Have you ever wondered if it was all worth it? All the emails and phone calls, special projects, late meetings, early mornings and out-of-town trips? Frantically shuttling bodies back and forth and cobbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be with you in person. It's good to be with you online. Thank you for continuing to join us in that way. As Michelle just said, it is nice to have faces. They're hidden behind masks, which gives me the benefit of pretending like you're all just smiling at me the whole time. So that's how I'm picturing you. It's just nice and friendly and kind, so I appreciate that. Last week, we started our series called Vapor, which is a study through the book of Ecclesiastes. So I would actually say this, if you're catching up later this week, if you're listening to this on like a Tuesday, or you're watching online and you didn't catch last week, stop. I would encourage you to stop and go back and listen to last week. Do it on double speed, or if you really want a good laugh, listen to my voice on half speed, because that sounds funny. But listen to the last one and then catch up with this week. Because again, this is a series and it's not really made to stand independently of one another. We kind of need all of the parts to understand the four separate parts. And so last week was a downer. Last week was a bummer. I warned you ahead of time that you're not going to feel good at the end of that sermon. This one is not much different, all right? So just buckle up. This is Ecclesiastes, and I think it's good and ecclesiastical for us to sit in the difficult sometimes, for us to sit in hard reality sometimes. And what we said is that this is the bleakest book for the bleakest month. And I don't think I need much of a backup. This winter has been terrible, just gray and dark and rainy. It's the perfect time to go through Ecclesiastes. Solomon is the author of Ecclesiastes, and he writes it towards the end of his life and just hits us with some stark realities. And I continue to contend that on the other side of these realities, if we can accept the reality that we talked about last week, which is the idea that most Americans, most people in our culture are wasting our lives. He calls it vanity of vanities of striving after the wind. It's vapor. That's why the series is called Vapor. It's that Hebrew word, a hevel, that means vapor or smoke. Here one minute, gone the next. Seems like you can reach out and grab success or grab happiness or grab something worth pursuing and that when you get to it, it's gone. It slips through your fingers and we don't have it anymore. So the difficult reality that we confronted last week was just that, that most of life is vapor. Most pursuits, when we get to the end of them, we will find them to be empty. That's a difficult reality, but it's an essential one. We're going to face another reality this week, and I continue to believe if we will face these bravely, that what we'll find on the other end of them is this immutable joy, this joy that can be untouched by circumstance. I believe that we'll find the satisfaction on the other side of these realities that really is abiding. I think that we'll become more grateful for God and more desirous of Jesus for him to come and for our relationship with him. And so we're going to wade through these things as a church. Now, I ended last week with that thought, that it's my belief that Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes, would tell most Americans, a vast majority of people in our culture, that you're wasting your life. You're chasing vapor. And then I said, well, God gives us something that is worth chasing. What is that? And I said, we're going to talk about it next week. And then I prayed and we went home. Or, well, I went home. You guys just stayed where you were. So this week we want to start off by answering that question that we left off with. What is the thing worth pursuing? If it's not ambition, if it's not career, if it's not pleasures, if it's not monuments to ourselves, if it's not security, if it's not the book knowledge and general wisdom, what is it that's worth investing our life in? Well, I think that Solomon would answer that question like this. He concludes, based on my reading of Ecclesiastes, Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. Solomon concludes that pleasing God is the best pursuit. The best investment of your life, the best way to spend your days and get to the end of your years and not wonder, did I waste my life, is to spend those days pleasing God. The best way to reach joy, to grab onto something that's not vapor, that is substantive, is to spend your days pleasing God. That's what he says. And I believe that he intends that because he says it multiple times throughout the book. Look with me at what he writes in Ecclesiastes. We'll start in chapter 8 and then we'll be in chapter 12. He says, And then in chapter 8, And then he ends the book this way, Ecclesiastes 12, 13. He sums up all the teachings and he says this, Fear God, keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. If you were to go to Solomon, the author of Ecclesiastes, and say, what's worth it? What should I do? He would say, fear God and keep his commands. We can talk about everything. We can talk about all the different pursuits. We can talk about all the different realities. We can be confronted with all the difficult things in life. We can accept the problem of pain and the vexation of wisdom. We can do all of that. But at the end of the day, here's what matters. Pursue God, keep his commands. This is the whole duty of man. That's what we are to do. That's what he has tasked us with. And this is Solomon's, I think, tip of the cap. It's his acknowledgement of what's called in theological circles, proverbial wisdom. Solomon also wrote the book of Proverbs. And in the book of Proverbs, there's a lot of if-then statements. If you do these good things, God will bless you with these good things. If you make choices like this, you will reap blessings like this. If you do dumb things, you will reap a bad harvest. If you choose folly, if you choose foolishness, if you choose sin and indulgence, then you will reap a harvest that is equitable to those indulgences. One of the ones that I think of is there is a verse in Proverbs that I've always loved because I truly believe in that phrase, you show me your friends and I'll show you your future. We're the average of the five people that we spend our most time around, all of that stuff. There's a verse in Proverbs that says that the companion of the wise will become wise and the companion of fools will suffer harm. And that's generally true, isn't it? If you hang out with people who are wise, who make good choices, eventually you're going to start making good choices like them. If you hang out with knuckleheads who make bad choices and have bad priorities, eventually you're going to start making bad choices like them. And the result of their bad choices and the result of your bad choices is going to be the harm that you suffer. And so in general, that's true, isn't it? That if we hang around with good people who we want to be like, we look at them and they have things in our life that we want, we'll begin to adopt their values and we'll take on some of their characteristics. Similarly, if we spend our time with people that don't share our priorities and make bad decisions, we're going to continue to make those bad decisions. Some of you guys have lived this out in your life, right? I mean, for some of you, your story is you were hanging out with people who are not bad people. They just have different priorities than someone who's just become a believer. And you become a believer, and now you have different priorities in your life, and you come to the painful realization of, gosh, I need another set of friends. I don't want to just walk away from these people. I love these people, but I need other folks speaking into my life who share the priorities that I do. For many of you, that's why you found church. Not that your friends are bad people. They just no longer share your priorities. And so you want to hang out with other people who do share your priorities. And Proverbs tells us that if you'll be the companion of wise people, that you'll be wise. If you'll be the companion of foolish people who make bad choices, then you're going to suffer the consequences of those choices. Likewise, all throughout Proverbs, another one of those if-then transactions is. I don't have a specific verse. I should be a better pastor who looks one up, but I didn't, so just go with me. It says in plenty of places the idea that if you work hard, if you put your head down and work hard and be humble, then at the end of your life, you will reap a harvest of wealth and security. If you work hard, you do your job, consider the ant that works even when it doesn't have to. If you'll do that, then by the end of your life, you will have amassed and built up, and God will honor your good work and your toil. Likewise, if you are lazy, a little sleeping, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come on you like an armed man, okay, says Proverbs. So if you're lazy and you just kind of want money to come to you, you just feel entitled and you deserve all this stuff, then you're never going to reap the benefit of wealth and security. And so here's what Solomon is saying in Ecclesiastes. That proverbial wisdom, if you please God, your life will go better for you. If you surround yourself with wise people, then you're more likely to prosper. If you do work hard and put your head down, then you're likely to build up. You're likely to be successful. Solomon acknowledges that. The end of the matter is this. Fear God, keep his commandments. Pursue him, do the right things. Honor that proverbial wisdom. But then he gives us this other reality. Then he gives us this caveat to that. Because what we know is that we need a caveat there. Because plenty of us know people who have hung around good friends, who are surrounded with wise folks, and have made terrible choices. Plenty of us know good people who are surrounded with other good people who have experienced what we would consider an unfair amount of pain, pain that seems like it would be waiting on folks who invest their lives around bad people. Likewise, we all know people who spend their time around knuckleheads and seem to be doing great. We also know people who have worked really hard, who have kept their head down, who have done their part. They get to the end of their life and they're still living hand to mouth because of a bad deal or because of a child that costs a lot of money or because of difficult diagnosis or whatever it is. And we know people who have been lazy and do seem prosperous. And that causes us to go, what gives? What do we do when proverbial wisdom doesn't ring true to us? We turn to Ecclesiastes, where I think Solomon writes this book later in his life. And what he says is, yeah, proverbial wisdom, those traditional accepted teachings of living a moral life and God honoring that and us being honored for it, that's true. But he wants us to know something. Even if you live that life. There's a whole section in my Bible where it says the vexation of wisdom, where he says, I even pursued wisdom. I did the right things. I honored God. I kept my nose clean. I walked the straight and narrow. I pursued purity. And even in that, you know what I found? A degree of vanity, a degree of vapor, a degree of chasing after the wind. And so the other reality that I want us to confront this morning in Ecclesiastes is this. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Obedience does not protect you from pain. Somewhere in our faith and in our churches, we've gotten this idea that the more I clean, I keep my nose, the more God will protect me from pain in my life. The more I walk the straight and narrow, the agreement is, God, I'm gonna follow your rules and you're gonna offer me protection. This is why when someone who is good and is wonderful and is loving and seems to be all the things that maybe we feel like we're not, when we watch them get sick or we watch them pass away or we watch bad things happen to them, we kind of feel this sense of unfairness, right? We kind of feel this sense of, why is that allowed to happen? Well, Solomon says it happens because our obedience does not protect us from pain. It doesn't opt us out of it. It doesn't opt us out of struggle. I think one of the most dangerous, pernicious lies in Christendom is that the more I honor God with my life, the more He'll protect me with His sovereignty. And it is not true. We do not get that idea anywhere in the Bible. As a matter of fact, this is what Solomon says. This is what he has to say. And this is why I believe that that's his point. He makes this point that obedience will not protect us from pain multiple times in the book. He says it over in chapter 5. I'm sorry, chapter 9, verse 11. He says, You think you're really smart and that's why you're successful. No. You think you're dumb and and that's why you can't seem to make a way. No. Time and chance happen to us all. No one dodges the raindrops of tragedy and pain in their life. He says it over and over again in the book, but the best way he says it, the most profound way he says it, in chapter three, the first eight verses of chapter three. If you have a Bible, I would encourage you to look at that passage with me. And normally I don't read eight verses in a row in church service because I find it disengaging sometimes when pastors do that. But this is so beautiful and so poignant and so important that it felt unfair to you guys to pick out one as a synopsis. So we're going to read it all together. Not aloud, that would be weird. I don't do that kind of weird stuff, but we're going to read it together as I read. Ready? For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted. A time to kill and a time to heal. A time to break down and a time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to cast stones away and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing, like pandemics. A time to seek and a time to refrain from embracing like pandemics, a time to seek and a time to lose, a time to keep and a time to cast away, a time to tear and a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. It's such a beautiful, elegant truth that he details out for us there. And there is a place where I want us to land, but there is another takeaway from there. It's not the point of the sermon, but I thought I would be remiss if I didn't make this point as we go through this beautiful passage together. There's a time for everything, and we ought to let those seasons have their time. We shouldn't jump from one to another. What makes me think of this is this. This last fall, I had a bunch of buddies come in town, and we all kind of took a weekend and just hung out. It's just a guy's weekend. We were supposed to golf most of the time, and it rained, so we just sat around. But it was fun. My friends and I, that's what we like to do anyways. We're just old men. But I have one friend named Dan, and Dan, he is the opposite of me. He is enthusiastic. He is on fire all the time. He loves to yell and be loud and celebrate things and cheer and be happy. He never meets a stranger. Dan is a weirdo that talks to people in elevators and I'll never understand it. He'll just chat up whoever is around him, right? And I love Dan. I had lunch with Dan the other day, but on that particular trip, Dan at the time had a pregnant wife and three small children and had just moved across the country. And both he and his wife were looking for jobs, and they're looking for houses, and they're trying to figure out how to get their kids in school. So when he came to that weekend, his life had been a pressure cooker, and he needed to release, right? So Dan wanted to dance, and he wanted to yell, and he wanted to scream, and he wanted to be be excited and I didn't want to do any of that. I just wanted to sit there and be quiet and have no one ask me any questions. And Dan's like, Nate, come on, let's go. And we're watching some dumb game and he wants me to be invested in it and I don't care. And there was a tension there. And I felt in my soul, as I frequently do, my grumpiness well up. And all I wanted to do was say, Dan, why don't you shut up for like maybe 30 minutes, dude? Can we just chill out? But I kept talking myself out of doing that. Because what I realized is, Dan's my buddy. And what he needs is to blow off some steam. It's his time to dance. It's his time to yell and be boisterous. It's his time to be loud and to laugh and to be joyful. That's his time. And if I rain on that parade, I am the worst of friends. If I don't recognize in myself that it's his soul's time for those things, and I don't allow him that time, I am the jerk of all jerks. So I just sucked it up, and now we joke around about it. Likewise, when someone around us is sad, when someone around us is mourning, when someone around us needs to cry, shame on us for robbing them of that time too. And shame on you for attempting to rob yourself of that time. You guys know that we just walked through something pretty difficult as a family, and that we lost Jen's dad. And there were days when she would just look at me and she would say, I'm sad. I'm just sad. And I would say, then be sad. Then today's the day to be sad. And that's all right. And there will be more days when we're sad. Our souls need those days. They're cathartic for us. They're required by us. And shame on us if we try to rob our friends and our loved ones of the sad days that they need too. Those ought to take their time and have their season. I think what we try to do is we try to skip the bad ones, right? We try to skip past, I don't like this time of mourning. I want to skip to my time of laughter. I don't like this time of stillness. I want to skip to the time of dancing. I don't like this time of sadness. I want to skip to my time of joy. And what Solomon is saying is, no, there's a time for both. You can't experience true joy if you don't let yourself walk through true grief. The dancing isn't as joyful if you haven't set in pensive silence. Right? So I didn't want to move past this passage without making the point to you guys, without imploring you, let the seasons have their time. When it's a time for dying, let it be a time for dying. When it's a time for birth, let it be that. If someone you love needs to be sad, let them be sad. Don't be the clumsy moron that tries to convince them that what they're going through is not that sad. Our souls need the good times and the hard times, and we shouldn't skip them. But what I really want you to see from this passage today is that if what he writes is true, there's a time for mourning, and there's a time for joy, and there's a time for gladness, and there's a time for sorrow true, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for joy and there's a time for gladness and there's a time for sorrow and there's a time for dancing and there's a time for stillness. If that's true, then all of those times are coming for all of us. Do you understand? It doesn't say for the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous there are more times to laugh. For the righteous there are more times to build things up. For the righteous there are more times of joy. For the righteous, there are more times to laugh. For the righteous, there are more times to build things up. For the righteous, there are more times for embracing. No, it just says that this is objectively true. Everybody walks through these seasons. The righteous and the unrighteous. The godly and the ungodly. The devout Christian and the militant atheist. All of us walk through these seasons. And it may feel weird to you that I'm hammering this point home that like, hey, guess what, guys? At some point or another, life is cruddy for everybody. But it is. It's also joyful for everybody. But no one dodges the raindrops of pain and tragedy in their life. Nobody. And if we will accept that, then what we can learn and see from this passage is pain is not punitive. Pain, hurt, struggle, hardship, that's not punitive. That's not God exacting revenge on you for a failure in your morality somewhere. That's not God punishing you. Pain is not punitive. It is the result of brokenness. We don't experience pain and hardship in our life because at some point in our past, we displeased God with the choices that we make, and now he's exacting his revenge on us. That's not how it works. Pain is not punitive. Pain is a result of brokenness. We've talked about this before, but God created heaven and earth, and he created it perfect, and then sin ruined that perfection. And ever since then, the world is broken. And in a broken world, divorces happen and abuse happens and people get cancer and we have to watch Parkinson's and all these other diseases eat away at people that we love. In a broken world, cruddy things happen. And what Solomon is acknowledging is not only do they happen, but they happen to everybody. And yes, in general, proverbial wisdom is true. In general, if you honor God in the way that you make your choices, then you will be honored as well. But just understand that that isn't a blanket insurance policy against pain because time and chance happen to us all. And we walk through all these seasons equally. And it's important to know when we get there that that pain is not punitive. That pain isn't something that we warrant with our behavior. This actually shows up in the New Testament. Someone is blind, and the disciples look at the blind man, and they say, what happened to him? What did his parents do that he's been blinded like this way? They thought pain was punitive. They thought his actions warranted, or his parents' actions warranted what he did. And Jesus says, now this world is just broken. He says what Solomon says. In this world where we wait for Jesus to come back, like Romans 8 talks about all of creation groans for the return of the Savior, for the return of the King, for Jesus to come and make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. And spoiler alert, this is where we're going to finish the series. But while we wait, we all walk through these seasons. And it's so important for us to understand that pain is not punitive. Here's why I think this. I don't know if I have permission to share her story. If I don't, I'm sorry. Kay Gamble also sits on our finance committee and approves my expenses on a monthly basis. So, you know, she has a way to nail me if she doesn't appreciate me sharing this story. But Kay is a wonderful lady who goes here and a few months ago was diagnosed with breast cancer. The doctor looked at the breast cancer and said, I think it's offerable. I think we can get it. I think it's going to be okay. She went in. She got it. And Kay, if you know her, she's quiet. Of course, she doesn't tell anybody about this. I only hear about this after the fact. They go in. They get it. Everything's good. Doctor says, we got it all. I think you're going to be in good shape. You don't have to do chemo or anything like that. We're going to give you a pill to kind of be on the safe side. You'll take that for five years, but you're good. You can go on with life as normal. So there's some pain and then a relief. Everything's good. Then she gets a call a couple of days later. The doctor said, hey, we took another look at that cancer, and it's the kind that likes to spread a lot. So we're going to have to be pretty aggressive with this, and we're going to need you to start doing chemo. Man, we're all old enough to know what chemo is. We know what that does. We know what that looks like. And we know the kinds of days that Kay is facing. And that stinks because Kay's good. And I want her to know that those cruddy days that she has to walk through are not God punishing her. That's not punitive. She doesn't have to search her soul and say, God, what have I done in the last 10, 20 years of my life to warrant this pain? What have I done to warrant this bad news? How did I disappoint you? How did I displease you? What would you like me to do now, God? Would you like me to give more, serve more, or love more? Which the answer is always yes to that. He would always like us to give and love and serve more. But not as a shield to pain. And how crushing would it be to go through life thinking that every time we experience some form of difficulty, some form of grief, that that was somehow God turning the screws on us so that we learned our lesson better. What I want Kay to understand in this season of cruddiness amidst the chemo is that it's just simply her turn. It's her turn. Her life stinks for a little bit. And guess what? All of our lives stink for a little bit sometimes. They have before, and here's the fun thing, they're going to again. It just will. It's Kay's turn. Recently, it was our turn. For some of you, it's still your turn. I know stories of people and loss and tragedy that we've experienced just in this church. And I just think that there is something tremendously comforting about looking at a season of grief with the understanding of, it's my turn right now. It's my time to mourn. But what I know is, eventually it'll be my time to sing. It's my time to tear things down. But eventually, if I put my head down, it'll be my time to build things up. And in this way, and I think that this is beautiful, Ecclesiastes empathizes with our experiences. It actually empathizes with us. It's a brave, bold thing to say. To admit, yeah, we should obey God. We should pursue the proverbial wisdom. But what a wonderful admission in the Bible that actually syncs up with our experience to say sometimes bad things happen to good people. I've told you before, I had a roommate in college who was a better person than me in every way possible. He graduated. He became a pastor. He was leading churches before I was, and I always admired him more than I cared to admit, and he dropped dead at 30 of a widow-maker heart attack playing ultimate frisbee with his friends. It will never make any sense to me how he left and I stayed, and how his wife Carla and his boys had to walk through that. I remember his five-year-old knocking on his coffin wondering when he was going to wake up. But what Ecclesiastes says is, it was Chris's time to die. It was Carla's turn to walk that hard road. Sometimes bad things happen. And even though the best possible investment of our life is to pursue God and godliness, we need to do it eyes wide open knowing that that does not protect us from tragedy. We're never told that it does. That time and chance happen to us all. What a difficult thing it would be to have to try to sync up my faith to somehow explain away Chris's death as deserved. What a difficult thing it would be to try to help Carla find a path back to faith, which she has found, if part of that explanation would be, well, you guys deserve this because of your behavior. Ecclesiastes looks around and goes, yeah, sometimes life doesn't make sense. Sometimes it seems unfair. And sometimes it's just our turn. And we understand that everybody takes a turn. But here's the thing. I have been kind of sitting in that reality for a while in my personal life. It's been our turn recently. Our turn's still not over. And I've been studying this book, which is stark, man. But somehow, despite all of that, in thinking about what awaits us in the next two weeks and allowing my life to sit in that. And we're going to come back next week. Next week's going to be happy, I promise. Next week's going to be great, all right? We're going to cry some happy tears next week. It's going to feel better than this. In the midst of everything that we have been walking through, because of the promises that are in Ecclesiastes and because of the encouraging things that he writes that we're going to talk about next week. I can honestly tell you that for me personally, I am sitting in the middle of a time of more profound joy than I think I've ever experienced in my life, of more gratitude for my God, more gratitude for my Savior, more of a desire for Him. And I want you guys to experience that joy too. And so next week we're going to come back and I'm going to tell you all about it. Let's pray. Father, life's hard sometimes. We are so thankful that you gave your servant Solomon the courage to admit that. Father, we all have to hurt sometimes. We are thankful that we have a Jesus who weeps with us in our pain. Lord, if it is someone's season to be sad right now, I pray that they would just be sad. And that that would run the course that it needs to run. God, if it is someone's time for joy right now, let them be joyful. Let them be exuberant. Let them feel your presence and your joy. For those of us who are walking through a hard time, Lord, I pray that we would be comforted by this stark knowledge that sometimes it's just our turn. And I know there are folks who feel like, gosh, it feels like it's been my turn a lot lately. Lord, I pray that you would give them lots of turns of joy too. Let all of this, our pain, our triumph, our struggle, and our joy, draw us near to you. Either in gratitude or in need, Father, draw us near to you. And Father, I pray that in that drawing that we would find what David describes as the fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. Help us see more and more our gratitude for you and our need for you. It's in your son's name that we pray. Amen.
Have you ever wondered if it was all worth it? All the emails and phone calls, special projects, late meetings, early mornings and out-of-town trips? Frantically shuttling bodies back and forth and cobbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? First of all, how about our boy Brad Gwynn lending his voice to that video? He did a great job. If you see him, if he comes out of hiding and you can identify him, tell him that you were impressed. This is the first part in our new series called Vapor, and I'm going to tell you all about that in a minute. But I also want to acknowledge that, Lord willing, this is the last 100% virtual service that we have to do at Grace Raleigh as the elders voted to resume in-person gatherings next week on February the 14th. So I'm looking forward to having people in this space as the service was starting. Erin came up to me and she said, just think this time next week, there will be people here. We will see smiles and we can talk to other folks because listen, I'll be honest with you. I'm tired of making small talk with Emil, our keyboard player, every week. We're out of things to talk about. I need more of you to come here and create a buffer between me and the band. I'm sick of it. But we're looking forward to seeing you next week. Those of you who can join us, those of you who can't, who don't feel comfortable coming back yet, we totally get it. Your experience is going to be the exact same. So don't worry about that. And finally, if this is news to you, if you didn't know that we were resuming in-person gatherings next week, then that just means that you're not on our email distribution list. And if you'd like to be, whether you're watching on YouTube or watching on our website, there's a link below that you can click, fill out some information, and you'll get all the latest news from Grace Raleigh if that's something that interests you. Now, like I said, this series is focused on Ecclesiastes. It's called Vapor, and you're going to find out why at the end of this sermon today. I love the book of Ecclesiastes. I think it might be my favorite book. It's definitely my favorite book in the Old Testament because Ecclesiastes just tells the truth, man. Ecclesiastes is stark. I relate to Ecclesiastes. I appreciate the courage of Ecclesiastes. But the way to think about it, I think, as we approach it together as a church, is to really think about the idea, what if Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, some of these people who have climbed the mountains in their life, they are at the mountaintop. They have all the success that you could possibly want. They have all the things, all the toys. Anything that we would look at to say, I'm going to pursue that and that's going to make me happy. That's going to make me content. That's going to provide me joy and provide what feels like a fulfilled life. Certainly they've done. And so what if at the end of their lives, they wrote a memoir and they said, after I've done everything, after I've accomplished everything that there was to accomplish, from my view on the mountaintop, let me tell you what I see. Let me tell you as I look back over the years of my life, what was worth it. Let me tell you what really brought me true joy and true contentment. Let me tell you where I felt most fulfilled. And let me tell you what I regret doing. Wouldn't you want to read that? I would. I would love to know at the end of their lives when they did everything, the American dream, everything that any of us would ever want to do, they've done. I would love to know at the end of their life what was worth it, what made you happy, and what was a waste of time. That's what Solomon does for us in the book of Ecclesiastes. Now, many of you know that Solomon was the son of David. He was the third king of Israel. We may know that he wrote Proverbs and Song of Solomon as well in the Bible. But what you may not know or remember, I think I've mentioned this in years past, but Solomon was really a very accomplished king. He was the wisest man to have ever lived. He strengthened the army. Really, Solomon's life was he drug a third world country into international prominence, into being a first world country. Economically, he raised the stakes. He built a port city to begin to receive tariffs from other nations. He built great monuments. It was a great time of peace. He built up an infrastructure within Israel and was the greatest king that they ever saw. He was a rich, wealthy man. He had everything that you could ever want. And he got to the end of his life, and he writes for us the book of Ecclesiastes, where he does exactly what I said would be great. What if somebody who had been to the mountaintop wrote a book and told us what they saw? That's what Solomon does. But what I love about this book is what I alluded to earlier. It's bleak, man. It's stark. We've been joking as a staff that we have saved the bleakest book of the Bible for the bleakest month of the year. Everybody hates February. February's tough. Ecclesiastes is tough. It is unflinchingly honest. Ecclesiastes really, parts of it isn't trying to make us feel good. It's just trying to tell us the truth. Ecclesiastes puts in our faces some pretty difficult realities. And if you're really paying attention, if you really care about the message, it's tough. But it gets a bad rap, I think the book does, because it's not just bleak. As a matter of fact, the reason I love this book is not just because it's unflinchingly honest and just blunt and just tells you how it is without any cushion or anything like that. But I actually believe that if we will courageously confront the stark realities presented in Ecclesiastes, that on the other side of that confrontation awaits us true joy and true contentment. I actually think that if we'll confront the realities in Ecclesiastes that we'll come out the other side with a greater capacity for joy, with greater contentment about the blessings that we have now, with a greater appreciation for God and with a greater desire for Jesus. And so that's what we're going to do. We are going to confront what Ecclesiastes places in front of us. We're going to sit in some difficult realities. And so I'll tell you this. First of all, this series is just that. It's a series. It's designed in four separate parts with the intention that you would consume all four of those parts. So I usually don't say things like this, but I would encourage you that if you miss a week, try to catch up before you listen to the next week or watch the next week. The last series we did, Things You Should Know, those were kind of standalone sermons. You could drop in at any point in the series, listen to the sermon, it would make total sense, and that was fine. Some series are designed that way. This one is designed to build on one another. Because of that, I'm just going to go ahead and tell you on the front end, I'm going to bum you out today. Today stinks. I'm not going to say happy things today. I don't have good news for you today. We're going to get to the end. I'm going to be building this tension to a place where it feels like now Nate's going to give us the good news, and then I'm not. I'm just going to pray, and we're going to go about our days. So just know that up front. I'm telling you now. Because I feel like that's the ecclesiastical thing to do. That's what ecclesiastes would want us to do. Sometimes we have to sit in the difficult parts of life. Sometimes we have to let things stew a little bit. And so that's what we're going to do this morning. This book starts out with what is, it has to be the most depressing opening of any book of the Bible. It's 11 verses, it's this poem or stanza, and it's just, here you go. It's just, everything stinks is what Solomon does at the beginning. I'm not going to read you all 11 verses, but I did want to give you a sense of the sentiment of this passage. And so I'm going to read you verses 3 and 4 and 7 and 8 as kind of summary verses of how Solomon chooses to open up his memoir telling us how he found what he really believes leads to true contentment and true joy. This is what he writes in verse 3 and 4. That's rough, man. That's rough. He says he sees all the toil. A generation comes and they pour out and they build up and they build armies and they build buildings and they have careers and they build families and then they go. And then the next generation does it. And then that generation fades away and the world remains the same. It doesn't matter. It's just an endless cycle. And then he has this line. I think it's such a great line. I love this picture. All the streams flow to the ocean, yet the sea is never filled. All the water on all the continents, all the little brooks and streams flow to rivers, and all of those rivers empty themselves out into the sea. All the water from the world is emptied out into the sea, and yet the sea is never filled. The eye can never see enough. The ear can never hear enough. That's bleak. But it's true, isn't it? You feel that it's true. You know that it's true. It feels appropriate on Super Bowl Sunday to bring up a quote from the undisputed king of Super Bowls, Tom Brady. It's hard for me to say this. For those of you who don't know, if you haven't heard of Tom Brady, God bless you. You are a fortunate person. But I'm going to fill you in, okay? He is quite simply, and this is hard for me to say, the greatest football player who's ever lived. He just is. I'm a Peyton Manning guy. I like Peyton Manning. I don't like Tom Brady. But darn it, he's good at football. Every other sport has these conversations about who's the greatest of all time, and I pick this guy, and I pick this guy, and we kind of debate back and forth. Football, that's done. There's no debate. He's the best ever. Today, he plays in the Super Bowl. He already has six championship rings. He's won six times. Do you understand that if he wins today, that he will have more Super Bowl championships as an individual than any single franchise in the NFL? That's absurd. The dude's ridiculous. And he was asked recently, Tom, which one of your championships is your favorite? Which one of your Super Bowl wins is your favorite one? And when that question was posed, I immediately thought, well, it's the first one, right? It's got to be the first one, because that's kind of, he cracked the egg there, and that was the sweetest, and then after that, you know, whatever. Or maybe there was one where there was some life circumstances going on, and it made that one particularly sweet. So I was interested in the answer. And without missing a beat, he just kind of smirked and he said, the next one. The next one's my favorite one. The next one means the most. The eyes never tire of seeing. The ears are never done hearing. All the streams flow to the ocean, and yet it's never full. It's just a fact of life, isn't it? It's never enough. Dude's won six Super Bowls. Couldn't Atlanta just have one of those? The most important thing to him is the next one. And that's how we are too, isn't it? Every time we buy a house, what do we do? We know what our budget is. We know what's smart to spend. But then this house at this level has these features that I really, really need. I didn't need them before, but now I need them or I will not be happy. We buy at the apex level, right? We always want the next promotion. We always want the next thing. We always want the next vacation. We can never have enough good meals. Look at me. I can never have enough good steak. I always want the next one. How am I going to cook that one? Who's going to come over then? We're always thinking about the next thing. We always want more, more for ourselves and more for our kids and more for our families and more for our friends. We always want more. We never tire of seeing or hearing. Solomon's right. He's right when he opens up that way. And we in our guts know it. But he doesn't just do these blanket statements where he says, guys, listen, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. He actually gets into specifics. He gives us his different pursuits. And he starts off the next chapter and a half, the second half of chapter one and all of chapter two, he details these pursuits. The first one he says is that he pursued wisdom. He pursued wisdom. And this doesn't mean just biblical wisdom. This is like academia. This is knowing a lot of things. This is he was a very learned man. He says this. He says, So he decided, I'm going to make my life about being smart. I'm going to make my life about pursuing wisdom. I'm going to be the smartest person in the room, in every room that I go into. And by all accounts, he did it. He says here, I knew more than any of the kings that preceded me. I am the smartest person in the room. And then we also know, and I mentioned this already, that he was the wisest man to ever live. Solomon knew all the stuff, man. He had the doctorates. He probably had some honorary doctorates. He knew who the minority whip was in 1976. Like he knew the things. He was up to date on current events. He understood photosynthesis. Like he got all the stuff. He could answer the questions. He was the one you wanted on your trivia team. Like I said, he was the smartest person in the room in every room that he went into. He was the best. He had accomplished that. He climbed that mountain. He was the obnoxious guy that has an office lined with bookshelves that just kind of say to you with a smug smirk, yes, I've read all these and I know everything they say. That was Solomon. But at the top of that mountain, he says this in Ecclesiastes 1.17, I perceive that this also is but a striving after the wind. It was a waste. I banked my contentment and my joy and my happiness. I made my life about pursuing wisdom, about being the smartest person in the room, about reading all the books and knowing all the things, and I did. And from that mountaintop, it was a vanity of vanities. It was a chasing after the wind. I wasted my time. So, he pursued pleasure. He decided that he was going to pursue pleasure and deny himself nothing. Look at how he describes it. I said in my heart, and that's exactly what he did. He had the best parties. He drank the best drink. He had the best food. I bet he committed a big portion of his life to throwing these big royal parties that were just the absolute best. They were super fun. He had all the biggest people come in. He brought in international celebrities, and they went after it. He was a member of the best country club. He sat on the porch, and he had drinks with his buddies every afternoon. He went on the shopping trips and he did the vacations and he had all the fun. I don't know what an ancient yacht looked like, but his was trending on Twitter when he got it. I guarantee it. He had all the stuff. He had all the fun. And then when all that fun, when all that partying wasn't enough, he built monuments. He built things for himself. Like I said, he built a whole city with a port in it. He built a temple. He built a wall around Jerusalem. He did public works projects. He had the lake house, right? He went ahead and sprung for the beach house. He got the top floor where the elevator is the front door. He went ahead and got the fun car. He went ahead and he bought the boat. He did all of that. He had been there. And then he pursued carnal pleasure. We find out other places in Scripture that the man had 300 wives and 700 concubines. He literally denied himself nothing. If his eye saw it and he wanted it, he had it. And I think that's important to understand because I think often that's what we think would make us happiest. If I could just have the thing, then my life would be better. If I could just move into that neighborhood, if I could just have a relationship with that person, if I could just be done with this relationship and start a new relationship with somebody that is X, Y, or Z, if my kids can just accomplish this thing, if I just didn't have this problem in my life, if I could just have that job. We often set our eyes on things and think, if we could just have that thing, I would be more joyful and content. If I could just have that thing, I wouldn't be so stressed. And what Solomon is saying is, he had the thing. He had all the things. He had 300 wives and 700 concubines. He built, he had vacation homes. He did all the fun things. If his eye saw anything, he had it. He denied himself nothing. And from that mountaintop, Solomon says this, His eyes never tired of seeing. His ears never tired of hearing. All the possible streams of pleasure were flowing into his life and it was never full. All he wanted was the next one. Maybe if he just had a few more wives. Maybe if he built another city. Maybe if he had another boat or did another deal, then he could rest. He says, nope, I had it all. And it was a vanity too. It was a chasing after the wind. And then he turns his eyes to one more thing and he pursues ambition, career. He pursues accomplishment. He built up the kingdom. He drug it out of the third world into the first. He was successful at this. He was the CEO that first takes a company into being a Fortune 500 company and then a Fortune 50 company. He nailed the GameStop stock several times in his life. He knew what he was doing. He accomplished great things. He chased career. He chased power. He got all the promotions you could possibly want. He did way better with the company than anyone ever thought he could. He was the one that you went to to say, what should I do with this deal? He accomplished everything that there was to accomplish in career. And at the end of that, at the end of that pursuit, he again said, this is a vanity of vanities. It is a chasing after the wind. In Solomon's conclusions to his different pursuits, I'm reminded of another football story. Maybe this is appropriate for Super Bowl Sunday, or maybe I just need to expand my experiences. But if you like football, then you will also like Brett Favre. He was a great quarterback for the Green Bay Packers in the 90s. And Brett Favre is one of these good old country boys. He played at Southern Miss. He coaches high school football now. He still does interviews with a sleeveless shirt on because he can. And he's just that kind of guy. And he kind of, I heard a story from one of his wide receivers one time that he would literally, the coach would call in a play and he would, we're not going to do that, and he would literally draw a play on the dirt in the NFL field and tell everybody what they're going to do. That's just the kind of guy he was. So everybody liked him. And there's a famous story that after his first Super Bowl in 1997, they won. And the media is looking for Brett to ask him some questions about winning. And nobody can find him anywhere. So somebody, one of the staffers or trainers, goes to find Brett, and they actually find him in a bathroom stall, hunched over, crying. And I don't know exactly how the conversation went. I read this years ago, but the thrust of it is they found Brett crying and they said, what are you doing? And he goes, I just thought that there would be more. What do you mean? He said, I thought it would feel different than this. I thought it would feel better than this to finally win one. Can you believe that? He gave his whole life, dedicated his whole life to the craft of football. Little League and high school, it consumed his college years. Then he devoted himself, and he had a rocky beginning as a quarterback. It took him a while to get his feet underneath him and to prove himself. And now here he is. He's the best player on the best team, and he just won the biggest game, and he was the MVP of it. And his conclusion is, I just thought it would feel better than this. I thought I would finally have something. But it's the same conclusion that Solomon draws. Vanity of vanities, chasing after the wind. And I think that that is such a perfect conclusion for Solomon to have drawn, for Brett Favre to have stumbled into. Because that phrase, vanity, or chasing after the wind, really, if you read this in the original language, comes from the Hebrew word hevel, H-E-V-E-L, hevel. And hevel is really best translated as vapor or smoke. It really means vapor or smoke. It has kind of this enigmatic quality. It's this picture of, if you think of smoke, smoke is there, you can see it, and it looks like if it's solid enough, if it's coming off of a big fire, that you could reach out and grab it. But if you reach out to wrap your hand around it, it just slips through your fingers. It's there one second, you see it, it's very real, but as soon as the flame goes out, you kind of just watch it dissipate. It's there one minute. It's gone the next. Right? And that's what Solomon says all of those things are. You think that pleasure is going to make you happy. You think that if you just get the next thing, if you just get the next house, if you just have that next relationship, that when you get there, that's what's going to make you happy. That's what's going to do it. Then your soul can rest. He tells you that when you get to it, you're going to reach out to grab it. And it's going to disappear. You're going to look at it. You're going to see it. You're going to turn your head. And then when you look back, it's going to be gone. And you're going to start chasing the next thing. That's why this series is called Vapor. Because that's what Solomon says it is. As a matter of fact, I believe, based on Ecclesiastes, that Solomon would look at a vast majority of Americans and say to them, you're wasting your life. You're chasing vapor. It's going to disappear on you. I think he would look at the vast majority of people in our culture and remind them, all the rivers flow to the sea. It's never going to be full. You aren't either. You're wasting your life. The good news is, God gives us something that's not vapor. That's not a waste. But we're going to talk about that next week. Let's pray. Father, would you let the weight of Ecclesiastes rest on us? Would you let us sit in this? Would we honestly consider what in our lives is vapor? Will we consider, God, what are we chasing that we can never catch? What is it that we want that will never satisfy? Father, I ask specifically for those listening, those people who call grace home, would you give us the courage that Ecclesiastes requires to admit to ourselves and to you where we're chasing things that we can't catch? Would you create in us an earnest desire to reach for the things that we can have that will satisfy us, that will ultimately draw us near to you, that will help us desire Jesus even more. Would you be with us throughout our weeks, Lord? Help us to be people who pursue you, who want to know you, God, who lean into you. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.
Well, good morning, Grace. It's good to be with you in this way. I am excited for the fifth part in our series called Things You Should Know, where we're looking through things in Scripture or that come up in church or in Christendom that we are familiar with, we've heard of before, but maybe we don't know how to explain or maybe it hasn't been discussed or maybe we're just too far down the rabbit hole of faith to raise our hand and ask about these things to get some clarity. And so what we wanted to do, so that you didn't have to ask those embarrassing questions in small groups, is take five weeks here at the beginning of the year and talk through some of these topics that we may have questions about, because we don't really discuss them all the time. This morning, I wanted us to look at grace and mercy. Grace and mercy are two things that we see come up in Scripture a lot. We're going to look at Scripture in a little bit to see how replete it is with references to God's grace and God's mercy. And we sing songs about them. We certainly know about them. We've heard about them. The name of the church is Grace, for crying out loud. But I wonder how many of us would be confident in whatever your working definition of grace is. I wonder how many of us would be confident understanding mercy or explaining it to our kids if they heard those words and said, hey, what does that mean? How many of you would feel comfortable going, I got this, I'm going to knock this out of the park? If I asked those of us listening and watching, hey, could you explain grace and mercy to the church? Could I get you to come in one Sunday morning, I'm just going to bring you up on stage, and you tell the good people of grace what the name of the church really means. Now, I have no doubt in our church, we would do a good job. There would be, I think, a myriad answers across a wide range of definitions using a lot of unnecessary words that would be mostly right. But I think it's worth it as a church to take some time and define these words in a simple way and understand what grace and mercy really are. Because when we understand God's grace and God's mercy towards us, I think that we can't help but want to respond in exuberant praise. I think when we really understand what's going on with grace and mercy, when we really properly understand those two characteristics of God, that it inspires within us a response of gratitude, and that gratitude manifests joy, and it ought to make us want to leap out of our skin and praise our good God. Which is why we've positioned the sermon at the beginning of the service this week, and we're going to transition right into worship as I wrap up the sermon. Because I wanted to give you guys a chance to respond to the reality of God's grace and mercy. So with that in mind, and I would also say, for those of you who are listening to this or me, not on Sunday morning, if you're catching up later in the day, if you're listening on a podcast in the car or on a walk or something like that, as you listen to my voice right now, I would encourage you, plan to listen to some praise and worship music on your own at the end of this sermon. Just go ahead and budget some time in your head to listen to two or three songs or just have it playing in the car and allow yourself to respond to what's shared here this morning. But with that preamble, I wanted to jump right in to defining these words for us so we have a working definition here at Grace. So mercy, the way I understand it, is simply when we do not get what we deserve. Mercy is when we do not get something that we deserve. When our actions or our attitude or our behavior warrants punishment, something punitive, or just some natural consequences, and we don't receive those consequences, we don't receive the punishment that we deserve, when we've earned some trouble and we don't get into that trouble, that's mercy. So mercy is simply when we don't get something that we do deserve. Think of it this way. Pretend you've got a 16-year-old son. He's just got a new car. He's got the keys. And part of the deal with having the freedom to drive is that there's a curfew. And his very first time out, he goes out with his buddies and he breaks a curfew. And he understands that you guys have set up these rules that if you go and you break curfew, when you come back, we're going to take your car keys for a week. That's the deal. All right? So he gets back, he's broken curfew, and what he deserves is for you to take his car keys. And instead you say, you know what? I hope that you remember this. I want to forgive you. I'm not going to hold this against you. Go into bed. I'm not going to take your car keys. Right? That's mercy. He does not get a punishment that he does deserve. He doesn't get the consequences that his behaviors warrant. You just showed your son mercy. That's what that is. So mercy is when we do not get something that we do deserve. Grace, conversely, is when we do get something that we don't deserve. Grace is when we get a special favor or a blessing that we did not earn, that our behavior does not warrant. So we go back to the 16-year-old kid. You've forgiven him and you've sent him to his room, go to bed. I'm not going to take your keys. You can continue to have that freedom. You deserve that punishment, but I'm not going to give it to you. But grace is this. Maybe part of the agreement with your son is if he's going to have the freedom of driving, then he has to be responsible and earn his own gas money, which is a pretty fair driving arrangement across, I think, all families. That's a pretty typical arrangement. You're going to have a car, you've got to pay for your gas money. And because you love him, and because you want him to be blessed, and because it seems like he felt particularly bad about breaking curfew, not only do you send him to bed without taking his keys, but then after he's gone, you take his car and you sneak over to the gas station and you fill that thing all the way up for him. And you leave it there as a surprise the next morning. That's grace. Grace is the full gas tank that he doesn't deserve. He just broke the rules, man. He doesn't deserve that at all. He doesn't deserve any special favors. But because you love him, because you're a good parent, you fill up his gas tank. That's grace, right? And it's important that we understand these concepts because they are all over Scripture. Scripture shows us over and over again that God shows us mercy and that God shows us grace. I went through this week and just kind of looked at some of the passages, and I wanted you to see a few of them. So I'm going to read them kind of machine gun style real quick here. There's going to be three in a row for mercy, and then we're going to talk about these. But just look what Scripture has to say about mercy. I love this one in James. This is just a snippet of the verse, but it's a simple phrase. James writes that mercy triumphs over judgment. And then on in Lamentations, back in the Old Testament, the scriptures say, And then finally, Paul writes in Ephesians, What we see in those verses very clearly is that God's mercy is the forgiveness of our sins. God's mercy to us is forgiving our sins, is not giving us the just punishment that we deserve for our sins. I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but when we sin, it is offensive to Creator God. When we sin, we take up arms in a violent insurrection against God's domain in the universe. Last week, we talked about Satan, and we talked about his fundamental sin that is all of our fundamental sins, which is to look at God and to say, you're supposed to be up there. You're supposed to be the authority figure, but I don't want that to be true in my life, so I'm going to be my own authority figure. When we sin, when we choose something that is outside of God's will, what we're saying to God is, I don't accept your authority in my life. You're not the boss of me. I'm the boss of me. You don't make my decisions. I make my decisions. You see, when we sin, it is an active rebellion against the way that God created us. God is the creator. We are the created. I'm firmly convinced, and I've said it before, that that's why Genesis starts the way it does. The very first words in the Bible are, in the beginning, God created. It establishes that relationship, creator, creation. In charge, subservient. And when we sin, we go, I don't like that you're in charge. I want to be in charge. And we rebel against God. And God sent his son in light of that rebellion to make a path back to him so that we could spend eternity with him. And God says, when we sin, listen, you can't spend eternity with me anymore. You can't do it. You're imperfect. You've offended me. You violated the terms of the agreement. I am taking your keys. And then God sends his son to make a way for us to go to heaven anyways, for us to spend eternity with him anyways. And what do we do? We trample on that. We sin again. We demand forgiveness again. And I'm not sure that we stop and realize the miracle of God's mercy, the miracle of his forgiveness. When we do, that phrase in James, mercy triumphs over judgment, becomes really amazing. We deserve judgment. We broke the rules. He should take our keys. But he doesn't because our God chooses mercy and mercy triumphs over judgment. Jesus tells Peter, when Peter says, how many times should you forgive someone when they wrong you? Jesus says, 70 times seven. As many times as they wrong you, show them mercy. It's in his very nature to do this. Even though we are involved in a rebellious insurrection against Creator God, He looks at us in all of our offense. And for many of us, we're not talking about ignorant sin here. We're not talking about this thing that we did and now we realize, oh my gosh, I shouldn't be doing that. Now that I'm acquainted with Scripture, I know better. I'm talking about the willful sin that you and I commit every week, every day. Who am I kidding? That's offensive to Creator God. And yet he shows us mercy because lamentation says his mercies are new every morning. Every day requires more of God's forgiveness. Every day we break curfew and every day he gives us mercy for that. He withholds the punishment from us that we do deserve. He withholds the separation from us that we do deserve, the damnation from us that we do deserve. That's God's mercy. But it gets better because I think God's grace adds another layer on top of that that's even more remarkable. Look at what Scripture says about God's grace, just two verses really quickly. In Ephesians, Paul writes, for by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God. And then on in Romans he writes, and we are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. So mercy forgives us. God's mercy forgives us, but God's grace restores us. You see? God's mercy says, you're forgiven. I know you messed up. I know you broke curfew. You're forgiven. But then God's grace says, and I've made a way for you to be in my family. He fills up the tank. God's mercy says, I no longer hold your sins against you. God's grace says, because of that, I sent my son to die for you, and now you have a seat at my table etern, Do you understand? God's mercy says we messed up, we've offended Creator God, we've willfully sinned, and we've offended Him, and we deserve punishment, and He says, I'm not going to punish you. And He could stop there. He could say, I'm not going to punish you, I'm not going to punish you this one time for breaking curfew, but don't mess up anymore. And then if we mess up again, then we're done. We're toast. That's it. But in his grace and in his goodness, he doesn't stop at forgiveness. He stops at restoration. Not only are you forgiven, but now here, have a seat at my table. Not only are you forgiven, but now you are an adopted son or daughter of the king. You are an heir to the universal throne. Not only am I not going to hold it against you, not only am I going to clothe you in the righteousness ofal son. For those of you who are not familiar with it, I'm about to give you the quickest, worst rendition of it ever. All right. I've preached about this before. I can do a better job than this, but for the sake of time, we're going to look at some essential details. The parable of the prodigal son goes like this. There's a father who's wealthy and he has two sons. And one of those sons, the younger one, looks at the dad and he says, you know what? I really just want your stuff. I don't want you. Can you just go ahead and give me my inheritance? I'd rather you be dead anyway. Just give me my money so that I can live how I want. And that father, in his goodness, for reasons I don't understand, says, okay, fine, and gives him the money. And the son goes off into the city and he spends it on living in ways that just feed his appetites and his lusts. And he runs out of money. He spends it in totally dishonorable ways. He comes to the end of it. Everybody leaves him. He can't find a job. He ends up eating slop on a pig farm. And one day the Bible says he comes to his senses in this really poignant moment and he decides, I'm going to go back to my dad's house. But he works out this speech in his head where he's going to go back and he's going to say, I'm going to go back and I'm going to tell him, can you just please forgive me and let me be your servant? I don't deserve to be your son anymore. What I've done is too offensive. Will you please just let me be your servant? Because they live better than I do right now. And so he heads home with this speech in mind, which, by the way, it's a pretty fair speech, right? Dude took his dad's money, went off and spent it however he wanted to, wasted it on debaucherous things, and then comes back with his hat in his hand. Yeah, you're darn right he doesn't deserve to be a son anymore. He should live as a servant, at least for a few years, right? But he goes back, and the father sees him from a long way off and runs out to greet him. And the son starts in with his speech, dad, I'm so sorry, I don't deserve, yada, yada, yada. And the dad shuts him up right away, flings his arms around him and hugs him. And in that moment, the son knows that he's forgiven, that his father's not going to hold those things against him. That's mercy. But he doesn't stop there. He takes the ring, the signet of the family, and he puts it on his son's finger. And he takes the robe and he takes the slippers and he puts those on the son. And then he goes and he kills the fattened calf, the really good stuff. And he throws a big, huge party. And he says, my son is back, and he welcomes him right back into the family, which he didn't have to do, and his behavior didn't warrant. It's the perfect picture of the mercy and the grace that God offers us. We're the prodigals. We run away and make willful decisions to offend our God, to throw off his authority in our life and be our own authority. And then at some point or another, we come back, hat in hand, apologetic, I'm so sorry. And he forgives us. But he doesn't just forgive us. He restores us. He doesn't just say, hey, I'm not mad at you. Come here. You would expect that he would say, you're forgiven. Get away from me. I need a minute. That's not what he does. He says, you're forgiven. And then he hugs us. And then he sends his son, his only son, whom he loves, who was perfect, who never offended him, to die for you and for me. He gave us that gift. Do you understand? We don't deserve the grace of Jesus. We don't deserve that. We didn't earn it. Our behavior doesn't warrant it. Nowhere in the scripture is there a contract that says when we break the law and offend Almighty God that he owes us the death of his son? That's not the deal. But he does it anyways. That's grace. And in light of that, the mercy of forgiveness and the grace of restoration, we should want to exuberantly praise our God. But I'm also aware of the fact that many of us, as we listen to this, if you look at the ends of the spectrum of, Nick, you better shut up so I can start praising God right now. I'm about to jump out of my skin. And then, oh, okay, that's cool. I think I understand grace and mercy a little bit better now. A lot of us are closer to this end. A lot of us have responded in our heads and in our hearts to what I just said in that way. Oh, okay, yeah, I get it. I understand that better. That's good. Thank you. And it makes me wonder, me included, why we're on that end of the spectrum. And as I thought about that this week, I could only include that it's probably because we're all entitled brats. We're probably on that end of the spectrum because there's a very good chance that the two to three hundred adults I'm talking to right now are really just entitled brats. Here's what I mean. I just want to give you a picture of my daughter's life. I have a daughter named Lily. She just recently turned five. This is her last six weeks. Before you get offended at me calling you an entitled brat, which I did just do, just hear me out. Lily's last six weeks have been unbelievable. She is, through no fault of her own, incredibly entitled now. I ran this by Jen. She's not happy I'm saying this, but we've accepted that it's true. Here's what's happened with her. In December, we as a family spent basically the month down in Athens, Georgia with Jen's family as her dad transitioned into eternity. And in doing that, with Christmas coming up, there are people here in Raleigh who love us and who love Lily and wanted to make sure that Lily got a gift. So a couple times I would come back to Raleigh to take care of some church stuff, and there would be packages waiting on me at the house. I had, I literally, the first time I came back, this is embarrassing, we had some neighbors collecting our mail for us. I had to get a wheelbarrow and go down to their house and fill it up with all the stuff that was waiting on us. And then they pulled a wagon and we unloaded it at my house. That was Christmas arriving at the Rector's. That's us. And other people had like dropped things off at the door. So now I go home, I'm getting these gifts. I take them back to Lily, who is now opening these gifts like, hey, all these people got you these things. Okay, great, thank you. So she's opening them. We're trying to do the video with excitement. She's trying to fan excitement, but she's four at the time. She's not really good at this yet. She doesn't know that's part of the deal when you get gifts. So she's already getting gifts in early December. I made another trip back. There's more stuff waiting. I bring that back. I go ahead and give that to her because we know that there's Christmas coming. We don't want to mute those things. Then at Jen's house, because of things going on, we did early Christmas with her dad. So all the grandkids go in and she's now opening three or four other gifts from her grandparents. Thank you for these and these and these. Then Christmas Eve, we have real Christmas with Jen's family and she gets more gifts. Then the next day we go to my family's house and she gets more gifts, right, on Christmas. And so now the situation in a state that we don't even live in is at my parents' house, there's a pile of gifts that's too big to carry back to Jen's parents' house. So we just have to leave it there for a second. At Jen's parents' house, she has gifts strewn across three stories of a home, including inside a princess room that her grandfather made for her while he still could that she gets to sleep in, complete with lit teepee, okay? This is her life. There's a mess of toys there. There's some on the main floor. There's a basement that she's adopted as a playroom. And then there's toys in the playroom that my parents have for her. And then she comes back. We don't get back until early January, right? When we get back, there's more gifts waiting on her because people at the church love her and are so good to us. And then her birthday's on January 15th. So on January 15th, prior to that, more gifts are showing up at the house. She's opening them up. She lives in a, in a, like a dang gift parade. It's a totally normal thing for her to come home and open up to like, hey, these two things came for you today. And she just opens it up like they're nothing. Then on her birthday, the neighborhood kids come over and give her stuff she doesn't need in exchange for cake that they don't need. And then the next day we have church drive by where the families come through and they hand her more stuff that she doesn't need. And we wave at them in the freezing cold, and we just have so much junk all over our house. And to this child, it's totally normal. She has no idea that she lives inside of a gift parade. They just show up every day. And what Jen and I have realized is she's entitled. Now, I will say this. She is not a brat. She's not that. That word was for dramatic effect only. She's sweet and kind and loving, but she has no capacity to show the proper gratitude for all the gifts that she's been getting because to her it's a totally normal thing. It's embarrassing to me how much people love us and love her. And I don't know what I'm going to do as a dad. I've literally tried to talk Jen into when somebody gives us a gift, let's put it in a room somewhere. And then as she is good, if she has a good week, then we'll give her one of the gifts from the gift room, right? To try to help her earn it. I don't know exactly how to solve this. I would imagine that we're not on an island with this issue. But the reality of my daughter's life is she's entitled. And she doesn't know it. We're going to try to correct it. But what I understand is that that entitlement blinds her to what generosity really is. That entitlement works to mute her joy because she sees everything through the lens of this is normal. I deserve this. If I ask for a thing, I get the thing. This is how life goes. And she has no reason to believe that that's not how life goes. She's only barely five, and she's loved. See, here's the thing. I think it's great. I'm happy for her. I'm floored by the love that our family experiences. I'm grateful that she gets to live a life like that. But she has no perspective on how grateful she should really be. Because again, her entitlement blinds her to the generosity around her and serves to mute her joy that she should have when she receives a gift. I bring that up because I believe that you and I live in a stinking gift parade and we just don't know it. We live in parades of God's goodness and we don't see it. All of our life, if we grew up in church, as soon as you're involved in church, at some point or another, you're going to hear, you've sinned and you've offended Almighty God. And then as soon as that is said to help us feel better, as a capstone to it, you've sinned and offended Almighty God, but God offers us mercy, so you're good. Jesus died on the cross for your sins, so you're fine. You've sinned, you don't get to spend eternity with heaven, but God offers us mercy and sends his son to die for us, so you're forgiven. So we never have to sit in the reality of what our sin really warrants. We never have to sit under the weight of, I have sinned, I have chosen my authority over God's authority, and that has earned me eternal separation from him. We don't have to sit in that for more than 30 seconds before the pastor comes back and says, but God died for you, so we have mercy. We never stop to think that we don't deserve mercy. We never stop to consider that these gifts don't have to keep showing up at my house. We've never done the math to understand that God doesn't owe you forgiveness. Do you understand? He doesn't owe it to you. He created you. He set you on the planet. He said, these are the rules. This is how you can please me. And we've all at different points in our life said, you know, I'm not really that interested in pleasing you. He doesn't owe us forgiveness for that. We walk around like we're entitled to it. We walk around like we deserve it. We walk around like, listen, the deal should be, God, I'm going to mess up a couple times. If you could let some people kill your son, that seems pretty fair. Grace, we are not owed mercy. That's nowhere in the contract. You say, yeah, but God is love. God forgives. He is love. He does forgive. He's also just. And what we deserve is separation from the God that we've offended. But because mercy triumphs over judgment, and because His mercies are new every morning, he withholds that judgment from us and he offers us forgiveness. He offers us a mercy that we are not owed and that we do not deserve. Yet we are so familiar with it and we sing songs about it so often and we count on it and take it for granted so regularly that sometimes we treat mercy like another doll that someone handed us out the window that, yeah, of course I get this. It's my birthday. This is what we do. And our entitlement blinds us to the grandeur and the majesty of God's mercy. Not to mention the graces that we don't see. Grace is a goodness that we get that we have not earned. Grace is God's favor on our life that doesn't warrant it. We just walked through the really, and we're in the middle of the really difficult season of losing Jen's dad. His name was John. Towards the end of John's life, we found out we were pregnant with a boy that we're going to name John. What grace from God. What grace from God that he says, listen, everybody has to go. As appointed to man wants to die. Everyone's going to have to walk this path. And now it's John's turn to walk this path. But because I love you and because you're good and because you're my child, you're good because I made you good. Here's another John for you to love. That's grace. We don't deserve that. We didn't warrant that. Do you understand that the goodness in your life is grace? It's God's goodness in your life that when you get the new car and you drive it down the road and it smells nice and it looks nice and you're real proud of yourself and it makes us feel like we arrived, that happiness, that moment, that's God's grace. When we sit in our living room and our kids are back from college and we watch our grandkids scurry around or we see their joy and a gift that we were able to buy them, like that's God's grace. When we sit around with our friends and we laugh and we have a good night and we go home and we feel warm, that's God's grace. Your gifts and talents that got you where you are, those are gifts from God that are his grace. His grace is all over our lives. And if we would just stop and look around and acknowledge that we're in a dang gift parade, I think we would be blown away by God's goodness. It reminds me of one of my favorite verses in John, where he simply writes, from his fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. From God's fullness, out of the goodness of his heart, we have all received grace upon grace. He just lavishes them upon us because he's a good father and he likes to see you happy. He likes it when you cry tears of joy. He likes the moments that you share with your husband or your wife or your friend or your parents or your kids. He likes those sweet moments. He designs those for you. He doesn't just forgive you. He doesn't just say, hey, I'm not going to hold your sins against you, but he fills up your tank with gas every day over and over from his fullness. We have all received grace upon grace. He doesn't just forgive you. He sends his son to die for you and he restores you and he welcomes you into his house to sit at his table. And these little snippets of grace are just glimpses into eternity where it's nothing but grace and nothing but goodness and nothing but joy that's waiting for us, that he won for us, that he gifts to us that we didn't earn. And so I just wonder what God's grace and mercy will look like when we no longer see them through the lens of entitlement. I wonder what God's grace and mercy will look like when we no longer see those things through the lens of entitlement. When we can just stop for a second and acknowledge, yeah, I don't deserve mercy. That's not part of the deal. God chooses to show me mercy because he loves me. What will it look like if we take for a second? In a few minutes we're going to sing that song that has the line, I see the evidence of your goodness all around me. What would happen if we would look around at all the goodness in our life that's a gift from God and acknowledge that, man, we live inside of a gift parade. God has given us countless goodness and countless grace. He lavishes it upon us. His mercies are new every morning because we require them every morning. Let's this morning be grateful for God's grace and for God's mercy. Let's see them fresh and new, not through the lens of entitlement that blinds us to the grandeur of his generosity, but through the lens of humility that helps us see his grace and mercy for what they are. And let's be humbly blown away by those things. So sing along as we sing or sit and listen as we sing. But in light of God's grace and mercy, let's praise him together this morning.
My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. This is the fourth part in our series that we've launched the year with called Things You Should Know. The idea is that as Christians or as church people, there's things that we talk about, things that get mentioned that we all kind of nod along with and seem to understand, but maybe we've never stopped to slow down or had the courage to ask the questions that we have about these things. So we wanted to take a month and just kind of look at some of the different topics that come up in church world, that come up in Christendom, but maybe we have never delved into on our own, and maybe we have some existing questions about those things. Last week, we looked at the Sabbath, and I hope that your view and framework around the Sabbath was changed and that some of you are coming off enjoying one of those yesterday or have chosen today as your Sabbath, and I hope that it goes very well for you. This morning, we want to talk about the devil. I think that there may be one other time when I have preached about Satan. It's not a fun topic. It's not fun research to do. If someone got a hold of my browser history this week, they might be really worried about Nate and all the things that I've Googled that have to do with Satan and his influence. So it's not something that we talk about a lot, but it's something that we definitely need to address. I think in church circles, we hear about Satan. We hear about the enemy. We know that he's called Lucifer. We know that he's against us. We know that he hates God. We know that he hates us. But maybe we don't know very much beyond that, beyond what's maybe been put forth in pop culture or something like that. And so I thought it would be good to take a week and focus on Satan, focus on the enemy, on who he is and what he does and really what he wants, what he wants with you and what he wants with me. The best place to do this clearly is scripture. So one of the things I did this week is I sat down and I just started keeping a list of all the places where Satan shows up in scripture or references to him are made in scripture. And I made a master list of all of those and then looked at that list and found the commonalities and tried to distill down some of the essence of what the Bible has to say about the enemy. And so I found four passages that I think sum up who Satan is in an effective way, and I wanted to look at those. And then I wanted to ask the question, okay, that's who he is. How does he accomplish his goals? So to understand who Satan is, one of the first things we want to do is look at his origin. And it's worth saying that we're not exactly positive where he came from or what he does. Now, we think that we know. We think we know where he came from. Most scholars agree, but it's important to point out, and I need to be intellectually honest and say that there's no one explicit place in Scripture where it says for sure this is where Satan came from. But our best guess is found in Ezekiel and then more pointedly in this passage in Isaiah. This is what Isaiah writes. He says, This is primarily where we get the origin story of Satan. It's believed that Satan was an angel. His name was Lucifer. That's what Odaystar means, morning star. That's what Lucifer means. And we believe that he was one of the archangels. He may have even been in charge of worship in heaven. He was a powerful angel, which means if you could see him, you would see that he was beautiful and intimidating and mighty and incredible. He looks very little like the cartoon depictions of him. And one day he told a lie to himself that he could be like God. He looked at God ruling over heaven and he said, I could do that. As a matter of fact, I could rule over you. And so he decided that he was going to lead a coup or an insurrection against God to overtake heaven. And it's believed that Satan was cast out of heaven along with a third of the angels that then became demons. And that began this war, this tension that's existed for all of time that you and I find ourselves in the middle of where Satan and God the Father war over our very souls. And it's interesting to me that the first lie that Satan believed is the lie that he told us. It's the first lie that we believed. It's the lie that we continue to believe. It's the fundamental lie of all of sin, which is, I could be like God. I don't need him. I can do this myself. I can call the shots. Isn't that what he whispered into the ear of Eve? Didn't he go down and slither up to her and say, you know, he's told you not to eat of this tree because he doesn't want you to be like him. He doesn't want you to know what he knows. He grabbed her and he said, you could do that. You could be him. You understand? If you get nothing else out of this sermon, just please understand, that's the fundamental root of all sin, is deciding, you know what? I think I could be the boss of myself. I don't really think I need his standards. I think I can figure this out on my own. That's the root of all sin. And it was the root of Satan's fall, who fell from heaven and set about for all of time, warring against the Father. And in Hebrew, actually, in the language of Hebrew, his name means accuser or adversary. He is the accuser of us. He is the adversary of God. He is opposed to God and all the things of God. And so that means he is your accuser and that he is your adversary. And the sneaky and scary part is he accuses you to you. He runs you down to you. God doesn't believe what he's saying, but you might. So he accuses you and he brings shame and guilt on your conscience and he opposes you. In the New Testament, we get a little bit clearer picture of who Satan is and what he came to do. Jesus says in the book of John, he was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he lies because lying is his native tongue. It's all he knows how to do is to lie and to deceive. And it's important that we point out that these aren't simple lies. These aren't dumb, foolish lies that anybody could see past. It's not lies like the ones in this commercial that I'm reminded of from a few years ago. I think it originally started as a Super Bowl commercial, but I'm not certain. But it makes me chuckle every time I see it. There's this dad, and he's sitting in the living room, right? And his back's against the couch, and he's got the coffee table in front of him, and there's Cheeto dust everywhere. Just this orange dust explosion. It's on the couch, it's on the floor, it's on the toys, it's everywhere. It's all over the place. And he's looking at that, and you can hear kids in the distance, and one of them, looks like about a four-year-old boy, comes running through the living room past his dad and he's got a Cheeto explosion all over himself. Face, shirt, pants, hands, the whole deal. And his dad grabs him and he points at the Cheeto explosion in the room. And he says, do you know anything about this? And the little kid goes, nope. And runs off. And I love it. I think it's great. Satan doesn't tell lies like that. He doesn't tell lies with Cheeto dust everywhere that are easy to pin on him. His lies are far more pernicious. The thing to understand about him that might make us uncomfortable and should make us uncomfortable is that if he's an angel and he's eternal, he's a lot smarter than us. He's a lot smarter than we are. He knows how to manipulate you. His lies look a lot less like, no, I don't know what's going on with the Cheeto dust, and a lot more like, who do you think you are? Why do you think you could ever do that? Why do you think they would ever listen to you? What would make you believe that they could ever believe you? What could make you think that that sort of sin was okay? How could you ever possibly justify that? You are the worst. His lies are a lot more sneaky and pernicious, I think, than we give him credit for. He's excellent at lying and at convincing us of things that aren't true. In part, and this is interesting to me, I almost pulled this thread and preached about this this week, in part because in the lies and the things that he offers us, they're a little bit true. They look like the truth. He very rarely offers us something that we don't have or that we won't get. He just offers it to us right now or just offers it to us in a package that seems more attractive. He's an incredibly effective liar. And then in Peter, we see him say something. And I think it's interesting that Peter chooses to talk about the devil. Because if there was anybody in Jesus's inner circle who wouldn't show as much concern for Satan, it had to be Peter. Peter is the guy who's talk first, think later. Peter's the guy who jumped out of the boat and walked on water. Peter's the guy that when Jesus said to his disciples, you will all betray me and leave me, Peter's the one that stepped up and said, no, I won't, never, God, I will die before I leave you. And we know that he did betray Christ in this really poignant scene. But my point is that Peter was the hard charger. He was the one out in front. He was the one that was all bluster and gusto. And even Peter, who if anybody would say, don't worry about Satan, we got Jesus, he's not a big deal. It would be Peter. But listen to what he says at the end of his life in his letter. 1 Peter 5, verse 8. Be sober-minded. Be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. He prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. Listen to me. Listen to me. We don't want to think about it. We don't want to acknowledge it. But there is an active and effective and intelligent and efficient enemy of your soul who is prowling about seeking to destroy you. There is an enemy stalking around your children and around your marriage and around your husband and your wife and around your friendships and your church and your small group and the things that you hold dear, there is an enemy prowling around you seeking to destroy those things. And shame on me for not bringing that to your attention more often. It's an uncomfortable thing to talk about Satan. It's certainly not a fun thing. But based on the frequency with which he's mentioned in the Bible, it seems reasonable to think that God desperately wants us to be aware of His presence. Can I tell you for what it's worth that even as we were starting up this service this morning, things started going wrong with my microphone that have never gone wrong, not since Steve got here anyways. The Lord knows what used to go wrong with it. But things started happening and distractions were going and we came right up to the minute when we're supposed to launch the service like we really haven't in a long, long time. And I really just think it's because Satan would prefer you not think about him. He would prefer I never did this. He would prefer to continue to operate in the shadows, to continue to prowl about like a roaring lion, ever there, ever present, but never aware of him. And shame on me for not bringing him to our attention more often. But the reality is there is an incredibly effective enemy prowling around our families trying to figure out who he can pick off. So I think it behooves us to ask the question, how does he do that? How does he devour us? How does he lie to us? What's his goal? How do we know when Satan is acting in our lives? How do we know when it's just us, just our nature, just circumstance, or Satan is at play here? Well, I think that there's a really interesting conversation that Jesus actually has with Peter that sheds some light on this. And it's really made me reshape the way I think about satanic influence in our life. But towards the end of Jesus's ministry, towards the end of his life, Jesus gathers the disciples around and he tells them, hey, I've got to go to Jerusalem. They were in the northern part of Israel in Galilee. And he says, I need to go south to Jerusalem, to the hub, to where everything's going on. And when I go, they're going to arrest me and they're going to try me and they're going to kill me. And Peter, totally altruistically, with pure motives, says, well, then don't go. You don't have to go to Jerusalem. We've got a good thing going up here, man. Just stay up here and don't die. How's that? And there was no sin there. It wasn't like Peter said, Jesus, we could really monetize this miracle thing if you wanted to. Stick around a little bit. There's some hay to be made here. It doesn't say stay and do these things with us that you shouldn't do. He's not trying to convince him to not follow what he understands to be God's will. He's just trying to convince him to preserve his life. It's a good, honest, altruistic encouragement from a friend who wanted what was best for Christ. And yet, this is Jesus' response in Matthew chapter 16, get behind me, Satan. You are a hindrance to me, for you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man. It's always struck me that Peter didn't mean evil by his plea. Please just stay with us, Jesus, so that you don't die. That's a good, kind, loving thing to want for anybody you care about. But because his will was not the Father's will, Jesus calls him Satan. Get behind me, Satan. You're a hindrance to me, for you're not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man. So it occurs to me, based on this passage, that to Jesus, satanic influence is anything that doesn't pull you towards God's will, which really opens up this wide swath for how Satan acts. Jesus, I think to him, satanic influence is anything that doesn't pull you towards God's will. It's something that pushes you away or pulls you away from God. I think what Jesus would argue is that there are no neutral forces in our life. There's not things that are blatantly bad and satanic and blatantly good and godly and then all this gray area in the middle. To Jesus, it seems rather binary. Things are either godly and pushing you towards God or they're satanic and pulling you away from him. There's no middle ground. And because in this instance, Peter was exerting influence over Jesus that wasn't pushing Jesus towards God's will, his influence was satanic in that moment. So it makes me think that his forces are at play far more often than we give him credit for. And I think where we should want to settle in is to ask the questions, okay, Satan is there. He's prowling about. He is the enemy. He is the accuser. He wants to destroy me. He wants to take me away from God. He wants to hurt God the Father by rendering me useless, by taking me away from him. How is he going to do that? How is he going to exert his influence in my life? This morning, I want to look at four big ways he does that. Now, if you're looking at the notes and what will appear on the screen, you're going to see this phrase, Satan's greatest hits. And I just got to level with you about something here, okay? A little peek behind the curtain. I don't know why I did that. I don't know why I call them Satan's greatest hits. It doesn't really fit into the sermon. I type these notes up on Thursday. I sit in my office. I think, yeah, that's good. That's going to work. And then I type it up, and then I email it to Steve, and then he makes slides. And every now and again, I get here on Sunday, and I think, why did I say it that way? But I usually just go with it because it's fine. But this morning, I looked at Satan's greatest hits. And listen, I got to tell you, if that seems dumb to you, it seems dumb to me too. But we're just going to roll with it because we put it in there on Thursday, and it's too late now, baby. So let's look at Satan's four greatest hits, how he really influences us, okay? The first one I want to look at is isolation. I think one of his greatest ploys, one of the things that he loves is isolation. Think about it. If he's a prowling lion seeking who he may devour, who do the lions devour? Well, they devour the ones that are off by themselves. They devour the ones that have wandered away from the flock. And if what he does is speak lies to us, if he's a liar and the father of lies, when are we most likely to believe them? When there's no other voices in our life to tell us that he's wrong. If Satan is whispering into our ear that we are unlovable and there's no one in our life that tells us that we are, we're far more vulnerable to believe that lie. When Satan is whispering into our ear that we're not good enough, when he's whispering into our ear that we're not worthy, when he's whispering that we shouldn't try that or that we shouldn't do that or that so-and-so doesn't like us or that they only said that nice thing to you because they're trying to get you to do this. They're only treating you that way because they're trying to manipulate you. When you begin to read the worst into everyone and everything and you're totally isolated and have no other voices in your life, how easy is it to convince you that the voice that you do hear is correct? If we play this isolation out to its ultimate end, we can talk about things like school shootings, can't we? Every time one of those things happens, it's an act of atrocious evil from the very pits of hell that somebody could walk into a school and open fire on children. But look at what they have in common. Who's perpetuating that evil? Young, isolated white dudes. Isolated guys who are either in late adolescence or are coming out of adolescence, whose story is the same. They don't have friends. They don't have people around them. And so they got radicalized by thoughts and whispers. And because they don't have a community, because they don't have anybody around them, they become more and more convinced that these lies that they're being fed are true until they act on them. And it is abhorrent evil. That evil is born out of isolation. And while I don't think anyone listening here is in danger of becoming that, it's a sobering reminder of how isolation works. And I think of why this pandemic is so very dangerous. Let me just implore you, if you've found yourself in this pandemic increasingly isolated, if you've left your small group because Zoom meetings are lame, I totally get it. Or you're missing church, or you just can't have people around you because you don't want to get sick. Whatever the reason may be, if you found yourself in COVID becoming increasingly isolated, can I just tell you in all candor that you're one of the ones he's circling? Can I encourage you to join a small group? Can I encourage you to reach out to some friends? Can I encourage you to pick up the phone today and just have a chat? Can I encourage you to find someone to say, hey, here's what I've been thinking. Can you help me make sense of this? And let's not let the enemy's lies grow in isolation. And if you're listening to this and you're like, I'm good. I'm not isolated. So far, I've made it. Great. I'm happy for you. I don't feel isolated either. Let's look for the ones who do. Let's think of our friends who might have begun to feel that way. Let's reach out to folks that might feel forgotten. If anybody is in your circle, is in your orbit, your atmosphere, can we just take some personal responsibility and make sure that they don't feel isolated? Can we yell at them as they wander away from the herd? Hey, come over here. Let's do lunch or something. Let's do like a Zoom call. Let's have a Zoom happy hour, whatever you want to do. Hey, come hang out. Can we help thwart the plans of the evil one in that way by making sure no one among us is isolated? The second thing that Satan loves to do, the second greatest hit, the secrets. Satan loves secrets, man. He loves the shadows of your life. He loves those nooks and crannies. Man, when you're hiding things, he can whisper stuff to you like, no one will ever forgive you for that. No one will ever understand those choices. No one can ever offer you grace in this situation. And then he whispers things to you like, just keep it tight. Just keep it there. You'll figure it out. You're going to defeat it. You're going to beat it. You can do it. Sure, that same sin that's been chasing you around for 10, 20, 30 years. But yeah, now's the time when you're going to draw the line in the sand and by a sheer force of will, now's the time you're going to beat it. Satan loves secret sin and he loves convincing you that no one can understand it. And he loves convincing you that you have it under control. Because here's what he knows. Secret sins are a cancer in our lives that will eventually claim it. You understand? Secret sins, those things that we do that if our friends found out about, they would not think the same of us. At least that's what we have ourselves convinced of. Those things that we have tucked away that we don't tell anyone, that we carefully monitor, that we carefully watch, that we make sure stay in the shadows and never see the light of day, those sins, Satan loves those sins because they are a cancer in your very life that will lead to it being claimed. Proverbs says it like this. He says, no man can hold hot coals against his chest and not be burned. Those secret sins, those are the ways that families are broken and that lives are destroyed. If you're dealing with one of those, you're probably sweaty right now. But if you're dealing with one of those, can I just tell you as a friend and a pastor, you're right where he wants you to be. If you have a secret sin in your life that nobody knows about, first of all, I get it. I've been there too. And anybody who tells you they haven't, 95% chance they're a liar. Everybody's dealt with those things. We all have ours. But if you continue to persist in yours, he will get you. It will get worse. It will come to light. You can choose to bring it to light or it will bring itself to light. And when it does, it will tear you down. I just want you to know because I care about you. If you're fostering a secret sin in your life, you are exactly where the enemy wants you to be. The other thing I would say is, when you do the thing that you're so very fearful of, and you allow some light to be shed into that dark corner of your life, certain that this is the end of your life, what you will find is more grace and joy and freedom there than you've ever experienced in your life. This belief that I could never shed light on what I am ashamed of because no one will think the same of me is simply not true. When we do that in a Christian community, we are met with grace and with love and with affirmation, and I want you to be met with that. And I want you to believe for the first time in a long time that this sin doesn't have to define me and it doesn't have to beat me. Shed some light on that and defeat the enemy. Disappoint him and let him slither back into his hole and find another way to get you because that's not going to work anymore. Let's claim some victory this week. If you have a secret sin in your life, I was praying for you before I came up here that you would have the courage to take the steps to shed some light on that so that we are no longer in his crosshairs. Now, you may be thinking, I'm doing great so far. I'm not isolated. I got no secret sin going on right now that I'm ashamed of. I'm an open book. And I would say, good for you. That's a healthy life, and you ought to feel that way. But I think his third greatest hit is one that's going to hit pretty close to home for a lot of us. It's simply distraction. Just distraction. Listen, Satan wants you to be as ineffective as possible. He wants to tear you away from God. If he can't tear you away from God, then he wants you to be useless in his kingdom. He doesn't want you to bring anybody one step closer to God. So how does he do that? Well, he's going to try to isolate you, but that hasn't worked. Good for you. He's going to try to get you to develop this secret sin that you can't share with other people. That hasn't worked. Good for you. Well, if I can't do those things, you know what I'll do? I'll just distract them. I'll put a dang cell phone in their hand. I'll give them a TV and a gossipy neighbor. Listen, I'm not even talking about the distraction of what if I've lived my whole life for the wrong things. I'm not even talking about the distraction of getting to the end of our life and wondering if we've invested in it properly. That's priorities. I'm talking about literal distractions, just literal nothingness that keep us from doing anything. So that maybe we think about our life and we think our life is on a good trajectory. We're doing good. We're good people. We're reading our Bible when we can. We're coming to church when we can. We're disciplining our kids or enjoying relationships with our kids the way that we should. We have good, healthy friendships in our life. And on the whole, the trajectory seems good. But on a day-to-day basis, how are we spending our days? It's Sunday. If you have an iPhone, you got a screen time report this morning. What does it say? How much time have you lost doom scrolling Twitter since November 1st? I would not like to share that with any of you, what my answer is. How much time do we lose to the algorithms that try to keep our attention? Scrolling Instagram or Facebook or Twitter. How much time do we lose to the news? That's very likely, and I'm guilty too, just an echo chamber for what we already believe. How much time do we lose to sports? When we wake up in the morning and the alarm goes off or we just simply come to and we wake up, what's the first thing we do? Is it grab our phone and invite in? What distractions do you have for me today, Satan? I am convinced that so very many of us go through our lives convinced that we're doing the right things and that we're good people. And we're right. But we allow so much of our day to be stolen from us with stuff that doesn't matter that Satan has effectively rendered us totally ineffective in God's kingdom. How often, this is for me included, do we put our head on the pillow at night, tired, because I was a good servant of the Lord today. I served him the way he wanted me to serve. And how many of us go to bed distracted and thinking about all the new distractions that await us the next day? I think distraction is Satan's number one strategy to render us ineffective. How distracted are we in our lives? How much of our daily attention do we give things that just at the end of the day don't matter and definitely don't help us build the kingdom of God? The last one I wanted us to look at this morning is division. Satan loves division. He loves to divide us. He loves to pit one against the other. Scripture is replete with God's will that his church be unified, that his people be unified, that we be of one body, of one mind, of one accord, that we march forward and have one plan. There are no limits to what a group of people who love Jesus and who love one another can do. And Satan hates that. He's terrified of it. He does everything he can to make sure that the people of God don't unify under a single banner. He wants to drive as many wedges between us as he can. He wants us to judge other people, even in our church, for stupid things that they do or say or that we take out of context. It is Satan's will that we be divided. It is Satan's will that we choose to not like other Christians. It's God's will that we be unified. This is why I think Satan loves our current political climate. I think he's just eating it up, man. I don't think politically things could be going better for Satan because all he cares about is driving a wedge between those who call Jesus Savior. And right now what we have is this culture where Christians on both sides will make judgments about other people's spiritual health based on how they vote. Christians on both sides of the aisle will hear that so-and-so voted for so-and-so and judge who they are spiritually based on a vote that they cast. With no context, with no discussion, they just assume that what I think of that side of the aisle is what you are, and what I think of that side of the aisle must be what you are. And because you voted that way, you must be ignorant, or you must not believe what I believe, or you must be swept away, or you must be convinced by the media, or you must be convinced by social media, or whatever it is. And Satan just sits back and folds his arms and is happy and grins because, look, I've set in motion this system that's going to cause division in the church. And now, within our churches, we have groups of Christians that are judging each other based on how they voted with as little information as possible. And it's the scheme of Satan. You understand that, right? He chuckles with glee when we do that. He delights when we scroll Facebook, pick and fight. When we pick up our phone and we go, look at what Sansa said. There's such a lemming. We show it to whoever's around us. Can we just do this, Grace? Can we just say not today, Satan, on that one? Not here. Not here. Can we just give each other the benefit of the doubt? When we see someone post pro something that we didn't vote for, can we just say, you know what? I know that person. I know their character. I know they're godly and that they have a thoughtful reason for voting that way, for thinking that way. And I also know that we have in common our Savior, Jesus, and my allegiance is to him. And there is nothing else. There is no other tertiary issue that could break away my allegiance to Jesus and loving other people with that same allegiance. Can we do that? Can we start to be gracious with each other, Grace? Listen, I want to be careful. I'm not saying that I've seen this happening. I'm not thinking of any particular instance in grace. What I am acknowledging is this culture that we exist in now where to pick a side is to claim so much about your life and who you are. And can I just ask that in this place, in this bubble, that we not do that? That we not let that strategy of Satan work? Can we remember that the other people of grace, the other partners of grace, the other people in our orbit who know Jesus are children of God? That they love him? That Jesus died for them? And that everything we know about them is thoughtful and good and that may be the way that they're aligned politically is too. And can we sweep that aside as a tertiary issue and focus as a primary issue on the fact that we love Jesus and our neighbors need desperately to know him? And why don't we be part of our culture that sweeps the rest of that stuff aside and quits letting Satan be so effective in that arena? There's an encouragement if we'll do this. There's an encouragement if we will seek others and not isolate ourselves and if we will not allow ourselves to be lied to. It's not just all bad news when it comes to Satan. You know, I referenced Peter earlier and I said that he tells us that we need to be sober-minded and watchful because Satan prowls about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. But what I didn't do is read you the rest of that passage. This is the rest of this Yeah, he's against you. Yes, he's going to try to isolate you. Yes, he's going to try to get you enslaved in secret sin. Yes, he's going to try to divide us. Yes, he's going to do all those things and try to distract you. But if you'll resist him, if you'll refuse to become isolated, if you'll refuse to allow God's church, his bride, to become divided over silly things, if you'll fight off distraction in your life, if you'll have the courage to shed light on the secret sins in your life, if you will hold fast to God, then he promises you that after you have suffered for a little while, which is a kind thing for God to do to acknowledge that this is hard, resisting all of that is difficult and challenging. He says, if you do it, then the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Ephesians 6. He says, He acknowledges what we're talking about today. And he starts off this passage on putting on the armor of God, and he says, when you have stood firm, therefore, stand firm. When you've stood up, keep standing. When you've fought, keep fighting. When you're tired, keep going. And when we do that, when we persist, when we acknowledge the satanic influences in our life, and we do everything we can to resist those, the God of peace will be with us. He will guard us, protect us, and have defeated the enemy for us. We are frustrated that he continues to fight, that he continues to try to claim us, but God, we are so grateful that you have defeated the enemy for us. We are frustrated that he continues to fight, that he continues to try to claim us. But God, we know that you have won the battle. We know that for every lie he whispers in our ear, that you are blaring truths into the other one. If only we will listen. Give us the ears to hear your truth. Give us the eyes to see his lies. God, if any of us has a secret sin, would we just shed some light on that this week? Give us courage. May we be met with grace. Let us see light and believe the first time in a long time that we can be done with those things. God, if we are a part of the divisiveness in our culture and in your body, I pray that you would give us grace, patience, wisdom, and peace, that we would not be a part of that scheme. God, if anyone is isolated, bring your angels around them. Let them know that they are loved, that they are not alone. Let them know that they are seen. And God, for those of us who are distracted, would you give us the courage and the desire to be focused every day on what matters most in our lives, on the things that you've placed in our lives and the opportunities that we have to influence people towards you? We thank you for winning this war. We ask you for the strength to stand firm in it. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.
Amen. And good morning, Grace. Thank you for watching online. I can't wait until we can be back together. Until then, I hope that you're getting into a good rhythm of watching church in your sweatpants. I'm jealous of that. This is the third part of our series called Things You Should Know. And the idea with this series is there's certain things in Christendom and in church world that we talk about or reference. And my suspicion is that sometimes we just kind of nod along with those things, not really knowing what they are, not really having a full grasp of them, and maybe too afraid or embarrassed to ask these questions. And so we wanted to take a series where we ask the questions for you and hopefully give you some answers or some things that maybe we haven't thought about before. And so this week we arrive at what I think is the forgotten practice of the Sabbath. If you've been around church world at all before, you've probably heard at least Sabbath mentioned. You probably know that it was a thing that the Jewish people observed in the Old Testament. You might even know that it's a thing that Jewish people continue to observe. But I think in the church world, we've largely forgotten the Sabbath, right? I mean, I know for me, I can't remember the last time I intentionally observed a Sabbath. I'm a pastor. Most of the Christians that I know, I can't remember the last time I heard someone talk to me about the Sabbath discipline and what they do and how they do it and incorporating this in their lives. And so I really think that it's kind of this forgotten aspect of our faith. And what's more than that is, it's pretty important in the Old Testament. And so I was excited this week when we put this one on the schedule. I knew Sabbath was coming up, so I've been kind of thinking about it in the background for the past couple of weeks, and I was excited to get to it and talk about it. And I figured that when we got here, we would talk about this much-needed rest, this need to rest and to recharge and refuel. And I think we can all appreciate that. This idea that we weren't made just to be machines, we weren't made just to be productive, that we should stop and slow down and focus on the gifts that God gives us and what we have to be grateful for and try to ask our question, why are we working so hard anyways? So I figured we'd spend the morning talking about how God has designed us to rest sometimes, how God has designed schedules and rhythms so that we can rest. And so I started the week getting ready to preach the sermon and doing research on the Sabbath and started to kind of pull a thread. And I realized, oh my gosh, I've never pulled this thread before. I've never known this about the Sabbath and what it could mean. And honestly, I started to get pretty excited in my office. I darted over to Kyle's office and basically gave him the mini sermon because I was so excited about what I was learning and excited to share it with you guys. And what I learned is that the Sabbath is so much bigger than just rest. So I want to take you kind of on the journey that I had to discover what the Sabbath is. And hopefully when we get to the end of it, you will join me in properly prioritizing the Sabbath in your life. But we see this law, this idea of the Sabbath, come up in Exodus chapter 20. It's part of the Ten Commandments. You may know what those are. These are the ten on the tablets, two stone tablets. Moses comes down the mountain and he presents the rules to the Hebrew people. These are the top 10 rules that God has for us. the seventh day is a Sabbath day to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant or your livestock or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord to the fore. And it's interesting to me that it's in the Ten Commandments. To me, it's a really curious commandment. Because if you look at the other Ten Commandments, the first one is, you know, don't have any other gods before me. God says nothing should be more important to you in your whole life than I am. Which, that makes sense. And then it's like, well, don't commit adultery. Yeah, that's certainly, that's got to be in the top 10, right? No killing people. That's a big deal. Don't steal things. Don't lie. Honor your parents. Like, all those make sense to be in God's top ten rules, but the Sabbath? I mean, if I had to sit down, if you gave me the Bible and you said, make a list of the top ten things that Christians need to do, the Sabbath is not going to make the cut. I doubt it makes the cut in your list either. And if you're sitting at home saying, no, it does make my list, and you don't regularly observe the Sabbath, you're a hypocrite. Right? It wouldn't make our list, but yet it made God's. And I've always thought that it made God's because of where it came in history. Because if you'll think about the group of people receiving these laws, they're the Israelites, the Hebrew people, the descendants of Abraham. They've been enslaved for 400 years. For 400 years, they were production machines. Seven days a week, several hours a day, morning to night, you work, you produce. With the whip at your back, you produce. When they receive these commandments, they're in the desert. They're fleeing from the Egyptians. And God comes to them and he says, these are the big 10 things I want you to prioritize in your life. And it's easy to see that he's speaking to his children. These children who have sat under the burden of productivity for their entire life, for generation after generation, and God is telling them, you're not machines. You're more than your work. You're more than what you produce. There's good gifts that I've given you in life that I want you to focus on sometimes. It's okay to stop and rest. And while those things are certainly applicable to us in 2021, they were especially applicable then. And so I've always suspected that maybe God included the Sabbath commandment and the Ten Commandments because of where they were at culturally. But then look at what he does. Not only in Jewish law does he want them to observe the Sabbath every seven days, but then every seventh year is a year of the Sabbath. It's a sabbatical year. And in those years, they're supposed to give their fields rest. They're supposed to give the earth rest, which by the way, we understand scientifically now is actually best for those fields because the nutrients can build back up and they can produce year after year after year. That's why farmers rotate their fields and their crops. But they didn't know that back then. They just knew that God told them to let their fields rest every seven years. Every seven years was a year-long reminder of Sabbath. And then on the seventh, seventh year, so every 50 years, they had what was called the year of Jubilee. And in the year of Jubilee, all debts were canceled. All land was restored to rightful owners. Slaves were freed. It was like a huge societal reset button. Every year, every 50 years, the year of Jubilee is a year-long Sabbath, and it hits reset on all of culture and society, and then it starts again. Seems like a bigger deal than just rest. So as I'm thinking through Sabbath and this sermon and what we need to learn about it, I really started to wonder, why is rest such a big deal to God? Why is He so interested that I just take a load off every now and again? Why does God just seem to be such a nap fan on Sundays? Like there's got to be more to it than that. And so as I kind of pulled that thread a little more, I was reminded of the very first Sabbath that we see in Genesis after creation. And we may know the creation story. In the beginning, God was there and he created the heavens and the earth, right? And then each day he created a new thing. On day one, he created something. Day three, day four, day five, all the way through day six when he created man. And then on day seven, he rested. This is what we read about the Sabbath in Genesis chapter two, verses one through three. And listen, I've got a bunch of verses for you this morning. So if you have a Bible, get ready to jump around. But this is Genesis 2, 1 through 3. Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all the host of them. And on the seventh day, God had finished his work that he had done. And he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it, God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. God himself modeled the Sabbath for us a couple thousand years before he instituted it as a law. And somebody else pointed out, I didn't notice this, but other people pointed it out and I thought it's fascinating. If you read through the creation story, if you have your Bible there, then you can look through Genesis chapter 1 and look at each day. Each day has an evening and a morning, or a morning and an evening. It'll say it was day two, God created these things, and it was morning and evening, the third day. It was day four, God created these things, then it was evening, then it was morning, the fifth day. But we get to day seven, and it's the only day without an evening and a morning. We get to day seven, which in Hebrew tradition is the number of completion. It's the number of perfection. It means we're done messing with this. That's over. It's finished. And so God did his work and then he rested. And what's interesting is there's no evening and there's morning. There's no eighth day. It doesn't say on the eighth day, God created more stuff. On the eighth day, God started working on the rest of the universe. No, he entered into rest. He was done. He had made it. His work was finished. And now God entered into rest on the day of perfection to an unending seventh day. And the interesting part is we were created to join him in that rest. Adam and Eve were created to participate in that rest with God. We're told that God walked with them in the cool of the evening. We're told we see evidence that they didn't have to work for their food. It just grew on trees and they grabbed it. They were born into eternal and perfect retirement. They did not carry the burden of productivity. They only carried the burden of praise, which is a really easy burden to carry when you're walking around with God in the cool of the evening every day. It's important that we understand that Adam and Eve, and therefore us, were created to join God in this perfect eternal rest. But sin disrupted that rest. Sin ruined that rest. And it's so fascinating to me that the curse for sin, the punishment for sin, if you look over in Genesis chapter 3, when God approaches Adam and Eve after they eat of the tree that they shouldn't have eaten of and they sinned, that God punishes them and he curses them. And what's the curse? Work. Productivity. Now you're going to have to work the field. You didn't have to do that before. Now you have to fight against thorns. You didn't have to do that before. Now you have to produce your own food. You didn't have to do that before. The curse in the garden is the curse of the burden of productivity. Do you understand that? Now you have to work. Now because of your sin, you can't rest. I created you for rest, but now because you broke that rest, you have to work and you can't exist in my rest. This to me was a profound thought that God created us to enter into his perfect and eternal rest that he began after creation. Just participate in that with him relationally. He did not design us to carry the burden of productivity. That's the curse of sin. And then it occurred to me that Jesus came to restore our perfect rest. Jesus himself came as a way to restore us back into the Father's rest so that we could have a way to enter back into his rest. And what I began to understand is that when we see rest in the Bible, we're not talking about just taking a load off for a day. We're really talking about eternity. We're talking about entering into heaven with God, re-entering into the rest for which we were designed. And it's interesting to me that I never caught it before, what Jesus says in Matthew. In Matthew chapter 11, he says this, I used to always think that that verse was for people who were living under the oppression of legalism, and it is. But we see here that he's talking about more than just rest. He's talking about more than just a day to recover. He says, I will give you rest for your souls. Your souls can rest in me. I believe Jesus is talking about a larger rest here. And then when we fast forward up to Hebrews chapter 4, we see the author in Hebrews talking in you can read it. It's all through chapters 3 and 4 of Hebrews, speaks of eternity in the terms of entering into the Lord's rest. He speaks of heaven, of being with God forever and ever. He speaks of that in terms of entering back into that rest that God designed us for, that Jesus won for us. And then at the end of the Bible in here is a call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and their faith in Jesus. And I heard a voice from heaven saying, write this, Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on. Blessed indeed, says the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them. I had never noticed it before or put together everything. I knew of each of these passages and each of these teachings in disparate parts, but never before had I seen this theme of rest woven through the scriptures. This idea from the very onset that God designed us to enter into his perfect eternal rest where our souls can be easy and all we carry is the burden of praise. And I had never thought about how Jesus came to restore us to that rest and piece together this passage in Hebrews and then even as the capstone in Scripture in Revelation 14, John describes hell as a place where there is no rest. Hell itself, eternal separation from our God, is to spend eternity restlessly. But salvation, heaven, is to spend eternity in the Lord's rest. I had never thought of these things in these terms before. Or thought how profoundly big rest was in Scripture. And it's funny because in December, many of you know if you've been following along with Grace, you know that recently my wife Jen lost her father John. And so in December, we had the profound privilege of being with him as he transitioned into his rest. And I can remember being in the room with him, just me and John, watching him, praying over him, thinking about life and all the things that come as you watch someone transition. And I wasn't thinking about this sermon, believe me. I wasn't thinking about grace at all. It was one of those fogs that all you can possibly think about is the day. So I didn't even know that this was coming. And I certainly hadn't pieced together these things in Scripture, but I can remember watching him and being viscerally jealous of the rest that he was about to enter into. Being jealous of the peace that was about to be his. Being envious of this place where he was about to go, where all the things that seemed to worry us so much just fade away. All the tensions and the squabbles and the misunderstandings, all of our insecurities and all of trying to prove ourself and have enough and all of the envy and all the strife and all the battling within yourself, the sin that exists. In heaven, all of that fades and And you just enjoy God and His goodness. And I was jealous of that rest. And then as I studied this week, I see that I was jealous of that rest because that's what God designed us to do. God designed us to be where John is now. He designed us to enter back into his rest. And so Sabbath is a big deal because it's a reminder of the eternity that Jesus won for us and that the Father designed for us. Sabbath is a big deal because it reminds us of the eternity that Jesus won for us and God the Father designed for us. It's so much bigger than physical rest, don't you see? Yes, it's about physical rest. Yes, it's about taking a break. Yes, we can't be productive for seven days a week. And when we do that, we tend to lose ourselves in that. Yes, we were designed for more than productivity. And it is about taking a load off. And it is about taking a good Sunday nap. It's about all of those things. But it's about so much more. It's a way to bring eternity down into your living room once a week, into your yard and on your hike and in your car and in your songs. Once a week, we bring eternity down here into this world as a temporary reminder that there is an eternal rest waiting on us. Our reality is that we have to get back to work. Monday's coming. We can't rest all the time. We still carry the burden of productivity. Matter of fact, Proverbs tells us, it says, a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come on you like an armed man. All right, so chill out on slacking off as a result of the sermon. But even though we know we have to get back to work, God commands us to stop once a week and observe a Sabbath and rest and recover. And yes, be reminded that we are more than productive machines. Yes, be reminded that we are more than what we do and that our life is about more than just what we produce. But also be reminded that there is an eternal rest that is waiting this little pocket where in Sabbath, the burden of production is replaced by the burden of praise. This burden of production that we carry every day of our lives for just a season, for just a day, we take that off and we set that aside and we say, that's not for me today. And we carry the burden of praise. What Jesus says is easy and light. And we carry the burden of praise because when we stop and when we slow down and when we say no to things and we don't go out of the house and we don't go work and we don't do projects, when we just sit, we see who we love. We're reminded of God's goodness in our lives. I love that song that we've started to sing about the evidence. I'm terrible at song titles, but it has that line that all around me there's evidence of your goodness. Sabbaths help us notice that evidence. Sabbaths help us see God's goodness. And so we slow down and we look at our spouse that's weathered some storms with us and we're grateful for them. We look at our kids and we see their joy and we're grateful for them. We reflect back on the years that got us there and we're grateful for them. We look forward to what's ahead and we're grateful for that. We talk with our friends and people who mean something to us and we're grateful for those. We think about our God and how good he is to us and how he's seen us through and been patient in our wanderings and continues to forgive us and we're grateful for that. And in Sabbath, the burden of productivity is replaced by the burden of praise because in gratitude, we turn and reflect and praise God for everything that he's given us. That's what we do when we observe the Sabbath. We realize it's so much bigger than this temporary rest, that it's a picture of the eternal rest that we cling to, that waits for us. And the good news is, if we've placed our faith in Jesus, if we call God our Father and Jesus our Savior and understand that because Jesus died on the cross for us, He has covered over our sins and we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ, then we can be sure that that eternal rest waits for us. And I just think it's incredible that God instructs us once a week to stop producing, not just because we actually need rest, but more because he wants to remind us of the eternity that he has designed for us, that is waiting for us. And in slowing down, we can finally see it and notice it. I have been blown away this week by how big of a deal Sabbath really is. And so I want to invite you. Will you join me in properly prioritizing the Sabbath in your life? Will you join me this year in properly prioritizing a Sabbath rest every week? Will we replace the burden of productivity with the burden of praise? You know, it's possible that if you don't feel as close to God as you could, if your walk with God feels a little bit disjointed, if you feel like you're a little stagnant, it's possible that we feel that way because we haven't been observing Sabbaths. Because we haven't been stopping and reminding ourselves of these things. It's possible that it feels like we can't get much traction in our walk with God because we have forgotten the simple spiritual discipline of the Sabbath that was so important to God that he wrote it into the top ten rules. He has a year every seven years to remind us of it and then one big year every 50 years to remind us of that seventh year, and he stopped creation on the Sabbath and invites us to enter into that with him. I don't know how we lost track of this day. I don't know how we as Christians just decided this wasn't a big deal anymore. More pointedly, I don't know how I lost track of that. But I don't want to lose track of it again. So I want to invite you to prioritize those Sabbaths this year. And let's just see what happens when once a week we stop our production and we focus on praise and we're reminded of the eternity that waits on us. Let's pray. Father, I always say that you are good when I pray because you are. But you are patient too. We know good and well that we should observe Sabbaths and we just don't do it. Would you convict us in that gentle way that only you can? Father, would you show us a path to prioritize this? And God, for the people who would do this, for those listening who are thinking, yeah, that's a thing that I want to do. I want to observe Sabbaths in my life. God, would you first give them the belief that they can actually do it, that they can actually stop for like 12 hours without the world spinning out of control? And then, God, when they do that, gosh, would your spirit just meet them there? Would they feel you in those moments? Would these become special times for us as we're reminded of the eternity that you have created for us? Father, it is in the name of the Lord of the Sabbath that we pray these things. Amen.
