All right, well, good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. Thanks for being here on this incredibly gross, hot Sunday. I heard somebody say it's like walking around in warm soup outside. I think that's pretty appropriate. I think we're going to take out the lounge areas next week and make more space for y'all. So we're getting the message. You're coming back to church, so this is great. These lounge areas are penalties for not coming in the summertime, so now we'll get back to normal. We've been moving through a series called 27 that we're going to do this summer and next summer where we're doing an overview of the 27 books in the New Testament to kind of give you an idea of where we're going for the rest of this summer and where we're going to pick up next summer. For the rest of the summer, I'm just going to go through the general epistles, the general letters that are largely in the back half or entirely in the back half of the New Testament. We're going to do Hebrews this morning. Aaron Winston, our children's pastor, did a phenomenal job covering James for us in July. So if you want to catch that one, you can go back and take a look at it. And then we're going to do 1 and 2 Peter together, 1, 2, 3 John together. Because I don't want to do three sermons out of 1, 2, 3 John that all say like, hey, if you love God, obey him. That's the message of 1, 2, 3 John. And then we're going to do Jude Labor Day Sunday. We decided that we would save the most overlooked book of the Bible for the most overlooked Sunday of the calendar. So that's going to be very appropriate when we do Jude and you guys watch online while Aaron and I work. But this morning we're going to focus on Hebrews. And deciding how to approach Hebrews and how to give you guys an overview of Hebrews was a little tricky because Hebrews is such an incredible book with so many good things and so many good themes. The overriding theme of Hebrews is to exalt Christ. The overriding point of Hebrews is to hold Christ up as superior to everything, the only thing worthy of our devotion and our affection, the only thing worthy of our lives. That's what the book of Hebrews does, and it focuses us on Christ, which is appropriate because we preached Acts last week. Well, I preached. You guys listened and did a great job at listening. I preached Acts last week, and we talked about how it's the Holy Spirit's job to focus us on Jesus, past, present, and future. And so once again, we're just going to enter into this theme in the text where the whole goal of it is to focus us on Christ. And so my prayer for us is that that's what this will do for us this morning. In an effort to exalt Christ, the author of Hebrews, who we're not sure who it is, the author of Hebrews starts out his book this way. Hebrews 1, 1 through 3. Long ago at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days, he had spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purifications for sins, he sat down at the right some of the most sweeping prose about our Savior that we'll find in the Bible. The only other place that compares is probably found in Colossians, which Aaron covered. Aaron, our worship pastor, covered last month as well. So from the very beginning, he exalts Jesus. He is the image of God. He is the exact imprint of his nature. He upholds the universe with his majesty, the sweeping picture of Christ. And then the author goes on to kind of build this case for the superiority of Christ. And the book is called Hebrews because it's written to the Jewish diaspora all throughout Asia Minor. As here, I know that you have a Jewish background. Let me help you understand your new faith by helping you understand your new savior. And he goes to great lengths to explain to them why Jesus is superior. And he does this through four major comparisons. He compares Jesus to Moses. He compares Jesus to the angels. He says Jesus is superior to the high priests. And he says that Jesus is a superior sacrifice. And he goes through and he tells them why Jesus is superior to those things. Now, to the Jewish mind in the first century A.D., all of those comparisons would carry a great deal of heft. They would matter. The Jewish mind would immediately know what that meant, would immediately be taken aback by the boldness of the author of Hebrews, and feel the weight of the comparison that they were being asked to make. But for us in the 21st century in America, those things don't resonate with us like they did with the first century Hebrew mind. We know, even if this is your first Sunday in a church in two decades, you probably already know that we're of the opinion that Jesus is a bigger deal than Moses. Like, we got that one down. You know that already. You know that we think that Jesus is superior to angels. No one's getting confused and worshiping angels. Aaron's never gotten a request for a praise song for angels. Like, we've never gotten a Gabriel praise song request. So we know that. Nobody has any misgivings about me being superior to Jesus. We know Jesus is the superior priest. We know he's the superior priest to everyone that's ever lived. And that's a really hard concept for us to hold on to, I think, when we see it in Hebrews that he's the great high priest. That's a difficult one for us because most of us in this room have never really even had a priest. Most of us in this room have had pastors. And pastors are different than priests, take on a different role than priests, have historically been viewed differently than priests. So that's a tough one for us. And then the sacrifice, none of us in this room have ever performed a sacrifice. If you have, I'd love to talk with you about what led you to do that in your life. I'd like to hear that story. I don't know if I want to commit to a full lunch because you're crazy, but maybe just out there, you just tell me about that time with the goat, okay? But these things are difficult for us to relate to. They don't hit us the same way. So a lot of my thoughts and energy this week went into helping us understand why these are such weighty comparisons, why they are so persuasive, and most importantly, why they're still important to us today in 21st century America so that the book and the message of Hebrews can be just as impactful for us as it was for first century Jews. So I think, as we think about the overview of Hebrews, the most interesting question is, why did those comparisons matter to me today? Why are they important to me today? So we're going to look at them and we're going to ask, why does it matter that Jesus is superior to these things? So the first one that we see, I'm doing kind of a combo platter and you'll see why, but Jesus is superior to Moses and the angels because his law and message is greater than theirs. In your notes, I can't remember if I put it there or not, but there should, it'd be helpful to write above these three points and be bracketed by the text. Jesus is superior because, superior to blank because. So that's, that's the question that we're answering. He's superior to Moses and the angels because his law and message are greater than theirs. Okay. Here's why I kind of combined those two. We probably all know, the Jewish mind certainly knew, that God's law came from Moses. God brought the law down off of Mount Sinai and presented it to the people. Now we often think that just the Ten Commandments were written on those tablets, but those tablets were covered front and back. So we don't know what all was on there, but most certainly more laws. And if you read through the books of Moses, the first five in the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, you'll get somewhere around 620 some odd laws depending on which rabbi or scholar you're talking to. And so those were the laws of Moses. And those were the laws around which their religion was framed. Those are the laws around which their culture was built, around which their entire life was formed by following those laws well. And Hebrews is earth shattering to them because it says, hey, Jesus's law is superior to Moses's law. You can cast Moses's law aside. It doesn't mean there's not some good ideas in there. The one about like not committing adultery, we should probably carry that principle forward. But those laws are done. It's now Jesus's new law that he gives us in John. Jesus tells us that in these two things are summed up all of the law and the prophets. Everything that Moses or the prophets ever wrote or writings that's ascribed to them can be summed up in loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind, amen, and loving your neighbor as yourself. Jesus tells us that early in his ministry. But then at the end of his ministry, he's sitting around with the disciples and he says, this new command I give you, there's this new thing I want you to do. I'm going to add to the, I'm going to sweep away those commands. I'm going to give you this new command. Follow this. I want you to love your neighbor. I want you to love others as I have loved you. It's this new command that Jesus gives. And so that command is superior to all of the commands that came from Moses in the Old Testament. It's also superior to all the commands that come after that. His message is superior. This is what it means with the angels really quickly. According to Jewish tradition, it was the angels that took the tablets from God and delivered them to Moses as God's holy and anointed messengers. So what we're seeing in these two comparisons is Jesus' message is greater than any message that's come before or will come since, and his law is the greatest law, superior to all other laws, and it's the only one worth following. This is incredibly important for us because we live in a culture and we are people who are incredibly vulnerable to the insidious slide towards legalism. We are incredibly vulnerable to reducing our faith to a list of do's and don'ts. Okay, I know I'm supposed to love my neighbor as myself. Like, I get that. But is it a sin if I do blank? I hate that question. Is it a sin if I do this? Is it a sin if I watch this? Is it a sin if I go there? Is it a sin if I have this? That's an immature question. It's almost irrelevant. Is it a sin? And we even do it in the early stages of our faith. Am I in or am I out? When I die, am I going to burn forever or dance in the streets? Which one is it? I just want to make sure I'm praying the right prayer so I don't burn forever. That seems like a bummer. So I'm going to believe in this. Am I in or am I out? Is there an unforgivable sin? Is there something that if I do it, I'm going to lose my salvation and then I'm out? And we try to make it about the rules. We enter into Christianity kind of asking the leader, like whoever's in charge here, can I just have my personnel handbook? I just need to know when my vacation days are. I need to know how many Sundays I can miss in a year and still be like, good. You know? I don't want to have to feel that out. We want our policy handbook. And when we make that our faith, we pervert it and distort it into things that it ought not be and was never intended to be. When we try to make the Bible basic instructions before leaving earth, have you heard that? If you haven't heard it, sorry, because it's stupid. And I just told you it, now you know. We try to make it God's handbook for life. There's a rule for everything, we just got to find it. And when you do that, the people who know the rules the best and appear to follow them the best are the spiritually mature ones. Meanwhile, the people over there who don't follow what we think are the rules super well are actually getting busy loving other people as Christ loved them. But we don't value them because we value the rules. So it's important to let Hebrews remind us that Jesus' law is superior to the laws that we add to his law. Because we love to say yes and. We love to turn Christianity into an improv class. Yes, that's true, and this. Yes, to be a believer, what does God ask of you? That you would love other people as Jesus loved you. Yes. And also you shouldn't watch shows that are rated MA on Netflix. You should not do that. Yes. And you should love other people as Jesus loved you. And you shouldn't say cuss words. Because we got together in a room at some point, and we decided that these words that are spelled this way are bad. And you can't say them. And they're very offensive. And they offend the very heart of God. Jesus didn't make that law. We do yes and, and we start to build other rules that are requisite for our faith. And at the end of that is legalism. And some of y'all grew up in legalism. I know my parents grew up in legalism. My mom went to a church outside of Atlanta where you couldn't, if you're a girl, you were not allowed to wear skirts above the knees. They all had to be to the knees or below. And if they weren't, you're a sinner. You couldn't go, you weren't even allowed to go to the movie theater. If you're going to see a Disney movie, you cannot, you cannot go to the theater. You were not, your family was not allowed to own a deck of cards because with those cards, you might gamble and offend the sensibilities of God. And what happens when we do that is people like my mom who grow up in that, when they grew up in that, in their adolescence, they're riddled with all this guilt of things that they're supposed to do and shame for not being able to do them. And that shame isn't coming from Jesus because you've offended his law. That shame is coming from rickety old deacons because you offended their sensibilities. And it's not right. We should always choose love over law because that's what Jesus asked us to do. And here's what can happen when we do that. At the last church I worked at, there was a policy, and some of you are familiar with policies like these. They're particularly prominent in the South. There was a policy that you could not consume alcohol in public. You had to privately foster your own alcoholism. You couldn't consume it in public. You can have it in your house. You can have it with trusted friends. But you can't consume it in public and you can't be seen purchasing it by someone from the church. It's absurd policy. Be all in or all out. Just say don't drink it. That's way less hypocritical than drive to DeKalb County to get it and then drive back. So one day, I'm cutting my grass. I'm relatively new to the neighborhood. And when I finish up, my neighbor, Luis, comes out. He says, hey man, hot day. I said, yeah, it's hot. He goes, you want to have a beer with me? Now that's against the rules. I'm not allowed to have a beer with Luis because I don't want to, I'm not going to get into it. According to the rules, this is bad. But he's my neighbor and we know what do you want to have a beer with me means. He's showing me hospitality. He wants to talk to me. He wants to get to know me and I need to love him. And it's not very loving of me to be like, I'll be right back. I'm going to go get my water. That's just not what you do. So I said, sure. I had a beer, an illicit, an illicit beer. God, I'm still sorry. And we talked and we became buddies. And Luis had a stepson and two sons that lived with him as well, him and his wife as well. Gabriel, Yoel, and Yariel. And over the course of the next six years, I got to be their pastor. And I got to baptize all four of those guys in the church. Now, if I had said no that day, could that still have happened? Sure. But, I chose love over law, and God used it. We should be people who choose love over law, understanding that Jesus' law is the superior law. And just in case you think I'm letting people off the hook to do whatever you want under Jesus' law, as long as you're loving others, it is absolutely impossible to love others as Jesus loved us without being fueled and imbued by the love of the Holy Spirit. We cannot love others as Jesus loved us if we do not know Jesus and love him well. That the two things that sum up the law and the prophets, love God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen, love your neighbor as yourself. You cannot love your neighbor as yourself. You cannot love your neighbor as Jesus did if you do not love God with all your heart, soul, mind, amen. It takes care of everything. And suddenly there's times when you shouldn't watch that, or you shouldn't do this, or you shouldn't have that, or you shouldn't shouldn't go there or you should do this or you should do that, but not because it offends some law or sensibility that we've added to over the years, but because to do that or to not do that is the most loving action to take. That's why it's important for us to still acknowledge that Jesus's law is the superior law and that Jesus is a superior messenger and the angels. Now your notes are out of order. The next one we're going to do is priest and then sacrifice. So I'm sorry about that. But it's important to us to understand that Jesus was superior to the priests because Nate is broken. It's important for us to understand that Jesus was superior to the priest because I am broken. When we were running through the slides before the service started, we got to this one, and the band and the tech team laughed at me. They're like, Nate, you think we don't know that? We haven't pieced that one together. And I said, well, my mom's coming. So this one's for her. Sorry, mom, this is news to you. I know that you don't need me to tell you that I'm broken and that I'm a human. And that I'm going to teach you the wrong stuff sometimes. The way I think about faith and the Bible and God and Scripture and all the things evolves. It changes. There's things I taught when I was 30 that I'm so embarrassed about now. And there's things I'm saying to you right now that when I'm 52, I'm going to be like, oh, what a moron. I just know that's true. I'm broken. And even though you guys know that, and you guys know not to put pastors on pedestals, and you would probably all say that you have a pretty healthy idea about that, and I consider it part of my personal ministry to you to act in such a way where it's very easy for you to not put me on a pedestal. That's my ministerial gift to you guys. You would probably all say that you know better than that. But we still get the jokes. Those still happen. I had a friend, a good buddy, still a friend of mine named Heath Hollinsworth. Heath had three brothers. He still has three brothers. Jim was the oldest and Jim was an associate pastor at the church that Heath and I both worked at. So we all worked together. And then Ryan and Hunter worked construction. So they're a little bit less important in the kingdom of God than me and Heath and Jim. Which is the, that's the point I'm making. And whenever they would be around their dad for a meal and it came time to pray for the meal, Heath was in charge of the service. He was program director. It was a big church. So he had positions like program director. Here, Aaron does that. But whenever it came time to pray for a meal, their dad really didn't like praying in public, so he would always get one of the boys to do it, and he'd kind of look them over, and he'd be like, Jim, why don't you lead us today? You're the closest to the Lord. You have the most direct line. And Heath would be like, I work at a church too, and I'm sure it flew all over Ryan and Hunter. But he would joke about it. It didn't really make him mad. He just thought it was the stupidest thing because Jim was ordained and Heath wasn't. His dad thought he had a more direct line to the Lord. And as stupid as that sounds, you guys say that to me. I know we don't really believe it, but we keep saying it. When I golf with y'all and I hit one in the woods, which is rare, but when I hit one in the woods and it comes bouncing out just miraculously, just a squirrel throws it and it just lands in the middle of the fairway, somebody is going to say, got that pastor bounce, somebody's going to say it. We make the jokes and we think the things, and I can tell you from personal experience, we exonerate pastors too much. We honor pastors too much. We think too much of them. We have too great an expectation for them. I am not to be exonerated. My job in God's kingdom is not more important than your job. My gifting is not more valuable than your gifting. And listen, your character is not less important than my character. A lot of us have more expectations for me and what my character should be than for ourselves. And that makes no sense because you're a royal priesthood too. If it's okay for you and not okay for me, then you either need to raise your standards for yourself or lower them for me. Probably raise. And I don't mean to hit that too hard, but the church has a long history of making the people who stand here way more important than they actually are. And we've got to knock that off. While I'm here, and just kind of kicking you guys in the gut, let me kick you in the teeth. The other thing I was thinking about with priests and why this is important is the historic role of the priest. Do you realize that for a vast majority of Christian history, from the first century A.D. to now, for the vast majority of that, Christendom did exist under a priesthood. And that those priests were the sole arbiters of the truth of God in the lives of their people. Do you understand that? The people, for much of history, were largely illiterate. The vast majority of people were illiterate for much of church history. And before the printing press, a Bible was so expensive that it took the whole town to raise money to get one, and then they'd put it up on the lectern in the church or in the pulpit, and they would literally chain it so that nobody could steal the Bible because it was that valuable, and it's the only one that existed in the town, and because everyone's largely illiterate, the only person who can read it is the pastor. Do you understand how easy it is to manipulate when that is true? Do you understand how vulnerable that populace was to the malice that might be in their pastor? Do you understand how limiting it is for your faith if there's only one person who can explain to you who's reading scripture on your behalf and then telling you what it says and then telling you what you should do about that? That's how we got indulgences and we paid for St. Peter's Basilica because they manipulated the masses in that way. Because I'm the only one in the room who can read this and I get to tell you what it means. That's incredibly harmful. And now, we live in a time when Bibles are ubiquitous everywhere. You all probably have multiple Bibles in your home. You probably have more Bibles than you do people. If you'd like to add to your collection, take one of ours. You can download it on your phone. You can look it up on the World Wide Web. You have universal access to the scriptures of God. And yet, I see so many of you, so many Christians, walking through life, functioning as scriptural illiterates, trusting your pastor to spoon feed you truth twice a month for 30 minutes. And that's all you know of this. People have fought and people have died and people have lived to make this available to you. And yet as Christians, many of us live our lives as functional illiterates who still rely on our pastor or spiritual leader to spoon feed us the truth twice a month? How can we be Christians and be so disinterested in what God tells us? How can we call ourselves passionate followers of Christ and yet not read about him? How can we have access to this special revelation of God and the inspired and authoritative words within it that tell us not basic instructions for life but about our wild and wonderful and mysterious father? They tell us all about that and we have access to it all the time. We can read it whenever we want. We can do all the research we want. We can even, you can download professors walking you through this as you explore it on your own. And yet we function as illiterates still acting like the only source of truth is our pastor for whatever sermon they want to give that day. Jesus is your pastor. He's your source of truth. And he made sure that this got left for you so that you could learn about him. I'm here to augment the work that you're doing. I can't do the work for your whole life. Neither can your small group leader. It's important to know that Jesus is our high priest because we have the freedom to go to him and to pray to him whenever we want. We don't need a go-between. We don't need someone else to spoon-feed us truth. He makes it available to us here. Now, let's end on a higher note than that. It's important for us to know that Jesus was the superior sacrifice because he was enough. It's important for us to know that Jesus was a superior sacrifice because he was. This is important to mention. Because the old sacrificial system, you had to perform a sacrifice, and then you were good until you messed up again, and then you had to go back and you had to sacrifice. Like I wonder about the people who like went to the temple for a certain festival and they performed all their sacrifices and they're good. They're good before God. If they die, they're fine. And then they like take a wrong turn or there's traffic getting out of Jerusalem and they say things they shouldn't say. Like, I guess we got to go back to the temple and do this again. But Jesus is a superior sacrifice because we need one for all time. That's it. We're done. We don't have to go back and keep making sacrifices. And yet, we do the yes and thing again where we go, yeah, Jesus died for me and he made me right before God, but now that I'm a Christian, I keep messing up, so I need to do more and I need to better, and I need to perform my own personal sacrifices to get myself back in good graces with God. And we make Jesus' sacrifice not enough. Yeah, that was good then, but I know better now, and I need to keep working harder and keep being hard on myself and keep making my own sacrifices to then get back into the good graces of God so that he will love me more and approve of me more. And we live our lives, I do this too, as if Jesus' sacrifice wasn't enough. And now God in his goodness and glory and perfection requires me, Nate, to make greater sacrifices to supplement the insufficient sacrifice that Jesus made for me. I think that we would do well to wake up every morning and remind ourselves, even if we have to say it out loud, what Jesus has done for me is enough. God loves me as much as he possibly can and ever will. There is nothing I can do today to make God love me less. There is nothing I can do today to make God love me more. And there's nothing I can do today to make myself more right before God. Jesus was enough. He did that for me. And then walk in the goodness and freedom of God. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace. Walk in that fullness. Walk in that grace. Walk in that gratitude by allowing the sacrifice of Jesus to be enough. That's why Hebrews can still, that's how Hebrews can still resonate with us today. By acknowledging that Jesus is superior to the law and the message of old, that he's the superior priest that gives us unfettered access to him, and we ought to passionately pursue that, and that he is the greatest sacrifice because he's enough for us once and for all. We don't have to keep supplementing that with our insufficiency. And to do all of this, as we're reminded of all of this, and we start with the sweeping prose about Christ, and then we see the comparisons, he starts to close his book by drawing this conclusion, and I think it's a great place for us to stop and put our focus on today as we prepare our hearts for communion after the sermon. But he starts to summarize his book and to wrap up by telling us to do this. I preach about this lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, my Bible says, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. In light of all that we learned, in light of who Jesus is, the image of God, the very imprint of His nature, and in light of the ways that Jesus is superior and serves us and sacrifices for us and is our high priest, in light of the law that is to love Jesus with all our heart, in light of the law that is to love other people as Jesus loved us and then so in turn love Christ and be fueled by that love, in light of all these things, what are we to do? What are the rules that we're supposed to follow? How are we supposed to live this Christian life? Hebrews 12, 1 and 2. Run your race. Go out there and run hard. Pursue Jesus with everything you've got. Go love other people with your whole heart. And to do it well, you've got to throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And we don't do that by white-knuckling it. We don't do that by trying to be our own sacrifice. We don't do that by supplementing the work of Christ in our life. No, we do it by focusing our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. If we'll do that, we will follow God's laws. We will pursue Jesus hard. We will love others well, and we will have run a good race. That's the point of Hebrews. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for who you are, for how you've loved us. Thank you for your son. Father, I pray that it would be critically important to us to acknowledge the superiority of Christ. That it would be critically important to us to pursue Him, to love Him, to know Him. Father, if we are not in Your Word, if we're not pursuing You on our own, would you light a fire in us to do that? If we've spent too many years not knowing your Bible well, would you let this be the year that fixes it? If we've spent too many years adding to your law, would this be the year that we let that go? If we've spent too many years supplementing your sacrifice, would this be the year that we finally accept yours? And God, as we go from here, would you help us run our race? It's in Jesus' name we ask these things. Amen.
Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If you've been coming in July and never before that, and I'm new to you, they gave me the month off, and they were very, very kind to do that. So again, as I iterated in the Grace Vine this week, thank you so much for being the kind of church that allows me to take a month off and be with my family and be present with my kids. When I came back to work this week and I said bye to the kids, my daughter Lily was actually disappointed, which I feel is probably a good thing. I guess that means the month went well. It would probably be bad news if she was like, praise the Lord, he's leaving again. That may be how Jen felt, but Lily was sad. And just to set the expectations for this morning, I heard comments and things as I was wrapping up the month of June to take sabbatical and then some stuff during the month and even some stuff this morning about like, oh man, this is going to be a good sermon. You had six weeks to get this one ready. Like you used to come back and light our faces on fire. No, no. I didn't think about this sermon for one single second in the month of July. Not a single one. I didn't even know that I was preaching. This is the book of Acts this morning. I didn't even know I was preaching on the book of Acts until Tuesday when I decided that it would be the book of Acts. And then some stuff happened in my week. I ended up having to go back out of town. I wrote this sermon on my parents' dinner table at 10 o'clock on Thursday night. I'm essentially winging this, and I'm rusty. So let's just tamp down expectations of good and hope for brief, and then later I'll be good. If you really want to hear the sermon that I've been thinking about all month, then you should come on September the 10th. On September the 10th, we're going to roll out the plans that we have for the church. We're almost done. We're ready to show you. We're very excited. We're going to launch the campaign in earnest. It's going to be an update, and I've been really thinking a lot about what I want to share with you guys that Sunday morning about the future of grace and what we hope for. So that's the one that I hope is really good. This is going to be fine. With that being said, you can open your Bibles not to the book of Acts, but to John chapter 16. We will get there in a second. As I think about the book of Acts and what I want you to do with Acts, so we're going to be focused on just kind of an overview of Acts. What is it? How do we use it? Why is it there? What can it teach us? One of the things to know contextually about Acts is that it's essentially the second half of the book of Luke. Luke wrote the gospel of Luke and then he wrote the Acts of the Spirit or the Acts of the Apostles, depending on which strand of the church you come from. But they're both written to a guy named Theophilus. So they're basically part one and part two of the accounts of Christ and then the accounts of the Spirit. And when I think of the book of Acts, I think of it this way as it fits into the New Testament. From a narrative perspective, the book of Acts is an atlas. I think we have that in your notes. Yes, in a narrative sense, Acts serves as an atlas. Now, here's what I mean. I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember this, to know what this is. I see you don't know. You know lots of it. You have no clue. You never touched this in your life. Then here's what you don't know. If you're too young to know what this is, I have been entrusted with a church, the leadership of a church, with children, young lives to mold, a marriage, various stations of responsibility throughout my life. I have never felt a deeper sense of responsibility than when I was in the back seat of our 1985 Maxima with automatic seat belts and my dad would tell me to open up the Atlas and tell me where I need to turn next. That is fully locked in. I've never felt a greater sense of responsibility because you can't just let any of the kids do that. You let my sister do it, we're going to be in Kansas. It's going to be a disaster. I have to do it. And the family is relying on me. So atlases hold a great place in my heart. And when you look at an atlas, when I open this to North Carolina, the way that an atlas works, I know you guys can't see it, but you can see enough for this to work. When you look at North Carolina, it's just the whole state, right? It's an overview of the whole state. And then what you get is you get these little windows where different cities are blown up. So like Charlotte is there. Charlotte's there. But then this is Charlotte for when you get in the city, you need more detail. And then Raleigh gets its own on the next page there. This is back before 540. I was actually looking at it this morning. Yeah, this is 1995. I had to email some people who are not in the millennial demographic to get my hands on one of these. But that's how atlases work, right? There's an overview of the whole state, and then where more detail is required, there's these little windows, these little blow-ups that accompany it to give you more detail for certain parts of the map. And that's how I think about the book of Acts and how it interacts with the New Testament. When you think about the story, the narrative arc of the New Testament, from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the gospel telling the story of Christ, to the end of the book, Revelation, and you think about chronologically, how does that flow? Acts is, from a narrative perspective, the atlas. It gives the overview. It's the state overview of the New Testament. And then the letters that we see subsequent to Acts, the Pauline epistles, Paul's letters, Romans and Corinthians and Galatians, Ephesians, and all down through Philemon, those serve to me as windows into the goings on in the book of Acts. When you read through Acts, you'll see Paul go to Philippi and Thessalonica and Corinth and all the places. And then you can turn to those letters and you can get a greater detail about what's going on in those churches. And the same with the general epistles. They're kind of tucked into the narrative story of Acts. So as we approach the Bible and we think about the New Testament, the composition of it, the book of Acts serves as kind of the atlas of the roadmap that gives you the narrative arc from the Gospels to Revelation. And that's helpful for me as I think about the structure of my Bible. But far more importantly than what Acts does for the Bible in a narrative sense is what the book of Acts does in an ecclesiastical sense, in a sense that pertains to the church and to the theology of the church. So in an ecclesiastical sense, Acts serves as a telling of the great work of the Holy Spirit that links the two great works of Jesus. So an ecclesiastical church, as it pertains to the church, as it pertains to church life, as it pertains to theology and how we understand God moving and acting and working in his church, the book of Acts serves to tell the story of the great work of the Spirit, of the age of the Spirit, as that work links the two great works of Christ. Now, admittedly, theologically, for those of you who think about these things, I struggled with that sentence because Christ, according to John 1, was involved in creation. That's a great work. Christ is still at work right now as our high priest interceding on our behalf. Christ will rule forever. So I don't mean to reduce the life of Christ and the works of Christ to the death and resurrection and then his return. Those are just what I'm calling the two great works of Christ. And so in the church age that we are in, in the age of the spirit in which we find ourselves, we constantly look back to Christ on the cross, that great work, and we anticipate the next great work, the return of Christ. And the book of Acts serves as a descriptor of the age of the Holy Spirit, whose work links the two great works of Christ as the Spirit grows the church. So that's how we think about the book of Acts, and that's what it sets out to describe for us, is the work of the Spirit, the age of the Spirit and of the church, the thing that Jesus came to build. So if we want to know, okay, it's the age of the Spirit. Acts details the acts of the Spirit in this church age. Then what is the Holy Spirit supposed to do? What is its job? What can we expect of it? What are we looking for as we look at the works of the Spirit? The best answer to this question actually comes in John chapter 16. I know it might feel weird that the highlighted verse on a sermon on the book of Acts is from the Gospel of John, but I think after we read it together, it will make more sense to you. This verse, this passage, is Jesus talking. John 15, 16, and 17 is this long discourse from Jesus just to the disciples. It's some good, intimate, revelatory teaching. It's capped off at the end of it by the high priestly prayer when Jesus, it's the longest recorded prayer of Christ where he prays for them and the church to come. And he prays for you and for me if we have placed our faith in Jesus. And in the midst of that discourse, Jesus tells them, I know you're sad that I'm leaving, but it's actually better that I am. And here's what he says in John chapter 16, verses 6 through 11. He will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment. It's a threefold purpose. Concerning sin, because they do not believe in me. Concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father and you will see me no longer. Concerning judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged. So Jesus outlines to his disciples and to us this threefold purpose of the Holy Spirit. And what I want you to see this morning is what that means. What does it mean to convict the world of sin, to convict the world of righteousness, to convict the world of judgment? And then how does that show up in the book of Acts? And then not only in the book of Acts, but in our lives as well. So if we look at the first one, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit convicts of sin. And then he gives detail of this down in verse 8. And when he comes, he will convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. Verse 9, concerning sin, because they do not believe in me. This is the apex sin, to not believe in Christ. It's the one that can't be fixed. It's the thing that we have to do. And so when we ask what it means for the Holy Spirit to convict the world of sin, I think it means this. The Holy Spirit convicts of sin by helping people believe in Jesus. And I know I already taught you ecclesiastical. Now I'm throwing in salvific. That just means something that has the power to save. And so this repentance of who Jesus is, repenting of who you thought he was and accepting who he says he is, is the fundamental repentance to enter Christendom. It is the foundational repentance for anyone who would seek to become a Christian. It's why I articulate as often as I can that to be a Christian means to believe that Jesus was who he says he was, he did what he said he did, and he's going to do what he says he's going to do. The fundamental repentance to become a Christian is to repent of who you thought Jesus was and accept who he says he is. And I believe this to be true because of how the Holy Spirit works in the book of Acts to bring this repentance about in the crowds of the people of Jerusalem. If you look in your Bible in Acts chapter 2, what you'll see is that Jesus has died, he's resurrected, he's milled about for 40 days interacting with people and freaking people out, and then he ascends into heaven. And when he ascends into heaven, he tells the disciples to wait until the appointed time and they'll know what to do. So the disciples are assembled in this upper room and they don't know what to do. They're just looking at each other going, what do we do now? I don't know. He just said, wait. Wait on what? I don't know. We'll know when it happens. Meanwhile, Jerusalem is abuzz. They're trying to figure out what's going on with this guy and what these guys are doing in this upper room. So they're all milling around outside, thousands of people just waiting to see what the disciples are going to do. And one day at Pentecost, the flaming tongues descend down from heaven and light on the disciples and they are given the gift of tongues and they go out onto the balcony, onto the portico, and they preach to the crowds that are gathered there. Peter preaches in his own language and each person hears it in their language. That's the gift of tongues that we see in Acts. And they're all convicted and they all want to be saved. Peter goes out and he preaches the gospel. He tells them who Jesus is. And their response is, we believe, what do we do? And Peter's response, my Bible scholars already know, repent and be baptized. And this is something that I've chewed on for years. But repent of what? We're tempted to say, we often say, repent of your sins. Sure. All of them? Perfectly? This is the line of delineation for salvation? I should repent of everything I've ever done and am doing and I should repent perfectly and if I can't do that then I cannot enter the kingdom of heaven? Certainly perfect repentance of all the things isn't the line because there would be no one saved but Christ. Because of that I am convinced more and more that what Peter is telling them to do is repent of who you thought he was before you killed him and when you killed him. This crowd is the same crowd that was surrounding the courts of Pilate when Pilate was going, we don't need to kill this guy. He hasn't done anything. Why don't you just let me release him and kill Barabbas? And the crowd said, no, give us Barabbas and kill Jesus. And Pilate says, well, this isn't on me. And the crowd says, well, his blood is on our hands and on the hands of our children. It's that same crowd. I don't know if it's one for one, but a majority of them are in the same place. It's that same ethic, that same group of people. And so Peter is telling them, repent of who you thought Jesus was, that guy that you killed, and confess that he is the Lord, that he is who he says he is, and then be baptized. It is salvific repentance. It is foundational repentance for all people for all time. And the work of the Holy Spirit is to convict us of the sin of not seeing Jesus and accepting him for who he says he is. And he is still doing this work today. If you have a friend that you are trying to love towards the kingdom of heaven and share the gospel with, it is we work, we say words, we pray, we do. It is the Holy Spirit's job to convict and to open up eyes to see Jesus for who he says he is. And often, in our culture, in this day and age, in a nation that is very close to post-Christian, where everyone has heard the name of Jesus, and if they're not following Jesus, they probably have a reason, and here's the thing, it's probably a good one. In our culture now, the Holy Spirit has to do a lot of the same work that he had to do back in the church age, back in the age of Christ. What did he have to do to help them see that Jesus was who he says he was? He had to knock off the scales of religiosity and tradition and poor teaching and well-meaning teachers who were slightly askew and led them to an expectation of Christ that he never set for himself. And so the Holy Spirit is doing that same work today in our hearts and in our lives. I read a stat this week that over the last 20 years or 25 years, over 40 million Americans have stopped going to church. Why is that the case? Why are we living in this deconstructed culture? Well, part of it is on them. Part of it is they had great pastors and great teachers and great people in their life, and they just weren't listening. And that's part of the deal. But a larger part is because we've done church really badly, because we've depicted Jesus as who he isn't, because we put expectations on him that he didn't ask for. And so people are growing up in the church blind to who Jesus really is because the teaching in the church has been so bad. And the Holy Spirit has to convict us in our adulthood and help us knock the scales off of the Jesus that we were taught and help us see the Jesus that presents himself in scripture and in the hearts of people who love us well. So the Holy Spirit is still doing that work. And I'm not so ignorant as to believe that he's not doing that work for some of us in here today who have our doubts. I would just posit to you that maybe your doubts about who Jesus is aren't because of who he said he was, but because of what someone else told you that he was. And maybe the Holy Spirit can help open your eyes to see past those things. Then Jesus says that the Holy Spirit convicts of righteousness. What does it mean to convict of righteousness? I think of it like this. Jesus says that he convicts of righteousness because he is going to be with the Father, and that's a little bit mysterious. And so for this one, I did, I did my research, which I know, I know it's a surprise for everyone, but I did my research and I think it's easiest to understand it like this. The Holy Spirit convicts those who believe to grow in Christ likeness. So once, once he's convicted you to believe and you see Jesus for who he is, then he convicts you to grow in Christ-likeness, to grow in your own righteousness. This is the process that the Bible and theologians call sanctification. The sanctification process is to become more like Christ in character. I grew up thinking of salvation as this moment, as this point of inflection in time where you were saved or you were not, and that is still partially true. But now as an adult, I think of salvation as a process from the moment God opens our eyes in faith to the moment he claims us in eternity and secures us in his kingdom forever. That is a process as we live the rest of our lives as Christians. And in that process, in our time of living, God sanctifies us. He convicts us of places where we're not righteous, where we're not Christ-like. And he shows us where we need to be more righteous and more like Christ. The Holy Spirit convicts. Now that we have opened our eyes and we believe in him, then the Holy Spirit says, good, that's step one. Now step two, I'm going to convict you of where you're not righteous so that you can become more righteous and more like Christ in character. We see him doing this to Peter in the book of Acts. We see the Holy Spirit acting this way in Acts. In Acts chapter 10, there's a conversation between Peter and Cornelius, and Peter receives a vision. Peter was a good Jew. He was a Jew's Jew. And in this time, there was several dietary restrictions that had religious connotations to the Jew. There was things he could and could not eat and people he could and could not eat with. And the Holy Spirit comes to him in a dream, gives him a vision, and basically says, hey, you can leave those rules behind. Knock it off with that. Eat with Cornelius. And Paul has to end up getting on to him. You eat with Gentiles when no one else is around, but when Jews are around, you won't do it because you're a hypocrite and you're scared of other people and you need to knock it off and quit being a sissy. It's this moment of conviction for Peter. And what I love about that moment of conviction, and it's so important for us in our moments of conviction, I think conviction can sometimes have a negative or judgmental connotation. That we feel that when we're convicted of a sin, that that's somehow God telling us, hey, you're not pleasing me right now. That's the spirit in your ear saying, you should stop that behavior because it's not pleasing to the Lord. It displeases God for you to do that. Over sabbatical, I got the fresh conviction of get off your phone and engage with your children, right? Well, the conviction doesn't come from the spirit because me being on my phone and reading the New York Times or my Kindle app or whatever it is, is sinful. And God wants me to stop doing that because it displeases him. And the holy watchdog is disappointed in me. He's convicted me of that because he's saying, hey, by doing that, you're not loving your kids as well as you could be. So love your kids. And this all makes sense when you consider the new commandment that Christ gave us. Christ left the disciples with one commandment. Go and love others as I have loved you. That's the new commandment I give to you. That's the commandment for all Christians and all of Christendom. Go love others as Christ has loved us. And so the conviction of the Holy Spirit towards Christ's likeness and righteousness isn't a conviction of displeasure before God. It's a conviction of, hey, when you do that, you're not loving other people well. When you engage in that behavior, you're not obeying the command to love others as I have loved you. Look at Peter. He says, stop, knock it off with the dietary restrictions. Why? Because those restrictions are prohibiting you from loving Cornelius in a way that he needs to be loved. He thinks he's unacceptable to God because you won't eat with him. So stop it, man. You can't love Cornelius well. This is what convicts me. This is an unconvincing statement. I know. I need to be healthier. I have young kids. I'm old. I did the math the other day. I'm 42. When my grandma was 42, I was two. I was John's age. My son, that's nuts. I'm going to be 70 when he has a career and meets someone. I would like to meet his kids. So I got to knock it off with the red meat. I got to knock it off with filet of fish, which is going to be a tough battle. Those are good. That's the Holy Spirit's conviction. Not because those things are displeasing before the Lord, but because if I want to love my children and the next generation well and be present for them in old age, then I need to do what I need to do now to be ready for that. Now, I don't know what the Lord's timing is, and I don't know what's going to happen between now and then, but I am convicted that I need to do my part to be healthy for my family, and I think that's a good conviction for us to have. Not because what we consume is displeasing before the Lord, but because what we consume doesn't enable us to love the people in our lives the way he's asked us to do that. So when we're convicted to righteousness, what we are convicted towards is Christ's likeness and loving people better. All sin that you have in your life, all unholiness that you have in your life. It's so abhorrent to God because it does displease him, because it does disqualify us, but more than that, it disables you from doing what he's asked you to do, which is to love other people well. So when he convicts towards righteousness, he's convicting us towards love. But the other important part of this is coming to grips with the abhorrence of our sin. And not just the abhorrence of it, but the weight of it, the volume of it. It's right and good for the Holy Spirit to hold up a mirror before us and for us to be crushed underneath the weight of our sin because of the place it brings us to. I came across this as I was doing a little bit of research this week. This is from Charles Spurgeon. Charles Spurgeon was the pastor of the Metropolitan Baptist Tabernacle in London in the late 1800s. He's called by many the prince of preachers. He may have been the greatest preacher that ever lived. He comes to remind them not only of God's loveliness, but of their own unloveliness, of their own enmity and hatred to this God of love, and consequently of their terrible sin and thus ill-using one so infinitely kind. Listen, the Holy Ghost does he want to convict us towards greater love for one another, he does want us to feel the weight of our sin and our utter inability to fight the battle against it alone. When the Holy Spirit has done his job and we have invited him into our hearts to do his work, he will so overwhelm us with the weight of our iniquity that we will cry out to the Father, I am helpless. It will be the cry of Paul in Romans 7, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death? If you are here and you think you can just leave this room determined to be more righteous, then you will not be more righteous. And if by some miracle you succeed in breaking the chains of one sin in your life, you will usher in the new chain of pride at having done it on your own. Congratulations. The Holy Spirit pushes us towards love of others and helps us feel the weight of our sins that we might be reliant on him and his work rather than ourselves. That's how he convicts of righteousness. Now, how does he convict of judgment? What does it mean to convict us of judgment? Because the time of the evil one is coming. Let's sum it up like this. The Holy Spirit convicts concerning judgment by reminding us that good will triumph over evil. When Paul, we see this in Acts, when Paul goes to the Greek Areopagus, Mars Hill, he interacts with the philosophers there who like to talk about ideas. And a lot of you guys know the story. They say you have monuments to all the gods. I see here you have a monument to an unknown God. I know who that God is. That's actually Jesus. And he goes on to share the gospel with them. And then the end of that passage in Acts chapter 10, it says that they were convicted by the Spirit about who Jesus was and an assurance of the judgment to come. An assurance of where they would go when they died. We see the Holy Spirit doing that work in Acts. And the Holy Spirit does that work now. When we say that his job is to convict us of judgment, it means his job is to remind us that there is a time coming when that judgment will happen. And if you are not a believer, that judgment is terrifying and wrathful and awful, and you ought to be terrified of it. But when you are a Christian, we can look forward to that judgment with hopeful anticipation. That moment that I preach about often when Jesus comes crashing down out of the clouds in Revelation 19 and on his leg is righteous and true and he comes back to restore creation and to redeem us and to make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. As Christians we cling to the hope of that moment. It's what gets us through death. It's what gets us through trials. It's what gets us through hard times is the belief in the arctic hope and the assurance that one day Jesus will do what he says he's going to do as the Holy Spirit seeks to link the great works of Christ, not just from his death and resurrection, but links the church age to the return of Christ when it's all said and done to tell us die for, when he comes back to get us. So the Holy Spirit is constantly, constantly, constantly pointing you to Christ. In sin, he points us to who Christ is to believe in him. In righteousness, he points us to the character of Christ to become more like him. And in judgment, he points us to the future of Christ in hope that we might cling to these things in life. That's the role of the Holy Spirit, to point you to Jesus, past, present, and future. To assure you, while you watch someone you know fade away, that you will see them again in glory and they will not look like this. To assure you, when you watch your children struggling through something you can't fix, that there's more to the story than this, it ends better. To assure you that the people you know that have been degenerated by illness or mental issues or whatever, that one day you will get to meet a healthy, loving version of them. The Holy Spirit points us back to the victory on the cross, to the victory of Easter, where all the crud that you deal with was broken and defeated. If only we can place our faith there. So that's the role of the book of Acts. That's the role of the Spirit in the book of Acts and now. And what's wonderful about Acts is it's the only book in the Bible that ends with an ellipsis. Acts isn't finished, and neither is the Spirit. The book of Acts isn't done being written. We're still in the book of Acts. Now, I'm not getting crazy. I'm not saying we're adding stuff to the Bible. All right, relax. But we're still into the church age that was ushered in at the ascension of Christ that awaits the return of Christ. We are still writing the story of the church and the Holy Spirit is still moving in the writing of that story. And he's still moving in you to convict you of your belief in Christ, of your Christ-like character and of your hope in what he will do one day. Let's pray. Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you for the church and the gift that it is to us. Thank you for all the expressions of the church happening all over our community and all over the world today. God, I pray that each person in this service and the service next door and the service across the country and across the globe, that each person is somehow convicted by your spirit today, is somehow warmed by the hope of your spirit, by the promises of your spirit, is somehow moved closer to love through the spirit opening their eyes. God, I pray that the people who sit in the services today who don't yet believe you because they don't see you for who you are would have their eyes opened even just a little bit more today. We thank you for the church and what it is. We thank you for the church age. We thank you for your spirit, for your helper, who points us constantly to your son. And it's in your son's name that we pray. Amen.
This is the fourth part in our series called 27, where this summer and next summer we're going to do an overview of all 27 books in the New Testament. We've been spending June in the Gospels, and this week we arrive at John. John is my favorite Gospel, and in the mode of the other Gospels, if you've listened to all four sermons, you kind of know that each Gospel is written to a certain audience and depicts Jesus in a certain way. By way of review, Matthew was written to the Jews, and Jesus is depicted as the king. Mark was written to the Romans, and Jesus is depicted as a servant. Luke was written to the Greeks, and Jesus is depicted as a man. And the book of John was written to everyone, and Jesus is depicted as God. The book of John is different than the other books. It's written to all people for all time, not a specific audience, and it begins right off the bat talking about Jesus as God. John's gospel is different. In fact, it starts off different. It starts off with a resounding claim that feels far different than the other gospels. I love the way that John starts his gospel. It's one of the reasons it's my favorite gospel. Look with me in John chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. And I'm going to keep reading verses 4 and 5 because I read them again this morning and I'm like those are cool verses too. They need to hear them. So here, John chapter 1, this is how his gospel begins. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him not anything made that was made. Listen, in Him was life by John. Who at the very beginning, from the very beginning, places Jesus in the Godhead at creation. He says, in the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through Him all things were made. Without Him nothing was made. If you think back, this is why it's a big deal to call Him the Word of God, because if you think back to Genesis 1, and you think back to the creation account, how did God create things? He spoke them into being. God said, let there be light. And there was light. He said, let there be fish and birds and animals. And there was fish and birds and animals. He spoke them into being. It was God's very word that was the agent of creation. And here at the beginning of John, right off the bat, just boom, right in your face, John says Jesus is the word, the logos of God. He is the agent of creation. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. He places Jesus in the moment of creation along with creator God the Father and God the Spirit that Genesis says is hovering over the surface of the deep. So right there we get the idea of the Trinity. B.B. Warfield, a theologian from either Yale or Princeton, I should have double checked, from the early 1900s, wrote a lot of things about the Gospels and a lot of different things about Jesus. But one of the things that he said is that the synoptics were written from below upward, and John was written from above downward. The synoptic Gospels are the first three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They follow the same chronology. They have a lot of the same stories. They have a lot of the same parables. Those are called the synoptic gospels. And they present Jesus from the bottom upward. Matthew and Luke begin with genealogies. Here is Jesus' genealogical tree. Here are the men and women from whom he descends, right? It starts at the bottom. And then they introduce him as a baby, helpless, lying in a manger. And if you know nothing else outside of these gospels, this is your first encounter with Christ. And you see him gradually. We learn that he is God and that he is divine and that he is the son of God and that he is the Messiah. We build Jesus from the bottom upward. But in John's gospel, in John's gospel, we see Jesus from the top downward. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and then we see him show up at baptism. Then we see him human. Then we see him as fully God and fully man. But John's gospel is unique and differentiates itself from the rest of the gospels. If I were going to stay in the mode of the series that we've done so far, every week I kind of look at how Jesus is depicted and why he's depicted that way, and then we kind of pick it apart and see why that's important to us. Why is it important to us that Jesus needed to be displayed as king, or that Jesus is a servant, or that Jesus is man, and we kind of look at that. And so if I were going to follow that mode, I would take this week and I would say, why is it important that we understand that Jesus is God? How do we pull that theme out and how does that apply to us? But to me, and it doesn't mean I don't respect the other gospels, but to me, I love the gospel of John so much and there's's so much good stuff in there, that I found that to be overly reductive and dismissive of the message of John. So I didn't want to do that. And I thought about all the things about John that I love that make it unique, and eventually what we'll do is we'll land on this single unifying principle that comes out of the gospel of John that I think is one of the most profound, powerful, freeing principles in all the Bible. We might spend our entire spring on this one principle. But as we get there, I wanted to share with you what I love about the book of John, what I think makes it unique, because I'll tell you right now, the whole goal of this sermon, the only thing I want you to do is leave here and read the book of John. That's my goal. It's for you to walk out those doors or those doors thinking tomorrow or this afternoon, I'm going to crack open the book of John and I'm going to read it. And I'll tell you, I started reading it again too. And I read chapter one this morning. And if you can read chapter one and not want to read the rest of it, then I can't help you. Chapter one is a great chapter of the Bible when you're locked in and you're paying attention to what's going on. So my whole goal is to have you leave wanting to know Jesus through the book of John and wanting to read the book of John. What I think is unique about John, and it's not just me, I mean, you can find lists online. But the things that matter to me are, first of all, John is written from the perspective of a loving friend. Now Matthew and Luke, they knew Jesus. John Mark knew Jesus through Peter and Paul, but John knew Jesus. John was a loving friend. He was a close friend. And in your life, if someone was going to write the story of your life, who better to write it than a close and intimate lifelong friend, than someone who's known you and walk with you for years? Someone who's seen you, who's seen your vices and your values, who's watched you lose it, who knows what frustrates you, who knows what brings you joy, who knows how to complete your sentences, who knows what makes you happy, who's been with you in the down times and laughed with you and cried with you and mourned with you and wept with you? What about, who else can have a perspective on you like that of a good friend? And we say that John was Jesus' good friend because it kind of drips off the pages. First of all, in John's gospel, he refers to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Now that, that is a bold claim. To write your gospel knowing the other gospel writers like they're around, they're going to see this and he still puts it out there that he is the disciple whom Jesus loved. So it would almost be like writing a letter, writing a book about your parents and calling yourself the child whom my parents loved. Like it's a bold claim. And in my case, everybody would just be like, yeah, that's true. It's legit. But he calls himself the disciple whom Jesus loved. And you can see that their relationship was unique amongst him and the disciples. At the last supper, they're reclining together and the way that they would eat dinner, you would lean on your side and you would reach to the table that way and so they were kind of front to back and John's head was in Jesus' chest at one point because he was asking, who is it, Jesus, that's going to betray you? And Jesus whispers into John's ear, it's the one who's going to dip the bread next. He whispers into John's ear who it was going to be, that it was going to be Judas. It's this intimate moment that only John records. And John records a lot of intimate moments like this. As a matter of fact, at the cross, we see that John may have been the only disciple that even bothered to show up. And Jesus musters up the energy and the oxygen to push himself up on the nails and tell John, when I die, please take care of my mother. He entrusted Mary to John. That was how close and intimate they were. So John's gospel is written from the perspective of a loving friend three decades later as he reminisces on the sweetest years of his life when he walked with his Savior. And so John just writes down different things than the other gospel writers did. John almost writes down a personal memoir of Christ where we get insights into these amazing conversations. We get insights into miracles that we don't see in other places like the miracle of the wedding at Cana. We get the longest recorded prayer of Jesus. We get long teachings of Jesus that we don't see in the other books. Matthew and Luke have the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon by the Lake, whichever setting you want to take. But John has teachings and conversations that we see nowhere else. I actually have some there in your notes for you so you can use this as reference later when you're going through John. But in John chapter 3, we see him have this amazing conversation with Nicodemus that the other gospel writers don't record. Nicodemus was a Pharisee. And the Pharisees rejected Jesus and who he was. But I've always respected Nicodemus because Nicodemus had a way to see past the fake news and the tide and the current and the way that everything else was running in culture and say, wait, but what do I think and who is this man? And so he seems to have requested a conversation with Jesus. And they meet under cover of night and Jesus lays out everything for Nicodemus, who he is, what he came to do, and how we can be, in our words, saved. And in this discourse with Nicodemus, we see the most famous verse in the world, John 3.16, for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. It's the salvation message, it's the gospel, it's the whole point of the Bible wrapped into this one succinct verse. It's in the conversation with Nicodemus that that verse appears. One chapter over in John chapter 4, Jesus has this incredible conversation with the woman at the well, this Samaritan woman where he breaks cultural norms, he goes past hated divides, and he talks with a woman who comes to the well in the middle of the day because she's so ashamed of her life that she doesn't want to be seen by the other women. And Jesus calls her out, says, you've had five husbands. The guy you're living with now is not your husband. That's not good for you. I don't want you to keep doing that, but I love you. I'm the living water. Drink of me and you will never perish. And she goes back to her village or her town and she tells everybody, there's a dude at the well that just told me everything I ever did and you guys need to come check him out. And the whole town goes out there, they meet Jesus and they have faith in him. We don't see that story in the other gospels. And then I referenced it earlier in John chapter 17 we have the lengthiest prayer recorded of Jesus. Now the most famous prayer of Jesus is the Lord's prayer. When he teaches the disciples how to pray, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. That prayer. And then we have accounts of the prayer in Gethsemane, right before he's arrested to be crucified, where he says, Father, please take this cup from me. Please don't make me do this. But in John chapter 17, we have Jesus's most lengthy recorded prayer. It's an insight into his heart and his desires into his conversations with his father. And scholars refer to it as the high priestly prayer. And in that prayer, it's so remarkable because he starts off by praying for the disciples. And then after he prays for the disciples, he prays for all of those who would follow the disciples. He prays for the church down through the generations. Do you realize that in John chapter 17, if you're a Christian, if you're a part of God's church, if you call God your father and Jesus your savior, and to be a Christian means that you believe that Jesus is who he says he is. You believe that he did what he said he did. And you believe he's going to do what he says he's going to do. If you are a Christian, then in John chapter 17, Jesus prays for you. It's right there in the red letters. And I can't get over the fact that tucked away in this corner of the Bible, in the 17th chapter of John, that my Savior prayed for me and he prayed for you. And it's recorded and we get to read it. We don't see that in the other gospels. That kind of intimacy is not there. We see it in the gospel of John. And just as an aside, do you know what Jesus prays for? For his disciples and for the generations of the church to come? What would you pray for in that moment? Faithfulness? Power and efficacy of mission? The growth of the church? The fidelity of the saints. Jesus, in that moment, the most important thing on his mind was to pray for unity. Unity within the church. Unity within his children. Unity within the descendants of God. So when I read that passage, I feel equal parts inspired and encouraged that my Jesus prayed for me. But there's also a tinge of sadness there for me. Because I think we can admit and confess we're doing a pretty bad job of making our Savior proud of our unity. We, the church, we've let our Jesus down with all of our denominations and all of our differing beliefs. And it's not that we can't have variant beliefs, it's just that we insist on ours to the exclusion of others. And you fire up Twitter and it's just Christians calling other Christians bad Christians and you fire up Facebook and now it's Christians who know each other calling Christians bad Christians. And it's all just gross. And it's not the point of the sermon, but grace, let us not be a part of that evil. Let us not be a part of God's children that further the divide amongst His church and amongst His children. Let us honor the prayer of Christ and seek unity with one another, understanding we're not going to agree on everything and that never really seems to be a priority of Jesus'. But we see those lengthy discourses in the Gospel of John. Another thing that makes John unique amongst the Gospels, as I mentioned earlier, Matthew, Mark, and Luke include the teachings of, and Jesus always very intentionally taught through parables. We know these parables, the parable of the prodigal son, of the lost coin, the shrewd manager, the persistent widow. We could go on and on. We know the parables of Jesus. Even if you're not very familiar with the Bible, even if this is your first Sunday in a church in over a decade, you could probably name and loosely describe a parable because they're just kind of ubiquitous in our Christian culture. In the book of John, you won't find any parables. I don't know why, but for some reason, John didn't feel like he needed to record those. Maybe he had access to the gospels written prior to his and was like, they got those squared away. I don't have anything to add to the parables. Or maybe he thought it was more captivating to describe Jesus in the terms and to follow the teachings of Jesus in the way that Jesus described himself. Because in the book of John, Jesus teaches using I am statements rather than parables. If you read through the book of John, you'll find seven huge I am statements where Jesus tells us who he is. He's not reliant on the descriptions of gospel writers. He's not reliant on the descriptions of historians or other people or word of mouth. He tells us straight up who he is and what he is and how we ought to think of him. And the seven I am's are there in your notes if you have them. They're not going to be on the screen, but Jesus says, I'm the bread of life, I'm the light of the world, I'm the gate for the sheep, I'm the good shepherd, I'm the resurrection and the life, the way, the truth, and the life, and I am the true vine. And if you look at those for a second and you study them, what you'll see is that all of those things are referring to salvation and they're referring to life in him. I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father but through me. I am the light of the world. I am the bread of life. Come to me. Believe in me. I am the Savior. I am the Messiah. And then once you get to me, I am the shepherd at the gate. I am the good shepherd. I am the true vine. I am the bread. I will sustain you. Jesus beckons you. Come to me, believe in me, know me, and then be sustained by me. All through the gospel of John, these are the I am statements where Jesus invites us to come and to know who he is and then to find life in him. And then in the book of John, we get these verses that I love so much. I tell you guys every week, this is my new favorite verse, and whatever, but I love these verses in John. I love the way that John opens, that we read at the beginning. In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made. That is profound. Elevates Jesus to exactly who he is. Later on in that same chapter we get John 1 16 which is one of the verses I like to repeat around here that humbles me every time, fills me with joy every time. It's a simple verse. From his fullness we have all received grace grace. At grace, we say that we are conduits of grace because we are connected to God. And from his fullness, we have received grace upon grace. We can give grace upon grace to other people. From his fullness, from God's goodness, we, all of us, have received grace upon grace. I pointed out John 3, 16, the most famous verse in the Bible. I also think of John 10, 10, one of my favorite verses for a long time. The thief comes to steal and to kill and to destroy, but I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. Where Jesus says, I'm going to give you the best, most exciting, richest, fullest life possible. Well, he promises you, I know, I know the world tempts you with things that you think you want to run after. With wealth or power or success or men or women or attraction or friendship or whatever it is. I know that the world tempts you with things that you want to run after. But I promise that I will give you life to the full. When we pursue Jesus, when we trust our life to him, when we spend our life pursuing him, his promise on that pursuit is not that we will have given up some sort of richness of life to pursue him in this life and experience eternity later. No. It's that if you pursue him now, he will give you that richness now. You cannot imagine a better life for yourself than Jesus would give you if you would only follow him. That's his promise. I come to give you life to the full. I could do a sermon on every one of the things I've said so far. Because there's so many good, so much good stuff in the gospel of John. But my favorite one, the verse that I love so much, the verse that I want to land on that feels to me like a unifying principle for all of Christendom, is found in John chapter 15. After he said that he is the true vine, he tells them this. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. I am the vine, you are the branches. If you abide in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Now here's why I love that verse. And here's why I think it is so profound. Because Jesus says, you don't need to worry about anything but abiding in me. You can sweep all the other concerns of life aside and focus on me. Pursue me. Follow me. Make me the apple of your eye. Stay attached to me and you will bear much fruit. And here's what I really love about that promise. One of my biggest fears in life, I think we all carry this fear to different degrees. One of my biggest fears in life is to get to the end of my life and to learn that I've wasted it. Is to have to settle into the harsh reality that my years didn't matter very much. That I could have done more or I could have done better. I first heard this quote from D.L. Moody. I've researched it out. I don't know to whom to attribute it because it wasn't his, but I heard it from him. He said that one of the most tragic things in life is to watch a man spend his entire life climbing the ladder of success only to get to the top and realized it was propped against the wrong building. It is profoundly sad for people to spend their life in pursuit of things that don't matter. And I carry a fear of that with me. And this verse, this principle safeguards you from that fruit. Over in first, I think it's first Peter or 1 Peter, it says that if we can learn to love one another, that it will keep us from being ineffective and unproductive in our knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. There are these promises through Scripture that if we'll pursue God and do what he has for us to do, that we will not waste our life, that we will bear much fruit. The question becomes, I think naturally, what that fruit is and what it looks like. What does it mean to bear fruit? And I think we probably think about that in ministerial terms. We think about that at Grace. We say that we want to be kingdom builders. We actually say we want to be kingdom builders so much that my goal for you, if this is your first Sunday here and you're here for 10 years, I hope that moves you through this process in life where you realize that everything that you have been given, every talent, all your time, all your treasure has been given so that you can leverage it for the growth of the kingdom of God. That's what we want for you, to leverage everything in your life to bear fruit and grow God's kingdom. So what does it mean to bear fruit? Well, I think we think about that ministerially, making disciples and converting people to Christianity, evangelism, discipleship and evangelism. We think about those things. We call it strengthening or adding to God's kingdom. And I think that's absolutely true. That is the way that we bear much fruit. And if we abide in Christ, we can't help but bear that fruit. That's another part that I love. If a branch is attached to an apple tree, then when it's time, that branch is going to grow apples. All it has to do is stay attached to the tree. It doesn't have to worry about what kind of fruit to bear or when to bear it or what to do or how to get the nutrients. All it has to do, stay attached to the tree and you're going to bear fruit. All we have to do if we stay attached to Jesus is we're going to bear fruit. That's it. That's all we have to worry about. But I got to thinking about what kind of fruit we bear. And if you just look at the natural world, there's all different kinds of fruit. Apples, oranges, pears, tangerines, lemons. That's about all I know. I don't eat a lot of fruit. I can tell you a lot of fast food menus. But throughout the natural world, trees grow fruit. They grow all different kinds of fruit. An apple tree doesn't decide, you know what we're feeling this year, boys? Oranges. Let's do it. That doesn't happen. Apple trees grow apples. That's it. For the rest of their days, apples. I don't think that God's kingdom and that this natural world is that much different. I tell you all the time, Ephesians 2.10, you are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them. I think that's the same ethos that we find in Proverbs when it says that we should train up a child in the way that they must go and they will not depart from it. We're going to train up that child to be quiet in church. That's great. We love you, Faith and Phil. But in that, in that is this tip of the cap to the idea that we're all different. In Corinthians, we see that there are a myriad spiritual gifts, and not everybody has all of them. We all have our different parts to play. We all have our different giftedness. God knew before you were that age when you were going to live, what you were going to do, and what gifts he was going to imbue you with so that you might be used in his kingdom. He already knew that. And I've told you before that because you're a God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that you might walk in them, that your job is to figure out what your good works are and then walk in them. All of that ties in with abide in Christ and you will bear much fruit. I don't think the ministerial fruit looks the same for everybody. I think it is as wild and variant as the natural world and that what abiding in Christ and bearing fruit means is you will bear the fruit that God designed you and intended you to bear. If it comes out of your creativity, your hospitality, your gift of care, your gift of discernment, your gift of boldness, your gift of timidity, your gift of confidence, your gift of charisma, whatever it is, God has gifted you in different ways and he has gifted you to bear your fruit in his kingdom, in his way, in his ministry. So it doesn't look the same for everybody. And so what Jesus is promising is if you abide in me, listen, if you abide in me, then you will become the exact person I created you to be. You will experience the exact full life I want you to experience, and you will produce the exact fruit I designed and created you in your mother's womb to produce. You will be the absolute best version of yourself on this side of eternity, and all you have to do is abide in Christ. All you have to do is pursue him, is walk with him, yearn for him, know him, love him. And we could talk a long time about what it means to abide in Christ. Right now I'm leaning towards making the spring series that leads into Easter. Just call it Abide. And every week talk about what it means to abide in Christ. If you're a note taker, I should have brought it up here with me, but write this down. There's a book called Abide in Christ by a guy named Andrew Murray. I would highly recommend it. I tell a story about the facilities manager at the summer camp I worked at, a guy named Harry Stevenson. And now he's one of the godliest men I've ever met in my life. He has those eyes that when you look at him, you know immediately he loves Jesus and he loves me. Just an incredibly godly man. Harry, when I asked him, I said, what book do I need to read, Harry? And he told me, Abide in Christ, Andrew Murray. And I've read it and reread it. If you're a reader, go read it. If you're not a reader, grow up and go get it. The book of John beckons us to know Jesus that we might find life in him. The whole book of John through the I am statements, through the claims of Christ, through the conversations, through the prayer, through the examples beckons us to come to know Jesus. Look again at the I Am statements. Jesus himself beckons us, come to know me, come to trust me that you might find life in me, that you might find the best life possible in me. The book of John beckons us to know Christ, that we would find life in him. It beckons us to abide in Christ. And I would just close by saying this as I push you back into reading the book of John on your own. We can only abide in Christ if we can know Him. And we can best know Him through John. And that's said with a caveat. There's other ways to know Christ. We experience Him. We pray with Him. We walk with Him. We see Him in the Gospels for sure. But I think if you want what is the best written account to know the person of Jesus, to see His heart and to see Him exposed and to understand Him, then the Gospel of John is absolutely essential reading for knowing our Christ and abiding in Him and bearing much fruit in your life and in your ministry. So I'm going to pray. We're going to sing a song. And I hope you'll walk out those doors and open up the book of John soon and begin a fresh pursuit of Christ. Let's pray. God, we love you so much. We thank you for your son. We thank you for John's account of him. That we can know him intimately through John's gospel. We thank you for all the powerful teachings that we find in there, for the way that your son loves, for the simple admonition to abide in him and let you handle the rest. God, we want to be who you created us to be. We want to do what you intended us to do. Would you give us the clarity of sight, the strength of faith, and the boldness of courage to walk with you? Would you let us shake off the demons and walk past our past and leave the shadows behind and pursue you with vigor and fullness of heart and openness of mind and eyes that we might know you and experience what it is to walk with you. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.
Good morning, good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If you are here with your dad today, good for you. You're a good kid. And if you're a dad and your kids are here, man, that's so great, especially if your adult kids still want to hang out with you. That's the dream, right? That's all we're trying to do with John and Lily. Just when we release them to the wild, we want to make sure they come back. I do want to offer a prayer here at the beginning of the sermon for fathers and for Father's Day because it's a day of mixed emotions. In our house, we've lost Jen's dad. And so she wants to celebrate me, but it's also a sad day. And sometimes days like this are wonderful because they allow us to celebrate wonderful people, but we also know that for different reasons, Father's Day can be difficult. And so I just wanted to offer a prayer here as we begin, and then I'm going to go into a message that has nothing to do with fathers or even manhood at all. So let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for being our good father. For those of us who have been blessed and lucky to have good dads, we're so grateful for that blessing. We're so grateful for dads who point the way to you, who are fallible and who mess up, but who love us and love you, and they show us how to do that. So thank you for them. And if we have those, God, help us to be like them. God, for those for whom today is painful, maybe it conjures up loss or hurt or any other things that days like this can stir. I just pray that you would be with them, that they would be reminded that you are the good father and that your love today would fill in the spots that are left behind by hurts or hardships or blind spots. So God, be a good father for us today. Let your children feel your presence. Thank you for the good dads. Give us grace for the not as good dads and help us be good dads too. In Jesus' name, amen. Okay, we are in the third part of our series called 27. We'll be doing it this summer and next summer, going through the 27 books in the New Testament. In the month of June, we've been going through the Gospels. So in the first week, we looked at Matthew, and we said that Matthew was written to the Jews and depicts Jesus as the king. Last week, we looked at Mark. We said Mark was written to the Romans and depicts Jesus as the king. Last week we looked at Mark. We said Mark was written to the Romans and depicts Jesus as a servant. And this week we're looking at the book of Luke. And Luke, the gospel of Luke, was written to the Greeks and it depicts Jesus as a human or as a man. So Luke was written to a Greek audience. There's a guy named Theophilus. It's addressed to, oh, blessed Theophilus. And Luke and the book of Acts are really two parts of the same book, the same letter that was written to Theophilus so that he might understand everything that happened in the life of Christ and then the things that happened immediately following the life of Christ. And so Luke was written to a Greek audience to depict Jesus as a human, as a man, because to the Greek mind and in Greek culture and thinking and philosophy, man is the apex of creation. We are the culmination of all the things. And so to depict Jesus as the greatest man to have ever lived, as the greatest philosopher to have ever lived, would be appealing and capturing and captivating to the Greek mind. But as I thought about us and how to preach that and how to apply that to us and how that should stir us, I was really focusing on the humanity of Christ and kind of asking myself all week long. I started thinking about it last week and just kind of chipping away at what does it mean to be human? What does it mean that Jesus was a human? Why is this important? And I was trying to figure this out. Whenever I write my sermons, I don't know how you guys write your sermons, but when I write my sermons, I try to just like, I think of it as the attack angle. Like, how am I going to approach this? What am I going to talk about? What's interesting about this? What's helpful about this? And I was having a really hard time with it. And so when I have a hard time, I talk to people. And our worship pastor, Aaron Gibson, happened to be around. He's the only person around. I would have loved to talk to someone else. It was just him. So we ended up talking about it. And he actually made this point. I thought it was a great point. So I included in my sermon. Aaron has done at least one useful thing today. But he reminded me that Jesus' favorite title for himself was Son of Man. Jesus' favorite title for himself was Son of Man. And in all honesty, we have such a good staff. I can go talk to any of them and be like, I've got writer's block. I don't know what to do. I can just throw out the sermon. And every time they get me unstuck and they are wonderful. And when he said this, I kind of do a thing when I'm trying to figure a sermon out or something out. And I ask you about it and you say something. Once you say the one useful thing, I'm like, that's it. I got it. You keep talking. I'm not there anymore. I'm thinking about son of man. And he said this, and I was like, that's it. So I dove into some research on that. Why did Jesus call himself that? What did it mean? And what I learned is it very much is Jesus's favorite term for himself. It shows up 32 times in the gospel of Matthew, 15 times in the gospel of Mark, and 26 times in the Gospel of Luke. And every single one of those times, it's Jesus himself using that term to refer to himself. The only time it's used 12 times in John, and two of those times it's someone else calling him that mockingly. But all the other times, this is how Jesus refers to himself as son of man. So why did he like that term? Why did he refer to himself as son of man? Well, first, the phrase son of man would have meant in the ancient world what human being means to us. It's just a way to say that I'm mortal. It's a way to say I'm a human. I'm part of the human race. So Jesus, every time he says it, is declaring his humanity. He's dropping a little hint. I'm a human. I'm a son of man. And we know that Jesus is both man and divine. The fancy theological word for Jesus being 100% human and 100% divine is called the hypostatic union. So Jesus is highlighting the hypostatic union every time he says son of man, because he's declaring his humanity, but he's also referring back to this famous prophecy in Daniel chapter seven, this famous messianic prophecy. And I'm going to read it to you this morning and it'll be up on the screen because it just sounds cool. As I went back and I read it, I was like, this sounds like one of those good ancient prophecies and I want you guys to hear it because sometimes they say cool things in the Bible and this is one of them. Daniel has a vision in chapter 7. I saw in the night visions and behold with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man comes like the Son of Man, and he is presented to the Ancient of Days. The Son of Man is Jesus. Ancient of Days is God the Father. And so this is a messianic prediction about Jesus ascending to the throne and being the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. So when he says in the New Testament, Thy am the Son of Man, the Son of man has no place to lay his head. When he refers to himself like that, he is referring to Daniel seven. He is declaring his divinity while at the same time he's declaring his humanity. And I think that's a really interesting name and choice for Jesus to make to constantly declare his humanity. And I think it's even more interesting that Luke decided that this needed to be a theme of his gospel. There's other themes within the gospel. We spent the spring in the book of Luke, and we talked about it being the hospitality gospel, that throughout the book of Luke, Jesus is either going to, attending, or coming from a meal. It's the hospitality gospel. There's around the table. But another theme of Luke, another thing that he weaves throughout the gospel is the humanity of Christ. Which brings us back to our question for the week. Why did Luke craft an entire gospel with the intent of displaying Jesus' humanity? Why did Luke craft an entire gospel with the intent of displaying Jesus' humanity? What is so important about that? Why should it matter so much that Jesus is a human? Why did he himself choose a name that would highlight his humanity the entire time? Why did Luke, one of the gospel writers, decide to craft an entire gospel to display that aspect of our Christ? Why is this so important? This is an important question that I've been wrestling with all week. And the more I wrestled with it, the more aspects of it that I thought about, even kind of diving into what does it mean for us to be human? What makes us human? And going down that rabbit trail and all the things, what I realized is that there's a story in Luke, in Luke chapter 4, the temptation of Christ, that probably more dramatically and openly and honestly and overtly displays the humanity of Christ more than any other story in the Bible, save maybe the stories around his crucifixion. Jesus is utterly human in this story. And as I went through the story, I realized that the temptations that Jesus has are that Satan offers Jesus and the responses that Jesus offers Satan. I realized that those things actually highlight all of the reasons why it's so important for us to understand that Jesus is a human, that Jesus is man, that he's 100% man and 100% God. And it helps us understand why that's so important. And hopefully, as we move through this, if I do it right, what we'll find is ultimately Jesus' humanity is comforting and inspiring and even an opportunity to experience a little bit of heaven on earth. So let's look at the temptation of Jesus in Luke chapter four and look at the aspects of Jesus's humanity that are on full display for us to see that kind of answer some of our questions. Now, for those of you who are not familiar with the temptation of Christ or need a refresher, at the beginning of Jesus's ministry, he was 30 years old and then he was about to start calling disciples and declaring the gospel and start that process of public ministry. Before he started his public ministry, it took 40 days and he went out in the desert to pray and to fast and to prepare his body and his mind and his spirit for what he needed to do. And this isn't the point of the sermon at all, but it's so interesting to me that Jesus, the Savior of the world, the most capable minister that's ever existed, which is so gross an understatement it is stupid to say out loud. Jesus was good at ministry. Yeah. Okay, let's pray. Go home. That's the best point I got today. Before, he's perfectly capable of the ministry. Before he began it, he went and he prayed and he fasted for 40 days. My volunteers in the room, folks who had stepped into kids ministry, into committees, to being on an elder board, who volunteer with students, who volunteer with the ministry downtown. Those of you who have brought children into the world and started that ministry. Me, as I took over the church. What period of preparation and prayer and fasting do we give ourselves for the task at hand before we just launch right into it thinking ourselves capable? And if Jesus doesn't do that, if Jesus doesn't launch into things without stopping and pausing and praying, then why do we think we can? So maybe there's a season for us where that's what we need to do as we enter into ministry. But he goes to fast and pray, And at the end of the 40 days, Satan comes to him to tempt him. And we see these three temptations that he has. The first one is found in chapter 4, verses 3 and 4. The devil said to him, if you are the son of God, command this stone to become bread. And Jesus answered him, it is written, man shall not live by bread alone. So Satan comes to him, he's maximum hungry. I don't think it's humanly possible to be more hungry than you would be after 40 days. And Satan says when he's maximum hungry, maximum weak, if you are the son of God, this whole time Satan's trying to get him to prove that he is who he says he is. If you're the son of God, then turn this stone into bread and eat it and everybody will believe you. And Jesus says, quotes back scripture, man shall not live by bread alone., how is the humanity displayed in this verse? What we see in Jesus' response is that he's hungry. He's tempted, but he says, I don't need that right now. So what we see is that Jesus feels what we feel. Jesus feels and experiences what we feel and experience. And that's such a short and cheap sentence that if we don't stop, we're going to miss what that means and how profound that actually is. Originally, as I started writing the sermon, I was going to spend the whole morning here because I think it's unbelievable. First of all, Jesus condescended. He was in heavenly form. I don't know what heavenly form is, but it's better than this. And he took on this when he didn't have to and limited himself when he didn't have to. He became a human. It's the ultimate act of humility. I've known a lot of people over the years who want to help the impoverished in other countries. I've not known very many of them to move into that neighborhood. Jesus moved into the neighborhood. He took on human form and he began to feel what we feel. He experienced hunger like we experience hunger. You think God gets hungry? You think God the Father is looking forward to a steak on Father's Day? He doesn't care. He doesn't need food to sustain him. He took on hunger. Jesus was maximum hungry. He lived in a country and in a society that was not wealthy. He said the son of man has no place to lay his head. He wandered around as a vagabond for most of his adult ministry. If you've ever been hungry, people who have ever known hunger, they have a Jesus who can empathize with that hunger because he was hungry. He feels what we feel. I bet Jesus, because he's human, growing up, had insecurities. There was probably some cool kids that didn't like him, and it was hard. I'd be willing to bet that Jesus liked a girl that didn't like him back. I'd be willing to bet that Jesus saw his parents fight. I'd be willing to bet that he was embarrassed, that he was proud. Can you imagine the pride that you would have to fight back if you found out you were the savior of the world? Jesus has experienced all the human emotions that we have experienced. He experienced temptation. He experienced loss. We don't know where or how, but somewhere in between Luke chapter 3, or 2 rather, and Luke 3, Joseph disappears from the narrative. Joseph, his earthly father, who I'm just going to refer to as his father for ease of language, but I know that God's the father. He lost his dad at some point. We're not really given much indication if it was by death or by divorce, but we know that he fades away from the narrative and he's lost in the fog of history. So what we can be sure of is that Jesus understood either what it was to be in a broken home or what it was to lose a father early. Jesus, and I don't say this lightly to make a cheap joke. Jesus had father issues. I've always, I would be very interested to see how Jesus treated older men as he was growing up in his ministry. Because people with father issues tend to revere older men in ways that are different than folks without father issues. And I don't think that we stop to think enough about what it means for Jesus to be a human and to have experienced humanity. Because I started thinking about that too and what is it to be human? And I was reminded of back in the summer of 2020, I started to see a therapist or a counselor. I never know the right word. The one to help me identify and unpack all of my childhood issues. And there was no compelling event that took me there. There was no pressing thing. I just heard from enough people that it was a good practice to see a therapist. And so I thought if it's worked for other people, if it's been a good practice for them, I need to go try it too. And I found it to be an amazing experience. He told me all the things and I fixed it all within about nine months. I'm good now. Never need it again. It's probably time for a checkup, really. But in therapy, as he walked me through things, and I was just telling him about what's going on in my life and different things, and he'd ask me about my past, and it's not all just like childhood and parents, but you do talk about all that stuff in there. He showed this to me about myself. There's things about me that I don't like. There's things about me that if I could wave a wand, I would fix them. If I could wave a wand and give myself more patience, I would. If I could wave a wand and give myself more discernment in conversation, to not be such a dummy all the time, and for the joke that you don't need to go for, I would waive it. There's rough edges of my character that if you gave me the option to get rid of them, I would. I just don't know how. And you start to talk to your therapist about things like that. And what he helped me see is, yeah, those things are a part of you, but they're a part of you because of how you were brought up, the environment you were raised in, the things that happened around you. Those things are a part of you because of so much that was so outside of your control that you really can't even be blamed for those things being in your life. Now, it doesn't mean that as adults we shouldn't deal with those things and cope with those things and try to work them out of our life, but their very existence in our life is not our fault. And I started to learn, because I always thought that when somebody messes up, when somebody does something that they shouldn't do, that that's their fault. And if someone's living a life of bad choices and they're throwing their life away, that's their fault. They need to get their head out of their rear end, pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and do the right thing. And I thought that about myself, too, that anything that existed within me that was bad and wrong and displeasing to God and displeasing to myself, I needed to figure it out and white-knuckle it and just walk my way to health. And what I learned in therapy is that that's not how that goes. The things that are a part of me that I didn't want, I didn't put there. Life did. It's just humanity. And learning that about myself gave me a deep empathy for the people around me. I know that it's difficult to tell at times, but it's deeper now than it used to be. It helped me understand if I didn't choose my brokenness, then they didn't either. And the bad habits and the bad behaviors and the bad attitudes and all of those things that exist in their life were not chosen by them because they want them. They are products of the environment that they were brought up in. Those are things that happened to them, not things that they chose. And then those things cause behaviors that are unattractive, but they don't like those behaviors either. It gave me a deep empathy for others. It helped me understand that when I meet a grown man who wants to tell me his 40 time or is proud of how loud his car is or something, that he's not just a jerk. He is a jerk because nobody cares about that stuff. But he's also just saying in an undeveloped way, will you please like me? Will you just tell me that I'm enough? Will someone give me some approval? It helped me realize we're all just bags of insecurities and coping mechanisms. And some of us just learn to do it better than others. But it gave me a deep empathy for humans. And I say all that to say that Jesus was a human too. Jesus carried those things. Jesus had to work through his brokenness and his loss and his disappointment. Jesus watched that happen in the people around him. He saw that too. This is why I honestly believe that when we sin and we mess up and we make life choices and involve ourselves in patterns and habits that Jesus wouldn't choose for us, that when he sees us do those things, I truly don't think that his primary response to us is frustration or anger. I think it's pity and hurt and love and empathy. I think he sees our hurt driving us into places of deeper hurt, and he's just waiting and begging for the day that we come back to him and allow him to heal us. I think it's that song we sing, Reckless Love. There's no mountain that he won't climb up. There's no wall he won't kick down. Like he's coming after us. He sees you hurting and hurting yourself and he's relentlessly pursuing you. And listen, I don't think he's mad at you for your sins. I think he watches your sins and it hurts him that you continue to hurt yourself in that way because he's a human and he knows why you're doing it and he has deep empathy for it and he wants you to stop. It matters so much that Jesus feels what we feel. The other aspect of his humanity that we see in the temptation of Christ is that the second temptation. Your notes say verse 7. I'm going to start and their glory he's offering in the kingdoms of the world. For it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you then will worship me, it will all be yours. And Jesus answered him, it is written, you shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve. So Satan takes him to where he can see the kingdoms of the world and he says, they've been given to me. If you want them, I'll give them to you. All you have to do is worship me. And Jesus' response is, I am only allowed to worship God the Father. And so what this reveals is Jesus serves who we serve. Jesus serves who we serve. He's subject to the same laws and edicts that we are. He doesn't say, I only can worship myself. He says, no, I can only worship God the Father, no one else, which means that Jesus was subject to the same laws that we were. He followed the Ten Commandments perfectly. He followed the law of the Old Testament perfectly. He was a human who was tempted to break the law, but he didn't. He still followed God's laws like we do. He didn't think that he was too good for them. Last night I was watching Bluey with Lily, my daughter. And if you are a parent of, I don't know what the age range would be, of a kid under 10 and you don't know what Bluey is, you're not a good parent. It's amazing. We're watching it, and in this particular episode, there's two little kids. Their little dog's Bluey, and Bingo is the little sister, and Bluey is the older sister, and then they've got a cousin named Muffin. All this is important, okay? Don't forget these details. And Muffin's coming. She's riding with Uncle Scout or whoever over to Bluey and Bingo's house. And Muffin asks her dad if she's special. And dad says, yes, you're very special. And then dad says, you're the most special kid on the planet. And I'm watching it thinking, that is not smart. That's not smart. Your kid is not the most special kid on the planet. No kid is. And they get to Bluey's house, and they start to play. The three kids start to play, and they're playing a game, I think, called Library. And you've got to check out the book, and you can only check out three. And Muffin is doing whatever Muffin wants to do. Muffin doesn't want to check out three. Muffin doesn't want to be quiet. Muffin's not following any of the rules of the game. And so Bluey and Bingo go complain to Uncle and Mom, hey, Muffin's not playing right. And they're like, just let Muffin play however Muffin wants. Like, okay. So they go back, and Muffin's behavior is ruining the game because Muffin believes that she is the most special child to ever exist and doesn't have to follow any of the rules. And so finally it comes to this point where Dad's got to get involved. So he goes and grabs Muffin and says, why aren't you playing right? And Muffin says, well, because I'm the most special child, I don't have to follow the rules that anybody else follows. And he says what a good dad would say. I'm sorry, I was wrong. You were not the most special child. You're the most special child to me and your mom. You're not more special than them. Okay. I say all that to say that Jesus did not go through life as God's special little boy, okay? He didn't just declare, I'm Jesus, I can do whatever I want, none of the rules apply to me. He lived with the same humanity, the same restraints, the same limitations that you do. He did not go through life thinking that he was special and some sort of exception. So the challenges that you face with being Christ-like, being godly, trying to follow the rules and do what the Bible says, trying to learn the Bible and apply it to your own life, Jesus faced those too. Jesus serves who we serve. He follows the laws that we're told we're following when we love God and love others. He was challenged just like you were. The last one is of particular interest to me. We see it down at the end of the story, verses 12 and 13. Satan has just told Jesus, he's taken him up to the top of the temple and he says, if you're really God, if you're really who you say you are, then fling yourself off the temple and God will send his angels to capture you. And this is Jesus' response. And Jesus answered him, it is said, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test. And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time. Before we unpack what's there in the temptation in Jesus' response, I included that last verse. Satan departed from him to return to him at a more opportune time. It's not as if Jesus had this one encounter with Satan and then was not tempted for the rest of his life. I have a note in my Bible that I wrote years ago that Jesus had moments of weakness too. Satan would prey on him at opportune times. So this resisting of temptation, this humanity that he experienced wasn't just a one and done deal here at the beginning of his ministry and now you're good. This is a persistent, pervasive thing. But in this response, it's fling yourself off and surely God will catch you. Jesus says, it is not right to put the Lord your God to the test. Now this is interesting because Jesus is God. And Jesus later says to Pilate, when Pilate's trying to ask if he was the king, he says, dude, if I wanted to get out of here, I could call the angels and they would get me. So we know that Jesus can call on the angels if he wants to. He doesn't need God the father to do it. He could have done this, called on the angels himself, not been in violation of any laws or any rules, I'm in perfectly fine. But he says, no, I can't do that. It's not right to put the Lord your God to the test. Because if angels are going to come rescue him, it's not going to be because he insisted on it. It's going to be because God acted for him. And so what we see is that Jesus relies how we rely. Jesus relies how we rely. Jesus relies on God the same way that we rely on God. And the phrasing there is a little funny because I wanted it to fit in with the other notes because that's what good pastors do. But I'll explain it a little bit. I think of it this way. When Jesus went through life and was performing miracles and was preaching and teaching and was directing people and doing what he does, he didn't do all that with his Jesus powers. He did that with his Holy Spirit powers. He didn't perform miracles because he was Jesus from his Jesus powers. I don't know how to talk about it as if he's not in the Marvel universe, but that's how I think about it. He didn't use his Jesus powers. He prayed, and through the Holy Spirit, he healed. He prayed, and through the empowering of the Holy Spirit, he cast out demons. He prayed, and through the Holy Spirit, he was guided in wisdom. He prayed, and through the Holy Spirit, he was strengthened for obedience. He relied on the Holy Spirit the same way you rely on the Holy Spirit. He did not skate through life being Jesus, finding it within himself to do Jesus' things. He relies on the same God that you rely on. When he hurt, he ran to God for strength and for comfort. We see him do this. We see his humanity on full display in the Garden of Gethsemane where he falls on his face praying the night of his arrest and eventual crucifixion, God, please don't make me do this. Yet not my will, but your will be done. He did it God's way. He relied on God during his ministry when he would perform miracles. Not only is he praying to the Spirit to bring about this miracle, but then when he's done, he says, don't tell anybody I did this. It is not yet the proper time. He's sensitive to God's timing. He's reliant upon God for direction on the timing of when he should be crucified. Jesus relies on who we rely on. He prays like we pray. He needs the Spirit to move and to comfort and to cajole and to convict in the same way that we do. And so in all these different ways, we see on full display in the temptation of Christ, the humanity of Christ. And we see that he feels what we feel, that he serves who he serves, that he relies how we rely. And this makes him different than any other God in the pantheon of gods that we've invented or created or thought about on this earth. There's no other God that condescends to take on human form and offers his very presence to us, to understand us, to walk with us, to feel what we feel. And there's no other God that can offer this. And this is, my wife pointed this out to me. This is why she's my number one sermon counselor. But she pointed out this, and this is what the humanity of Jesus is driving to, that Jesus offers empathy over sympathy. Jesus offers empathy over sympathy. When we see somebody hurt, before we had a miscarriage, Jen and I, and somebody would miscarriage, I could offer them my sympathy. I'm so sorry that happened to you. That must be difficult. But when it happened to us, he gave us the gift of empathy. And the gift of empathy, there's a couple at the church who miscarried recently. And it had recently happened and I had not called them and I saw them in church during worship. And I was able to just walk up to them and give them both a big tear-filled hug. And none of us said a word. And we all knew exactly what I meant. That's what empathy does. You know when you're going through something and you want to talk to somebody about it. You want to talk to somebody who's gone through it too. When Jen lost her dad, she wasn't super interested in people comforting her that had not walked through that. There's just something to knowing that the person you're talking to has that shared experience. Jesus has shared our experience. When we pray, we pray towards empathy, not sympathy, not a condescending God who doesn't understand the human experience and the human existence. We pray to a God who literally whispers into the ear of the Father as we pray. It says Jesus, Romans 8 tells us Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father interceding on our behalf. Going, I know what they're going through. I've been there. I get that. I understand it. Father, here's what they need. Do you realize that when you pray, you pray to empathy and how powerful that is? in this way, praying to a God that empathizes, understanding that Jesus is human, that Jesus offers us his presence. We can run to him with anything, and he is there with us, and he is present with us. This is why he leaves his spirit and says, it's better than me. I will be with you through my spirit. This is why I think Luke chose to highlight this in his gospel. This is why I think Jesus declared his humanity over and over and over again, and why it's on full display in all the gospels, particularly Luke. Because he wants you to know that you serve a God who feels what you feel, who serves the way you serve, who has to rely on God the way that you rely on God, and ultimately, who offers you his empathy and his comfort, not just his sympathy. And I think that's a pretty powerful thing that draws us to him. Let's pray. Father, we love you. We need you. And we are grateful that you are here for us. Thank you for the way that you love us, for the way that you care about us. Thank you for a Savior who condescended and took on human form, who became one of us so that he might know us and experience us and love us well. Thank you that you empathize with our hurts and our hangups and our habits. We thank you that you are a God who's experienced loss, hurt, frustration, disillusionment, and disappointment. And God, I pray that you would be with us in those things and in those ways. In Jesus' name, amen. Normally, I step off the stage right now, and I let Aaron do his thing. But I was thinking, as we were singing the first first three songs and I was listening to them sing, I'm always moved when people who are gifted with their voice declare it and let their heavenly father who made them that way hear it. I'm always moved when God made musicians on purpose use it to turn people to praise to him because God made them this way on purpose so that they would do this. But it also occurs to me that your heavenly father gave you a voice too. If you're like me, it's average at best. But what better Father's Day gift could we give to our heavenly father than to let him hear the voice that he gave you and declare praise back to him? So as we sing this last song, let's let it go. Let's let God hear us. Let's offer a Father's Day present to him as we allow him to hear the voices of his children declaring his praises.
Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. If I hadn't gotten the chance to meet you yet, I would love to do that after the service. We are in the second part of our series called 27, where we're going to be this summer and next summer going through the 27 books of the New Testament and kind of giving you an overview of each book with the goal of kind of raising the biblical literacy of the church, making us more aware of and comfortable with the Bible, and kind of knowing what each of the books are about. And hopefully this series serves to drive you into God's Word. This week we arrive at the Gospel of Mark. Last week we looked at the Gospel of Matthew. And in the next two weeks we'll look at Luke and John. So we're kind of doing a sub-series here in June of the Gospels. As I was thinking about the Gospel of Mark and the message of Mark, I was reminded of a story that I heard a while back. I think I actually heard Andy Stanley talking about this. Andy Stanley is a pastor out of Atlanta. A lot of you know who he is. If you don't know who he is, you're probably not a very good Christian, but we're happy you're here. But he's a pastor out of Atlanta, really great. I really love a lot of the stuff that he does. And I think I heard him tell this story, but I also went online and it's been written about a couple different times in a couple different ways. But in January of 2013, then President Obama, he had just been reelected, and he invited Andy Stanley to come give a sermon the morning of his inauguration at St. John's Episcopal Church. And in this room was going to be, of course, Barack and Michelle and their family, but cabinet members, his staff members, very high-level people, easily. This is the most powerful room in the world. And Andy Stanley is invited to give a sermon to the most powerful person in the world. And it makes me wonder, when I first heard this story, my immediate thought is, oh my gosh, what are you talking about? What do you preach to that room? What do you preach to someone who's about to take the oath of office for the President of the United States. And I wonder what you would say if you had 20 minutes before the next president takes office, regardless of your political affiliations. I couldn't care less what they are. Just stick with me on this. Don't be the guy that's listening to this part of the sermon being like, I'd tell you what I'd tell him. No, you wouldn't. No, you wouldn't, all right? Shut up. What would you actually want to say to try to be maximum helpful and inspirational to the leader of the free world? It makes me so nervous to think about that and what I would say. But here's what Andy Stanley said, and it's stuck with me ever since. He asked this of President Obama. What do you do when you realize you're the most powerful person in the room? He's saying this to the man who is and will continue to be the most powerful person on the planet. And to a very powerful room, Andy Stanley says, what do you do when you realize you're the most powerful person in the room? He speaks right to where they are, and he answers it with this. You leverage your power for the benefit of the other people in the room. What do you do when you realize you're the most powerful person in this space? You leverage that power and that authority and that influence for the benefit of the people around you, not for yourself. That is a great message to the President of the United States. I don't know what the passage was. I looked hard to try to figure it, to try to find it, to try to find the actual sermon, because all that is, all that you can find if you Google it is a bunch of really conservative Christian online magazines who are upset that he called President Obama the pastor-in-chief during the sermon. Everybody got all worked up about that. So there's tons of articles that he had the audacity to say that, which who cares? And you can't find the actual sermon text. I wish I could find the sermon text because I'm certain, I'm certain that Andy preached this out of the Gospel of Mark. I'm certain that he did. Because I bring up that story. What do you do when you're the most powerful person in the room? You use your power and your influence for the benefit of the people around you. And he looked at President Obama and he said, you are in a very big room. My hope and prayer for you is that you will leverage everything that you have to make it better for the people around you. I wish every government official could listen to this sermon the day they took office. And I'm certain that the sermon came from the Gospel of Mark because that distilled down is the message of the Gospel of Mark, is to be a humble servant. Last week, I told you that Matthew was written to the Jewish community and depicts Jesus as a king. This week in Mark, Mark was written to the Romans to depict Jesus as a servant. Mark was written to a Roman audience and depicts Jesus as a servant. Mark was written by a guy named John Mark. You may recognize him if you're familiar with the book of Acts. After the first missionary journey, Paul parted ways with him and Barnabas, and then eventually John Mark got back in Paul's good graces and was with the disciples during this time. He was also very close with Peter, and his gospel is really a collection of the stories that Peter told John Mark. So this is almost the gospel according to Peter, but John Mark happened to be the one that wrote it down. It's a very urgent gospel. It's a very quick gospel. If you've never read a gospel before, I would tell you to start with Mark. It's very action-packed. It just goes from one thing to the next, and it's a very succinct gospel, and it was the first gospel written. And again, it was written to the Romans because the Romans were very prevalent in that day and age. And it was written to portray Jesus as a servant. And it's interesting that each of the Gospels is written to a different audience. Matthew is written to the Jews, Mark to the Romans, Luke to the Greeks, and John to the whole world. And in each case, Jesus is depicted in such a way that it's very clear that the author's intent is to kind of arrest your attention and make you look at this Jesus figure. So when you're a Jewish person and Jesus is depicted as the king, that's what you expect him to be. So you're listening, you're all in. When you're a Greek person and Jesus is depicted as a man, as a human, you're all wrapped up in humanity and humanity being the apex of creation. And so you're paying attention. When you're reading the Gospel of John and it presents this man as a god, you're leaning in. That's interesting to me. And so to a Roman person, getting a message about this all-powerful creator god who takes on human form and is the most powerful person, literally, who has ever lived, it would arrest your attention to note that he was a servant. Now, why is it so powerful to depict Jesus as a servant to the Roman audience? Well, to a Roman, the whole point of having power was not to have to serve anyone else. To the Roman mind, the whole point of accumulating wealth and influence and power and authority was to put yourself in a situation where you didn't have to serve anyone else. You had someone serving you. To grow were very comfortable with servanthood. They did not have the sensibilities that we had. If you were a rich person, you had some servants. How you treated them was up to you. And to be a servant was to be the lowest of the low. It was better to be poor and have your own hut to live in, but no one telling you what to do every day than it was to be the servant in the home of a rich person where you just lived at their beck and call. Or beck and call, I don't know. So to the Roman mind, they would never ever have expected Jesus to be depicted as a servant because that was the lowest of the low. And to them, as you accumulated power and authority, you accumulated servants. The whole reason for having more power was so that you had to do less things for yourself. And you know, even though in the United States, we certainly don't have a servant or slavery culture, but we do think of authority and power in a lot of the same ways. We do think that to grow in authority and to grow in power and influence means that you have more people around you to do more things for you. We start to develop this idea that certain tasks are beneath us. I don't have to do that anymore. Remember, I saw one of the guys on Shark Tank, one of the sharks in the NBC hit show, Shark Tank. If you haven't heard of it, I'm not going to explain it to you. But they're billionaires, and one of them makes a comment that he doesn't wear a watch. And they were like, why don't you wear a watch? He goes, I don't need to. Whenever I get somewhere, I'm on time. And you're like, oh, oh, you're a jerk. As people accrue power and authority and influence in certain circles, we just assume that there's going to start to be some tasks that are beneath them, and there's going to be rights and privileges that come with their influence and power. One of my favorite stories that came out of the Donald Trump presidency, don't worry, I'm not going to say anything. Just know that whenever, if you're a pastor and you say any president's name at all, the whole room goes. This is going to be fine. I've read biographies, different accounts. This is, this is, this is, this is actually, this is a verifiable fact that in the Oval Office, I believe underneath the Resolute Desk, the Resolute Desk is the name of the President's Desk. If you didn't know that, I will not belittle you for not knowing things about the Bible here, but come on, that's just basic U.S. stuff. You got to know what the Resolute Desk is. There's a button under the Resolute Desk, and President Trump would delight in having guests into the Oval Office, and he'd say, hey, watch this, and he would press the button, and a few minutes later, a waiter would come in with ice-cold Diet Cokes, and he would love that this button would usher in Diet Cokes, right? And I think that's delightful. And I've heard, I've read somewhere, I don't know if this is true, I just want to believe it to be true, that Joe Biden kept that, President Biden kept that button in place, and for him, they bring in ice cream sundaes. Isn't that fun? I love it. Grandpa Joe bringing in ice cream sundaes for the kids. This is great. Now, what we would expect and what the Romans would expect is for Jesus to be the one hitting the button. And what Mark says is, no, he's the one bringing the Cokes. He's the one in the kitchen waiting for the call, cracking it open and pouring it over ice and bringing as many as is needed, and he's doing it with a smile on his face. That's who Jesus was, and that's how he's depicted. And to a Roman mind that would expect someone in authority to just continue to be in authority the way that everyone around them is in authority. It's pretty groundbreaking to think that Jesus is the one bringing the cokes, not hitting the button. And to the American mind, I think it does the same thing. Because if we're being honest, we don't think of people in authority as typically as the people bringing the Coke. We think of them as the ones that are hitting the button. And so I think if I had to summarize the book of Mark, if there was a summary verse, what is Mark about? What does Mark want us to know? What is he trying to communicate, not just to the Roman audience, but to us and to all people for all time? In Mark's words, what's he trying to communicate? Well, we actually have that in Mark chapter 10, and it's Jesus's words. On the screen, we're going to start in verse 43, but I'm going to start reading from verse 42. Verse 42 says, That is the summary verse, the summary passage of Mark. That whoever wants to be greatest among you must be least. Whoever wants to be first must be last. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve. That's the message of Mark. And I love how Jesus begins this discourse. Do not be like the Gentiles who lord their authority over one another. Have you ever had an experience with someone who got a scintilla of authority and it just went straight to their head and they were the most annoying humans on the planet? I have. His name was Philip, and I'm going to tell you his story. Normally, I do not use names to disparage people. I just say a guy that I know, but this time, Philip has it coming. This is years ago, 24, 25, I'm working for my dad, and my dad's an accountant. In the 70s, he got into this weird niche of accounting where he audits housing authorities. He travels around the country, and that's what he does. And so I'm working for my my dad and I'm on a trip, I think Dallas-Fort Worth, I'm working with Phillip. Phillip is my age. This is his first time on a business trip being the auditor in charge. It's on the work papers. It says auditor in charge, Phillip. I won't say his last name. That's not fair. Then you'll Google him or something. But he's listed as the auditor in charge. It's a big deal. And it's just me and him traveling. He's the boss. And I was very clear. I knew that I had that job because of who my dad was. He had a CPA. As Philip did. He passed the test. I had theology classes. I had nothing. Dude, you're the boss. Whatever you need me to do, I'll do. And so there's this one test that I would run in the test and control series, and I had to schedule out an account. This particular account was about $12 million. And I had to just basically retrace it through the year and make it zero out. And I don't even know what that means now. I don't know how to explain to you. I could get Greg as an accountant, he could come up here and he could kind of translate for you guys. I don't know what that means. I just know that I needed to zero it out. I needed to make sure that everything they were inputting into it had a reliable source and that it all matched up and that they weren't cooking the books, which I'm the guy to make sure no one's getting away with anything financially. I sure do know. Gosh. So anyways, I've got to schedule this thing out. And I'm scheduling it out, and I get the difference down to less than $100. And I'm going back through. It's one of those, I've got to stack. I've got this book, that thing that was printed out on the dot matrix with the green and white paper, and I'm flipping through, and I'm highlighting, and I'm looking, and I got it down to $100, about $100. And once you got the difference down to a small enough amount, you could just put on the cover page to make it all zero out, you could just put that amount there and you could write next to it, immaterial difference, which is accounting speak for, we didn't figure this out, but we're pretty sure it's fine. That's what that means. Like it's,, this doesn't matter. It's a, it's a hundred dollars and a 12 million dollar account. No fraud here, all right? So, I've been working on this thing for six or seven hours. I get it down to a hundred bucks. I can't get it down any lower than that, and I go to Phillip. I say, hey, Phillip, I've got this thing down to about a hundred bucks. Can I just, you cool if I write this off as an immaterial difference? And Philip goes, I just really want to do this one right, Nate. So I need you to go find me that $100. And I'm like, okay. All right. So I go back to the office. I'm like, I got to find this. I got to find the new sheriff in town. It's $100. Okay, here we go. So I'm flipping back to the thing again. I'm looking for it again. I find some stuff. I'm looking and I've got it down. I've got it down to four cents. Got it down to four cents. I know. And I'm just, I've got to find this four cents. I don't even care about Philip anymore. I've got to find this four cents, right? We go to dinner. We're done. I come back the next morning. I spend all morning looking, thumbing through this thing for the four cents. I had it memorized, right? I can't find it. I have to admit defeat. And I'm like, gosh, I don't want to go into Philip's office, but I got to go into Philip's office. I'm like, hey dude, I got it down to four cents. I'm going to write that off as immaterial difference if that's all right. And Philip looks me in the eye and he says, I'm going to need you to find me that four cents. I have never been closer to jumping across a desk and strangling someone out than I was in that moment. I was livid. So I go back to the office and I'm like, I can't find the four cents. Let me see what I can do here. So I grabbed the previous year's work papers. So because every job you go on, you bring the work papers from the previous year in case you need to reference something, see what we did last year, or in this case, discover that your boss is a jerk. So I found the folder. I opened it up. I go to the test that I'm working on. And guess who did that test last year? Philip did. And do you know what he wrote off as an immaterial difference? $208. I'll never forget that number. It was $208 to my four cents, and I was so mad. And I went back to him, and I told him, you know, last year you wrote off $208 as an immaterial difference. I think four cents in a $12 million account seems pretty reasonable. And he said, I need you to find me the four cents. So I went back to the office, and I wrote it off as immaterial difference, and I never looked back. I tried to play nice to you, Phillip, but guess what? My dad's the boss, and I know that he's going to take my side on this, so I'm not even that worried about it. I didn't want to do this to you, but I had to. Don't be like Philip. Gentiles, when they get an ounce of authority lorded over you, and they want to make sure that they're afforded the respect and the rights and privileges that come with leadership, you're going to address me as this, as doctor or pastor or whatever, Mr. or Mrs., if they're C-suite. You're going to address me as this. You're going to talk to me like this. You're going to defer to me. And sometimes when people get in power, they're nice until you start acting like you're equals. Then they got to make sure that you know how things balance out. That's what Gentiles do. They lord their authority over people. And worse than being annoying, when Christians do this, we push people away from God. If you're a leader in any capacity, small to large, and you allow that authority and that position of power and that influence to go to your head, and part of what you try to do with that influence is maintain your influence, and you lord it over people, you're actually pushing people away from Jesus. You're actually harming, you're not just harming yourself and harming your relationship with that person, you are harming the very kingdom of Jesus if you hold your leadership and authority in ways that the Gentiles do. If you hold it for yourself rather than for others. And what's actually interesting among many things that Andy Stanley said to Barack Obama that day is he came back at the end and he said, what do you do when you realize you're the most powerful person in the room? Will you leverage that for the benefit of the people around you? And then he says, and actually, to do anything less than this is to think that you're greater than Christ himself. To do anything less than serve is to act as though you're greater than Christ. Because the greatest one of all time came to serve and to be last. So when we don't do that, we are declaring to ourselves in our tiny little universes that we are better than Jesus. And in church, and this is the converse of this, when we do serve, when we do carry leadership, when we do carry authority like Jesus did, when we do that, we can actually pull people into Jesus by being Christ-like. We talk a lot in church about being Christ-like, about being more like Jesus. When the word sanctification comes up, sanctification is this time period and process from the point in which we become saved. Our salvation process starts to when it is sealed and done when we go to heaven. That intermittent time when we are in God's hand but we are not yet perfected in heaven is sanctification. And I always describe sanctification as becoming the process through which we become more like Christ in character. That's what sanctification is. So in the Christian journey, in the Christian life, we are all of us who would call ourselves Christians, seeking to be more like Christ. And so what Mark says is, if you want to be more like Jesus, serve others more. If you want to be more like Jesus, then anytime you have any influence anywhere at all, use it for the benefit of the people around you rather than yourself. And when you do that, it will draw people into Christ. That's the message of Mark. That when we don't carry our authority and our influence like Jesus does, we push people away. And when we do carry it like Jesus did, we draw people into him with Christ-like character. Now, I know that there are some of you who may be thinking to yourself, like, dude, I'm not in charge of anything, okay? I don't lead anybody. I don't have circles of influence. I don't do that. I'm not in charge of anyone anywhere. I get that. We move into seasons where we have greater and less influence. But I would submit to you that we all do at some point in our life and at some point in our week. Maybe you're a stay-at-home mom. You're in charge of those kids. Might not feel that way all the time. Might feel like they're in charge of you, but you're in charge of those kids. How are you going to exert your authority over them? Are we going to be the kind of parent that makes sure that our kids know who the boss is at every moment of every day? Are we going to be the kind of parent that sits lazily on the couch and the purpose of our kids is to go get us something from the fridge and bring it to us rather than engaging with them? How are we going to use the influence and the authority that we have in our homes? If we go to school and we volunteer, we're in charge of those kids for at least for a small amount of time. If you're over there, you're in charge for a small amount of time. If you're working at Summer Extreme this week, you're in charge for a small amount of time. We all move into places where we are the one who is in authority, where we are the one who has the most influence, where our voice is the heaviest one in the room. And when we are, how are we going to treat it? How are we going to usher a little bit of Jesus into their day, into that moment? Even when we go sit down at a restaurant, we are in authority over our server. What can we do in that meal to serve them, to show them a little bit of Jesus, to make their day a little bit better, to leave a good imprint on them for that day? How can we carry the authority that we have, even in that small situation, to bring them closer to Jesus and not push them further away? We can do this in the drive-through, in a position of authority. We are in authority. The people helping us are the people who are working for us. We can show them a little bit of Jesus just in that moment to draw them closer into our Savior. And if you don't think I'm right, go through a drive-through with my wife, Jen. Because when we go through a drive-through together, this is, I'm not making this up. When we go through a drive-ru together, if we get the food and the drinks and it's done, like we've reached the end of this exchange, and I've not been adequately kind to the people that we've been talking to, she will lean across me and say very loudly, thank you so much, you're doing great, have a nice day. And then look at me. Now, I didn't know there was such a thing as vindictive kindness, but she has figured it out. And she'll sprinkle a little Jesus on both of us on the way. A little bit on them, make their day better. A little bit on me, make my day worse, but I need to get better. I think we need to realize when we have opportunities to act in unexpected ways, to show people the kindness that exudes from our Savior, be those conduits of grace that we talk about being around here. But to more of you, not maybe more of you, but to a big portion of you, you do have some authority. You do have people who work for you. Maybe you're a team lead. Maybe you just got a new job and there's new people that are listening to you now and you've got to figure this out. Maybe you've got two employees. Maybe you've got 200 or 2,000. I know that we do have a lot of leaders in this church. And to those of you who do have people working for you, those of you that do have the opportunity to influence. Now here's what I would say about you, the ones that I know who do carry influence here. I know that you know this already. And I know that it means a lot to you to try to be the type of leader that Jesus was. And I know that serving your staff and serving the people around you matters a lot. But let this morning be an encouragement and a reminder for you to dive back into that. If you're here this morning and you do lead somewhere, you're on a board, you run a classroom, you have employees. You run a business. You oversee whatever. And you have been using that authority to serve yourself and to help yourself climb? I get it. That's how the world handles authority. But in your efforts to do that, I just want you to know as a Christian, you're actually pushing people away from you and from your Savior. But Jesus shows us that there is a way to lead and to have influence and authority that will be so radical that it would draw people into him. And for those of you who do lead, I wonder what could be better one day at your retirement party or after you're gone and there's a group of your employees and coworkers sitting around and they're talking about what it was like to work for you, what it was like to be led for you. What if the ones who believe in Jesus said about you, because that person was in my life, I'm closer to Jesus than I would have ever been? What if what they said about you after you retired, and no one's around, and they're not saying this to blow smoke up your dress, they're saying this because they mean it, because God put that person in my life, I'm closer to him than I think I ever would be because I got to watch them serve God faithfully for years. What a privilege it was to work under them because of what it showed me about who their Jesus was. What if the people who don't know Jesus but work for you would say about you, after seeing you at your best and your worst, after watching how you leverage your influence and authority, what if they were to say about you, you know what, I don't share the faith that they do, but they're one of the ones that I believe when they say it. I don't know that I believe like they do, but I know that they believed. I know that they love their Jesus. They were the real deal. We all, in different times and different ways, move into and out of positions of influence. The message of Mark is that when you find yourself there, remember, you can leverage your authority to get people to serve you and do what you want. But that's not what Jesus did. And that's not what he told you to do. And I am convinced that the best thing possible that anybody could say about you after working with you or for you or being under your leadership for any amount of time is, I am closer to Jesus because God put that person in my life. And we get them there by serving them. That's why Jesus says, whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me. So whether we lead in small ways at the drive-through or in big ways, leading in life. We should carry that leadership and that influence and that authority like Jesus did and try to use it to serve others. Now a couple practical things on how we do that and I'll wrap up. Two things. How can we begin to be people who serve like Jesus served? Well I think one of the things we can do is that we can begin to equate serving with being Christ-like, not being belittled. We can begin to equate serving with being like Christ, not being belittled. This week, I reached out to an old friend of mine who is a pastor about an hour and a half away from here. And he and I worked at summer camp together years ago and have loosely kept in touch. And I emailed him and I just said, hey, man, I'm so sorry that it's taken me six years of living this close to you to try to get together, but I'd love to get together and just talk as pastors and buy you lunch sometime. Let me know if that's going to be possible. And he emailed me back, and he said, is Ruth's Chris or nothing for me, which is pretty typical of this guy. It's funny. And then he says, I'll have to get back with you on when. If you don't hear from me, feel free to email me again. And I thought, nope. If you don't email me, we will never speak in our whole lives. Because what did he do? He belittled me. Made me a secretary. I'm not your secretary. But as I was preparing the sermon, and I wrote that point, well, looks like I'll be emailing John. Because it's an opportunity to be Christ-like, not to be belittled. When we get asked to do something that we feel is beneath us, jump at it. Do it. It's an opportunity to be Christ-like, not be belittled. The second thing we can do is we can pray this prayer of confession and repentance. And as we consider the message of the gospel of Mark, and we consider this idea that to be first we must be last, to be great we must be least. I would encourage us all to pray this prayer together as I pray here in a second, but the prayer is simply this. Father, show me where I'm leveraging my power to be served rather than to serve. Whatever power and influence you've given me, however loud my voice is in a particular room, would you please show me where I'm using that influence and that authority for myself and not for the people that are around me? And in praying that prayer, hopefully he will open our eyes to greater opportunities of service and servanthood so that we can be like Christ and serve people towards the kingdom of God. Let's pray. Father, we just thank you for who you are and for how you love us. We know that your son could have showed up and just lorded it over us, and he would have had every right to do it, to just ascend to the throne, to be the most important and most powerful person in the room. He could have done that, but he came meek and mild, and he came as a servant. God, as you move us into positions of authority and influence, would you remind us of the way that your son came and that your son led and that your son served so that we might do the same? Would you, Father, in your goodness, keep us humble, make us eager to serve, give us a heart that sees the needs of others and meets them where they are, and deflate our egos where they're too big and where they're making it hard for us to serve like we need to. Thank you for your son. Thank you for the cross. Thank you for how you've loved us. In Jesus' name, amen.
