We always talk about the stories of Moses and Abraham and David and Paul. We know all about the boys, but what about the girls? Why don't we talk more about the people in the Bible who are like me? It turns out the girls of the Bible are pretty awesome. And when we take the time to learn their stories, we will be amazed at what God can do with someone who is consistently, humbly, and lovingly faithful. This morning we finish up our series called Faithful where we've been looking at stories of faithful women in the Bible and we are wrapping up with a who, she was just a bad joker, man. Like, I really, really liked getting into the story of her this week. She's a woman named Deborah, and Deborah was a judge and a prophetess. I think she is this underrated hero of the Bible. I think that her name kind of echoes down. She is one of these great women that did incredible things and that it's very much worth taking a weekend and focusing on her because her story, even though we really only see it in Judges 4 and 5, we see the story in Judges 4 and then her song in 5 that basically retells the story in poem form. But that's where we find her. So if you have a Bible and you want to turn there, you can go ahead and turn to Judges 4. If you don't have a Bible with you, there's one in the seat back in front of you. But that's where we're going to be today. And whenever I kind of recount a story for you guys, I like for you all to be interacting with Scripture too so you know that I'm not making this stuff up. There's something in particular that I'm excited to share with you that I'm going to just read because it's so outlandish that I want you to know that I'm not making it up. But Deborah, Deborah, she was a cool lady, man. She was a judge. And just so we're clear on this, before we kind of jump into the story, I want us to understand what a judge was in Israel, because I think that's something that we hear in church. Maybe you've even heard it referred to as the time of the judges or the period of the judges. And that's something that I think church people kind of nod along with sometimes without really knowing what that means. And so the period of the judges in Israel is the period of time between when Joshua conquered the nation of Israel and all the 12 tribes set up camp. And now they're claiming the nation of Israel as their own. And then years later, they got their first king in King Saul. And so the period between that is known as the time of the judges. And during the time of the judges, when the government was actually set up as God intended it to be set up in Israel, God was the king. He was their eternal heavenly king sitting on the throne. And eventually, the people of Israel were like middle school girls, and they wanted to have what everybody else around them had. And so they stomped their foot until their face turned blue, and they demanded a king. And And they gave him, and he gave him a king and Saul. And he said, and these bad things are going to happen when I do this. And they did. But that time before that is the period of the judges. And a judge was somebody who was a military ruler who also presided over legal matters. So what was going on in the period of the judges is the Israelites were God's chosen people. He gave them some rules that he wanted to follow, the Ten Commandments, and he wanted them to honor him. And at times they would throw off that rule. They would dishonor God. They would forget about him for a generation. And when that happened, God would allow a foreign oppressor to come in and subjugate them until they cried uncle and said, God, we're sorry. We realize we've ignored you. Please save us. We're going to follow you again. And God would say, okay. And he would appoint a judge to rise up from among them and be a military leader that would overthrow the oppressing surrounding nation. Okay. But they would also settle disputes, settle legal matters. You owe them money, they owe you money, or however it would go. So that was the role of the judge in the Old Testament. And Deborah was a judge and a prophetess. Deborah was awesome. And listen, this is just an aside, okay? You can't look at the story of Deborah in the Old Testament and see that God entrusted her to be a judge and a prophetess and lead his people and think that women are incapable of leading the local church, okay? We can't look at the story of Deborah and say, God here trusted a woman to lead all of his people, but now in 2021, we can't trust a woman to be an elder. It's just an aside. But we look at Deborah, and Deborah has a tree. She's got a tree named after her. It's the palm of Deborah, and she sits under it, and she just makes rulings all day. She's like ancient Israel's Judge Judy, okay? That's who she is. Whenever they have a dispute, they're like, well, let's go talk to Deborah about it. Like, I lent you my ox. You gave it back to me. It has a limp. It doesn't plow as quickly anymore. You owe me an ox. The heck I do. I'm not buying you an ox. All right, we're going to talk to Deb. All right, that's what they would do. So they would go and they would talk to Deborah under the tree that was named after her. So she had been doing this for a while. And it's under this tree that she summons a general named Barak. And that's kind of where we pick up the story. I want to read to you what's going on in Judges chapter 4, because we get from these two verses, I think the biggest mom energy in the Old Testament. We don't see mom energy quite like this until we get to John chapter 4 when Mary tells Jesus to turn the water into wine. When she's like, do the thing that you do when you do the miracle stuff. Like, go ahead. When Mary starts ordering around the Savior of the world, the Messiah incarnate, that's the next time we see energy on the level of what Deborah does here in this passage. Listen to what she does in Judges chapter 4, picking up in verse 6. So here's what's going on. Deborah is a judge, and judges are appointed when there's a foreign oppressor. In this case, the foreign oppressors are the Canaanites. And the general of the Canaanite army is a guy named Sisera. And we're told over and over again in the chapter that Sisera had 900 chariots of iron. I have no idea or perspective about how big of a deal that was. I don't know what that means. I just know that whoever wrote this chapter of Judges thinks it was a big enough deal to mention a bunch of times. So the Israelites are pretty scared of these 900 chariots of iron. And Deborah somehow knows that God has told Barak, the general of the Israelite armies, to gather 10,000 men from the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun and go out and face Sisera and his chariots. She knows this. I don't know how she knows this. She was clearly close with God. I don't know if God gave her a message and said, hey, you know, I told Barak to go do this. He's dragging his feet. If you could kind of get after him for me, that would be great. I don't know if some messengers told her. I don't know how she knew, but she knew. And she knew that this is what Barak was supposed to do. So she summons him. And let's not miss that. She's a lady in the hill country in northern Israel. And she sent word, presumably to Jerusalem, for the general of the armies to come see her. Now listen. In the ancient world, there's no badder dude than the general. Especially in a nation without a king. He's the man. You do not tell the general what to do. But when Deborah summoned Barak, he was like, well, I guess we got to go. He went. Like, that's some big-time mom energy. She summons the general. We got it. We got it. I don't have a choice. Deborah called me to the tree of her name. I've got to go. And so he goes, and when he gets there, she moms him. And she says, didn't God tell you to get 10,000 troops and go fight Sisera? What are you doing, man? Like, didn't God tell you to do this? Why aren't you doing, why aren't you being obedient to God? He gave you clear instruction. You're not doing it. What gives? And I think that it's easy to read the Bible and see details like that and then just keep on reading without pausing to think about what's going on in this conversation. Do you realize the amount of faith that it takes from Barak to go do this? He's got to go to these tribes. He's got to look mamas and daddies in the eye, and he's got to say, I need your son. He's got to say, I need your husband. We've got to go fight Sisera, the dude with 900 chariots. Yeah, we're going to go fight him. You know that we're not strong enough to beat him, right? Yeah, I know, but God said that he was with us, so we're going to go and we're going to kill him. And it's the type of fighting that we both put sharp objects in our hands and we swing at each other until one of us dies. That's really hard fighting. But I need your son. Let's go. And then he's got to go out there and he's got to risk his own life as he leads these men into battle. So when he gets this direction from God, take these 10,000 people and go fight Sisera, it's pretty natural to be like, you sure? Maybe we should just wait. And so Deborah calls him. He's like, dude, what are you doing? God told you to go fight, go fight. And I like Barak's response and I like Deborah's response to him even better. We pick it back up in verse 8. Barak said to her, if you go with me, I'll go. But if you will not go with me, I will not go. And she said, I will surely go with you. Nevertheless, the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman. Again, let's look at that. She calls him up to her palm tree and says, didn't God tell you to amass an army and go fight Sisera? And his response is, yeah. Easy for you to say, Deb. You're up here at your tree. You're deciding who owes who an ox, all right? You want me to go recruit young men and go watch them march to their death, potentially die while I do it. Easy for you to say, pal. So then he says, I'll tell you what, he did say that. And listen, if you come with me, I'll go. If you put your money where your mouth is, big talker, we'll go do this thing together. And I don't know this for sure, okay? There's not enough in the text to tell us positively. It's just my opinion. If I get to heaven and I find out I'm wrong about this and many other things, I'm comfortable with this error. But I think that Barak responds this way because he thinks it's going to shut her up. Because he thinks that's going to stop the conversation. Yeah, he told me to. You want to come too? You want to put your money where your mouth is, big dog, then we can go together. And I think that he thinks she's going to be like, well, no, I mean, this is for armies. I got, you know, I got, I got all these people. I got to settle these disputes here. I can't go. And instead, Deborah doubles down, right? Deborah's like, all right, where can I ride? Is that horse good? Is he taken? Let's go. I will surely go with you, she says. She didn't care. She doesn't miss a beat. All right, I'll go watch the slaughter. Let's roll. And you got to know the Barak's like, oh, shoot. Okay, well, I guess we're doing this thing. So they go, and I love that she says that you're not going to get the glory for this either, just so you know. Like, this is kind of a woman's story, so you're an auxiliary character in this Barak. And sure enough, they go, and they have the battle, and God is with the armies of Israel, and he delivers victory into their hands. They rout the army of the Canaanites, and Sisera is left fleeing. The army is in disarray, and Barak is hot on his trail. He wants to kill this guy, or capture him. He wants to get the glory. And while Sisera is running away, and I'm just telling you this part of the story just for gratuity, because I think it's great. I'm not going to make a spiritual point from this point on. I'm telling you this part of the story because it's awesome. While he's running away, there's a woman named Jael, and she's married to a guy who's friendly with his king. And somehow it seems like she knows that the army's been routed, everyone's trying to get away. So Jael goes and she sees Sisera fleeing. And she's like, Sisera, come stay in our tent. I'll hide you in here until, you know, the heat is off a little bit. And he's like, okay, thank you. And he comes into the tent and he lays down and it says that she covers him with a rug and that he was exceedingly tired. He's exhausted from battle and from fleeing, and he's just tired out of his mind, right? And so he says, will you get me some warm water? I'm thirsty. And she goes, and instead of water, she gets him warm milk because she wanted him to be good and tired. And he tells her, when Barack comes by with the armies, you tell him that I went that way. And she's like, got it. You sleeping good? And so when he goes to sleep and he's good in the sleep, this is what happens. And I'm reading you this from the Bible verbatim because it's not going to be up there. So you're just going to have to listen because I want you to know that I'm not making this up and how great it is. Verse 21, but JL, the wife of Heber took a tent peg and took a hammer in her hand. Then she went softly to him. Apparently, you don't survive tent peg impalement. That's not a thing. And she didn't just get it in there. She drove the peg into the ground. She was mad for some reason. And she gets the glory. And here we are, thousands of years later, telling the story of JL. I shared that story because I've always just, I love that little detail. I love that little nuance in the Bible. I love knowing the story of Jael. And listen, these kinds of things are tucked away in all sorts of places, particularly in the Old Testament. And sometimes I want to do little more than on a Sunday, make the Bible come alive for you a little bit so that you get curious about it and you want to start finding this stuff for yourself. Go home and Google Dinah and her brothers, D-I-N-A-H and her brothers and see if you don't get a laugh out of that story. There's so many good ones in the Old Testament. Sometimes I just want to make it come alive for you a little bit so that you go home with some curiosity and read it on your own because there's really some great stuff in there. But the reason we're covering this story this morning is to talk about Deborah and what we learned from her. Because I think there's a lot of lessons that we can pull out from Deborah, but the one that I see the most, the one that I'm floored with and impressed with the most, is this. When you are certain of the Lord's direction, you can walk with confidence. When you are certain of the Lord's direction, of the clarity that he is giving you, then you can walk with absolute confidence. Deborah somehow, and I don't know how, Deborah knew with clarity that God had given that instruction to Barak. She knew it. And so she had the confidence to summon him and say, didn't God tell you to do the thing? And then when he said, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and come with me, she didn't miss a beat. She didn't hesitate. She wasn't a warrior. She didn't know how to do this. She was a judge. She was a prophetess. She didn't go out on the battlefield, but she didn't hesitate to go with Barak because she was so certain of God's direction that she was able to walk with confidence and follow that direction. She was able to walk in obedience because she was so sure of God's direction and of his providence and sovereignty to see her through that direction. And so in our lives, when we're clear about what God wants us to do, about the step of obedience that we are supposed to take, we can walk with confidence. And I think about it this way. First of all, I believe that every one of us here has the next step of obedience that God is placing in front of us. I think that's what discipleship and spiritual growth is, is simply taking the next step of obedience. Sometimes it's a relatively small one. I want you to develop a habit of a devotional life. I want you to develop a habit of getting up every day and spending time in God's word and time in prayer. Maybe that's yours. Maybe it's a bigger one. Maybe it's beginning to tithe or give or be generous. Maybe it's to have this conversation. Maybe it's to reconcile this relationship. Maybe it's to finally shed some light on some of the dark places in your life, to bring those out into the light and share those with some trusted friends and say, I need help with these. Maybe it's time to actually get some help for some other thing. Maybe it's time to lean on other people. Maybe it's time to offer forgiveness. Maybe it's time to ask for forgiveness. Whatever it is, maybe it's time to watch your mouth and stop looking at stuff you don't need to look at. Whatever it is, I believe that God has for each of us the next step of obedience that he wants us to take. And then when we take that one, he's got another one waiting on us and it's going to be lather, rinse, repeat for the rest of our lives. So we better get used to it. And sometimes I feel like that when God asks us to take a step of obedience, that there's like a fence between us and where he wants us to be. That we're in this yard, we're in this area and there's a fence and it's a walled fence. We can't see on the other side of it. And he says, hey, I want you to jump it. And part of our hesitation is, I want to, but I don't know what's over there. I don't know if I'm going to be met with forgiveness. I don't know if I, I feel like you want me to take this job, but if I do, I don't know what's going to be in that city. I don't know what's going to be at that move. I don't know what kind of co-workers I'm going to be with. I want you to go full in on this relationship, but I don't know what's going to be in that city. I don't know what's going to be at that move. I don't know what kind of coworkers I'm going to be with. I want you to go full in on this relationship, but I don't know what's going to happen when I get there. That's the thing with obedience. There's a fence between us and the step, and we don't always get to see how it's going to go. There's a pretty big fence here for Deborah. I want you to amass an army and go defeat another army that you have no business defeating. She doesn't know how that's going to go when the swords get unsheathed. But when we know with certainty God's direction, we can jump that fence with confidence every time. Now this actually brings us to the question I want to spend time answering today. This is a question that I think every Christian ever has wondered. This is a question that as a pastor, I get asked this with a great deal of frequency. This is a question that I think Christians wonder no matter how long they've been walking with the Lord, no matter how fresh their faith is, no matter the depth of their faith, no matter the breadth of experience of their faith. I think that this is something that all Christians wonder about. And so I wanted to take the rest of our time today and do my best to answer this question, which is, okay, listen, Nate, I understand. When I have certainty of God's direction, I can go to the next thing. When I'm certain about it, I know that I can go with confidence, but how do I know when I've clearly heard from God? How do I know? How do I know with the level of confidence that Deborah had to go risk people's lives that I can jump that fence? How do I know that I know that I've actually heard from God? I think that's a really tough question to answer. And so I wanted to offer you a couple suggestions this morning as to how we can be clear that we've heard from God, that we have clarity on his direction. The first thing I would mention is actually not in your notes. It's probably the most important one. When I was making the notes up, I should have included this one. I thought it was kind of a given, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was important to mention here. God's direction will never be in opposition to his word. Okay, God's direction in prayer and in counsel is always going to be in harmony with scripture. You're never going to pray away a teaching in scripture. You're never going to pray enough to make theft okay, right? Like the Super Bowl is coming up. You're having some kids over. They're in the youth group or they're in the kids ministry. And you're having some families over from the church and you want it to go really well. And your TV is kind of cruddy. So you go to Best Buy and you buy a big, nice one. And you know that you're going to return it on Tuesday, but you were doing this for Jesus. Like I'm doing this for the church. It's for the children, right? We prayed about it. This is what God wants me to do. No, that's theft, man. You're stealing a portion of the use of that object and you're returning it at Best Buy and now they have to give you your full money back and they have to sell it as an open box item and you've stolen from them. And they're a big, huge corporation and they deserve for us to steal from them. Maybe, all right, but that's not what we're talking about. The Bible doesn't make space for those exceptions. That's theft. You're not going to pray that away. You're not going to pray away loving your neighbor as yourself. There's no situation where you can say, I really feel like I should be able to treat this person like a jerk because they're a jerk for me. So this is what I'm going to do. You can't pray that away. You can't pray yourself into an affair. You can't pray yourself into something that runs contrary to Scripture. So the first thing about hearing God's voice is when you think you've heard it, it will never run contrary to this. If it does, you need to fix your ears. Okay, the other reasons. And this, I think, is the biggest one. It's the toughest one to swallow, but it's the most important one. How do I know when I've clearly heard from God? You learn his voice over time. You learn his voice over time. Jesus says that my sheep know me and they know my voice. We recognize when the Father calls to us. We recognize when Jesus is speaking to us. And what this means is the more times I wake up in the morning and I spend time in God's word and spend time in prayer, and I've talked to you guys before about listening prayer, about prayer not just being where we spout off things to God and then we go, okay, amen, and we walk away, but where we try to sit quietly and listen with our soul. And if that sounds mysterious and weird and wispy, it is. I can't explain it to you better than that. You just need to start doing it and trying. But we listen to God. We listen to him speak to us in scripture. We listen to the spiritual leaders in our life. The people that we trust and we hear from them and we start to learn more and more what the voice of God sounds like and when the voice of God is showing up, we start to learn things. Sometimes I'm in a conversation and I'll just hear this little whisper. Lean into this. Put down your phone and listen. Be present here. And it's like, oh, oh, this is a God conversation. God's using this person to speak to me right now. I need to hear this. The more we listen for God, the better we get at hearing him. I always think of it like when I was a kid, my dad had a whistle, just a classic dad whistle. Just, hey, get over here. And I will recognize, I could be in a park and 25 dads could whistle in unison. And I would know which one was my dad's and where he was. Like, I remember being in the church parking lot. I hear the whistle. I go to the car. Like, I just know I'm out playing in the neighborhood. I hear the whistle. I know that's my dad's whistle. Oh, I heard that whistle. That was your dad's whistle. Sorry, sucker. I'm still playing. But when I heard my dad's whistle, I knew you'd go. I just heard it so many times that it just resonates with me, right? That's how the voice of God works. So often, people will come to me frustrated because they're praying about a thing and they don't feel like they have any clear direction. Or it seems like God speaks to other people, but God doesn't speak to me. And it's a hard question to ask, but it's the best one to ask, which is, well, how long have you been trying to listen? How many years have you invested in trying to learn his voice? This is the thing that over time and through dedication, we begin to learn the voice of God. We begin to learn the voice of God so much that we get stories like Elisha. I've mentioned this before, but Elisha in the Old Testament, the book of 1 and 2 Kings, he's somewhere off on a mountainside and someone comes to him and they said, hey, the son of so-and-so just died. They're calling for you. And his response is to look at God and go, this is how you're letting me find out about this? You didn't want to tell me yourself? Like, when has something happened and you've seen it on your Facebook feed and you've gone like, God, you didn't want to mention this to me? Like, who of us are that close that we hear his voice that regularly that he speaks to us with such clarity that we would turn to him and we would say, this terrible thing has happened to someone in my life and you didn't tell me. Why didn't you tell me? I would never do that because I would just assume that I missed it if you tried to tell me. The only way we get that close to God and know his voice that well is by a consistent pursuit of him. So if we're frustrated that we're not hearing the voice of God, we don't have clarity about something, I would ask you, how long have you been trying to listen? The next thing I would say is this. How do we know that we've heard clarity from God? The voices in your life will speak in stereo. The voices that God has placed in your life will speak in stereo. It's awkward for me to say this, but if you go to grace, he's given you a pastor. He's given you other things to compensate for his lack of wisdom in your life, but he's also given you a pastor. He's given you parents, kids. He's given you parents. And if you have parents who love you and love God, they have been placed, you are lucky, and they have been placed in your life for you to listen to. When they speak, we need to hear God speaking to us. And that doesn't go away when we move away. They're still our counsel. They're still placed in our life to shepherd us. Our small group leaders, our small group people, our friends, the people that we look up to, God has placed people in our life who love us and love Jesus, and they are there to be his voice when we need it. And I have always found that these voices speak in stereo. They speak together. They speak in one accord. We go around and we ask people, what do you think about this? I think God wants me to take this step. What do you think about it? What do you think about it? What do you think about it? They're going to speak together in unison. It's going to harmonize with scripture. And when all these trusted voices in our life agree that this is what we're hearing and this is what we need to do, that's a sure sign that that's a step that we can take. I think the mistake that some of us make sometimes is we have a thing that we want to do and we're praying to God and asking permission for it. I think this is what God wants me to do. And we're going around and we're asking all of our friends and all of our trusted friends say, no, that's a bad idea. Gosh, I'm not sure I would do that right now. I don't know. They seem a little bit crazy. You might not want to get into that. And then you find the one person that's like, do it, dog. Go. That's what God wants. And you're like, see, they told me. And we ignore everyone else. And we follow the one piece of advice that we wanted to hear. God's voice often speaks to us in stereo through a multiplicity of counsel. Proverbs tells us that where there is much counsel, there is much wisdom. So if we want clarity in hearing the voice of God, ask people who we know, listen. And this is important too. Maybe you have somebody that you know who prays constantly. I think of Miss Ginger, Miss Ginger Gentry. She is a prayer warrior. She prays all the time. She was our Grace Raleigh Partner of the Year last year. No big deal. We started handing out that award. That's a huge deal. That was the most weird, tepid applause. I hope you heard that, Ginger. If I really needed to know some direction, you know what I would do? I would go to Ms. Ginger, who I know is a prayer warrior, and I would say, hey, I'm thinking about this thing. Will you please pray about this and tell me how you feel God's directing you? Use those voices in your life. The people that are a little bit further down the path, the people who have listened for longer than you, who you trust to hear the voice of God, go to them and say, will you pray about this for me and tell me what you think God is directing you to do? Listen to the voices that God's given us in stereo. The last thing that I would tell you to do if you want clarity on God's direction in your life, and this isn't the best or first option, but it is often a clarifying one, is to ask for a sign. Ask for clear direction. We see this happen in the story of Gideon and the judges. Just a couple of chapters later, God says, hey, I want you to go do this crazy thing. I want you to take 300 men and go fight this big, huge army with it. And Gideon's like, are you sure? And God says, yeah. And Gideon goes, if you're really sure, I'm going to put a doormat out in front of my tent. When I wake up, I want that to be wet and the rest of the ground to be dry. And God says, all right. So Gideon wakes up and the doormat is wet and the rest of the ground is dry. And he's like, I guess I really need to do the thing. But one more time, God, this time I want to wake up tomorrow. I want the ground to be wet and my mat to be dry. And he wakes up the next day and the ground's wet, the mat's dry. And he's like, all right, I guess we're going to do the thing. It's okay to ask for signs. I've actually done this twice in my life. It was such a big decision that I just felt like, God, I need something from you so that I know I can grab onto this if things get hard. And in February of 2016, Jen and I were outside of Atlanta, and we made the decision together that it was time for me to start looking for a job as a senior pastor. That seemed like the next thing to do. And so at the onset of the search, I was outside one night. I was letting the dog out. I went outside, and whenever I go outside, I always look up at the stars. I've always loved the stars. I've always loved the sky. And so I was just looking up at the stars, and I was praying. And I remember my prayer that night was, God, I know that this is going to be tough, and I'm not going to know what to do, and I'm going to have to make a hard decision. So can you just, when I find the right place, can you just make it clear? Can you put Jen and I on the same page on this? I don't want to take her to a place where she doesn't want to go. I don't want to go to a place where I'm not supposed to go. Will you please just make this clear? This is a big choice. And as I was praying that, I looked up, and I saw a constellation that I'd never seen before. And I thought, huh, must be a message from God. I wonder what that is. So I pull out my phone, I download this constellation app and I look at it and it turns out it was a constellation of Taurus. And so I'm reading about the description of the constellation of Taurus, like it's these three systems and they're combining this one thing. Okay, three and one, God, I'll be looking for that. And I'm trying to like piece together what are the tea leaves of this constellation that I need to be paying attention for in the search? And finally, I just gave up. And I put it down. I said, all right, God, I got you loud and clear. I'll keep that in the back of my mind. That'll make sense to me when it needs to make sense to me. And then we get to looking, right? And I got to tell you, you're 36 years old with no senior pastor experience. It takes a church that is pretty dumb or desperate to be willing to give you the keys to the place. That's what I learned in that search. I interviewed a bunch of places. I finished second a lot of times. There was a lot of doubt in there. I began to wonder, is this ever really going to happen for me? I don't have any experience. Everybody says they want somebody without experience. And then they hire the guy that's been doing it for 15 years. So do they really? and is this ever really going to happen? God, do I need to start looking for different things? It was hard, but I felt like I needed to hang in there, right? And then in December of 16, I came across Grace and had my first interview on December the 8th. And then that process kind of went into the next year. And at the end of February, early March, I had come up here on a weekend visit. And when I came up here for a visit and I got to spend time with the people, and I don't know how this happened because, I mean, look at this place. I fell in love with it, okay? I don't know how. I mean, polling all, I was like, I'm all in on this place. I fell in love with it and I really felt like this is where I wanted to be. I felt like it fit. I felt like it was good, and this is where I wanted to be, and I felt like Raleigh was going to be a good place to raise a family. But I also knew after my visit that there was another guy coming up the following weekend, and he probably thought the same thing. God's probably giving him the same direction because you never quite know how that works. And then I knew that after his visit, they were going to have an elder meeting. And then in the elder meeting, they were going to decide who they were going to offer and they were going to give somebody a call. And so it came that night. It was a Tuesday night, I think. And I knew, I think, that they were going to meet at like 6 or 6.30 and that they were going to decide who they wanted to offer and then they were going to make a call. And so, you know, I'm trying to hang in there. I'm trying to not be stressed. 7 o'clock rolls around. I'm like, you know, it's just been 30 minutes. I've got to get into the process a little bit. Then it's 7.30 and I'm like, well, what in the world is taking them so long? Little did I know they had marathon elder meetings back then so they would probably all laugh at that. 8 o'clock hits, 8.30, and I'm like, oh no, this is taking too long. I'm so clearly better than the other guy. How can there be this much debate? And then nine o'clock happens, and I'm like, well, shoot. They offered it to the other dude, and now they're going to call me tomorrow and offer me condolences, or they're waiting to see if he takes it, and maybe I'll be plan B when I'm not above that. And then I just kind of start to spiral. I kind of start to just get anxious and think this isn't going to happen and I'm going back to the place of this is never going to work out. This is never going to happen. I'm going to be a small groups pastor for the rest of my life. That takes work like four a year. And then I'm just bored. I didn't want to do that. And so to try to lower my anxiety, I just went outside to pray. And I go outside to pray. And y'all, I had totally forgotten about Taurus. I hadn't thought about it. I hadn't looked for it. I hadn't read about it. It was not in my mind. And I looked up. And for the second time in my life, I saw that constellation. And I thought, okay, I hear you. We're good. And I stopped praying. And I went inside and I told Jen, everything's going to be fine. She goes, what? And I was like, yeah, I saw some stars. It's going to be good. A few minutes later, Bert called me and they offered me a job. And, you know, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I feel like it's been a pretty good fit. I feel like what was on the other side of that fence has been pretty good. And so sometimes we're not quite sure, but we need a little bit of assurance. It's okay to ask for a sign. It's okay to say, God, I need some clarity here. I need some direction here. But if we want to have the clarity of Deborah so that we can walk with the confidence of Deborah, we need to start learning to listen to God, start giving him opportunities to speak into our life. We need to learn to tune our spiritual ear to his voice so that when he whistles, we hear it, so that when we're in a conversation and he's speaking to us, we slow down and we engage. We need to learn that God speaks in stereo through the voices that he has placed in our life. And we need to learn that sometimes the proper spirit, if we ask for a sign, God and his goodness will give us one. And then we can walk with clarity and confidence into the step of obedience that I know he's asking all of us to take. So let's have the confidence and clarity of Deborah as we go into our week this week. Let's pray. Father, you're just so good to us. God, I pray that we would be better at hearing your voice. We know you're speaking. We know you're guiding. We know you're directing. We know that you're influencing. We know that you're there. We know that you're calling to us even now. That even now you're speaking to our hearts. Even now you're showing us the next thing. Would you please give us ears to hear? Would you please give us eyes to see? Would you please give us the clarity of Deborah? The remarkable knowledge of your voice that Elisha had. Help us to know when you're speaking. Help us to hear when your voice is in our life. Surround us with good counsel. And God, for those this morning who need a sign, I just pray that you would give it to them. Whatever step of obedience that we might be facing, Father, would you give us confidence that whatever's waiting on the other side of that fence is better than where we are now. Give us the courage to take it. It's in your son's name we ask for these things. Amen.
We always talk about the stories of Moses and Abraham and David and Paul. We know all about the boys, but what about the girls? Why don't we talk more about the people in the Bible who are like me? It turns out the girls of the Bible are pretty awesome. And when we take the time to learn their stories, we will be amazed at what God can do with someone who is consistently, humbly, and lovingly faithful. What up, faces? Good to see everybody. This is great. Thank you for being here this Sunday morning. It really is good to get to see everybody's faces. I didn't really know what to expect this morning, but this is really, really great. It's good to see y'all. Thank you for joining us online if that's what you're doing. Somebody told me this morning it was a little bit hard to get out of the omelet routine, but they made it here anyway. But if you came to the omelet routine and you're enjoying one right now, good for you and your sweatpants. But we are happy to be here. This is, I think, part six of our series called Faithful, where we're looking at the stories of faithful women throughout Scripture that really have profound impacts on the kingdom of God through simply being faithful and kind of walking in obedience with what God placed in front of them. This morning we arrive at a woman in the New Testament named Lydia. And I think that she is an incredibly relevant figure for us in the New Testament church and particularly for us in the North Raleigh community. And I'll tell you why, but we really don't get much of a picture of Lydia except for this snippet of verses in Acts chapter 16. So if you have a Bible, you can turn to Acts chapter 16. We're going to be in verses 13 through 15. A little bit later, we're going to be in Philippians chapter 1. So you can go ahead and mark your Bible if you want to turn there and read with me. But we don't get a lot about Lydia. We just get this snippet about her involvement in the church in Philippi. And that city might sound familiar to you. That is the church that Paul planted that received the letter that we know as Philippians. So a lot in the New Testament is made up of these letters, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and Corinthians. Those are letters from Paul to churches that he planted. And so Lydia plays an integral role in the church that he planted in Philippi. And so this is where we pick up the story. He's gone to Philippi, and he has begun to preach the gospel. This is his very first day. He has just arrived. He goes to the town square. He begins to preach the gospel, and he meets this woman named Lydia. Here's what happens. We're going to pick it up in verse 13. the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul. And after she was baptized in her household as well, she urged us saying, if you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay. And she prevailed upon us. So Paul and his traveling seminary, as it's known in theological circles, Timothy, Titus, Barnabas, some of these guys are traveling with him. There could have been as little as four or as many as eight to ten folks with him as he traveled. They go into Philippi. They go to a place of prayer. So they go to wherever the spiritual place was, and they share the gospel. They talk about Jesus. Lydia hears this message of the gospel, is compelled, says she's in. She, I want to sign up. What do I have to do? They had her fill out a new member card, and she put it in the, she, they talked, and she accepted Christ right there, and then they took the next step of getting baptized, which is, we always see baptism as a step of obedience after faith, and so she took this step of obedience. She got baptized. And it says her household was baptized. So her family members were baptized. And then she looked at Paul, who just rolled into town, and she said, you guys need a place to stay. Come stay at my house. And I love the way that she leverages the spiritual guilt here. If you are willing to validate the faith that I am claiming, if you believe me, then stay at my house. If you don't think that this stuck, you know, you don't think I'm really a Christian, then go stay somewhere else. But if you think that what you just did worked, then come stay at my house. Like, what choice does he have? So he says, okay, I'll stay. Now, in this, just this little short snippet here, I feel like we see so much about Lydia that is really profoundly accurate to us. Before I do that, though, there's one thing in here, in this snippet about Lydia that I wanted to point out. This is not part of the sermon, okay? So let's pretend together that we've entered into a parenthetical expression, okay? I'm opening up the parentheses. Normally when I preach a sermon, I don't like to make a bunch of different points. I try to just make one point to send you home with to think about, but I don't know when I'm going to get back to Lydia and this was too good of a thing to pass up and not mention to you, okay? So while I'm in the parentheses, as I was researching Lydia, it says in the text that she was a worshiper of God. But it also says in the text that God opened her heart to receive what Paul had to say. A lot of scholars believe that she was sympathetic to the Jews that were already there, that had preceded her. So she knew about the same God that we worship, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The same God that Paul was preaching about, the same God that sent his son Jesus. She knew about this God, and she was sensitive to this God, but she wasn't all the way in on this God. She wasn't a practicing Jew. Lydia was from Thyatira. She grew up in a pagan environment. She grew up with Greek and Roman pantheons. That was probably her heritage. And so what we know about Lydia is that she was spiritually sensitive and spiritually seeking. She was open spiritually, but she was not yet decided spiritually. And when Paul came into town and shared the good news of the gospel, talked about Jesus, and she heard him, everything clicked with her. She was sensitive to the Jewish God, and now she'd heard the message from Paul, and now it makes sense to her. Now it clicks with her, and now she's all in. And what I think is fascinating and incredibly relevant for us now is that she was spiritually sensitive, spiritually seeking. And what we see is that God had laid the groundwork, that the Holy Spirit had begun to knead the soul of Lydia and the heart of Lydia as for fertile ground so that when her soul finally encountered the gospel, it would spring forth and respond to it. And so Lydia's conversion has very little to do with the profundity of Paul's words and the effectiveness of his sharing of the gospel and has everything to do with the Holy Spirit working on the heart of Lydia to prepare her for this moment. And I wanted to stop there and point that out so that I could simply ask you, how many Lydia's are there in your life? How many Lydia's will you encounter on your tennis team or on the golf course or in the office or in the neighborhood, the new couple that comes over and you don't want to help them move their things in, but if you do, you might get to have a conversation with them. How many people are just floating around in our lives whom the Holy Spirit has been working on, who are spiritually sensitive and seeking, who are attuned to spiritual things, and who are ready to hear the gospel, are fertile ground for the message of Christ, and they're simply waiting on you, like Paul, to blow into their life and actually share that story. So don't shy away from doing that. We have the opportunity to talk about our faith. We have the opportunity to answer spiritual questions of the people around us. We have no idea how long the Holy Spirit has been working that soil to prepare it for the good news of Jesus. So share the gospel. We have no idea when we're talking to Lydia. Okay, close parentheses. That may be what you needed. The rest of this may stink for you, and maybe it all stinks. I don't know. But hopefully something is effective. But that's that idea. You take that for what it worth. Now, the other thing we see about Lydia, and this is, I think, probably more relevant to our North Raleigh crowd, is that Lydia was a dealer of purple, okay? Now, many of you probably know, you probably picked up in your history lessons somewhere along the lines that purple was an incredibly expensive dye. It was the most difficult dye to create in the ancient world. I think it came from snails and getting it was really, really tough. And so anything that was dyed purple was an incredibly expensive garment. That's why purple is the color of royalty. So she dealt in really high-end goods. Think of her as like she owned Lululemon. Really overly expensive, not worth it stuff. That's what she sold. Then other rich people just flocked to it. This must be what we need. Surely purple is the color. That's what they did. Okay, so this is her. She's walking in affluent circles. She's a successful woman. By all accounts, very few scholars and theologians, she was single. So she was widowed or her husband had left her or something, but she was the head of her household, which is an interesting dynamic in the ancient world that didn't happen a lot. She becomes very influential in the church, which I think is a phenomenal example for the women that are influential in the church now and the elders that we have. But she was an affluent woman. She had things. She had money by all accounts. By all accounts, she probably had a big, nice house. She invited six to eight guys to come stay there and feed them for what ended up being a longer stay than Paul had had at any of the other cities. She was a woman of means. And I think that this is particularly interesting because up until this point, we really haven't seen anyone with wealth and affluence and resources encounter the gospel and sign up to become a part of the church. When we read the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that have the story of Jesus and the disciples within them, we see Jesus say things like, foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but even the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. I've told you before that Jesus and the disciples literally couch surfed and camped for three years while they went around Israel doing ministry. They didn't have a home base. Maybe Mary and Martha and Lazarus' house in Bethany was the closest thing they had to home base. I'm sure they could sleep there whenever they decided they needed to, but they didn't have anything. And when Jesus called the disciples, he didn't exactly call them away from lucrative careers. They're fishermen and tax collectors and carpenters and farmers probably. So he didn't call them away from means into poverty. And then Jesus actually encounters a rich man and he says, what do I have to do? And he says, sell everything you have and follow me. And there's an important principle there, which means I need to be more important to you than your stuff. So if you can prove that that's true, then come on. Otherwise, your priorities aren't there yet. But we don't see in the Gospels a person of influence and means encounter faith and become a believer and get engaged in the church. This is really, to my knowledge, the first time we see this. And I think that that would make this particularly interesting to the American church and even more particularly interesting to the North Raleigh crowd. Because listen, it's not a secret. We know this. We may as well be able to be comfortable with it and talk about it at church. A lot of us, we've got means. We have a couple extra nickels to rub together. A lot of folks in this church, you probably have more now than you thought you would when you were growing up, when you started your career. I'd be willing to bet there's a pretty good chance that for a lot of us, especially those of us who are at the tail end of our career or have already hung it up, you probably have been blessed with more than you expected. There's a lot of affluence in North Raleigh. Just to be honest, we got a lot of people at the church who have means, who have been successful. And that's okay. We have some people who might feel like, I'm not one of those. You might be talking to everybody else. You're not talking to me. I am not a person of affluence. I can relate to you. But listen, if you compared yourself to some of the families that we support at Fox Road, I bet you probably are affluent compared to them. And I know for a fact that everybody in this room, if you wanted to compare yourself to the families that we go to Mexico and build houses for, for $6,000 worth of cinder block, you're pretty affluent compared to them. So to me, when a woman of means encounters the gospel and then begins to interact with the church, we as North Raleigh should lean in and say, how do we do that? What's the example that she sets for us? How does she encounter the church with her wealth and with her affluence and with her resources? Because we are a church that has wealth and affluence and resources to varying degrees. And I feel like it's important to ask this question and to learn from her example because there exists in Christian circles, and I think it's almost uniquely Christian or maybe just uniquely religious, but my experience is Christianity, it's uniquely Christian to kind of feel bad about wealth, right? To kind of feel bad about having. To not want to have too much. To not want to drive too nice of a car. To not want my house to be too big. To not have to, I'm going to get a beach house, but it's going to be modest, you know? Like, I'm going to have a golf membership. It could be there. It's going to be here. It's going to be cheaper. Like, there's some uncomfortable stuff that exists around the things that we have and the resources that are available to us. We're just not comfortable with it. Case in point, I saw this displayed for me a little while ago. Some time ago, I was with somebody that I consider a friend. They're very dear to the family. He's not from here, so don't try to figure out who it is. I was with him, and our families were together. He's older than me. He's like my dad's age, so he's in generation older than me, and it was time. We decided to hop in the car and go get some meat to throw on the grill. So we go and we hop in his car and he's got a new car, it's a new Mercedes. And I hop in the Mercedes and we're riding down the road and I'm looking around and listen, I'm not a car guy. Okay. I don't, I drove a Nissan Leaf for the first three years that I was here. I think that's, that's all you need to know, to know that I'm not a car guy. All right. I don't care, but I am a car interior guy. I like soft seats, and I like big screens, and I like things that you touch, and then they change. Like, I like the technology inside of cars. That's pretty important to me. So I sit in this big, nice Mercedes, and I'm looking, and there's a screen like the whole width of the dashboard, and the seats are-stitched by elves and it is nice in there. It is really nice. I'm certain that a baby animal died for that steering wheel. I'm positive of it. We're riding down the road and I'm like, this is nice, man. Do you like this better? Prior to this, he had a BMW. I said, do you like it better than this? Yeah, for these reasons. Well, what does this do? And I'm kind of just talking to him about his car. It's a new car. He just got it. He says he likes it a lot. And so, great, let's talk about your car. And at some point or another, a few minutes in, he goes, he plays this card on me. Oh, you know, it's just a car. Oh. It's just a car. Just give me point A to point B. Okay, all right, loud and clear. We'll talk about something else. So we talk about something else. Now, I get home. I shouldn't admit this to you. Please don't judge me for this. But when he said, ah, it's just a car, that got under me a little bit. Because I'm like, bull, not just a car. So I Google it. I know, sorry. I Google it. The car's $115,000. Now listen, I don't care if your car is $115,000. It doesn't matter one little bit to me. But don't try to convince me that it's just a car. You don't get to play. Here's the deal. If you spend $115,000 on your car, that's fine. That's between you and your creator. I don't care what you do, but don't come at me with, well, it just gets me from point A to point B. If that's true, buy a Prius, okay? That's a $115,000 Mercedes that does more than that. I've seen it. It's nice. But you know why I did that? Because he's a really godly dude. I wish he would move here and become one of our elders. He teaches a weekly Sunday school class, and he sends me the notes every week. And you guys would benefit way more from his Sunday school class than from my sermons. I'll tell you that right now. They're really good. And he supports his church. He's integral there. His children love the Lord. And I thought about why did he feel the need to kind of, it's just a car. Because there's this thing about wealth and about having things that makes us uncomfortable. And there's those questions that we ask. I need a new car. How nice is too nice? I'm going to buy a new house. How big is too big? I'm going to get new countertops. How nice if they have gold in them? Is that too much? Should I not get that? And within these Christian circles, I think that we're made to feel badly about having means, about having nice things. And so when the gospel encounters a woman who has nice things and has means, I want to see how she responds to it and how she serves the church. Because I think we get caught up in that. How much car is too much car? Do I really need this extra wash? Do I really need this extra thing? Do I really need the Lululemon? Do I really need these need these things? Or should I be giving it to the kingdom? Like, how should this all work? What's the interaction there? And listen, I don't care how nice your things are. And for those of us who might want to judge my friend for having a car that's that nice, I'll tell you this, I can guarantee you that that car cost him less from a perspective of net worth and annual income than my 2015 Highlander cost me. It's got leather seats. It's really nice. And so I have lived enough years to get off being concerned how nice is too nice. I know they'd say they're a believer, but they live like this and they have all of these things. And do you know what they could do with that? I don't deal with that. That's between you and your creator. I don't care. I'm happy when my friends have nice things. It doesn't matter to me. And I think when we start to worry about what kind of things it's okay to have that we get it wrong. We're not thinking about it correctly anyways. What I want us to see this morning is it's okay to have things. What matters is what we do with what we have. It's okay to have affluence. It's okay to be successful. It's okay to have more than you would have expected. What matters is what you do with the resources that you have. This is why the example of Lydia, I think, is so important. Lydia encounters the gospel and immediately, right away, she accepts Christ, she gets baptized, she has her household baptized, they believe too, and then immediately her wheels start turning. How can I use what I have to serve this new church that I'm a part of? What can I do to move this forward? She knows she doesn't need to preach. She's not going to go preach it more effectively than Paul did. They don't have a 401c3. They don't have anything to give to. So what can I do to help this movement that I am now a part of? I know. I have a big house. I have people who can cook. We're going to handle your meals. We're going to take care of you. Come stay at my house. If you do nothing else at all, if you believe me that I am sincere in my faith, please allow me to use my resources to bless this ministry. Allow me to use what I have to move forward God's kingdom by giving you a comfortable place to stay. I almost did a whole sermon on the incredible hospitality of Lydia and how that's rippled down through the years, but I actually think it's more than that. It's not just being hospitable. It's in her head. The switch was flipped immediately. Okay, I'm a part of the kingdom of God now. How do I use the things that I have access to to further this kingdom? And so it's not about what we have. Who cares? It's about what we do with what we have. It's about flipping the switch in our brain that makes us stewards of what we have. A few weeks ago, we did baby dedications, and we talked about this idea of stewardship just very briefly. These children are not our children. They are God's children that have been entrusted to us, and we are going to hand them back over to him. The things that you have are not your things. They are God's things that he has entrusted to you, and you are responsible for how you use them. She immediately got this idea of stewardship and wanted to use her resources to further the church that she was now a part of. And so what we see is that Lydia's faithful stewardship had a profound impact on the church. What we find out later is that Paul and his companions stayed in Philippi for longer than they stayed anywhere else in that journey because they had these good, now budding relationships there. They felt so welcomed there. What we see in the letter that he writes back to the church in Philippi is this incredible warmth from Paul. It's called by scholars the Joyful Letter. It's a very short book. I think it's four chapters, but it's incredibly impactful. It's a great book. If you're just picking up the Bible, you don't know what to read, read Philippians gospel and do his work so that the church could take off there, so that we could have this letter thousands of years later. And if you don't believe me, I'm going to read, I think it's the first eight verses in Philippians, because this is Paul greeting them. So what Paul does is he goes around and he plants churches. And then he goes on to the next place. He leaves them in the hand of capable leaders. And he goes on to the next place. And then he writes letters back to them to encourage them. I've heard these things are going on. I want to encourage you in these ways. He writes letters back to them. This is what makes up a bulk of our New Testament. These letters that Paul wrote to the churches. And at the beginning of the letters, he always says, greetings to you, grace and peace from Paul, an apostle in Jesus Christ, and says a couple of things, and then he gets into it. But I'm telling you, the greeting for the church in Philippi has more warmth and heart to it than any other letter by far. Look at what he says. He says, Paul to this. This is a direct reference to Lydia. That is a warm letter. I love grace. If God takes me somewhere years from now and I write you a letter back, it will not start like this. It will not be this warm. That is an incredible amount of love and warmth. I pray for you all the time. My heart yearns for you. I thank my God every time I remember you. My soul yearns to be with you as it does with Jesus Christ for your partnership with me from the first day until now. You can't tell me that Lydia's instant switch to stewardship, that Lydia's hospitality, that Lydia leveraging her resources to further God's kingdom didn't have a profound impact on Paul and on the people traveling with him and on the efficacy of the church that they left behind through this simple act that we see of hospitality where Lydia says, I have resources, they're yours now, you can use whatever you need. And so the lesson of Lydia is this. Maybe God has given you stuff so he can use your stuff. Maybe God has given you resources so that he can use your resources to further his kingdom and to bless others. Maybe we don't just have more than what we expected because life has just been good and now we're supposed to enjoy it. Maybe we're stewards of the things that we have to further God's kingdom. Maybe he gave you stuff because he wants to use your stuff. And if we will adopt this mindset of stewardship and use our resources for the things of God as directed by God, quit getting worked up about whether or not it's okay to have and just admit that we do and say, okay, God, now how can I use this for your kingdom? He is still in the business of bringing about profound change and impacting eternity out of generous hearts. I remember when Jen and I were, I think we were engaged or just newly married. We will have been married 15 years this July. Can you imagine? Poor Jen, 15 years every day. Jen's parents bought a lake house. A little bit south of Atlanta, there's a lake called Lake Oconee, and they bought a lake house down there. And Jen's sister was in college. And they said they bought this lake house, And then they said the Christian thing about buying the lake house, right? Like, they're doing okay in life. They're buying a lake house. And we're like, oh, that's great, John Terry. You're buying a lake house. And they're like, it's for ministry. Sure. You can minister to yourself on Saturday morning while you're looking at the water. I want to be a part of that ministry, right? And I've seen people say, we're finishing our basement for ministry. We're getting a third house to minister to people because once a year, the pastor stays there for a weekend. So it's God's, right? This is how we do it. And so they said, we're getting this lake house. I'm like, oh, that's great. And they're like, it's for ministry. And I was like, sure. Yeah, you can minister to me and Jen. We'll eat your food. But they meant it. They meant it. And Lauren, who we called the Pied Piper, was always bringing tons of friends, right? Every weekend, John worked at AT&T. He'd wrap up at 4.30 on Friday and he he'd head down the road to the lake house, and Lauren and her friends would meet him there. And every weekend, they'd go down there, and Terry would drive down and meet them, and me and Jen were invited, and it was really thrilling for me to get to ride on the boat and have an opportunity to wakeboard after these chiseled Adonis college athletes were back there doing flips, and then I'd get up there and just kind of fall over and get concussed and want to come back in the boat. I loved going to the lake. But these kids came every week, and they would feed them. They would buy steaks. They would buy tons of stuff, more food than they could know what to do with. They'd throw it all away at the end of the weekend, and they'd do the very same thing the next week. This became such a regular thing that they started to come without Lauren. They started to come without calling. There was one night, I'm not making this up, 10.30 at night, John and Terry are in bed. It's 10.30, they're falling asleep, and they hear, Big John! Big John! And he looks out the window, and there's literally 15 college guys parked in front of his house. And the only one that he knows is a guy named John Collins, who's the one yelling at him. And John says, I told my friends you wouldn't care if we came. To which I would say, you've lied to your friends. I do care a lot, and go away. John goes down the stairs, flings open the door, makes sure everybody has something to eat, makes sure everybody's got a place to sleep. They're sleeping all over the floor. It wasn't a big place. They're sleeping all over the floor like on each other. Next day, he's up at 7. He's taking them out on the wakeboard all day. He tells Terry we've got to get some stuff for them. She goes grocery shopping. They host these boys, right? This happened all the time. They loved him. He was in some of their weddings. He profoundly impacted these boys by literally using that lake house as a ministry, by not getting worked up about, is it good or is it bad or should I or shouldn't I, but saying, God, I'm going to buy this and it's going to be yours. Some of those boys prayed to accept Christ with him. He got to meet their kids. And 15 years after they experienced the generosity, and they called him Professor Vinson, there was 15 of those boys at his funeral. They flew in from Miami and Phoenix and Boston, and they were there, and they were blubbering, and they were talking about the profound impact that John had on their life. They were talking about how he showed them through his generosity and being measured with them what it was to be a man who walked with Jesus. One of them was his pallbearer. One of the pallbearers, he was crying so hard outside of the church that I had to do his part because he literally couldn't. John was a man who had a good job and he was successful. He made smart decisions. But when he had the ability to help, he did. When he had the ability to give, he did. And like Lydia, because the gospel took root in his life, he didn't see his things as his things. He saw them as God's things for him to hold on to and use for God's kingdom. So I would tell you this this morning. The lesson of Lydia is still true today. God still uses a generous spirit in deeply profound ways that will echo through the decades that you have no idea about. He gave you your stuff so that he could use your stuff to further his kingdom. And so what I'm telling you this morning is, in this affluent North Raleigh community, I don't care how much you have. I don't care how much resources you have. I don't care what you buy or any of that stuff. What matters to God is what you use it for, however much or little you have. What matters to God is our attitude towards the resources that he's given us. And so I would tell you this this morning. If you have your things, and you have your wealth, whatever that means to you, you have your resources, whatever that means to you, you have these things in your life, you feel blessed by them. If you're the only one that's blessed by them, if your families are the only ones that are blessed by them, there's a chance we're misusing God's things. There's a chance we're not learning the lesson of Lydia and understanding that God gave us stuff so that he could use our stuff. God gave us resources so that he could use our resources. Can you imagine the type of impact a church like this with the resources that we have can have on our community if we will more and more learn this lesson from Lydia and see these things. When we encounter the gospel, look at the resources that we have, not feel bad about having them, but say to ourselves, how can we leverage these things as a church to impact our community together? The good news is, I think a lot of us get this. We're pretty good at this, but I want to see us do more. I want to see us adopt this mindset. I want to see us learn more and more from the lesson and from the example of Lydia and believe that by being faithful stewards of the gift that God has given us that we can make profound impacts on the decades to come and even eternity. So let's be like Lydia. Let's pray. Father, you are so good to us. God, for those of us that feel blessed, we just thank you for that. We thank you that we do have more than we could ask or imagine. I pray that we would see ourselves as stewards of the resources that you've given us. I pray that it would matter deeply to us to leverage the things we have to further your kingdom, to reach people for you, to point people towards Jesus. Father, for those of us who feel like we might be struggling, I just, I pray that we would see that as a season. I pray that those folks would be blessed in that they're struggling. God, plant seeds in us, little ideas of generosity and a generous spirit. Give us the opportunity to participate on the front lines with what you're doing and experience the blessing of what it is to bless others with things that you've used to bless us to. Make us as a church more like your servant Lydia. In Jesus' name, amen.
We always talk about the stories of Moses and Abraham and David and Paul. We know all about the boys, but what about the girls? Why don't we talk more about the people in the Bible who are like me? It turns out the girls of the Bible are pretty awesome. And when we take the time to learn their stories, we will be amazed at what God can do with someone who is consistently, humbly, and lovingly faithful. Well, good morning again. Thank you again for being here. This is my first Sunday back after having a kid, so I'm really grateful to be back in the saddle. I mean, I didn't do anything. Jen was primarily responsible for birthing the child. But yeah, so it's been a heck of a two weeks. For those who haven't seen, this is a picture of John. This is our boy. Yes, yes, I know. But before we go overboard with how cute he is, I am of the conviction that no child is actually cute until they've been alive for about three months. At the three-month mark, they become cute. At the newborn stage, they look like angry aliens, so we don't have to pretend like he's exceptionally cute, all right? But he's got blonde hair. He's a good-looking kid. We are excited about him. And I also wanted to thank Kyle for jumping in and preaching for us for two weeks. We had a plan leading into this series where we kind of acknowledged, you know, Nate, you're probably going to have to miss a couple of weeks somewhere in this faithful series because your baby is due. And I said, yeah. I said, so listen, when she goes into labor, I'm going to text you and you're teaching for the next two weeks. And he was like, all right, got it. So we had this plan in place, but neither of us expected to implement that plan almost three weeks prior to the due date. So he got the text on Friday morning and had to preach Sunday and I think did a remarkably good job. So thank you, Kyle, for doing that. And I'm glad to be back with you preaching about faithful women of the Bible. The woman that we're going to look at this morning is someone that I would be willing to bet that even though most of us probably know who she is, we might not know her name. It's a woman named Jochebed. And I had to actually look up what her name was, shamefully, because I know her story, but I didn't know her name. Her name is Jochebed, and Jochebed is probably the greatest mom of all time. If she's not the greatest, she's in the goat conversation. She's on the Mount Rushmore of moms, I think. And this isn't all the time the case, because sometimes excellent parents have children that just in their adulthood, they struggle. So it's not a one-to-one thing, but a lot of times you can tell the quality of a parent by the kids that they produce, right? And Jochebed produced some really good ones. From what we know, she had at least three children. She may have had more, but we know of three of them. One of them, her son, was a guy named Aaron. He was the first high priest of the nation of Israel. His staff was in the Ark of the Covenant. He is the one who performed a lot of the miracles that got the Israelites free of Egyptian enslavement. He instituted a lot of the religion that we still follow today. He had a profound impact on Israel in the Old Testament and continues to impact how we understand God to this day. I mentioned him in a sermon a couple of weeks ago when we were in Hebrews talking about Jesus as the great high priest. Aaron's a big deal. She had a daughter named Miriam. And most of us probably don't know about Miriam, but she was the first priestess in Israel. In a time when we didn't really know a lot about priestesses or that they even existed, but she was the first priestess in Israel. She actually wrote a praise song that's included in scripture, making her the first included female author in the Bible. And the praise song was just for the women of Israel. Men were not supposed to sing it, and it was about the conquest at God's faithfulness at the Red Sea, how God parted the sea and then defeated the armies of Egypt for them. She wrote that song, and it's included in the Bible. Those two kids are Jochebed's kids, and they did some really good stuff. Even if the third kid was a screw-up, she's still doing pretty good, right? The third kid was Moses. You may have heard of him. Even if you're here this morning and you wouldn't call yourself a believer, you're not really a church person, or you're listening or watching online, you wouldn't call yourself a church person. When I say Moses, you at least know who that is. You at least know, oh, that's a big deal Bible guy. Yeah. He freed the Hebrews from slavery. He led them through the desert. He established the religion. He came down with the Ten Commandments. It was the law of Moses. He wrote the first five books of the Bible. All three of these people, Aaron, Miriam, and Moses came from Jochebed's house. And so I want to know, what was she doing? What kind of Kool-Aid was she serving that produced these three incredible people that we still remember 6,000 years later? What was happening in her house that produced these types of adults. And I think if we can get some insight into that question, if we can get an answer there, then we can certainly apply that in our homes to our children, but I think that we'll pull out of it something that we can apply to all of life. So if we want to learn what it was like to grow up in Jacob's house, we don't have a ton of text. We don't get a lot of insight into her as a mother or as a person, really. We just get really one snippet at the beginning of Exodus in Exodus chapter 2. So if you have a Bible, you can turn there. If you don't, there's one in the seat back in front of you. Or if you're at home, there's one on your phone. If you're in person, don't look at your phone. That will distract me. I'll think that you're totally bored and now you're on Twitter or something. So look at Exodus chapter 2. We're going to pick it up right at the beginning. Now what's happening here before I read the verses? The Hebrew people are slaves to the Egyptians. And someone, one of Pharaoh's advisors, got in his ear and was like, hey man, these Hebrews, there's a lot of them. We think that when they were wandering through the desert, archaeologists and theologians believed that it was somewhere around 500,000 people that made up the Hebrew nation. So this Egyptian advisor said, hey, there's a lot of them. We're a little bit worried if they continue to grow at the current rate that they could be so strong that if they decided to rebel against us, there could be an insurrection that we wouldn't be able to stop. So we need to do something about this burgeoning Hebrew civilization within our borders. We need to do something about this population. And so what they decided to do is to kill all the boys two years and younger, and the midwives, the ones delivering the babies, were instructed, if you deliver a baby boy, you have to kill it right away. This is just evil stuff, but this is what they did. And so there's a woman named Jochebed, and she's about to have a son. And this is a snippet that we get of her story in that context. In Exodus chapter 2, I'm going to pick it up in verse 1. It says, Now a man from the house of Levi went and took as his wife a Levite woman. That's just a tribe within the nation of Israel. This is the action that she took. And then if you continue to read the story, what you learn is she goes down to the river with this new boy, this three-month-old baby boy in a basket, and she sets it in the reeds. She sets it in the river, presumably the Nile River. And she sends her daughter, maybe Miriam, up as a lookout to see what happens to this basket. And somehow or another, she knew, I would presume that she knew the general schedule of the princess, of Pharaoh's daughter, and knew that she came out to bathe in the Nile River. And so she timed it up just right so that when she released Moses, that this basket would be encountered by the daughter of Pharaoh. And she had her daughter looking out to make sure that this is what happened. And sure enough, Pharaoh's daughter saw the basket. She had her servants grab it. They opened it up. There's a baby inside. She's moved by this and is compelled to adopt the baby. When she adopts Moses, they didn't have formula back then, all right? So she couldn't just mix something up and feed it to him. So she needed a woman who was capable of feeding a child at the time. So she tells her servants, go to the Hebrew people, find a woman who's able to feed a child right now and ask her to wean this child for me until they're off of it and then return. So they go into the Hebrew encampment and who do they find? Jochebed. Oh, what do you know? I can feed a kid. So she gets her son Moses back and gets those moments with him, those special months and probably years with him until it's time for him to be adopted officially into the palace by the princess of Egypt. The rest of the story from there, he grows up in this royal society. He learns how to lead. He gets the best education possible. He's exiled into the wilderness for 40 years. God speaks to him out of a burning bush. He comes back. He leads the people into freedom. That's the story of Moses. But as we look at the story of Jochebed here, can you imagine? Can you just imagine? Those of you who are parents, can you imagine having a baby? The moment John was born and they placed him on Jen's chest, I knew good and well, and it's not hyperbole, and you dads know what I'm talking about. I knew good and well I would die for that kid. Can you imagine taking the thing that is most precious to you in the world, putting it in a basket, and floating it down the river? Just releasing it and hoping that it works out. Having no control over what happened, having done all that you could do, and then setting this child in a basket and letting it go down the river. Can you imagine watching that basket like Jochebed did? But as I think about this story and the lessons that we can learn from this story, what I realized was the wisdom of Jacobad was that she did all that she could, and then she acknowledged it wasn't enough. She did all that she could, everything possible, and then she acknowledged, and that's still not enough. I think it's noteworthy that she got a basket, she wove it, she got the best bulrushes, and she put it together. She made it just for her kid. She made sure it was perfect. Then she coated it with bitumen and pitch. She made it waterproof. She took extra special care. She observed the schedule of the princess. She sent her daughter as a lookout. She did everything that she could. She controlled every detail that she could. She didn't just find any old basket. She didn't just set it in the river at any old time. She did everything that she could, but then at some point or another, she acknowledged something that I think we struggle so mightily to acknowledge. I've done everything that I can, and now I have to acknowledge that that's not enough. There's some mystical intersection between our effort and God's actions, between our effort and God's responsibility. And I think the lesson from Jochebed as I think about it more and more this week is yes, she did all that she could. Yes, she had faith, but she was able to accept this reality that there is a gap between our efforts and God's actions. And that in that gap, you have to admit, my efforts, my abilities are going to fall short. If she would have just sat there holding on to the basket and never released it, she would have waited too long and would have missed the opportunity. If she would have waited in the river with that basket up to the princess, she would have ruined it by being present when she found him. And if she would have given him to her daughter and said, walk the baby to the princess and ask, she would have ruined the opportunity. I can also imagine her waiting too deep into the river, holding on to the basket, refusing to let go of control, and I'm also going to acknowledge that at some point that's not going to be enough. It reminds me of this proverb that I've always loved. Proverbs chapter 21, verse 31. It says, the horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the Lord. We can do everything we can to get the horse ready for battle. We can sharpen the sword. We can make sure the saddle's just right. We can know where the enemy is. We can approach the way we're supposed to approach. We can do everything we're going to do. But the battle belongs to the Lord. I can do the prep work. I can do everything I can do. But at some point or another, I have to hand the results over to God. And one of the reasons I love this story of Jochebed and the picture of her releasing that basket down the river is because as I was thinking about it one day, it occurred to me, isn't this just what parenthood is? Isn't parenthood just that moment over and over and over again where we've done everything we can and then at some point or another we have to release? A lot of you guys know this part of mine and Jen's story. We wanted a long time to be pregnant. We waited eight years to be pregnant and it was a hard eight years. And then when we finally did get pregnant, we found out about eight or 10 weeks in that we had miscarried. And that was hard. Maybe the hardest thing we've ever walked through as a couple. So when we got pregnant with Lily, I prayed so hard, God, please protect this child. Please don't let us walk through that again. Please, God, you've got to take care of us. And I would have done anything. I would have gotten three jobs. I would have never slept. Jen would have done anything. We would have put her on any diet, literally any injection. Whatever we can do to try to protect this baby that's growing inside of her, we will do it. But the reality is there was nothing we could do. We could do a couple things. We would be careful about a couple diets. But the reality was we had to pray. God, this child is yours. We believe you care about them and that you care about us. So we trust you with this pregnancy. And it occurred to me that this is what parenthood is. God, there's nothing left that I can do. I'm impotent here. But you care about us and you care about them, so we trust you. There was another reminder as we were having John during the process of labor and of waiting until it was really time to have the child. You know, there's contractions and things start to pick up in that process. And somewhere in that process, in the middle of the night, Jen's blood pressure began to drop and John's heart rate plummeted. And the nurses tried to pretend like it wasn't a big deal, but four of them rushed in there and started going really fast and dropping things and cussing. And one was trying to make light and like, like uneasy jokes. And me and Jen are scared. We're looking at each other. Our eyes are big. We don't know what to do. I can't even get near her to hold her hand because she's surrounded by nurses that are moving her around and they're giving her shots to try to do this and that and the other thing. And there's about 20 or 30 minutes where we were just scared. And all I could do is pray. And I was reminded of the story of Jochebed. We've done all that we can do. Now we pray. Now it's in the Lord's hands. And this is a picture of parenthood. One day, you do everything you can. You get them ready. You try to protect them. You try to choose the right school. But one day, you're going to let go of their hand, and they're going to walk into kindergarten, and you're not going to be with them for eight hours, and you don't know what's going to happen. One day, you entrust them to other dumb middle schoolers and the things that they're going to say and the stuff that's on their phones. There's coming a day, parents, many of us have experienced it already, where you watch them drive off. They drive away from home for the first time. They're 16 years old. They got their license. You can't control what happens in that car. You drop them off at college and hope they make wise choices. You walk them down the aisle and see them walk into a life that you won't live. You watch them have kids and wish them the best of luck. But parenthood is nothing if not a continual releasing of a basket down a river. Saying, God, I've done all that I can do. Now I trust you. And it's important to me to point something out here. And if I don't point this out, this could come across as like clumsy, ham-handed advice. Just trust God with your kids. Just trust God with the things in your life. Don't worry about it. Trust God. No, listen, she did everything that she could. She chose the perfect basket. She covered it with bitumen and pitch. She timed it out. She sent the lookout. She controlled everything that she could control. And so for your kids, because some of us are walking through some really serious things, and it would feel really clumsy to go, well, just trust God. We had a child this summer. It broke my heart to think about it. I think that they were four while they were walking through this. He choked on something really bad at dinner one night, really, really badly. Scared everybody in the family. Moms and nurse scared them to death. It traumatized him so badly that after that moment, he could no longer eat. He couldn't be convinced to put anything in his mouth and eat and swallow because he was scared of it. And they got treatment for it, and they did all the best things that they could. And eventually, eventually, he's able to start drinking smoothies, and then eventually, he was able to start eating things. And then, I was talking to his dad a couple of weeks ago. Then finally, they would give him something for dinner. And he was like, I can't eat that. I'm going to choke. And he's like, I saw you eat six chicken nuggets like an hour ago. So you're squared away, pal. Like then it became a thing where he was trying to get out of certain meals. But for a while, it was incredibly scary. And it would be super clumsy of me as a pastor to pick up the phone and call this couple and be like, I know that your child's having a hard time swallowing anything and is losing weight at a dangerous rate and is close to starving themselves, but just trust God with it. That's clumsy advice. Do everything that you can do. Get the best baskets. Get the best treatment. Call in the best experts. Go to the best practices. Get the best people associated with your children. Put in all the effort. Put in all the prayer. Rally all of your resources to do the best thing that you can do by your child. But be like Jacob and acknowledge that there's coming a moment where my efforts stop and God's actions begin. Do not hang on to that basket for too long. And do not trick yourself into believing that you can control the things that you can't control. So it's not just clumsy, trust God and everything will be okay. We don't just grab any old basket and throw the kid in the water anytime we want. Do everything that you can do, but acknowledge that there's coming a moment when you can't do anymore. And in that moment, choose to be like Jacob and trust God. And you know, I'm preaching about this, and sometimes I don't love to do parenting sermons because it doesn't hit everybody in the room. It hits a portion of the room. But I think that this one actually works for everyone because releasing things to God isn't just a practice for parenting. It's a necessary practice for all of life. This idea of preparing the horses for battle, but the victory is the Lord's. That's not just for raising children. That's for everything in life. Maybe you're in a marriage right now that has seen better years. Maybe it's getting really hard. And you want more than anything for this marriage to be fixed. You're not sure if your spouse is in it with you, but you want more than anything for this marriage to be fixed. This principle applies to that situation. Do everything that you can do. Get the best counseling that you can have. Have the hardest conversations that you need to have. Do the most introspection that you can do. Own the most in the relationship that you can own, but at the end of the day, you're going to have to admit that there comes an intersection with my efforts and God's actions, and you're going to have to trust that relationship to him. You're going to have to float that down the river and quit trying to control everything and trust that whatever needs to change in their heart, that God is going to change it if he's going to change it at all. With our careers, with what we want in life, with our goals, that interview that we really want to nail, the job that we really want to get, the account that we really want to close, the company that we really want to work for, the career that we really want to have, whatever it is that we're yearning and striving for, do all the work. Make the best possible basket, but at some point or another, trust that God cares about your career too and float it down the river and let him do with it what he's going to do. Those of us with aging parents, this is a hard reality. How do we take care of them? How do we do the right things? How do we know what to do? How do we know what to say? How do we know when to be forceful and when to back off and be respectful? How do we know when to take over? Do everything that you can do. Do everything that you know to do. But at some point or another, let go of the basket and let God take control of it. This applies, I think, to every area of life, to our finances, to our relationships, to everything that we do. Do everything that you can do. But just acknowledge, just know that at some point there's coming a time when your efforts will fall short and we will need God's actions to come in and trust those things to God. And if you're somebody who struggles with this, if you're anxious, just know that holding onto the basket too long could be the worst possible thing for it. If we go back to parenthood, think of the people that you know that have tried to control their child for too long and then release them into college and what happens? Because you couldn't release them sooner. Think about the people who probably should have put a little bit more bitumen on the basket. Maybe you should have picked a better basket. Maybe you should have been a little bit more thoughtful before you just slung that thing down the river. There's a downside to not doing everything that we can do. There's a downside to hanging on too long and to tricking ourselves into believing that we can continue to control things as we drown in the river ourselves and pull our basket of whatever's dear to us down with us. But I remember a couple years ago, I guess it was about 2018, we bought a house in April or in February of 2020. Praise God, because we couldn't buy a house right now. We started looking in 2018 for a house, and Jen was looking every day. I am convinced that between 2018 and 2020, there is no one who knew the North Raleigh real estate market better than Jen Rector. Not a soul on earth. I'm telling you, we'd be sitting there after dinner, and I'd be on my phone looking at Zillowow and I'd be like, oh, this house looks good. And she'd go, where is it? I'm like, it's over on like Diamond Hitch Trail. And she goes, oh, is that the green one or the brick one? I'm like, geez, the green one? She goes, yeah, it's got a great outdoor space, but I don't know about that kitchen. Okay, well, I guess we'll check that one off the list. Like she had this thing memorized, man. And we began to get concerned that we weren't going to be able to buy a house in North Raleigh because we really love this area. We really love North Raleigh. I didn't want to move to the outskirts. We really love it here. It was important to us to stay here. But it was really hard to find a house that we could afford and that we actually wanted. And we had a lot of conversations about, gosh, I'm not sure that this is gonna work out. Jen would be anxious that we're never gonna be able to buy a house or whatever. And one day it occurred to me and I just told her, I said, listen, I believe that God brought us to Raleigh. I believe that he actually cares about where we live. I believe that where we live matters to him and the community that he places us in matters to him. And because of that, we can trust him with this. Because we know that God cares about where we live, we can trust him with finding us a house. So we still did everything that we could do, but then one day he brought us a house that for us was perfect, is perfect. And I'm glad he did because no kidding around, if we would have waited another year to try to keep looking for this perfect house, I don't think that we could get into a house right now. And that's the encouragement that I would give you this morning. The thing that you're anxious about, the thing that you're trying to control, whether it's your kids or your career or your relationship or your finances or the things that you won't let go, that you're just latched onto this basket and you can't seem to release it to God or acknowledge that there's a place where your efforts need to stop and God's actions need to begin. If you're in that place, I would ask myself this question. Does God care about this? Does God care about this thing? If he does, then I can trust him with it. Does God care about this thing? If he does, I can trust him with it. Does God care about my kids? Absolutely he does, so I can trust him with them. Does God care about my marriage? Yes, deeply. It matters tremendously to him, so you can trust him with it. Does he care where you live? Yes. Does he care about your career? Yes. Does he care about your relationships? Yes. Does he care about your finances and your aging parents? Yes. He cares about all those things. So if God actually cares about this thing that matters so much to you, then I want you to know that you can trust him with that. His wisdom is greater than yours. His providence is better than yours. His strength is mightier than yours. His vision is further than yours. I think we have a lot to learn from the example of Jochebed. I don't know that this is the reason that she raised three incredible children, but I would be willing to bet that it's a big part of it. We all of us, especially those of us who are anxious, those of us who worry, those of us who stay up, worrying about all the different things that could possibly happen as we try to keep adding the perfect amount of bitumen and pitch and finding the perfect basket before we are willing to release it down the river to God. Let's acknowledge that this releasing, this principle of Jacobad, it really brings with it great peace. There is an incredible peace to watching something float away from you, knowing good and well, I've done all that I can. Have you done everything that you could? Yeah, I've done everything that I could. Now I'm giving it over to God. And what he does with it, I'm good with. There's an incredible peace to that. If we struggle with anxiety this morning, maybe what we need to do is finally release it and let the peace of God wash over us, knowing that if he cares about it, then he will take care of it. And in that way, I think we can all learn from the example of Jacob. Let me pray for us. Father, we love you this morning. We thank you for who you are and for what you do for us. Lord, I pray for the parents in the room. We struggle so mightily with relinquishing control of the children that you've given us. Would we acknowledge that we just simply can't control every detail? We're going to have to trust you in the conversations and in the spend the night parties and out on the road and at college and at school. We're going to have to trust that you care about those children too and that you will direct their paths. For those of us with other concerns, be it our finances or our careers or our relationships or our marriage, God, would we just be comforted by the fact that you care about those things too? Would we have the faith and the humility of Jochebed to do everything that we know to do, but at some point or another understand that our efforts are going to fall short and we need to entrust these things to your actions. Give us the strength and the peace to do that even today, Father. It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.
We always talk about the stories of Moses and Abraham and David and Paul. We know all about the boys, but what about the girls? Why don't we talk more about the people in the Bible who are like me? When I read the Bible, I see story after story of women who are amazing. I see the courage and hope of Miriam and the boldness of Mary Magdalene. I see the consistent and quiet obedience of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Ruth and Naomi teach us of love, loyalty, and perseverance. Esther becomes a queen who uses her power to save her people. And Deborah becomes a judge and general who defeats the oppressors of her nation. It turns out the girls of the Bible are pretty awesome. And when we take the time to learn their stories, we will be amazed at what God can do with someone who is consistently, humbly, and lovingly faithful. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I get to be the lead pastor here. Thanks for joining us in person here at the First Service. Thank you for joining us online. I've had more people, maybe than ever, who have said to me this morning, oh, you look nice. What's the occasion? And I guess the occasion is that my shirt is tucked in because this shirt just needed to be tucked in, and that's what I wanted to wear today. I had no idea. I'm wearing literally the exact same thing I wear every week for four years, but I tucked it, so I guess that makes a difference. I'll have to remember that in the future. I am very excited about this series because we get to focus on some people in the Bible that we don't often stop on. We're going to focus on the women of the Bible because I think that we have some really profound lessons to learn from their faith. I was very grateful to Erin, our children's pastor, for opening up the series last week by telling the story of Esther. If you missed that, I would highly encourage you to go back and make sure you caught it because she did a great job with that story. This week, we're going to be in the New Testament in three of the four gospels talking about one of the women who may be one of the most underrated figures in the Bible. I think she's even an underrated Mary in the Bible. We all know Mary, the mother of Jesus. We know her. I think she gets her proper adulations. We probably know Mary Magdalene and the things surrounding her, and we've learned about her before. But maybe we haven't thought to focus on Mary of Bethany. Or maybe we just don't know that it's Mary of Bethany that pops up in these ways in Scripture. but I think she is one of the more underrated people in the whole Bible, if not maybe the most underrated person in the whole Bible, and we're going to learn why today. My point today isn't to show you that Mary's underrated and to have you leave and go, yeah, she really was, she's really great. My point today is to help you think through something that I think comes out of one of the stories that Mary is involved in. And this story actually points to what I believe to be one of the most haunting truths in the whole Bible. For me, I grew up a church person. My memory doesn't go back further than my church attendance. And some of us are like that. Some of us have found God more recently than that. But what I typically assume on a Sunday is that most people listening are church people. And for church people, this story from Mary of Bethany is really, to me, is really haunting. And it's something that we want to deal with. It's one of the stories that kind of freaks me out and makes me worry just consistently in my life. So I want to invite you guys into that anxiety with me so that you can be riddled with it for the rest of your life as well. So that's what we're going to do this morning. The story that highlights this, and she shows up three major times in the Gospels, and we're going to eventually highlight all three, but the one I want us to focus on is found in Matthew chapter 26. So if you have a Bible, you can go ahead and turn there. This is six days before the Passover on which Jesus was arrested. So roughly, this is the night before the last week of Jesus' life. And if you've ever read through your Gospels, which I would highly encourage you to do, if you've ever read through your Gospels, you know that the pacing of the Gospels is kind of, it plods along, it moves at a pretty good pace. But then when we get to this last week of Jesus' life, beginning with the triumphal injury, triumphal entry, I guess that's another name for the crucifixion. If you actually start there, it slows down and takes its time. We get a lot of details about the last week of Jesus's life. And so the night before the triumphal entry, when Jesus is riding into Jerusalem through the Eastern Gate on a donkey, a symbol of peace, They're laying down palm branches in front of him, receiving him as a king. He knows that he's going to die. Nobody else with him knows. We're going to talk about this a little bit more in a second. The day before this happens, Jesus is at what some scholars believe to be his favorite place on earth. He's in Bethany. He is at the home of Mary and Martha and Lazarus. Many scholars believe that these were the closest things that Jesus had to besties. It wasn't the disciples. It was Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. They lived in this little town called Bethany. They all lived together. And just for perspective, it's kind of neat to think about it. I've seen it and it's neat to pull it together. If you were to go to Jerusalem right now and go to where the temple is, where the temple mound is, and understand where it used to face in the time of Christ, and if you were to put yourself in the Holy of Holies and take a step out and walk through the curtain that used to hang between God and his people, if you would walk through that curtain and face out, what you would see is the eastern gate and the walls of Jerusalem. On the other side of that gate is the Mount of Olives with the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed the night that he was arrested. You can see it from the Temple Mount. If you go over that hill, if you go over the Mount of Olives into the next valley, that's where Bethany is. So this is where Jesus is preparing to enter into the gate the next day. And so he's having dinner with everyone. Mary and Martha and Lazarus did what you should do. They were hospitable to him. They were throwing him a dinner, and they know that he's about to enter into Jerusalem. And at this dinner, while they're reclining at the table, Mary goes and she gets a vial of spikenard or oxnard. It's a very, very powerful perfume. We're told that it was worth about a year's wages. And we don't know that Mary and Martha and Lazarus were extravagantly wealthy. We don't know that they were poor. We don't know a whole lot about their socioeconomic status. But what we know is that this perfume was worth a year's wages, whatever that means to us. I thought about trying to summarize it, but I don't know enough about the median income in Wake County. So whatever that is, that's what it was worth, okay? And she empties the whole bottle out. You could just take a dab of it and put it where you want to put it, and that would do the job for the day, but she empties the whole bottle out on the feet of Jesus. And in some accounts, it says that the disciples were indignant. In others, it says that Judas was indignant. And he was, in any case, the ringleader. And he's thinking to himself, how can this woman do this? How can she do this? How can she open up this bottle of perfume and pour it all out on the feet of Jesus? Doesn't she know how many people we could feed with that? Doesn't she know if she would be willing to sell that for Jesus instead of being showy in her offerings here, doesn't she know how many people we could feed, the good that we could do? And Jesus, knowing that this thought existed in the room, addressed it. And he says this in Matthew all, in another gospel, we're told that Judas was a thief already and he was skimming off the top. That's why he was really mad. He could have pocketed some of this perfume money. And that's really why he was mad. But he says, you will always have the poor, which is a really interesting thing to say. We could do a whole sermon on what that means. But you won't always have me. And then he says something really profound that nobody else in the room understood yet. He said, she's preparing me for my burial. See, he had told the disciples, I'm going to go to Jerusalem and they're going to kill me. And then I'm going to be buried. And then I'm going to raise on the third day and I will have conquered sin and death and everything's going to be good. He had told the disciples this. And after he would tell the disciples this, they would kind of lean in and go, what do you think he means by that? He's not really, no one's going to kill him. He's not really going to die, right? But Mary believed him. Mary understood him. As a matter of fact, what's profound about Mary, and we see it in this moment, that she prepares him for burial. This isn't just an offering to a savior. This isn't just, I love you and you're in my house and I want you to have this extravagant gift. This is, Lord, I know that you are about to die for me. I know what's about to happen. These yahoos don't. I understand what's about to happen and I want to do my part to love you and to prepare you for the road that you're about to walk. What I want us to see is that Mary, she knew who he was and what he came to do. And I would contend with you, and I mean this, I've thought this for years. I'm deadly serious about this. I would contend with you that she was one of two people alive who understood both who Jesus was and what he came to do. I think the other person is no longer alive at this point. I think the other person is John the Baptist. I think the only two people in Jesus's life who knew who he was and what he came to do were her and John the Baptist. Some people knew who he was, but they didn't understand what he came to do. And some people didn't even acknowledge that he was who he said he was. And this should cause us to ask questions. Why was it that when Jesus comes down, when he condescends, he takes on flesh, he walks among us? Why was it that so very few people, maybe it was more than two, maybe it was four or five, maybe there's more that are not recorded, or maybe you could look in the text and make an argument that somebody besides those two did, but very few people knew who he was and what he came to do. And if that's true, why is that the case? It's so funny to me because I've heard over my lifetime people say, if God's real, why doesn't he just come down and tell us? He did. And then we wrote a book about it. And then we formed a religion around it. Like he did. And nobody believed him then. Why didn't they believe him? This question should concern us because I want to know that if Jesus were to walk through these doors this morning that I would go, that's the Messiah and I would fall at his feet. I want to know that that's true. But how can I know that's true when everybody missed it? If anybody, if anybody that was a contemporary of Jesus should have known who he was, if there were any group of people that when Jesus came on the scene should have been the ones waving the flags and pointing the fingers and saying, this is the Messiah, everyone look, come worship him. If there's any group of people who should have done that, it's absolutely the Pharisees. The Pharisees were the religious leaders of Jesus's day. They were the pastors. They were the theologians. They were the professors. They were the ones who knew the Bible. To become a Pharisee, I'm not going to get into all the details of it, but to become a Pharisee, you had to effectively memorize the entire Old Testament, the Tanakh, the 39 books that we have today. You had to effectively memorize those if you wanted to be a Pharisee. You had to know it inside and out. If you were a Pharisee, you knew by memory every messianic prophecy in the Old Testament. You knew them by heart. You could rattle them off. You knew exactly what the requirements were to be the Messiah. And yet the Messiah showed up, the one that they had been waiting for for generations. He comes to the door. He says, I'm the son of God. And the Pharisees say, no, you're not. And they should have been the ones to identify him. They should have known. They should have seen. And I don't know if you've ever thought about this, but the Pharisees were so certain that Jesus wasn't Jesus that they killed Jesus in the name of the Jesus they thought they should believe in. Do you understand that? They were so certain that he wasn't God that they killed him in the name of the God that they thought they were embracing. They missed him. And that terrifies me. Because the Pharisees are church people. The Pharisees are small group leaders. They're greeters and ushers. They teach Sunday school. They have their quiet times. They know their Bible. The Pharisees are me. They're pastors. The Pharisees didn't have a memory that went back past their church attendance. They're the church people and they missed Jesus. Why did they miss him? The Pharisees were blinded by their need for affirmation. I think the Pharisees were blinded by their need for affirmation from the Savior. I think that they had some expectations. He's going to come from the line of David, so they're watching a particular line of David. He is certainly, if he's going to be the leader of Israel, he is certainly going to come up through our ranks. We're going to know about him. We're going to see him trending on Twitter when he's eight years old. We're going to know about this kid, right? And we're going to watch him. We're going to watch him go through the educational process. We're going to see him flourish as a Pharisee. We're going to see him rise to the top of our ranks. He's going to come through the system and he's going to tell us that we've been right about him this whole time. He's going to show up and he's going to tell everybody else that even though we're this backwoods country with no future, he's going to tell everyone else that we've been right and that our God is here and that we are important. They were blinded by their need for affirmation, by their certainty that when the Messiah shows up, he's going to point to us and he's going to tell us that we've been right this whole time. He's going to point to us, and he's going to say, well done, good and faithful servant. You have led my nation well. I am so glad I entrusted them to you. And instead, he called them a brood of vipers and whitewashed tombs. And when he did that, they couldn't possibly believe that this was the Son of God, because when the Son of God shows up, he's going to tell us that we've been right and he's going to point to everyone else and say, you should listen to them more. They had a perfectly built theology of who the Messiah was going to be and when Jesus showed up, he didn't fit into their theology so they rejected him. And they didn't see him for who he was. They were blinded by their need for affirmation. The disciples, though, they knew who Jesus was. The disciples knew that Jesus was the Son of God. And if anybody should have known what he came to do, it was the disciples, right? See, everybody thought, everybody in Israel thought that when the Messiah gets here, he's going to ascend to the throne of David. He's going to sit on an earthly throne. He's going to raise Israel out of obscurity into international prominence, throw off Roman rule, and establish us as the international power of the world. That's what Jesus is going to do. He's going to be a king and a political leader and he's going to throw off our oppressors and we're going to show them. But the disciples, the disciples walk with Jesus every day. The disciples were with Jesus when people were clamoring around him, trying to usher him into Jerusalem to throw off King Herod and take over the kingdom, they saw Jesus vanish from the crowd so he couldn't be made king yet. They watched Jesus perform miracles and then say, don't tell anybody that I did that because Jesus wasn't ready for the hassle that was going to come from word getting out about his arrival. He knew that people wanted him to be the king and demurred and pushed away from that because they didn't understand what he came to do. So surely the men who ate and slept and breathed and walked and ministered with him for three years knew what he came to do. But they didn't know. They barely even knew that he was the son of God. In a minute, we're going to get to the story about raising Lazarus from the dead. And it's not the reason that Jesus waited two days and allowed Lazarus to die so that he could go and perform the miracle to raise him from the dead. It's not the reason that he did this, but a big reason that we see in scripture is Jesus allowed Lazarus to die so that he could raise him from the dead so that the disciples would begin to believe more in who he was. We see this scene that's unforgettable to me when the disciples are on the Sea of Galilee in the middle of the night and the sea starts to get incredibly rough and the storm is brewing and a bunch of old school sailors are scared for their life that they're about to drown. So it was pretty serious out there. They're so scared that they go into the hold of the ship and they wake up Jesus and they say, you got to do something. We're going to die. And Jesus walks up to the deck and he says some choice words to the disciples. And he looks out at the storm and he says, peace, be still. And the wind died down and the waves stopped and the rain subsided. And he went back down in the hole and he went back to sleep. And when he left, the disciples looked at each other and they said, who is this man that even the wind and the waves obey him? They did not yet know who he was. They hadn't fully accepted that he was the Messiah, the Son of God. They didn't get it yet. And even the day after this, this story that we're looking at in Matthew, after they have dinner in Bethany, they wake up the next day and Jesus rides into Jerusalem on the donkey as a peaceful conquering king. And they're following behind him. And they're arguing who gets to be the secretary of defense and who gets to be the vice president. Thomas, you definitely have to be the secretary of agriculture. Nobody cares about that. That's what you have to do. They're arguing about who gets to do what. So much so that James and John's mom is following behind Jesus. And I swear to goodness, if I were a disciple and Donna, my mom, was with me, she would have been the one asking this question. I love moms like this. But James and John's mom leans into Jesus and she's like, when you sit on your throne, can my boys sit next to you? Can they have a prominent spot? And he says, woman, you don't know what you're asking for. They still thought he was going to go sit on David's throne. They don't know that he's claiming a heavenly throne. They don't know that he's about to conquer sin and death and Hades. They don't know that he's about to deliver us into eternal life. They don't know. They misunderstood him. They couldn't see him. They don't understand that he's going, this is a coronation for a burial. They don't get it. Just like the Pharisees were blinded by their need for affirmation, I believe that the disciples were blinded by their aspiration. The disciples were so blinded by their aspiration, by their personal goals, by what they thought Jesus was going to do for them, that when he showed up, they couldn't see him. They were so certain that this is Jesus, he's the Messiah, I'm going to follow him. And see, they had already washed out of the educational system. I'm not going to get into the details of it, but just by the fact that he found them plying a trade, that he found them building things, that he found them fishing, that he found them collecting taxes, just by the fact that Jesus found them plying a trade tells us that they washed out of trying to become Pharisees. And so now here comes this teacher, this Messiah, the Savior of the world who believes in me and he's going to elevate us and we're going to show the Pharisees who we are. We're going to be a big deal as he ascends into international prominence. We're going to write his coattails right into importance. They were so focused on their aspirations, on what they thought Jesus was going to do for them. Because I'm following Jesus, because I'm doing it well, because I'm beating all the other disciples, because I'm the first one to answer, he's going to be proud of me. He's going to be impressed with me. He's going to give things to me. He's going to bring me with him as he ascends. They were so blinded by their aspirations that they couldn't possibly accept that this person they think is going to sit on the throne is actually about to die. They couldn't see it. And what I think is haunting is that both the disciples and the Pharisees were blinded by their selfish expectations. The two groups who should have known who Jesus was, who should have seen him for who he was, who should have believed in him, who should have understood why he was there, are the two groups that messed it up the most. And I think it was because of their selfish expectations that blinded them. It kind of works like this. Some of my golf buddies may know what these are. There's these glasses that you can buy that they sell to golfers. They're called golf ball finding goggles, I think. They're very aptly named. You put them on and they're all blue. All you can see, they turn everything blue except for white. White like glows incandescently. If you've ever spent any time at all golfing, then you have also spent time in the woods wandering around like a moron looking for the ball that you hit. Happy to pick any ball and go back out onto the fairway. With these glasses, you can put them on and you can't see anything except for everything's blue and golf balls glow white. So you can see those, you can get them as they're supposed to help you find your ball. I've never used them before. I don't lose golf balls. I'm just straight down the middle of Fairway 260 every time. I don't need them. But other people do, and I think maybe they work. But I think that the expectations that the Pharisees and the disciples had worked similarly to those goggles. That once they put those glasses on of their expectations, that the only way they're going to see Jesus is if he fits into their narrow-minded theology, is if he fits into their narrow expectations. If Jesus acts and behaves exactly as they're expecting, it's the only way that they could possibly see him. And because they insisted that Jesus had to fit into the boxes that they had created for him, they missed him. And this should haunt us. If you spend any time as a church person, this should concern you. And we should begin asking ourselves this question, is it possible that we have our own blinding expectations? Is it possible that we have expectations of who Jesus is and how he would behave and what he's come to do and what it's going to look like when he shows up in our life and what it's going to look like when he sends someone into our life to speak truth to us and what it's going to look like if he were to walk through the door or what it's going to look like to do his ministry or what it's going to look like to have his character or what it's going to look like if he were to walk through the door, or what it's going to look like to do his ministry, or what it's going to look like to have his character, or what it's going to look like when he comes back. If we have some expectations that are so rigid and so dogged, is it possible that they're actually blinding us to who he really is? Is it possible that if Jesus showed up in our midst, if the second coming of Christ happened right now, is it possible that we wouldn't recognize him for who he is? The Pharisees didn't recognize Jesus because he came from some backwoods city and he had a bunch of rednecks that were following him around. It didn't come from an educated background. It wasn't anybody that general society respected. And if Jesus showed up in the woods of Appalachia and came over here to us with his redneck followers, would we point at them and say, that can't possibly be Jesus because look at who's following him. They're not educated. They don't know anything. They're not as smart as us. They're easily duped. They're easily fooled. That's not Jesus. I feel sorry for those people. Tell me Wake County wouldn't think that. Tell me we wouldn't be that arrogant. And so it haunts me. If the second coming happened right now and Jesus showed up, would I see him? Or do I have on glasses that only allow me to see him in my way? Are we so rigid in our faith and in our expectation of Jesus that we really think that we've cornered the market on understanding him? Do we really think that the Catholics don't know anything, that they're totally wrong about everything? Do we really think that the charismatic people, the ones who actually raise their hands and participate in worship, do we actually think that they're so far off base that their Jesus isn't our Jesus? Do we actually think that when we come into grace every week, we are just nailing it? Nate is exactly right about all his theology, and everything he says is true. Man, listen, 40-year-old Nate is so embarrassed by some of the stuff that 30-year-old Nate taught. I'm just trying to say stuff now that 50-year-old Nate doesn't make fun of. I think differently about so many things now than I used to. I would even tell you I understand less now than I used to claim to understand. I'm worried that some of our theological rigidity and certainty would actually cause us to miss Jesus if he showed up and defied some of our expectations. I'm worried that some of our expectations and aspirations would actually cause us to miss Jesus. If Jesus showed up in my life, surely he would heal us. Surely we would be safe. Surely my children wouldn't run into issues that are difficult. Surely this couldn't happen to my family. Surely I would get the promotion. Surely he would shield us from this pain. And so I carry around that truth that the people who were supposed to see him didn't. And it makes me wonder, and it should make you wonder, how then did Mary do it? How did Mary see what the others didn't? Why wasn't she blinded with expectations that blinded the others? What was so different about Mary? And I think the only way to answer that question is to look at the stories where we see her. Besides this story where she anoints the feet of Jesus, we see her two other times. The most prominent one is in John chapter 11 when her brother Lazarus is sick and they send word to Jesus, your friend Lazarus, you love him, he's sick, come heal him. And Jesus waits two days and allows Lazarus to die and then comes to Bethany. And when he comes to Bethany, Martha sees Jesus and tells Mary, Jesus is here, the teacher is here. And Mary runs out and says to Jesus what you think we would all say to Jesus. She says this, John chapter 11 verse 32, Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. Yeah, that's a pretty fair statement, Mary. And I wish we could get into this story. I really do. We just, we don't have time. Jesus wept with her. That's an amazing thing to have a savior who weeps with us. And then he raises Lazarus from the dead, not to just depict raising someone from the dead because he loves Lazarus, but to show us in yet another way what he came to do, to deliver him into eternity, to conquer death and sin itself. That was a picture of the resurrection that was to come. And it is a picture of what happens to our souls when we know Christ. It's a picture of salvation is the resurrection of Lazarus. And he knew that Mary didn't understand that. But what I want to point out is when she runs to Jesus and she's ready to confront him, does she stand face to face with him and say, you did not meet my expectations? She fell at his feet. She fell before him. And it's an interesting posture because the other place we see her is that famous story with her and Martha, right? Jesus is coming over to the house. Martha's scrambling around, getting everything ready. Mary's sitting at his feet, listening to him. Look, it says this in Luke 10, verses 38 and 39. Now, as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village and a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. And she had a sister called Mary who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching. She encounters Jesus. Martha's rushing around trying to impress him with all that she's doing for him. She simply sits at his feet and takes him in, listens to everything that he teaches. And then we see her in the story that we're highlighting today. Interestingly enough, in this story, where is Mary? At the feet of Jesus. There's something to that posture. All three times we see Mary, she's at the feet of Jesus. In sadness because she's going to lose him, in uncertainty because she doesn't know how this resurrection thing is going to work out, she's at the feet of Jesus. In adoration when he shows up to teach because she wants more of him, because she wants to understand him, she's at the feet of Jesus. And even in frustration and disillusionment, when he has disappointed her and she doesn't know what to do with it, what does she do? She falls at the feet of Jesus. It's a humble posture. It's a posture of adoration. It's a posture of subservience and submission. And what I believe, based on the life of Mary, is that her vision was enhanced by her selfless affection. She saw Jesus for who he was and understood and accepted what he came to do because of her selfless affection for him. All she wanted was more Jesus. She didn't want to bustle around and try to impress him. She just wanted to soak him in. She didn't want to accuse him and point a finger at him and confront him. She just wanted to understand, so she fell at his feet. She knew that it would look crazy for her to pour out that whole bottle of perfume, but she understood what he had really come to do, and so she was preparing him for burial. And what's interesting to me is, in at least two of these stories, Jesus did not meet her expectations. Do you understand the significance of, he let her brother die. And she shows up to do what we would do, is point the finger and say, how'd you let that happen? And even though Jesus is, even though her experience with Jesus didn't meet up to her expectations of Jesus, she allowed her affection to shape her expectations and just fell at his feet. She, even though Jesus did not meet her expectations, she fell at his feet undeterred in affection. It's interesting to me that the only other person I think alive who knew who Jesus was and what he came to do was John the Baptist. And John the Baptist walked through that same disillusionment where he thought that when Jesus shows up, you're going to get everybody out of prison. So he sent a messenger to Jesus and he said, are you going to get me out of prison? That's kind of the deal when the Messiah shows up and Jesus quotes the passage back to him and he says, but you're not getting out of jail. Blessed are those who do not fall away on my accord. Their affection for their Savior was so great that it had room within it to adapt their expectations to who he actually was. Mary's affection for Jesus was so deep and so profound and so abiding that it gave Jesus the space to be who he actually was. Everyone else was trying to limit him with their expectations. Mary's affection for Jesus was so generous that she was willing to adjust her expectations to who she actually encountered. And I'm so fearful for us that when Jesus doesn't meet our expectations, that we are too rigid in them and we refuse to wrap our expectations around the person of Jesus and who he actually is. And instead we walk away from him because that can't possibly be my Jesus because he does not fit into my box and I cannot see him through these glasses. My hope and prayer for us is that our affection for our Savior will be so great that it will make room for him to show up however in the world he wants to show up. That it will make room for him to show up in our life in whatever person he decides to show up in, to show up in whatever ministry and in whatever truth and in whatever sermon and in whatever prayer and in whatever song that he wants to show up in. And if you've been a Christian who's paying attention for any amount of time, you know good and well that Jesus shows up in your life in the most unexpected of ways. And if we have expectations that are so rigid that we refuse to accept the ways that He shows up, then we'll be like the Pharisees and the disciples and we'll miss Him. Or we can be like Mary and have an affection for Jesus that is so great that it wraps itself around anything that he does and adjusts our expectations to who our Savior actually is and allows him to show up in deep and profound ways in our lives. I hope that's what we will do. Let me pray for us. Father, we do love you. I pray that we would love you more. God, I want to know that if you were to show up right now, if the second coming happened and this Messiah figure walked into our life, God, give us the discernment to know if it's him. When you show up in our life, give us the affection for you to allow you to show up in whatever form you want to take. May we not be so rigid in our expectations of you and what you're going to do for us and how you're going to build us up and how you're going to affirm what we've always thought. May we not be so rigid in our expectation that we don't make any room in our heart for who you actually are. Give us eyes to see you, Jesus. Give us ears to hear you, Jesus. Give us an ever-increasing affection so that the only place we want to be like Mary is at your feet. Help us see you in all the ways that you make yourself known to us. It's in your name we pray. Amen.
Thanks, guys. Thanks, Jeffy. I can tell you've been paying attention. That's fantastic. That's great. I don't know if y'all noticed, that was all guys up here. We've got a new boy band at Grace, so submit the names for that band online, please. The best one we'll put in lights next week. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. If I hadn't gotten to meet you, I would love to do that. Particularly, I've kind of noticed every week as we gather in person that there's some folks who moved to the area or just decided that they wanted to find a church sometime in the last year and found us online. I've had a conversation a lot where I say, hey, I'm Nate, and they go, yeah, we know. We've watched about 10 of your sermons. I'm like, oh, gosh, well, God bless you for being here. But if that's you and you come through the doors, I would love to meet you. So let's make sure we do that in a Sunday here very soon. This is the last part, as Jeff said, in our series called Greater, where we're moving through the book of Hebrews together. For context, just so that we all know, we've kind of begun each week this way. Hebrews was written, we don't know by whom, to Hellenistic Jews, Jewish people who grew up outside of Israel as practicing Jews and at some point in their life converted to Christianity. Because of that conversion, they are facing great persecution from the Romans and from the Jewish community. And the author writes the book of Hebrews to encourage them to hang in there, to persevere in their faith. And so he does this by comparing Jesus to different facets of the Hebrew faith. And that's why we've called this series Greater, because he goes to great lengths to show us how great Jesus is. And we've said it's the most soaring and lofty picture of Jesus in the Bible. And that's important because of where we arrive at today. Today, we arrive at Hebrews chapter 12, verses 1 and 2. Probably two of my favorite verses in the Bible. If you've been going here for any time, you know that I say that about a lot of verses. I don't know which ones are my favorite, but I love these two. And these two, to me, to someone who grew up as a Christian, I don't have any memories before my family was involved in church. These are two of the most life-changing verses I've ever encountered. They changed the way I went about my faith years ago. And so my hope and prayer for you this morning is, if you're familiar with these verses, if you understand them the way that I do, that this can be a good reorienting or recentering for your life and for your heart as you move throughout your weeks and your months ahead. My sincere hope and prayer is that for some of you, this might be the first time you've heard the verses looked at in this way, and that they can be similarly life-changing for you. I think they're life-changing and hope-giving. And it's important to note that they follow this long dissertation, right? 10 chapters, 11 chapters long of this lofty view of Jesus. To compel these Jewish Christians to stay in the faith, to hang in there, he paints this incredible picture of Jesus. And every week we've gone through and we've done our best to point to Jesus as well in the different comparisons. And as Jeff prayed as the great high priest, and last week we looked at him as the sacrifice. We see him as the greatest messenger. We see his law is greater than Moses' law. And we talked about how all streams in the Old Testament converge on Jesus. All hope in the New Testament remembers back to Jesus and the promises kept and anticipates the promises that he will fulfill. Everything culminates on Jesus. And last week we even talked about how everything we do as a church and as individuals and that the Bible admonishes us to do really is to point ourselves and others to Christ. So that's kind of where he's been driving to in the book of Hebrews. And then we get to chapter 12 and chapter 12 starts out with the therefore. And I've told you guys that whenever we see one of those, we have to ask, what is this therefore, therefore? And in this case, it's because the preceding chapter is Hebrews chapter 11. Hebrews chapter 11 in theological and Bible nerd circles is called the Hall of Faith. It is a who's who of the Old Testament, where the author is trying to explain to them, to this audience, really how faith works and what faith looks like and what faith does. In chapter 10, he tries to define faith. And then in chapter 11, he says, let me show you what faith does. And he just goes through these Old Testament heroes. And he says, by faith, Abraham, by faith, Moses, by faith, Rahab, by faith, David, by faith, Solomon. He just goes down the line. So it's the hall of faith. And then the end of the chapter, he's talking about all these other saints that suffered. Actually, in the first week, I referenced chapter 10 and read about some of the persecution that they were going under. And then we know that that could continue for the rest of history, right? John Wesley and John Calvin and all these other great heroes of the faith that has come, Billy Graham, that have come through the years. And so chapter 12 starts off like this, and to me, it's a verse that really resonates. I've always really loved it. He writes this. I love the imagery of that verse. There is this sense that all of the saints that came before us are in heaven. And they've run their race. And now they're watching us. They've done their part. They lived their life for better or worse with regrets or with pride. They lived their life. They played their part. They turned in their time. And now they're in heaven and they're watching us. I kind of even get the sense, if you take this verse a step further, it's not just the heroes of the faith. It's not just the hall of faith, but it's every saint that's come through the centuries. Every Christian that's lived and died and is now in heaven, you get the sense based on Hebrews 12 that they're looking down on us since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses like there is this heavenly arena and earth is the playing field. And you get this real sense from Hebrews 12, one, that it's our turn to run, right? It's our turn. It's our generation's turn. It's our turn to live our life. You know, when I was growing up, this has kind of struck me all freshly. We're going to have a son here in four or five weeks, Lord willing. And when I was growing up, my whole life was sports, man. That's all I cared about. I played sports all the time. I watched SportsCenter. I memorized the statistics. I went to school and I talked about sports. I came home and I played sports. I got done with those and I watched sports. Like that's all I care about. The measure of a man was how good you are at the sport that you chose. And I didn't understand anything beside that. Now that's antiquated and silly, but that's how I grew up. And when I was 18, 19, 20 years old, I played a little bit of soccer in college. When I was doing that, like I couldn't wait to have a son and train him in sports. And now at 40, I've moved much farther. I've moved past that. And I'm like, I don't care if this kid throws a ball. Do whatever you want to do, man. Just be comfortable with yourself. Just learn to love yourself in your own skin, and that'll be half the battle. Be good at sports if you want to be. But if he does play, and if Lily takes up sports, that's my daughter. My time is done playing. I'm not going to go play competitive soccer anymore. I did it for one season in my 30s and thought this was a huge mistake, and I will never do it again. Like I'm out, okay? I will go compete against average to below average golfers. That's the height of my competitiveness. My time is done. As a parent, you know this. When you do your thing, when you go through your adolescence, and then you're a parent and you have kids, it's their turn to run. It's your turn to watch and spectate and cheer on. And that's one of the things I love about this verse is this picture that it gives us of living our life, of running our race. It's our turn to run. From the youngest in the room to the oldest in the room, it's still our turn to run. And there is a sense that heaven is watching and cheering for us. And one of the things that I like to think, now listen, I like to think this. I don't know that it's true. I hold this with a very open hand. If I get to heaven and God says, you weren't right about that one, I'll be like, yeah, I wasn't really sure. But, and I'm not going to quote a verse to help support this, okay? I just think that this could be true. I think it's entirely possible that the people in your family who came before you are made proud and joyful by what you do here. I think it's entirely possible that my papa still smiles in heaven every Sunday morning when I get to preach. I think it's possible. I like to think that could be true because in Hebrews it talks about this great cloud of witnesses watching us from heaven. And we acknowledge that it's our turn to run our race because of that, because they're watching, because God has commissioned us to run this race. What should we do? Well, it tells us that we should throw off the sin and the weight. This translation I read from the ESV and it says that we should lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely. I think it's the NIV that phrases it like this and I kind of like this phrasing better. It says that we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that is set before us. Because it's our turn to run, we should run the race that God has laid out for us. Because we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, including God himself, we should run the race that he has laid out for us. And to do that, to run that race effectively, we should throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. And I love that there's two things included there. Because as Christians, we kind of know the deal, right? We kind of know as Christians, no matter where we are in the theological knowledge spectrum, we know that when we become a Christian, we should try to not sin. I think we get it. Even if you're here, you're a brand new Christian. You're here, you wouldn't even call yourself a believer, you're spiritually curious. One of the things that you're loosely aware of about the Christian faith is, if you want to sign up for Christianity, we should try to not sin. I think we all know that, right? But here he says we should throw aside the sin that keeps us from running our race and the weight. So verse one introduces the idea that something might be prohibitive rather than sinful. It introduces the idea that something in our life might be prohibitive of running our race rather than simply sinful. A good example of this, this isn't true anymore because I'm just not in this rhythm of life, but an example of something that if you would ask, is this sin, you would say no, but is it prohibitive? Well, probably yes, is for me in years past, the NBA playoffs. When Lily was born five years ago, I was in the habit of waking up every day, and I still am. I just come down and I do it in the office. But at this point, I was in the habit of waking up every day and spending time in reading and spending time in prayer. But when we had Lily, she started waking up at like six o'clock in the morning every day. So I realized if I wanted to get that time with God, if I wanted to have my quiet time and do what I say is the most important habit that anybody can form is to wake up every day, spend time in God's word, spend time in prayer. If I wanted to do that, then I needed to get up at five. And so I got in a rhythm of waking up at five, having an hour to myself and God, and then Lily, I'd hear a little wah upstairs. I would read my Bible, I would pray, and I would read a spiritually encouraging book until I heard Lily. That was my rhythm. And then when I heard her, I'd put that down, I'd go upstairs, I'd be ready to be a dad. But when the NBA playoffs rolled around, I wanted to watch those things, man. I love the NBA playoffs. I don't care for the NBA regular season. There's 82 games. There's too many of them. It's a waste of time. Half the teams are going to make the playoffs anyways. We all know which teams are going to be at the beginning of the year. What's the point? But the playoffs are fantastic. I love watching those. The problem with the playoffs, especially in the early rounds, is there's three, four games a night. The last one will come on at 9.45 or 10.30. They're every night. So if you want to watch all the games, and I do, you would stay up, I would stay up late watching those games. And you say, is it a sin to watch the NBA playoffs? I mean, I can't point you to a Bible verse that says yes. But here's what I knew. Here's what I saw in myself season after season. I would watch these games. I would stay up late. And suddenly, I'm like getting up at five every day. Suddenly, I'm getting up when I hear Lily's voice. Suddenly, I'm out of sync in my walk with the Lord. I'm falling out of that daily discipline. Or if I could make myself wake up at five, how good do you think my prayers were after four and a half hours of sleep? Not very coherent. Not really giving God my first and my best, right? So for me, what I learned, was it a sin for me to watch the playoffs? I don't know. Was it prohibitive of me running my race? Yeah, it was. So that was a weight, something that was prohibitive, that was preventing me from being as effective in my life as possible that I had to lay aside. So what I started doing is recording the late game, then I would get up at the normal time and then just watch and then just fast forward through the breaks while I was holding and tending to Lily, which is kind of a better way to watch a game anyway, so I've kept that practice. But I love this idea of something that can be prohibitive and not simply sinful because of that. It's important that as we consider running our race and as we consider, as we calibrate our own morality for what our soul and our spirit can handle, for what's good for us and for what's not good for us, I want us to actually move away from asking a certain question. Let's stop asking, is this sin? Don't ask, is this sin? Ask instead, is this helpful? When you're thinking about allowing something in your life, or you're thinking about something in your life that you have, don't ask, is this sinful? Ask, is this helpful? I don't know about y'all. I don't know how often you talk about this. But as a pastor, I get this question pretty frequently. Is it a sin to blank? Is it a sin to binge watch Breaking Bad? Is it a sin to watch the playoffs? Is it a sin to just have maybe more drinks than I should on like a Friday when I don't have any responsibilities the next day? Is it a sin to do blank? Can I just tell you something? That's a Bush League question to ask, man. That's a little baby Christian question to ask. Is this sin? And I don't mean to be too mean about it, but really what that question implies is, what's the bare minimum I have to do to keep God happy with me? Is it a sin to do blank? Like, how does God feel about this? Are we still good if I do this? This is us admitting when we ask that question. It's us admitting, what's the least amount of effort I can put into my faith so that I'm still keeping God happy? And here's the thing. The least amount that you can put into your faith to keep God happy is to accept Christ as your Savior. And the good news is that's the only thing you can ever do to keep God happy. It's to simply believe in the sacrifice of His Son. Once you do that, you are as loved and as accepted and as approved of, and God is as proud of you as he will ever be. After that, it's simply about living in his goodness. But when we ask questions like, is it a sin if I blank? That's Bush League, man. That's small thinking. We need to ask instead, is this helpful? Is it a sin for me to stay up late and watch the NBA playoffs? Probably not. Is it helpful in my race? No, it's not. Is it a sin when I get my screen report back at the end of the week and I've looked at my phone for four and a half hours a day? I don't know. Did that help you run your race? Is it a sin to watch this particular show? It's got a little bit of nudity and a little bit of violence and a little bit of cussing, but I think it's okay. I think it's all right for me. I think I can watch that. And what I've noticed over the years is as Christians decide whether or not a show is appropriate for them to watch, that the scale of their morality operates in direct proportion to the quality of the show, right? The better the show, the more okay things get, right? Because we really want to watch it. Is it a sin to watch a show that may be borderline? I don't know. Is it helpful to you? How does your soul feel after you watch it? You feel like you need a shower after you finish watching the show? Then maybe, yeah, I mean, it's not helpful, right? I think we think about morality like people who are trying to cheat on a diet. Like if you could go over to the Olympic Village when Michael Phelps is swimming in his 11,000 different events that he does for every Olympics. He's won like nine gold medals in one Olympics, I think. If you go over there and he sits down for dinner one night knowing that he has a big race the next day, he's not looking at a steak with crab meat on top of it and some sort of cream sauce going, is it bad for me if I have this steak? No, he's thinking, is this going to help me win my race tomorrow? I don't want anything entering my body that's not going to help me accomplish my goal. We need to stop thinking like Christians trying to cheat on our diets and start thinking like athletes trying to perform in the race that God has set us about. So let us, in our moralities, stop asking, is something a sin? And start asking, is this helpful? Does this help me run my race? Now listen, this idea, this admonishment from, in this particular case, the author of Hebrews, to run our race, to let us lay aside all the weight and sin that entangles and run the race that is set before us, that's an idea that's common throughout scripture. That means live the life that God wants you to live. That means be the person that God created you to be. It said this way in this chapter, which happens to captivate me because I'm a competitive guy and this stuff resonates with me, but maybe it doesn't resonate with you. Maybe the way that Paul says it in Ephesians resonates with you more. When Paul says in Ephesians 2 verse 10 that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that we might walk in them. This idea that the creator of the universe designed you very intentionally, created you in Christ, he purposed you, he set you down, he wound you up, he set you down, and he faced you towards some good works that he designed you to do. So go walk in those good works. Or maybe we like the imagery that we find in Timothy when Paul again explains that God is the master of the house and that we are all vessels. We're all utensils within the house and he's going to reach in the cupboard and he's going to pull out the utensils he needs to get the things done that he wants to get done. So just be ready to be a vessel. Maybe we like the way that Jesus tells us to do this. When he says that we are to be a city on a hill, or a light to the world, or the salt of the earth, maybe we prefer that imagery. Or maybe we like it when Jesus just comes out and just says it flat, straight up in the Great Commission, going to all the world and preach the gospel, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. It's all the same idea, guys. It's all the same stuff. It's just repackaging to try to connect with us in different ways based on different personalities that shared it when they wrote it in the Bible. But it's all the idea of we run our race. We live our life that we've been designed to live. And this idea is not a new one to us. Again, even if this is your first view at Christianity, if you're not very familiar with it at all, one of the things you know fundamentally is that if you are going to sign up for this life, then you're committed to trying to get your act together so that you can follow God better, so that he can use you more. That is a ground level foundational understanding that all of us have of the faith. So we can add to it that we shouldn't sin and we shouldn't allow things in our life that are prohibitive from running this race. But this effort to throw off the sin and the weight that entangles and run the race that is set before us, walk in the good works that God designed us to do, be the city on the hill, make disciples of all the world, however we want to phrase it, this idea that that's what we should be doing is one that we're familiar with. So the more interesting discussion is how. How do I run my race? How do I do that? How do I throw off the sin and the weight? That's to me where the rubber meets the road because none of you came in here this morning thinking in your lives that I have nothing in my life that I need to get rid of. I have nothing that I need to add to my life. I'm doing pretty good. If you did, email me. You're the new pastor. I'm going to sit down for a few weeks and listen to you. None of us came in here thinking that. The real interesting question, especially for Christians, is how do we do it? Okay, there's some stuff in my life that doesn't need to be there. I know. How do I get rid of it? There's some things in my life I need to start doing. I know. I've been trying. How do I actually get that to take? And I think that this question resonates with us so much because for most of us, if not all of us, for all of our lives, the answer to this how, okay, how do I get rid of things so that I can run my race? The answer to that question has been white-knuckleled discipline. It has been try harder. Draw more lines. Make more declarative statements. Double down on it. Last time I tried to beat this, I failed, but I didn't do this. I didn't take this step, so this time I'm going to draw the line here, and I'm never going to cross it again. And we try to eradicate sin from our lives with white-knuckled discipline. And we could use any sin here as an example. Anyone would fit. I'm going to go with the sin that is very common now, something that a vast majority of us have dealt with, or at least a majority of us have dealt with, which is this idea that we can pull out our phones and we can look at anything we want to at any time. And a lot of times, in a lot of days, we look at things on our phone that we ought not look at. But you could pick worry. You could pick gluttony. You could pick selfishness. You could pick greed. You could pick any sin you wanted to and place it here. But by way of example, let's choose the sin of pulling out our phone and looking at stuff on there that we ought not be looking at. And maybe this has been a habit in our lives for a long time. And we hear a sermon like this and we go, yeah, I'm going to throw off that sin and that weight. I'm going to stop doing that. I don't need to do that anymore. I want to run my race. How do we do it? And this is a sin that you've tried to beat before. And you do it by white knuckle discipline. God, I swear I'm never going to do this again. We put timers on our phone. We set it aside. We call our friends. We ask for some accountability. We commit to a new regimen of quiet times. We're going to do whatever it is we have to do. This is the time I'm going to beat this sin. How'd that go for you before? If you have ever drawn those lines in your life before, then I know that you have also failed. White-knuckle discipline, maybe because we're dumb Americans, is the only thing we know to try to get better at things. But when we're talking about sin, that doesn't seem to work, does it? And when we try to white-knuckle our way to holy, what we end up doing is failing. And when we fail, one of two things happen. Either we think we are not good enough for our God or our God is not big enough for our sin, right? We read these passages that we're no longer a slave to sin. I can walk in total freedom. And we're thinking, well, it certainly feels like I'm a slave because I don't know how to stop picking up my phone and looking at stuff I'm not supposed to look at. I don't know how to not have that drink when no one's around. I don't know how to not think those thoughts when no one knows what I'm thinking. I don't know how to not gossip about people when I know I should just keep my mouth shut. I'm told I'm not a slave to sin, but it doesn't feel like it. White-knuckle discipline leaves us in this place of disillusionment where we're disillusioned with ourselves and we're disillusioned with God. So just doubling down on effort, leaving here and going, I'm going to try really hard to run this race. You will for a couple days. If you have really good discipline, you might even do it for a couple of weeks. But eventually, and you know this in your soul, you'll be right back to the same stuff that you've already been up to. So then, how do we do that? How do we run our race? How do we actually succeed in throwing off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles? Hebrews tells us how, and it's beautiful. Hebrews chapter 12, verse 2. Here's the answer. You want to know how to throw it off? You want to know how to finally get over that sin? Look. Verse 2. You want to know how to defeat sin in your life? You want to know how to throw off the sin and the weight that prohibits you from running the race? Then listen to me. Your soul was created to and yearns to run. You want to know how to do that? Focus your eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of your faith. Doesn't that make so much more sense? Focus your eyes on Christ, on the single one, on the Messiah, on whom all the streams in the Old Testament converge, on whom all the hope in the New Testament relies, on whom all the hope in the New Testament church looks forward to. Focus your eyes on Christ, your high priest sitting at the right hand of God in his majesty in heaven who's going to come back on a white horse and make everything right again, who by his death and by conquering the grave and by ascending back up to heaven has won for you redemption so that you can look forward to an eternity where there's not any more stuff that doesn't make sense, where the weeping and the crying and the pain are former things. They are not a part of reality anymore. We focus on that Jesus, and when we do that, we throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles. How do we get rid of the things in our life that we don't want in our life? We focus our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. We do what we've been doing for the past five weeks in Hebrews, coming here every week and going, hey, Jesus is a pretty big deal. And you might say, okay, that's moving, that's good. How does that actually, how does that work? Well, I think it works like this. Jesus says in the Gospels to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added unto you. And at first read, it kind of seems like God is saying, prioritize me first and I'll give you all the things you want. Focus your eyes or seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and I'll make you a billionaire if that's what you want. But that's not at all what that verse means. What I've come to understand that verse to mean over the years is when we seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, that our hearts start to beat in sync with the heart of Jesus. Our heart begins to be enlarged by the things that move Jesus' heart. The things that Jesus celebrates become the things that we celebrate. The things that grieve the soul of Jesus become the things that grieve our souls. And the more we seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, the more our heart beats in rhythm with God and the things that we want for others are the things that he wants for others. And the things that we want for ourselves are the things that he wants for us. And so in Hebrews, when we're told to focus our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith, we're being told that because as we focus on Jesus, as we fall more in love with him, as our heart begins to beat in rhythm with his heart, then our interest in the other things, our interest in the sin and the weight that so easily entangles, they simply fade. They simply go away. If you want to focus on not looking at your phone, then don't think about not looking at your phone. Think about Jesus. And what you'll find is the more you focus on him, the less interested you are in whatever's on this stupid device. We think that to throw off the sin and the weight that entangles us in our life, that we need more discipline. We don't need more discipline. We need more Jesus, man. We don't need more discipline. We don't need more strength. We don't need more American cowboys running around there trying to white-knuckle their way to holiness. We need Christians who admit that we can't do it, who know that our strength is insufficient, who have had plenty enough life lessons in however many years we've been trying to walk with the Lord to know good and darn well that we don't have the strength to will our way to holiness. That our only hope for any of this is Jesus anyways. Let me show you what happens when you focus your heart on Christ. When you focus your heart on Christ, he so fills you up that you don't have room in your heart for things that he doesn't want. When you focus your heart on Christ, you don't have to ask yourself, is it a sin to watch this particular show? You just have to ask, does my soul really want me to consume that? We're so focused on Christ that our heart is beating with us. The things that we shouldn't watch or shouldn't participate in aren't nearly as tempting anymore. If you've ever had the experience of being on a diet and really sticking with it and learning how to eat right, it's amazing to me how a month into a diet, stuff that you used to go nuts over, you're now looking at that going, oh, I know what that's going to do to me. I don't want to touch it. Just give me the salad. And six months ago, Nate would be like, salad? What's the matter with you, man? And now I'm like, I don't want to deal with all the stuff that's going to happen if I eat that big hamburger. Just give me something light. I've got things to do. The more we focus on health with Christ, the less interesting other things are to us in our life. And here's the other thing. A heart that is growing in love towards Jesus does not have space in it to grow in love for other sins. A heart that is growing more and more in love with Jesus every day, a heart that is waking up and spending time in God's word and time in prayer. A heart that is coming to church and taking in the message and singing exuberantly to God when given the opportunity. A heart that is embracing small group and talking about spiritual things in small group and finding other outlets, other things, other things to consume during the week and turning off the radio if you still have a commute, if that's a thing that exists in 2021 and just taking some quiet moments between you and God, a heart that wakes up thinking, how can I begin to pursue Jesus better today, does not have space in it for the sin and the weight that we've been carrying for years. So let us not focus on the sins that we need to eradicate. Let us focus on having hearts that are so full of Christ that there's no space for the other things in our life. And then here's what it does that I think is really, really practically valuable for us as we think about getting rid of the sin and the weight in our lives. Focusing on Jesus creates an untenable tension in our hearts. Focusing on Jesus creates an untenable tension in our hearts. Take whatever sin you want. We've been using the sin of looking at your phone, of looking at things you're not supposed to. And I'm going to skirt the line of being too liberal and casual with sin here, but if we could sit down in my office and you would come to me, whatever your deep, dark sin is, whatever the thing is that eats your lunch that makes you think that I wrote this sermon for you, that thing, whatever thing that is, if you could come to my office and sit down with me and you say, Nate, I've been struggling with this for a long time. I want it out of my life. What do I do? I would tell you, listen, take that sin, whatever it is, and set it aside and acknowledge that it has become so ingrained in you and who you are that there are parts of your psyche that you don't even know that whether it's a dopamine hit or whatever it is, that you're going to rely on that as a crutch. That's going to continue to be a sin for you. And I would even encourage you, don't think about it. Don't think about trying to stop it. Just think about more Jesus. Just focus on Christ. And if you wake up in the morning and you have a quiet time, and you focus on Jesus, and then at night you do the thing that you're not supposed to do, but you know good and well that you're going to have that quiet time in the morning, and you make yourself get up, and you make yourself have that quiet time, even though you feel like garbage for what you did the night before, and you keep doing that, eventually you will create an untenable tension in your heart where either Christ or the sin is going to win, but you can't keep straddling the fence like you've been doing. Either I'm going to keep having my quiet times and keep focusing on Jesus and keep pursuing him on a daily basis and stop doing the other things that make me feel like a hypocrite when I do this, or I'm just going to walk away from Jesus entirely and I'm going to embrace this sin. And you're here this morning because you don't want option two. You want option one. So quit worrying about the sin that we need to get rid of in our life. Start worrying about consuming more Christ, and that will naturally eradicate the other things in our life by creating an untenable tension in our heart where we say to ourselves, if I'm going to get up tomorrow and pursue Jesus, I don't want the feelings of what this thing is going to give me when I do that. So no thanks today. And if we can do this, simply focus on Christ rather than focusing on our sins, I think what we will find on the other side of that focus is a freedom that we've never had before, is a belief and a hope that we've never experienced before. There's a picture in Malachi when it says that a forgiven person skips like a calf loosed from his stall. I want you guys to run through life like that. I want you guys to run the race that your soul yearns to run, and I want you to acknowledge with me that we don't do it by white-knuckle discipline and trying harder. We don't will our way to holiness. We admit defeat. We admit that we need Jesus. We focus our eyes on Christ, the founder and perfecter of our faith. And we allow his enlarging of our heart to eradicate within our heart the desire for anything but him, slowly but surely over time. That's how we deal with sin. That's how we throw off the sin and the weight that so easily entangles and run the race that we were designed to run. So my prayer for you is that you will run it. My prayer for you, after walking through Hebrews together, is that our hearts will be so enlivened by Jesus, so impassioned for him, that we will continue our pursuit of him to the expense of everything else in our life so that as a church, as individuals, we will skip like calves loosed from our stall, that we will run the race that God created us for, that our souls yearn to run. That's what I want for you. And that's what I'm going to pray over you right now. Father, would you please help us to run our race? We, all of us, have folks in heaven who are cheering for us, who I believe are made proud by us. God, we hope that the way we live our life, that the humble decisions that we make, not the great grand things that we do, but the daily decisions to pursue you and the results that come from that. God, we hope that those would make you proud. God, give us not the strength, not the discipline, not the determination to run our race. Give us the focus. Give us the humility. Give us the passion. Give us the desire for Jesus that we need to run our race. God, if there's someone who can hear me who feels like they have a sin or a weight in their life that is just dragging them down, I pray that you would breathe that fresh air of hope into them this morning for the first time in maybe a long time that it might be possible to live life on the other side of that sin. That it might be possible to run with you without that encumbrance wrapped around their ankle. Father, would you focus us on Jesus and captivate us with who he is so much so that our hearts have no room in them for anything but him. It's in his name, our high priest, that we pray. Amen.
