enough for him or that we don't deserve him. He chases after us, and he comes for us, and he died for us. And if we will daily steep ourselves in that reality, we will live a life of such gratitude that we will be compelled to live a life for the sake of others as a living sacrifice. We will be so overwhelmed by the reality of what he's done for us that we will spend our lives trying to help other people see what he's done for them too. And when that is our mentality that changes our attitude in the drive-thru, that changes our interactions with our children, with our coworkers, with our employees and employers, when we walk in that sense of gratitude, it will be easy to live our lives as living sacrifices because we are so overwhelmed by what God has done for us that we want to spend our days helping other people see what God has done for them. I am reminded of that great verse, John 1 16, and And from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. So here's what I hope you'll do. And here's my prayer to you this week, for you this week. The idea of offering our lives every moment of every day for the sake of others and not ourselves, is daunting. Really, in our power, it's impossible. Our only hope is to remember the message of Romans and be so grateful for all that God has done for us, for all that he's given us, and for the way that he saves us and forgives us and pursues us. To be so steeped in that gratitude that we cannot help but sacrifice for others so that we're not the only ones who realize all that God has done for us. I hope that we'll do that. I hope you'll do that. And I hope that this is just whetting your appetite for Romans and that you'll sit down and read it on your own too. Let's pray. Father, we are grateful to you. We are grateful for your son and for your sacrifice. God, help us to live lives of gratitude so that we might live as sacrifices for others as your son lived for us. God, if there is someone here who doesn't yet know you, I pray that they would. And maybe by simply walking through this wonderful book, they can better understand how to approach you and why they need you. God, be with us in our weeks. We're going to wake up tomorrow trying to live a life of sacrifice and we're going to stub our toe and we're going to mess up and we're going to say selfish things. But God, I pray that you would give us the grace for ourselves to get back up and let you lead us more and further and deeper. In Jesus' name, amen.
Well, good morning, everyone. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If you've been following along, you know that normally I preach, but the past few weeks I haven't been doing that. So it's very good to be back and get to see you guys from up here. It was fun to prepare a message this week, and I'm excited to share that with you. The other thing I'm excited about right now is the Olympics. Who else has been watching every possible minute of Olympic coverage? It's been fantastic. We love it in our house and it's been really special this time around. Lily, our daughter, is eight so she can enjoy it with us. We stay up late and watch it and then we hit pause and then we get up in the morning and we finish and it's just been really, really fun. And for those of you who have been following along, you know that one of the stories of the Olympics so far has been the United States men's gymnastics team. In the all-around competition earlier this week for those who have been hiding under a rock and don't know this I want to set the scene for you. In the men's all-around competition what they do is members of the team, three members of the team, it's a five-man team, participate in all of the events, and then the highest cumulative score wins the medal. They win the gold medal. And going into the event, you know that China and Japan are going to win gold and silver. There's really no one else that can touch them. But the U.S. has a chance to medal, to get the bronze for the first time in 16 years. And so hopes are high. And we are watching this earlier in the week. I think it was maybe Monday or Tuesday. We're watching it and it was so fun. We're so enthusiastic about it. And everyone's doing what they're supposed to do. Everyone's doing their routines like they're supposed to do their routines. They're hitting their prime position. And then it gets to the final event. The final event is the pommel horse, which if you don't know what the pommel horse is, you're not missing much. It's real stupid. I don't know why it's an event. It doesn't make any sense to me. They spin around, and then they're on the ground. Fine. Listen, incredible amount of talent. It's just dumb to watch. That's the final event. And we've got one person who did pommel horse in college. They're never coming back. Sorry. It's the final event. And the Americans have this one guy on their team. And his specialty is the pommel horse. This is the only reason he's on the team. He doesn't participate in anything else. He's only there as a pommel horse assassin. That's his whole job. And he's the last one to go, the last event of the night. And all night, they keep panning over to him, telling him he's coming up. He's the pommel horse guy, and they're showing him, and he's just sitting in the back brooding. He's not looking at anything or anybody. He's totally expressionless. Every now and again you can tell he's mentally going through his routine and he's just sitting there stiff all night. And then he gets up and he does his routine and he nails it. And it was great. There was tears in our house. And listen, a lot of you probably know the story. You probably know who I'm talking about. But if you don't, I want you to picture in your head the hero of American gymnastics and national sport in general. And I want you to picture what you think this athletic hero looks like. Because whatever you're picturing ain't this. It's not that guy. That's not who you had in your head. That guy looks like an NC State grad who's writing code at a startup. That's what he looks like. If he didn't have that medal around his neck, you'd just think he was there for fun, like as a fan. But that's the guy, Steven Nedarosik. That's the guy. And he, the reason I bring him up is he embodies to me what is one of my favorite principles in life, which is this idea that no matter what people see in you, no matter what people say about you, no matter what you might say about yourself, don't try to convince them they're wrong with your words. Just put your head down, do the work, and let the results speak for themselves. Don't worry about what other people say. Don't worry about what other people might think. Just put your head down, control what you can control, do your work, and let the outcome of that work and of that effort speak for itself. And that's what he did. He steps up to the pommel horse, and he takes his glasses off, and he gets real squinty. And Chris Rock, in his commentary, said, don't tell him. He thinks he's doing the rings right now. He can't see nothing. But you're looking at this guy and you're like, this can't be the guy. But he put his head down. He did the work. And he was the guy. The results speak for themselves. I love this principle in life. I think it's such an important one that gets us through a lot of seasons and allows us to accomplish a lot of things. And one of the reasons I love this principle is because it's a very Christian principle. That principle of put your head down, do the work, don't worry about what other people think, just let the results speak for themselves. That's a very biblical principle. As a matter of fact, you can pull that right out of the book of 1 Timothy. So if you have a Bible, I'd love to invite you to turn to 1 Timothy 4, verse 12. It's going to be on the screen. If you have a Bible, if you read the one in front of you, it's the NIV. I learned this verse. It's been an important verse to me for most of my life. If you've ever done any youth ministry, this is a big, important verse. It's on the other side of that wall right there in our fourth and fifth grade classroom. But I memorized it young at a Baptist church in the King's English. So if you don't mind, I'm going to say it like that, but you guys read along. Paul writes in 1 Timothy 4.12, let no man despise thy youth, but be thou an example to the believers in word and conversation and charity and spirit and faith and in purity. So a little context for this verse so you understand a little bit more about what's going on and what Paul is saying specifically to Timothy. We're in a series now called 27 where last summer and this summer we took one book a week and we're going through all the books of the New Testament the 27 books of the New Testament last summer in this summer trying to give you a synopsis or a sense of what each book is about so for those who are not super familiar with the Bible maybe it becomes a little bit more approachable because you know what the books are about you know what you're gonna read when you sit down to read it's to raise the biblical literacy of the partnership of grace and our hope is if you know the Bible books are about, you know what you're going to read when you sit down to read it. It's to raise the biblical literacy of the partnership of grace. And our hope is if you know the Bible well, that as we highlight these books, that you see them through fresh eyes and maybe it inspires you to dive back into scripture on your own. This Sunday, we're actually going to cover or talk about, not going to cover, talk about the books of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus. Because together, those make up what are referred to as the pastoral epistles. Those are letters, most of Paul's letters were written to churches. To the church in Ephesus, to the church in Galatia, to the church in Thessalonica, and so on and so on. But these books, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, were written to individuals. 1 and 2 Timothy, you can figure out who that was written to. Titus, you know who that was written to. It's written to those men in particular that Paul had left behind and installed essentially as senior pastors over the churches that he had been planting. And so the letters to Timothy are to him as he takes over the church in Ephesus, one of the most impactful churches in early Christendom. Early Christendom may not have survived without the church in Ephesus. And so he installs Timothy as the pastor there, and he writes in these two letters as books of advice, words of advice to a young disciple as he takes over a church. And in that is a lot of wonderful things about what church should be and how it should operate and what the qualifications for the elders should be. We see that in Timothy and in Titus. If you're an elder at the church, you should be very familiar with these books. If you're a believer, you should be very interested in these books. But there was no way to group them together and cover everything in them. But what I thought we could do is pull out this one verse in 1 Timothy 4 and talk about that, because that is a verse that is universally applicable to every Christian. That's not pastoral advice. That's Christian advice. Let no man despise your youth, but be an example to the believers in word and conversation and charity charity and spirit and faith and in purity. And word and conversation means the way that you carry yourself, the way that you interact with people. In charity and in spirit, charity is love. It means the way that you love others. In spirit, it's the way that you carry yourself. In purity, it's this pursuit of holiness. So the way that I would sum this up is that Paul is telling Timothy, I know you think you're young. And I know you think that it's going to be difficult for people to listen to you. And trust me, this has been a very encouraging verse for me. Right now, I'm the ripe old age of 43, and I look every bit 46. But when I took the church over, I was 36. And I was worried about this. And this verse brought me comfort. Because Paul says, put your head down, do the work, be an example to those around you in your pursuit of holiness and the way you love others. That's a really simple way to understand it. Put your head down, do the work, and be an example to the believers in the way that you pursue holiness and in the way that you love others. And I believe that this verse applies to all of us equally. That when Paul is telling Timothy to do that, he's telling all Christians for all time to do that. And here's why I think this is true and why I think we need this advice from Paul this morning. Because there's two things about each and every one of you that are here right now or that can hear my voice right now from your home or wherever you're listening further into this week as you catch up. Here's something I know to be true of every single person who can hear me. Two things. The first is we are called and created to live spiritually impactful lives. Every single one of you, no matter how much you know it, no matter how much you admit it to yourself, no matter how comfortable or uncomfortable you are with that. Even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't yet call yourself a believer, you're here to support family, you're here because you're curious, you're here because church is nice, whatever brought you here, I believe that God has a purpose for your life. The Bible teaches that God has a purpose for your life, that you are called to live a spiritually impactful life that matters for all of eternity. Every single one is called to that, whether you realize it or acknowledge it or not. And I know this to be true because in myriad places and myriad ways throughout scripture, the authors emphasize this point. In 1 Corinthians chapters 12 and 13, we see this big long list of spiritual gifts. We're taught about the church as the body of Christ and how every part of the body has a part to play and a job to do, has a responsibility. And we're told that the Holy Spirit actually gifts us upon salvation to play our part, to contribute to God's kingdom. And that's not for pastors. That's not for leaders. That's not for the charismatic. That's not for the people who are bold and out there and in front of you. That's not an instruction for the elite few, for the spiritual Marines. That's not for them. It's for everyone. We are all given gifts. In Ephesians chapter four, those are the gifts of the spirit we see in first Corinthians 12 and 13 and we see again in Romans. But in Ephesians 4, we're told that Christ gives us gifts. That every one of us is gifted to be either an apostle, a prophet, an evangelist, a shepherd, or a teacher. That Christ himself imbues us with those gifts to be used in his kingdom to build his kingdom. Every one of us, I'm going to talk about this in a few weeks, every one of us is a kingdom builder of the kingdom of God. And we've been gifted to that end. And if those two things don't convince you, then maybe the verse that I bring up all the time will help you see. Ephesians 2.10, I love to remind you of this verse. It says that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. It teaches me that my job as a parent to John and Lily is not to craft them into who I want them to be. It's not to mold them into who I think they should be. It's to raise them in such a way that they can identify their good works and walk in those that were prepared for them before time. You, each of you, each and every one of you, it's absolutely true of you that when God knit you in your mother's womb, he knew your story, the gifts that he was going to give you, and the role that he had you to play in his kingdom. He's purposed every single one of you to live a spiritually impactful life, to impact the people around you for Christ. I'm reminded of the verse in Colossians that says that we are led in triumphal procession by Christ and through us will spread the fragrance of the knowledge of God. Each one of us as a believer is designed, created, called, and purposed to live lives that impact the people around us towards Christ. Every single one of us. I know that to be true of you. I know it to be true of you that you are called and created to live a spiritually impactful life. Here's the other thing I know to be true of you. We all doubt our capacity to actually do it. Every single one of us, as I'm up here ranting about your purpose to live a spiritually impactful life, all but the most arrogant and least self-aware of us are thinking to ourselves all the reasons why we can't make an impact, but we can't make that big of an impact. All of us have disqualifying voices in our life that keep us from fully embracing that. Timothy's disqualifying voice was, I might be too young. They might not listen. And Paul says, hey, don't listen to that voice. Put your head down, be an example to the believers in the way that you pursue purity and in the way that you love others. Let the outcome of those actions speak for themselves. As I sit here and tell you, you are called to live a spiritually impactful life. There is no doubt in my mind that all kinds of things are running through your head as to why you can't live a spiritually impactful life as that person over there. Each of you thinks that your counterpart on the other side of the room has a better chance of living a spiritually impactful life than you do, and you're all wrong. We're all called to that, but we all, here's the problem, have in our life these disqualifying voices that we're tempted to listen to. And more often than not, the loudest voice of disqualification is in your own head. The loudest voice that tells you, I really don't have much of a shot at making a difference in God's kingdom. I really am not going to be that impactful in my life. That voice, more often than not, comes from you, not the world. And we think things like maybe when you hear me talk about that, maybe your thought is Timothy's thought. I'm too young. No one will listen to me. I don't have enough experience. I don't have the resume to be spiritually impactful, to impact people towards Christ. Maybe you're on the other end of the spectrum. I'm too old. All my years are behind me. Whatever chance I had to make an impact has passed. I've missed my sweet spot. Now I'm just cruising it to home. There's nothing left for me to do. Maybe you think to yourself, I'm not that articulate. I don't like being in front of people. I'm not winsome. I'm not charismatic. Maybe when I talk about making a spiritual impact, you think, yeah, well, I'm a stay-at-home mom. And my world is so very small right now. And this sermon is for other people. It's not for me. Maybe you would disqualify yourself with your past. Say, yeah, man, you don't know what I've been and what I've done and where I've come from. Ain't nobody listening to me. Maybe you're new to Christianity. Maybe you're not new to Christianity, but you're new to taking it seriously. And so when I open up the Bible and talk about the different books in the Bible, you're not really familiar with them at all. And you're just thinking, I'm just trying to play catch up here, man. I'm not ready to go impact other people. I'm new to this. I don't know. They're going to ask me questions and I'm not going to know the answers. So I can't make an impact yet. I don't know what your disqualifying voice is trying to convince you of to make you step out of the race and not believe about yourself that you were created to live a spiritually impactful life. I don't know what's trying to convince you that you don't have a part to play in building God's kingdom while you're here on earth. But I do know that to our doubts, Paul tells us to put our heads down and pursue holiness. To whatever doubts you have in your head, to whatever your disqualifying voice is from spiritual service, Paul says to that voice, ignore it, put your head down, pursue holiness, love others, and watch what God does. He says to you, Paul says, let no man despise your past. Judge you based on mistakes that you've made before. Put your head down, pursue holiness, love others well, and watch what God does. Let nobody look down on your inexperience. You know the remedy to a past? A pure future. You know the remedy to inexperience? Experience. You know the remedy to thinking that you're too old or you're too young? Get in the ring and watch what God does. We write ourselves off from living spiritually impactful lives for so many reasons. And they're all lies. They're all lies that you tell yourself and that the enemy tells us to disqualify you from service in God's kingdom. And here's a really scary thing that dawned on me as I was preparing this. When we listen to the disqualifying voices, we do harm to those we love the most. Do you understand this? When we allow the voices from within and from without to convince us that we can't really take our faith that seriously because no one takes us seriously and God doesn't really have something he wants me to do and people he wants me to impact. When we believe that, when we fall prey to that and we step out of the ring and we're just coasting through our spiritual lives, we do the most harm to the people we love the most. What would have happened in Ephesus if Timothy had let those voices win? If Timothy had convinced himself that he was too young to be effective, and he stepped into the pulpit with timidity? Would Ephesus have slowly crumbled and dissolved away without leadership? I don't know. But if he was to choose to listen to those disqualifying voices, then he would not have served the people nearly like he needed to. More pointedly, parents, listen to me. If you don't take seriously your call to live a spiritually impactful life, if you let the voices talk you out of putting your head down and pursuing holiness and loving other people well. If you mail in your spiritual life and be content to be slightly above average. I'm good enough to check the box. I'm a good person. I'm going to heaven. My kids are going to heaven. If you just mail it in and go into cruise control for the rest of your life without pursuing God. Who's going to disciple your kids? Who's going to show your kids how to follow Christ? Who's going to model it for your children? If you refuse to put your head down and pursue holiness and love others well and let God in to let him use the gifts that he's given you, if you refuse to engage spiritually and don't take your spiritual health seriously and don't believe that you were placed in the life of your children to impact them towards Christ, if you won't do that for them, who will? Aaron? Children's pastor? Kyle? They get your kids for one hour a week. And let's just be honest about this. That's not even 52 weeks a year, okay? I've seen your church attendance. Let's be generous and call it like 40. They get your kids for 40 hours a year. They're going to disciple a kid in 40 hours a year? You get your kids for 100 hours a week. There is no one in your child's life better postured to love them towards Jesus than you. And when you refuse to engage in your own spiritual growth because the voices talk you out of it, you abscond on your duty to raise your kids in Christ and you thrust it on someone else and we shortchange them. When we choose to believe the disqualifying voices in our life, we hurt the people around us the most. The Bible tells us that marriage is to be a picture that reminds us of the way that Christ sacrificially loves the church. If you don't show your spouse day in and day out how Jesus loves the church by sacrificially loving them, if you're not trying to do that every day, if you're not taking seriously the call to impact your spouse towards Christ and watch God work in them, who's going to do that for you? If you don't take seriously the call in scripture to live a life building God's kingdom, pursuing holiness and loving others well, and letting God do what he will with the gifts, with the people around you? Who's going to be the pastor that your workplace so desperately needs? Who is your coworker going to come to when they need prayer because their mom's in the hospital? Who's going to invite your neighbor to the thing that's going to ignite them spiritually and reengage them with the church? Who's going to work in your circles of influence as only you can to impact people towards Christ? If you choose to allow the voices that disqualify you from Christian service, if you choose to allow them to win, if we don't take seriously this call from Paul to be an example to the believers in word and conversation and charity and spirit and faith and purity, if we don't do that, who's going to step in and do our job for us? We are all called to live spiritually impactful lives. And we must take seriously that call. Now, on the flip side, can you imagine what could happen if we choose to pursue holiness and allow God to use the gifts he's given you. Can you imagine what could happen in your life if you left here and you said, okay, God, listen, I don't know what your plan is for me. I'm not even sure what the gifts you've given me are. I have no idea. But I'm going to put my head down. I'm going to pursue holiness. I'm going to love others well. I'm going to make my life available to you. You use my life to impact the people around me however you want. God, I want to live the rest of my life building your kingdom. What would happen if you left this place and you got on your knees this afternoon, tonight, tomorrow morning, and you said, God, I'm yours. Use me. I don't know to what end. I'm not convinced that I'm going to make any great impact. But I am convinced that I need to live the rest of my life opened up to the possibility that you want to use me in the lives of the people around me. So here, it's yours. I'm going to put my head down. I'm not going to listen to my disqualifying voices. I'm not going to listen to the disqualifying voices of the people around me. I'm going to put my head down. I'm going to do the work. I'm going to pursue holiness. I'm going to be an example to the believers in the way that I love others. And I'm going to trust you with the results and let those speak for themselves. What could happen if we let God in our lives to use the gifts that he's given us? Well, I'll tell you one thing that could happen because we've seen it happen in real time here in this church over the last five or so years. I'm about to just, she probably will never come back to the church. But she's on staff, so she has to. I'm going to embarrass the heck out of Carly. You can leave the room now if you want to, Carly. I don't know how long ago it was that she started singing. Carly was the lady singing right here this morning. I don't know how long ago it was that she started singing, four or five years ago. But her origin story is she was our previous worship pastor's wife, Lisa, was in the restroom on a Sunday morning and heard an angelic voice coming out of a stall and stalked her and said, we need you on the worship team. You should try out. And Carly had to be cajoled. She had to be talked into it. Because she's not big on, she's not the first one to raise her hand and be like, yes, I would like to be in front of others and let them hear my voice every Sunday publicly. That's not her jam. So she had to be talked into it. And she reluctantly agreed. She auditioned. She did well. Let's get you on the team. So she starts coming up and leading worship. And here's the thing. I'm pretty sure that Carly led worship for about two full years before I actually heard her voice. Because it takes, it's true, isn't it? I don't know if you guys have ever thought about this. I've watched it happen whenever we recruit someone new to the team. It's one thing to have a pretty voice and be told that you have a nice voice. It's another thing to sing loudly enough and confidently enough into the microphone in front of other people to be heard above the mix. When there's someone up here singing and you can't hear them, it's not because Cindy doesn't have them turned up loud enough. It's because their Sunday morning voice is a little bit different than their Wednesday night voice. There's people in the room. It takes guts to step into that. But over time and over the years, Carly trusted us with her gift. She started to believe in God's purpose for her life in this area. And she started to trust it to God. And she started to trust it to us. And in the last, I would say, six to eight months, now when Carly leads a song, buddy, she's leading. She's belting. She's letting it rip. And every time she does it, I'm getting emotional right now. Every time she does it, I get emotional. And I get emotional because I think it's so beautiful when a child of God is using their gift from God to do exactly what he gave that gift to them to do. It is so powerful to think about the fact that when she was knit in her mother's womb, God says, I'm going to give this one a voice. And he didn't give her a voice so that she could sing pretty and entertain people. He didn't give her a voice so that she could bring attention to herself. Do you know why he gave her a voice? He gave her a voice so that he could hear it sing praises to him, so that he could hear his daughter sing to him in a way that he enjoyed. And he gave her a voice for his daughter to use to bring his other children into praise before his throne, into his presence. When she sings on Sunday and belts it out and lets it rip, she's using the gift that God gave her for the exact reason he gave it to her, and it's beautiful. And we would never experience it and be led into worship through her and through her gifting if she allowed the disqualifying voices to talk her out of it when she auditioned. If she allowed the disqualifying voice in her head to talk her out of it in the early years as she was getting her feet wet. And so we see what can happen in real time when we say, God, I don't know what you have for me and I don't know what my purpose is here, but I'm going to make my gifts available for you to use however you want to use them. In the meantime, I'm going to be an example to the believers in the way that I pursue you and in the way that I love others. Can you imagine what a church could look like if everyone in that church prayed that prayer and said, God, I don't know what you have for me to do. I don't even know how you've gifted me to do it. But I'm going to pursue you and I'm going to love others and whatever impact you want me to have, God, I'm ready to have it. Can you imagine what could happen with a church full of people who believe that? I'll tell you this. I'd like to find out. Let's pray. Father, we love you. Thank you for imbuing our lives with purpose that's bigger than us. Thank you for always encouraging us to put our heads down and to trust you with the gifts that you've given us. Thank you for being a steady voice in our life that tells us we don't have to believe the disqualifying things about ourselves. God, I pray that every person in here, whether it's today or five years from now, would allow you to open their eyes to the fact that you've called and created them to live spiritually impactful lives. Would those of us who've just been cruising, not taking things seriously, not being engaged, God, would we re-engage with you? Would we make disciples of our children? Would we be a pastor to our communities? Show us how you can use us if we simply get our doubts and our fears and our hesitancies out of the way and let you begin to work. God, I pray that you would bring it about. In Jesus' name, amen.
All right, everybody. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for joining us on this June Sunday. It's good to see you guys. It is incredibly hot outside. So thanks for braving that. Before we get into the sermon, just a small announcement. For me, this is my last sermon that I'm going to preach until August. A few years ago, the elders talked and decided that it would be best for the church for me to not preach in the month of July and best for me. And here's the reason why. And so we've been doing this for a few years now. The first and most important reason is this. There are other voices in the church that are very much worth hearing. They are thoughtful and insightful and articulate and wise and godly, and we are better off hearing from them. I don't know if you guys realize this or not. I'm sure you have if you've listened to a number of sermons. I don't really have something to say every week. So it's good for other people whose God has placed on their hearts things they do have to say to share with us. So first and foremost, we want to create an atmosphere of other voices. And that's why periodically in the year, I never go more than six or seven weeks in a row without someone spelling me and getting another voice up here. So that's always been a priority for us. It's always been a priority for me as a senior pastor. The other reason is taking that block of time allows me to focus on other areas of the church that I might not otherwise be able to give as much focus to in the regular rhythm of writing a weekly message. Last September, I stood up here on September the 10th, and I told you guys that I was going to be working hard, kind of in the margins and in the afternoons, behind the scenes, to develop some discipleship pathways for us that I believe is the next big step that we're going to take as a church, and maybe the most important thing I've worked on in the last year. So I've been quietly working on that behind the scenes and with other people in concert with others and putting things together. And I'm very excited in September, we're going to do a series on our five traits. Some of you may be aware that we have some, you might even be able to name one, but we're going to make those more a part of who we are and what we do as a church. And to accompany those, we're going to roll out what we're calling discipleship pathways that are kind of the next step for us to take towards spiritual growth as a church. So I'm finishing those up in July. I'm rolling those out to the small group leaders at the end of the month of July, and then you guys will be hearing about those in September. So that's how that work's been going on in the background since last fall. I'm finally ready to show it to you here as we enter into this fall. Now for this morning, as Mike said earlier, we have our last sermon in our series called Idols that's loosely based on Tim Keller's book called Counterfeit Gods. And in it, he presents this idea of source idols, things that really fuel the idolatry that we have in our life and other areas. Those source idols are power, approval, control, and comfort. And what he means by source idol is maybe our visible idol is greed or materialism, and we just want things. We want to get all we can, can all we get, and sit on our can. We just want more things. That's what we want. And so maybe that comes because we're really motivated by a desire for power. We believe money brings power. Maybe it's control. We believe money brings control. Maybe it's approval. Maybe it's comfort. But it's those source idols that really get sneaky and begin to turn our hearts away from God. And we talked about this idea of idolatry being so important because whatever occupies the space of our top priority in our life, and idolatry is anytime we put something in our life, we prioritize that over our devotion to God himself. Anything that occupies that top spot in our life is by default the recipient of our worship. And what we talked about is that nothing can bear the weight of our worship besides our God. So whenever we get that out of whack and we have something besides our God, besides Jesus Christ as our number one priority, then everything else in our life suffers. This morning, I've been excited to do this sermon because I believe it applies to everyone in the room. I've said along the way, different people have different source idols. We struggle differently with different ones. But comfort is one that even if it's not your number one, it's your number two. It's there. I think we all struggle with it. And the more I thought about this source idol of comfort, the more convinced I became that this is true. When it comes to comfort, we are the frog being boiled in cultural water. When it comes to comfort, we are frogs being boiled in the cultural waters of the United States in 2024. A desire for comfort is all around us. A desire to just be fine, to just be chill, to just feel comfortable, to have things set at the right temperature. Kyle just went back there and messed with a thermostat. You know why? Because we want to be comfortable. Because if we're not comfortable, we're not going to listen to Nate. That's why. So we've got to be comfortable. Here's a few ways I know that comfort is ubiquitously important to us. I have this theory in life that is yet to be disproven, that you can gauge a family's net worth by the number of unnecessary pillows they have in their home. Okay? And if you're thinking to yourself, joke's on you, I don't have any unnecessary pillows in my home, you're the problem. Okay? People have to move things out of the way so they can sit on your couch. And here's what I don't understand while we're here. While we're here, I'm just going to say this for the men, okay? Guys, I'm saying this on your behalf. Ladies, we don't understand why you go to the store and spend $200 on a chore to put on your bed every morning and every night. We don't understand why you go to HomeGoods and TJ Maxx and you dump 200 bucks on pillows to put further out from your sleeping pillows so that at the end of the day, you have to take them off when you're tired. And in the morning, you have to put them back on when you're in a hurry. It makes no sense. And you do it so it looks nice. For who? When's the last time you had a guest over to your house? And when you had them over, you were like, and here's our master bedroom. Nobody does that. Nobody does that. It's weird. Nobody sees your master bedroom. Listen, some of you I have been friends with the whole time I've been here. I am such good friends with you, I can walk right into your house unannounced, and I've done it before. You know what I've never seen? Your master bedroom. Because that's weird. No one sees it. Knock it off with the pillows. All right. There you go. Guys, you can talk about that at lunch. We have these symbols of comfort all over our culture. How many of you in your cars don't have heated seats? You don't just have heated seats. You have cooled seats. Don't raise your hand. Those things are wonderful. Yeah, two hands up back there. Whenever I'm riding with my friends that have cooled seats, I crank those suckers up all the way. I love those things, man. Those things are amazing. How many of you have a carefully negotiated thermostat temperature for your summertime nights and for your wintertime nights? These things have been, sometimes you had to bring in a moderating attorney just to get that settled. How many of you, how many of you, I'm being serious, how many of you have had the chance to fly first class before? and within 15 minutes of takeoff, you thought, I'm never sitting with the peasants again. This is amazing. Or you've been lucky enough to get the pods for international travel, where you extend out and you have a personal screen and there's a door to keep the pores out. That's how it goes. And you tell yourself, here's what you tell yourself. This is so funny. I've heard my friends say this. I need to be refreshed because I got to hit the ground running when I get there. I bet you do, buddy. I bet you do. That's why you chose the drinks that you did on the way over because you got to hit the ground running. I bet you do. That's why you chose the drinks that you did on the way over, because you got to hit the ground running. I bet. Sure. Maybe, maybe you just want to be comfortable. We like our space. We like our accompaniments. We like the things that make us feel good. And here's one of the ways I know that it's not a uniquely American problem, but it's a particularly American problem. I've watched House Hunters International. Have you watched House Hunters International? Without fail, the Americans go over to a foreign country, Costa Rica, Europe, New Zealand, wherever. They're looking at a $650,000 flat in the middle of Copenhagen. And you know what they say? This feels small. And it is. It's like a tiny little dishwasher, a one-burner stove. There's a toilet where you can control the shower nozzle from there. Like, it's all, it's real tight. And as Americans, we look at that and we're like, no way. I need my space. This desire for comfort is a particularly American struggle. In a culture, and this is true, where if you choose, if you have a desk job, and you choose at that desk job to stand, you have one of those high desks, people are like, look at the health nut over here. Look at Captain Fitness not sitting in a chair for eight hours a day. This is how much as a culture we prize comfort. And it's not just physical comfort that we prize, although that is a very good indicator. But mental, spiritual. We don't like to be challenged spiritually. We like to go to church. There's a certain amount of conviction that's okay. But over that, it's like, come on, man, you're being a jerk. And I'm not going to sit in this week after week. We want to be comfortable spiritually. I'm just going to edge right up to this and then I'm going to back off because I'm scared like you are. There are certain things I can't talk about and you know I can't talk about them because if I did, everybody in here would get fidgety and uncomfortable and it would feel like this. So I don't. And I talk about other things where we're comfortable, right? There are conversations that we need to have, but that conflict and that tension makes us uncomfortable, so we avoid them. In myriad ways, in myriad situations, we live in a culture that prizes comfort almost over and above all else. And what I want you to see this morning is we are like frogs being boiled in a cultural water. I came across this fact a couple of weeks ago in one of the books that I was reading, but it noted that if you, that there was an officer in the Spartan army circa 400 BC who got dishonorably discharged from the army because he was charged with taking a warm shower. He was charged with allowing himself the indulgence of a warm shower and he was deemed unfit to be a Spartan. How far we have come and the comforts and the things that we demand. So here's what I would say. And here's what I want us to realize this morning. If we don't idolize comfort, we've got to at least admit we have a tendency towards it. I doubt very much that anyone came in here this morning going, oh, comfort, that's me. I very seriously doubt that at the beginning of the series, when I did the first sermon five weeks ago and introduced this idea of idols and idolatry, that any of you went, oh gosh, if I just kind of survey the landscape of my life, I think comfort's probably my idol. I don't think anybody did that. And yet, I think it is prevalent and persnickety and pernicious and corrosive in all of us. And like I said, not just materially, but parents, how many things do you need to broach with your children that you don't? Because it would just be a hassle. I don't have the energy for that fight. I don't have the energy for that discussion. I know, and maybe it's confrontational. Maybe it's sympathetic. Maybe it's relational. Maybe you can see they're hurting and you just, you want to wait another day because it's going to be a hard conversation and you're tired. How many times do we choose our own comfort over what our kids need? Spouses. How often in our marriages do we tolerate a fragile peace? Because breaking that peace would cause so much discomfort that we don't want to deal with it. It's easier to just exist at this simmering tension. How much of what God asks us to do is blocked by the amount of comfort that we desire? I have a good relationship with my neighbor. I don't want to make it weird by inviting them somewhere or asking them about things. I have a good relationship with my coworker. I don't want to jeopardize that by asking an odd question or bringing up an odd topic. It's not just physically that we allow a desire for comfort to begin to derail us in our thought process. It's emotionally. We build up walls. How many of us, listen, how many of us know, know that God wants us to see a counselor? That we have some issues and some things in our life that we need to deal with that are rippling out and spilling onto the people that we love the most. And that what we need more than anything is to talk to someone that he has blessed and trained up to serve the kingdom in this way. And we need to go talk to them, and we don't. And you know why we don't? Because it will be uncomfortable to begin to deal with the things that could be brought up. So this desire for comfort goes way beyond throw pillows and first-class seats. And it permeates into every area of our life. And here's why this idol of comfort is so dangerous. Because idolizing comfort causes us to build our life around protecting it and we end up wasting it. Idolizing comfort causes us to build up our life around protecting that comfort, and we end up wasting our life in the process. I don't love admitting this, but I will, because I think some of us can relate to this in some way. After the first time I flew first class internationally, I got home, and I'm being dead serious. I started thinking to myself and racking my brain and talking to friends. What sorts of side hustles can I do to begin to generate more income so that when I travel, I can travel like that? What kinds of, how can I market myself in other areas? What kind of extra income can I make so that when I travel, I can get the upgrade? I can be in the excellence club. I can be the gold member. What can I do so that when my family has these experiences, I can turn them up a notch because I liked it so much? And listen, listen, that is so honest. It wasn't for other things. It wasn't, what can I do to monetize myself more, to work a little bit harder so that I can give more to God's kingdom, so that I can provide a more comfortable life for my family, so that my wife and my children can have a little bit nicer things and live life a little bit more easily. No, it was as simple as, God, I really like flying first class. I'd love to do that again. I don't want to have to fly back there with the peasants anymore, so let's see what I can turn up to travel nice. Listen, listen to me. How stupid is that? How stupid is that? But some of you do it for golf memberships. Or the cooling seats. Or the nice whatever. And isn't this so easy to do? Isn't it? Isn't our culture tailor-made to suck us into that trap? I was having lunch with a good friend this week. He's 35. And he's kind of come to a bit of a crossroads in his career where he could go this way or that way. And his entire career, he's been headed this way. He got the job. This is what the people in charge of me do. This is what I'm supposed to do. This is the next thing. This is what I'm going to do. And now he's picking his head up at this crossroads going, is that even what I want to do? And how often does that happen? For how many of us is that our story? How many of us have friends with that story? Who graduated high school or graduated college or got their masters and entered into the workforce? And when you entered into the workforce, all you were trying to do is prove yourself and make enough money to survive at some sort of level that you liked and that you wanted to attain. And then you got it. And then you needed to continue to pay for it. And then you married somebody. And then you looked and you said, okay, we're doing this thing together, either single income or dual income. We have goals. And then you spin it forward and you spin it forward and you spin it forward and you just put your head down and you do the next thing and you get the next promotion and your friend buys a white SUV and now I want that. And your friend flies first class and now I want that. And your friend buys this house and now I want that. And oh shoot, we're doing beach houses now? I guess I'll figure this one out too. I didn't know I needed white marble in my bathroom, but I really, really do. This tile is terrible, right? And we just need the next thing. And we never think about if we're spending our life and investing our years in the right thing. It's just the next thing. And by the time, listen, by the time we pick up our head and we wonder, is this even the direction I'm supposed to go? We have mortgages and we have and we have bills, and we have a standard of living, and we have certain expectations that we've built up. I took the kids to Turks and Caicos last year, so if I don't do it this year, I've somehow failed as a father. And on and on it goes. And we stay on the treadmill, organizing our life around comfort without ever realizing we had done it. This is what makes this the sneakiest, most pernicious idol of them all. Because none of you started your adult life and verbalized, you know what I want to do? I want to be comfortable. And I'm going to organize my whole life around it. But as you sit here, you're wondering if that's what you've done by accident. And if that's how we invest our whole life, we will have wasted it. And for me, there is nothing more sad, there is nothing I am more afraid of than getting to the end of my life and looking back on the decades and knowing in my heart of hearts that I wasted it. That I didn't use my years for things that mattered. And let me tell you what ultimately doesn't matter. Your comfort. It just doesn't. And I bring this up because I do think it's so easy to slip into this pursuit. I do think it's so easy to, without realizing it, almost by mistake, to have organized our entire life around building comfort and then marshalling our resources to protect that comfort without ever risking anything for God's kingdom. I can think of no better example of this in the Bible than in a parable that Jesus told of someone who in this instance marshaled their life around protecting comfort. And we see how the master responds to them. It's a well-known parable found in Matthew chapter 25. I'm just going to read verses 24 and 27. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there, but this is the parable of the tenants. I'm going to read from the NIV. It says bags of gold. That's one of the places where the scholars have let you down. It's talent. It's a talent. It's a denomination of money that may feel like to us a bag of gold. But in this parable that you guys know, but in case you don't, or in case you need a refresher, there's a master of the house. The master of the house represents Jesus. And the master of the house is leaving. He goes to these three servants and he says, hey, I'm going to go out of town for a while. Here's some money. Give me a report on what you did with the money when we come back. To the first servant, he gives five talents. To the second servant, he gives two talents. To the last servant, he gives one talent. And he goes out of town. And then he comes back in town. And when he gets back in town, he goes to the servant with the five talents. And he says, what'd you do with the money? And the servant says, see, I took the money, I invested it, I traded and sold, and now I'm giving you ten talents in return. I've doubled your investment. And the master says, well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful with a few things. I will make you lord over many. And then he goes to the two-talent person. And he says, what did you do? And the two-talent person says, see, I have bought and sold and invested, and I have doubled your money. I'm giving you back four talents. And the master says to him, well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a few things. I will make you Lord over many. And I would pause right here and just say this. I should do a whole sermon on it, but I'll just say this and maybe it'll sit on some of you like it sits on me. That phrase, well done, good and faithful servant, is worth living your life for. Pursuing that phrase, chasing hearing that from your God in your eternity, at the end of your life, marshalling all of your resources and all of your time and all of your talents and all of your interests and all of your effort and all of your discipline so that one day when we stand before the Lord, he will look at us and he will say, well done, good and faithful servant with the life and the time that you had. That phrase is worth your whole life. You will never be disappointed by the things that you pursue to hear that. And what's wonderful about that phrase is the five-talent person got the same response as the two-talent person. God doesn't care how big of an impact you make or how wonderful your work is or how many people know who you are or how many people come to your funeral or any of that stuff. He does not care about the size and the grandeur of your impact. What he cares is about the faithfulness and your small actions. What he cares about is that you are a good and faithful servant, and he will say, well done, whether you have five talents or two or one. I love that. But then he goes to the servant to whom he gave one talent to you. His master replied, you wicked, lazy servant. So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed. Well, then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers so that when I returned, I would have received it back with interest. He goes to the last servant. He says, what did you do? And the last servant says, well, I'm scared of you. I did not want to risk losing your money, so I buried it. Now, I cannot tell you in good faith and a good conscience that I have a depth of insight into a fictional character's soul in a very short parable in the Bible and can tell you that that man struggled with the God of comfort, but here's what I can tell you. In that moment, in that instance, that's what he chose. He chose to not risk anything and to be comfortable. And in that story, Jesus is represented by the master. And what was Jesus' response to that? You wicked and lazy servant. And he takes the talent from the one and he gives it to the one with the five because he knows it's going to be in better hands. This is what's at stake if we choose to marshal our resources around comfort and by default waste our life. Just bury the gifts and the talents and the abilities and the plan that God has given us because we're too afraid to risk anything. Then one day when we stand before him, we will not hear well done, good, and faithful servant. And here's the thing I want us to go home with today and understand. The more I thought about this God of comfort and how it juxtaposes with works of the kingdom, I was sure of this. Stories of kingdom-building faith always require a sacrifice of comfort. Stories of kingdom-building faith always require a sacrifice of comfort. You will never find anyone who's doing things for the kingdom who didn't, in order to do those things, have to give up some of their comforts in life. Later this week, next Sunday, I'll be flying to Ethiopia to visit Addis Jamari over in Addis Ababa. And I think of the women that founded that ministry. I think of Suzanne Ward and Cindy Douglas. And Cindy is over there months on end. She's over there months at a time with two teenage sons. You don't think that she's had to give up some comfort and that her family's had to give up some comfort for the sake of what God is doing over there in Ethiopia? And what God's doing there is amazing and needed and absolutely necessary. It's a wonderful work of the kingdom for which she had to sacrifice comfort. If you think of the godly people you know in your life, the people who love well and who serve well and who are always here during the week setting things up, they're always at their place wherever they serve, wherever they pour into, they're always pouring into it, they're always doing, they're always serving. Those people give up the comfort of doing that. When you think about good and godly parents, you have to give up your comfort for the sake of your children. Good and godly spouses give up their comfort for the sake of their spouses. Good and godly friends give up their comfort for the sake of their friends. You will never, ever find an act of the kingdom and an act of faith that is done without giving up some comfort on the other end. And we see this biblically in story after story. Two that spring to mind right away are of Saul changed to Paul. And I have to go quickly because we still got communion to do. And I think I'm going long, but just bear with me. When I think of Saul, he was on his way to Damascus to persecute the Christians there. Jesus appears to him, blinds him, sends him to a room, names him Paul, and says, I've got big plans for you, pal. And then goes to a guy named Ananias, and he says, Ananias, I need you to go see Saul, turn to Paul, and get the scales off of his eyes, because he needs to start serving me now. And Ananias says, no way, I'm not going to do that. He's a Christian killer. That does not sound very fun. And God says this in one of the most ominous statements in the Bible, Acts chapter 9, verses 15 and 16. But the Lord said to Ananias, go, this man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. But no, no, by all means, God is super concerned with your comfort. He is my chosen instrument to reach the Gentiles. Do you understand that Paul is the most influential post-disciple Christian to ever exist? No one has influenced the church as widely and deeply and profoundly as Paul. And in order to do that, he sacrificed all comfort. And God said, I will show him how much he must suffer for my name. Shipwreck and beatings and floggings and imprisonment and disease and poverty. He endured it all for the sake of God's kingdom. In the Old Testament, I think of Ruth and Boaz and Naomi. Ruth was a Moabite woman. There was poverty in Israel because of the drought, and some families started moving to Moab, and she happened to marry one of these Jewish boys that had moved over. And then the dad and the two brothers died, and it left the mom, Naomi, with two daughters-in-law. And the other one said, hey, I'm going to stay here. And Naomi looked at Ruth and said, you need to stay here in Moab. You're young and pretty. You can marry, and you'll be fine. But Ruth knew that if she did this, that Naomi would be destitute. And so she said this in this famous line, no, where you go, I go. Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. And she did the right thing, and she stayed with Naomi. She ended up marrying a man named Boaz. And if you fast forward several hundred years, you come to the book of Matthew. And in the first chapter of the book of Matthew, you have the genealogy of Jesus Christ. And when you read those genealogies, what you find is that you can trace a line from Jesus back to King David, the second and greatest king of Israel. And King David came from a man named Jesse. And Jesse came from a man named Obed. And Obed came from a woman named Ruth, married to Boaz. Because of her great act of faith and her sacrifice of comfort, God included her in his family tree. So first of all, we never will do anything for the kingdom that doesn't require a sacrifice of comfort. Second, we have no idea what can come out of that sacrifice and what God might do. The greatest example of this we see is Jesus himself, who gave up all the comforts of heaven to condescend and come here. I don't know what the pillow situation is in heaven, but I bet it's pretty good. I don't know. It can't enumerate all the comforts that Jesus gave up. But when he came here, it says in Matthew chapter 8, verse 20, that foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. For three years, Jesus sofa-surfed so that he could do ministry to us and build up disciples to leave us, to establish the church in which we now sit. Jesus is the greatest example of all time of what it means to give up comfort for the sake of a work for the kingdom. And what I want us to understand about this, because we do, all of us, somewhere have this God of comfort, that our proclivity for comfort stands in direct opposition to our desire to be used. I know most of you. I know a lot of you really well. And I know in your hearts more than anything you want to be used by God in this life for his kingdom. I know that you do. And what I want you to see this morning is that your desire for comfort stands in direct opposition to your desire to be used by God. God wants to use you in mighty ways. You are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. And I know you want to walk in those good works. But your desire for comfort almost more than anything else is what's keeping some of us from those. So here's where I would end with this simple question for you to consider as we move into a time of communion together. When is the last time you did anything at all that made you uncomfortable for the sake of the kingdom? When is the last time you made an intentional choice to allow yourself to be uncomfortable for the sake of the kingdom of God. This could be in a conversation that we know we need to have. This could be in a neighbor that we know we need to approach. This could be starting a small group that we know we need to start. Starting a ministry that we know we need to start. Volunteering with a place or with an area or in a team here where we know we need to do, we just haven't done it. This could mean broaching a subject with our spouse. This could mean taking the step to go into counseling and begin to let things tweak there so that we can do a little bit better for the people around us. This could mean what we give towards the kingdom of God. When's the last time our giving made us uncomfortable? When's the last time you intentionally chose to sacrifice your comfort for the sake of God's kingdom? And let me tell you this. I have never, ever talked to anyone who got towards the end of their life and said, gosh, you know what I regret? Just doing so much for Jesus. You know what, I think we gave too much. I think I did too much. I think I, here's what I've never heard. I should have made my life more about myself. Wish I would have. We have no idea what can happen when we begin to sacrifice this dearly held comfort for the sake of God's kingdom. And so I would simply ask you to consider as I pray and as we move into a time of communion, what is God pressing on your heart? Where is he asking you to sacrifice your comfort? I believe he's pressing something on each and every one of us. What conversation does he want you to have or action does he want you to take or invitation does he want you to extend or discipline does he want you to adopt or habit does he want you to give up? Where is God calling you to be uncomfortable? Let's pray. Dear God, thank you so much for sending your son who took on all of us and all of this and left behind all of that and all of you for our sake. God, we confess that we are slaves to comfort far more than we intended to be. That not being upset and not being rattled and not being stressed and not feeling uncomfortable in any way imaginable matters to us far more than we would have been willing to admit and perhaps more than we're still willing to admit. But Lord, in your gentle way, where you just navigate into our souls, will your spirit bring about the necessary conviction that you would have for us here? Help us to see with your eyes where we are choosing our comfort over you. And give us the courage, God, to choose you and to find out what happens on the other side of that choice. God, thank you for your patience with us. Thank you for your grace with us. Give us the strength to walk in the good works that you have planned for us and to set aside the comfort that keeps us from that so often. In Jesus' name, amen.
