Advent 2021
Peace
December 26, 2021 • Andy Hoot • Matthew 1:18—2:23
Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston and our neighborhood churches, or donate to this ministry, please visit http://mosaicboston.com. If you haven't been with us the past three weeks, we're in our last week of advent. This is a season, it's a tradition, in the church where we celebrate Christ coming, advent means coming, and we celebrate that Christ came in the fulfillment of the Old Testament scriptures, the first time as a baby born in Bethlehem. Simultaneously, we look ahead to Christ's second coming, where he will come not as a baby, but as a righteous judge and ruler. And so we've covered the themes of hope, love, and joy in recent weeks, and today we're going to close out this series just tapping into the theme of peace. We do not have Mini Mo today so I was put under contract to deliver a very short sermon today. There actually aren't that many children here in person and those online we're probably at 30% capacity or typical attendance right now. But my son is there with my wife so she's got me on the clock. But we're just going to have a nice sweet gospel sermon today. We've gone through the season very topically. I don't think we've actually read the Christmas story in its entirety this year. I want to read a lot to begin from Matthew 1 verses 18 through the end of chapter 2. I want to just read through this story that is just at the center of history and just a crucial moment in the narrative of redemptive history for God's people. Matthew 1 verses 18 through 2:23. I'll cover this and then I'll go back and spend a lot of time in the genealogy of chapter 1 later on. "Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph before they came together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit and her husband, Joseph being a just man and unwilling to put her shame resolved to divorce her quietly." "But as he considered these things behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, 'Joseph, son of David, do not fear to Mary as your wife for that, which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus for he will save his people from their sins.'" "All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet. 'Behold, the Virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us.'" "When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him. He took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to his son and he called his name Jesus." "Now, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in days of Herod the king, behold wise men from the east came to Jerusalem saying, 'Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.'" "When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled and all Jerusalem with him and assembling all the chief priests, and scribes of the people he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. They told him, 'In Bethlehem of Judea for so it is written by the prophet, 'And you, Oh, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah are by no means least among the rulers of Judah for from you shall come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel.'" "Then inherited summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star had appeared and he sent them to Bethlehem saying, 'Go and search diligently for the child and when you have found him, bring me word that I too may come and worship him.'" After listening to the king, they went on their way and behold, the star that they had seen when it rose went before them, until it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy and going into the house they saw the child with Mary, his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh and being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed by their own country by another way." "Now, when they departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, 'Rise, take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child to destroy him.' And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, 'Out of Egypt they called my son.'" "Then Herod, when he saw that he'd been tricked by the wise men, became furious and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who are two years old or under, according to the time that had been ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled with spoken by the prophet Jeremiah, "A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation. Rachel weeping for her children, she refused to be comforted because they are no more.'" "But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph and Egypt saying, 'Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child's life are dead,' and he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father, Herod, he was afraid to go there and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee and he went and lived in a city called Nazareth so that was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene." This is the word of our Lord. I want to begin with a simple point as we reflect on what I just read and is that we are all wicked sinners. I read this section because of its graphic nature. Of the gospels, of the birth narratives, we have Matthew, Luke and John tap into the birth narrative of Christ and this is the most jarring. There's shock, heartache, broken dreams, deception, pursuit, anxiety, pains, corruption, murder. Matthew shows us more than any of the other gospel writers that Jesus entered a world that was broken, full of conflict, full of anxiety, full of despair. Nothing that the world had to offer could solve, could improve, man's moral condition. If you study the historical Herod, this man that we're talking about, he was one of the best administrators, best businessmen of the ancient world, though he was still a pawn of the Roman world, he was as good as it gets. He had no answers and he contributed much to the moral depravity of the day. Matthew shows us everything that the world says Christmas is not. You hear a lot, "Christmas is a feeling. It's simply a time for family and home. It's sitting under Christmas tree opening presents, a time for peace and good will," and none of those are on display right here. Nothing but the depravity of man on full display. Christ, didn't enter into a picturesque Brookline mansion living room next to a spiral staircase with a fireplace and beautiful mantle. He was born in a stable wrapped in swaddling cloth. As Pastor Jan said the other night, "Swaddled in shame in this union, the scandalous situation, between the union of Joseph and Mary." As soon as Mary gives birth, the family has to flee a mad king. Even in the church, there's a temptation to look at this season as a kind of faux form of peace, to kind of calm, a distraction from the darkness that we're facing within ourselves, facing with the men, the man around us, in the church, out of the church, we can carry these traditions, we can think of ways to just uniquely present these themes of advent in a new fashion. We can talk about moral lessons. Let's be generous like the wise men, let's be, let's submit to God like Joseph and Mary, but that's not what the Christmas story's about. I'm just here to say people, praise God, that the Christmas story is not about this stuff. Praise God that after living in 2020 and 2021, we can see our desperate need for the Christmas story to be true. For more than ever we see a that the world we live in is not supreme to the ancient world presented in the text. All the answers that we have today offering problems don't seem to be providing peace. Any reasons that we might have had a couple of years ago to claim that our age is superior just has been cast away. Government, medicine, education, technology, wealth, food distribution, plumbing, running water, have not improved the moral condition of man. We see the world, we see people trying to build a righteousness on their own in vain. We see the ugliness of sin dominating our society, and it's easy to believe Romans 6:23 for the first time, really in decades, multiple generations going beyond gen Xers that all have sin and fall short of the glory of God. We are all wicked sinners. The most important thing as we process this is that this season has helped us to understand that that sin is not just out there, just in the world, outside of the church, in the people next to you here. Maybe the people next to you on the couches, that sin is in each and every one of us. I know that a lot of us today, we're scared of the circumstances that we're facing, by God's Providence, God's appointment. We're scared of just the craziness that we see around us, but really the scariest thing that lot of us are dealing with is how we're reacting ourselves. How many of you have learned about a new side of yourself in this season? When your opposition says something, you slander them, you call them moron, you cancel them. You essentially treat them as if they're inhuman, an act that scripture says, Christ tells us, is the same as committing murder in the heart. How many of you have just struggled with envy, seeing other people, the comforts they have to get through this season while you're trapped in some sort of hard situation, a hard job, a small apartment? How many of you have struggled with greed? Just buying more and more and more to satisfy yourselves? How many of you have struggled with overeating to distract yourself from the pain, the challenge, the anxiety? It's shocking. We feel guilt, we feel shame. A lot of pastors, I searched the country, what are they saying? They're saying, "We've had it hard. We've had it hard." Yes, we have, but scripture tells us we need to be angry and do not sin. If anything can weigh more heavily on us than challenging circumstances, it's the weight of guilt and shame of our sin staying on our shoulders. I just lead with this point that as 2021 comes to an end as part of this 20 month period, 22 month period, going back to March of 2020, we are wicked. We can't deny it. This story, praise God, we can look into this story and say, "These are the same circumstances that Jesus Christ came into." This same story was not just an abstract story. It's not a fable, a parable that we place our hopes into. It's a concrete story that we can place our hope in. This time of year, as we feel the gravity of the year we rest in the fact that Jesus did come. What does that mean for us? My second point is simple. God offers peace to wicked sinners. As Matthew in chapter 1, he provides this genealogy, and I'm not going to go through all of the names for you, but he continues pointing out the wickedness of man and it's in there that we find our hope, we find our option for peace as we process just the guilt and shame that looms over us as individuals, looms over us collectively as a church, looms over us as a nation. Really want to take some time, let me read verses 1 and 17, just to cover, "The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham," that's how it begins. And then it ends, "And so all the generations from Abraham to David were 14 generations, from David to the deportation to Babylon 14 generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ, 14 generations." These verses, they specifically show us that Jesus comes from the line of Abraham. Specifically, Abraham was told that he'd be a blessing to many people, the nations, and in Genesis 12, the first book of the Bible, 12 chapters in, and we have this text telling us that Jesus Christ is his heir. He is a descendant. He is the recipient of the promises. Furthermore, King David was told a thousand years before Christ's birth, that it would have an heir to the throne of Israel forever and so this genealogy shows us that Christ is the king in that line to David. This gives us evidence to believe that Jesus is the Messiah. This is the good news. But as you dig into the genealogy, when you look at who's included in the genealogy start saying, "Why are these people in here? Why would these people be mentioned in the line of the king? These people are wicked. These people are sinners. They're the wrong race per the Old Testament's standards." It's really hard to just process. In the Old Testament times when Matthew wrote this, a genealogy would be especially a Hebrew's pride. If you were a kid back then at the playground, you would make sure that all of your buddies, all of your friends, knew the good names in your line. It's hard for us to relate to this. Most of us can't go back one to three generations, but the way they did it was just the same. Let's keep the good stuff, let's hide the bad stuff, that crazy uncle, that crazy grandfather who lost all the family money. It's a lot like on LinkedIn we have the opportunity to present ourselves, show our connections, and what do we do? We present ourselves perfectly. But we see here just the line of Jesus Christ. You'd think if someone was conjuring this up, they would make it a little bit more publicly correct but we don't see that. Why would they do that? Because it's true. Let's notice just these people who by societal standards, moral standards of that time, should not have been in the genealogy. First notice Matthew 5, it includes five women. You have Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Mary, and Bathsheba, directly. In a patriarchal society, you don't include women in the genealogy period to establish your ethos, your credibility to garner praise for someone. More shock in this list includes moral outsiders. There's verse 3, "And Judah, the father of Perez and Zerah, by Tamar and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram." This Tamar. Tamar pretended to be a prostitute. She slept with her father-in-law, she gets pregnant. This is an incestuous relationship in the line of Jesus Christ. Why is it in the text? It happened. Rahab was another moral outsider. Before she got saved she was a prostitute in Jericho. The genealogy goes even further to say in verse six for King David, oh, and furthermore Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth, they were Gentiles. Ruth from Moab, the other two from Canaan. Even further you think it starts to get looking better when king David's brought it up, but specifically it mentions with David, it mentions Uriah. It says, "And David was a father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah." This is a king, but Matthew doesn't just leave it at that, at king David, he mentioned Uriah. Who's Uriah? The story goes that your Uriah was one of David's top men, top soldiers, most faithful guys, but David fell in love with Uriah's wife. David tries to get rid of Uriah. He tries to bring him home, to spend in time with her to cover up the pregnancy. Ultimately, Uriah, David sends him off to die at the battlefront. This is the king, the Messiah, the man after God's own heart, and Matthew mentions this sin. Furthermore, a lot of these kings listened in verse 7 through 11 did some horrible things for Judah's religious worship of God. They were just bad people led the country, astray, the nation astray in their worship. Ahaz offered his child as a sacrifice to a foreign God. As we look at this genealogy, we feel more deeply depravity of man, not just in our day, not just in Matthew's day, but throughout the history of the world. Why is it here? Because it's true. But it's here more to make the point that God is saying upon Christ's coming, "I'm taking ownership over my people." At advent, Jesus comes and he takes ownership over his people in all of their glory and all of their sin. When he is born, he accepts these sinners, these sinners outside of his bloodline. Though he never sinned himself, he takes the punishment for the guilt of their sin and covers their shame. He's making it clear, "Yes, I'm in the line of Abraham, I am in the line of David, but your pedigree, your spiritual, religious, racial, pedigree, Jew or Gentile. Does not matter. I welcome you into my family out of sheer grace." Flipping that it's saying, "No matter how good or religious you've been in your life, it's not enough to commend yourself to my line." Rahab the prostitute is in the line, but so is king David and the greatest and the least in Jesus line are not beyond the need for his grace, his unmerited favor to cover their sin. John 1:12 to 13 says, "But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God." This is the great news for all of us. This is the good news of the gospel, the good news in response to my first point, that we're all wicked sinners that God graciously offers peace to us in our sin. That's the Christmas story. Jesus does come into the world, judging us right away. He's sent to communicate to people from God, "I want relationship with you. I want peace with you." The infinite breaks into the finite and he wants relationship. It's all by belief, believing in this message that Jesus Christ lived the life I could not live, died the death that I deserved, resurrected on the third day, ascended into heaven, where he is ruling all things in this life at the right hand of the father, until his appointed time to return. It's when we believe that we can have salvation from our sin. The guilt, the shame does not have to weigh on our shoulders. We can have peace with God, but furthermore, we can have peace with ourselves. When we see the ugliness that comes out in tension and conflict and isolation, when the pleasures of life are taken away, when we turn to him, we can always receive grace. My question today, before you turn into this next year, those of you who are Christian, you've been walking in the Lord for a while, maybe this season did shock you, maybe you saw darkness, you saw the depravity in you that you had never seen before. You can always just bring it back to the Lord. We've all seen people flail around with guilt, with shame, of sin on their shoulders, and what does that lead to? It leads to them projecting that guilt, that shame onto other people, especially in the church. But no, take that to the Lord, receive His grace, see that He owns you, he loves you, he doesn't reject you. Those of you who just don't know Christ, if you've never received him as the Christ, the Messiah, the king of your heart, and you have this weight and shame on your shoulders, I beg you receive his offer of peace. This is the good news that we preach all year. This is the good news that we need take into the new year. This is the good news that we need to preach into our hearts every day. It's in this that we find peace and it's from this position of peace. In scriptures, peace means eirene, comes from the verb eiro, to fill. The opposite is anxiety. The verb, it's to be broken up. It's in God that we can have fullness and from the position of fullness, we can go to Him, have peace in a vertical sense and look upon the situations around us, in our lives on a horizontal level. Look at the relationships, look at the greater societal problems, and approach them from a position of fullness. I encourage you today just to spend time in the coming week, be filled in the Lord, find joy in Him. See how loving He is that he sent Jesus Christ to come for us into this dark, wicked world, into the depravity, with Herod coming to chase him at his birth, into the depravity that continues into our day, and just rejoice. Enjoy Him, love Him, and find your peace. Let's pray. Lord, we just come to you, perhaps after an age where we've been reliant upon just the comforts, the pillars, the horses and chariots of this world. Lord, we repent of that. We pray please forgive us for not thinking that ultimate peace, ultimate forgiveness, joy, love is found in you, and hope, our hope is rooted in the promise of your return. Heavenly father, we just pray, give us hearts of longing that more would be saved. Lord, give us daily reminders in this next year of just the abundance of your grace, the depths and length and height and breath of your love to us in Jesus Christ. Lord, when we look upon those in sin, let us not look upon in judgment, but look upon them in compassion in the same way that you looked upon us in Jesus Christ. Heavenly father, we pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.
Joy
December 19, 2021 • Andy Hoot • Ecclesiastes 6
Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston and our neighborhood churches, or donate to this ministry, please visit http://mosaicboston.com. We are in our advent series. This is our third week. This is the time of the year, a tradition of the church where we spend time pausing from typical activity. We like to rush through books here. We go through them very quickly from a broad lens, and pastor Jan takes us through like 25 verses each week and 45 minutes in a masterful way. This is a season of pausing, and we pause to reflect on the old, the essentials, the basics of our faith, that they might become new and we might be able to see the light of Christ in them afresh. In this season, it's hard for me to adapt to that, just in those songs, you might have known there's a solemnity, there's a longing, that's a part of the services in this season and that's in intentional. We like to make it feel like a party, like the heavenly sanctuary here regularly. It's still a party, just a different kind of party. So the whole service has a bit of a different feel today, and one of the things about advent was that it was a stripping, a pruning period for the people of Israel, where the prophets did not speak between the Old Testament and around the time of Christ coming for 400 years. And God stripped them of the prophets, the priests, the Kings, the temple was essentially in shambles, had seen its glory days and it was a time for the true believers to really just be forced to decide, "Am I following this God in darkness?" We just position ourselves here as people waiting for the second coming of Jesus Christ, we've seen him come, we've seen his glory. He was the exact imprint of the nature of God when he came and now we're awaiting that day that he comes back. It's a whole different feel. Today I'm going to take up the topic of joy and it's very much a conversation of where we should not be looking for joy, but in the process we can then find where we can get it, find the source. And so, I'm going to read from Ecclesiastes six versus one through 12, that's the whole chapter, and we will get started. This is the word of God. "There is an evil that I have seen under the sun and it lies heavy on mankind, a man to whom God gives wealth, possessions and honor so that he lacks nothing of all that he does desires, yet God does not give him power to enjoy them, but a stranger enjoys them. This is vanity. It is a grievous evil. If a man fathers a 100 children and lives many years so that the days of his years are many, but his soul is not satisfied with life's good things, and he also has no burial, I say that a stillborn child is better off than he. For it comes in vanity and goes in darkness, and in darkness its name is covered. Moreover, it has not seen the sun or known anything. It finds rest rather than he, even though he should live a thousand years twice over, yet enjoy no good. Do not all go to the one place. All the toil of man as for his mouth, yet his appetite is not satisfied. For what advantage has the wise man over the fool, and what does the poor man have who knows how to conduct himself before the living? Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the appetite, this also is vanity and a striving after wind. Whatever has come to be has already been named, and it is known what man is, and that he is not able to dispute with one stronger than he. The more words, the more vanity and what is the advantage to man for who knows what is good for man while he lives the few days of his vain life, which he passes like a shadow for who can tell man, what will be after him under the sun?" This is the word of our Lord. Let's pray. Heavenly Father we come to you today just with a mixture of emotions. Lord, we live in this world yet we are not among this world, those of us here in Christ, Lord, we are waiting, our soul longs, all of creation longs for your return. But Lord, you call us to endure, you call us not just to walk in this life but to run. Lord, we pray through your word, just bring us to a greater position of joy and you let us be filled, let us be full so that we might take on the challenges, the callings, the trials, the triumphs, and march forward in them for your glory, that your name might be magnified. Heavenly Father we ask you to strip away all those things, those idols, those distractions that are just keeping us from just loving you from enjoying you, from seeing you and all of your glory, and just appreciating just Christ coming and how he gives us access to you. Heavenly Father, just let your name be magnified. Let your spirit be among us, in Jesus name I pray. Amen. Now, I grew up playing a game called King of the Hill. It's a savage, savage game. So you basically, wherever you are, if you have a hill and a few children you play and basically the whole time you're literally just trying to run to the top. Simultaneously, all the other children are trying to run to the top, they pool, they kick, they'll hit. They'll try to trick you to get to the top. And the objective of the game is to be that person at the top, be the king. The hard part is that once you're up there, you're battling, you're fighting to keep your place. And when you make it to the top, it just continues. The game doesn't really end until everybody quits or until someone's mom calls you in or until someone just establishes dominance at the top of the hill. And the thing about this game is that when you live in a small community, once you establish dominance within a little circle, you conquer that hill. There's always another hill with a different group of kids, a different just larger hill, different challenge to take on. So, in kindergarten, once I establish my reign over Janine and Brian and Jeffrey and my babysitter Sharky's house, is a nice, like maybe six foot hill. The next challenge was the kids at my brother's soccer games, the other little siblings, it was just a constant like, "Where can I climb?" The ultimate place to play King of the Hill was at my local high schools, Friday night football games. Under the lights, to the side of the bleachers while the game was going on, you'd have a few dozen, fourth and fifth graders just pummeling each other, just battling out, trying to pull each other's limbs off just to get that glory at the top of that hill, that feeling of, I've made it, I've done it. And could there be any better glory than that for a fourth or fifth grade boy? It was probably more entertaining than the football game to a lot of people considering that the team stunk, but we can chuckle, we can sear at the thought of this game. Those of you who know me might be like, "This explains a lot, Pastor Andy, that slow voice, that permanently concussed persona of yours, that basic personality and level of culture." But more seriously in our culture, the reality is that at all ages, we're playing a game of King of the Hill in order to try to find our joy, that we're constantly looking at those above us with envy, and we look at what they have. We look at what they do, where they live, the car they drive, their spouse, their children, their lifestyle, their vacations, and we make idols out of it. And we can't be joyful with where we are. So we work, we strive harder to make it there. We're always working up, simultaneously we're always keeping an eye out for those below us. We get caught up in the game and we begin to think that we're positionally above them because of our strength, our wit, our cleverness, our hard-earned stamina, instead of God's grace. We do all that we can to keep those people at bay, if anything, we'll connect with them. We'll forge an alliance to use them to get past who's in front of us only to break it immediately after. Sometimes we actually do make it to the top. You realize it's not that fun at the top. It's really hard to maintain that position with all of the attacks coming our way. And you know what? It might just be better if we vacate that spot at the top and just be paralyzed down at the bottom in a position worse often than we were before we started playing. Other times at the top, we get there and we establish dominance and we're not fulfilled. So we go looking for another hill where there's greater competition, we can forge a greater sense of purpose, a hill that offers more satisfaction on the surface. So many of us try to keep pushing up without realizing that pushing upward, pushing upward is only setting ourselves up for a greater crash, a greater sense of discontentment and despair when we finally realize that it's all in vain. The climb is always upward, it's always steeper once we engage in this game, we fail to see CEO after CEO, athlete after athlete, artists after artists, celebrity after celebrity, politicians, after they've made it to the peak, made it to the pinnacle of their field, they have a breakdown, they self destruct, they get divorced. They just plan a mission to space to really fill the emptiness in their hearts. And furthermore, we're deaf and blind to those who have gotten there within their spheres. We're blind and deaf to the scriptures that tell us that the top does not actually satisfy. We don't believe that the money, the adrenaline and the pleasure of the perks they claim the honor don't actually satisfy. So, naively, ignorantly, stubbornly, cynically, we think that when we get to the top we'll handle it differently. We'll know we won't be disappointed. We won't just succumb to pride, we won't succumb to despair, we won't look for other hills to decline, we'll know when to stop, but that's pride, that's thinking we're different, we're special. Altogether we play this endless game, practice is thinking we end up being exhausted, often end up being broke because there's typically a pay to play structure, and we lack for true joy, just when all of our efforts don't pan out, we're broken, when they do pan out and it doesn't fill us, we're still broken. So what are we to do in this game of King of the Hill? With our trace amounts of energy, where do we go to find true lasting joy? If there was ever a man who could tell us, who could speak into the joylessness, the vanity of playing King of the Hill, pursuing joy satisfaction in things that the world offers it's king Solomon, the author of Ecclesiastes. Who was he? Scripture tells us he was literally king of the mountain. Scripture doesn't say that phrase, but he was king of the mountain. He was David's chosen heir, king of Israel, God's chosen people at the strongest and richest point in their history. He literally was the king of the Temple Mount. It was his hereditary right to build the temple of God on a mountain. He had literally built the temple. He literally built the palace and had mountains and mountains of silver and gold. If he were alive today, he'd be everything that Kanye West proclaims about himself, like ultra famous, huge following, millions and millions of followers, but he'd also follow his 700 wives, 300 girlfriends and all their fashion tips and relational drama online. Solomon would proclaim Jesus as King, but then do a lot of stuff that really makes you wonder, does he think he's king or Jesus is King, he'd have a lot of non-believers, a lot of believers following him because of his God-given gift of wisdom. His gift of verse, his cultural analysis. Scriptures tells us that foreign kings and dignitaries just paid tribute, literally just sent money to him to honor him. And they would travel hundreds of miles to just hear him speak. So we have in our scripture today from Solomon, perhaps the world's richest, wisest, most powerful and influential king in history, writing at the end of his life about the lessons that he learned. And what does he say? Solomon in Ecclesiastes says, "Playing the world's game of King of the Hill in the pursuit of joy is a grievous evil of vanity." Verses one and two. "There is an evil that I've seen under the sun and it lies heavy on mankind. A man to whom God gives wealth, possessions and honor, so that he lacks nothing of all that he desires, yet God does not give him power to enjoy them, but a stranger enjoys them. This is vanity, a grievous evil." From his unique experience of having it all, Solomon points out the vanity of seeking joy in a lot of specific things. So verse two, joy is found in wealth, possessions and honor, Solomon expresses. It's not found in these things. It says, you can have all these things in life, but a stranger enjoys them. What's the point of gathering all of them? What's the point of building it yourself up only to not know who it's going to go to next? Verse three, joy is not found in having children and family. "If a man fathers a 100 children and lives many years so that the days of his years are many, but his soul was not satisfied with life's good things. And he also has no burial. I say that a stillborn child is better off than he." Some of you just think if I had a child, that would make me whole. Long life will not give us joy. Verse six, even though he should live a thousand years, twice over you, enjoy no good. Do not all go to the one place. And so he's saying more time will not satisfy. How many of you live ... I like to the daydream about what if the day was 26 hours? What if there is 27 hours? Just those extra margins of time. How much more could I accomplish on a daily basis in a week? The sleep, the extra bits of work, the opportunity to work out, more time to meditate on scripture and pray, do my devotions, talk to my wife actually. And he says that wouldn't deliver. You could have a thousand years twice over. Work will not give joy. "All the toil of man is for his mouth, his appetite is not satisfied." So what he's saying here is that, people often throw themselves into work for satisfaction. And in Boston, this is a big thing. We derive a lot of our sense of our identity, purpose, joy in this. It says, what does it result in? It results in more work. When you work, you want more things? Well, you desire more things? You pay for more things that only creates the need to work more. And all that is vanity. Furthermore, wisdom. Verse eight, "For what advantage has the wise man over the fool?" And so he's tapping into, a lot of people go through, they pursue prosperity, they pursue wealth, they pursue relationships, they pursue children, long life, health, work. And when that doesn't work out, they start getting intellectual and pursue knowledge, pursue how to use it wisely, and he says this does not work. A lot of people who begin without the strongest upbringing in education. A lot of people who are maybe foreigners coming into a new land, just really trying to grasp the culture, just pour themselves into this, and it doesn't work, it doesn't satisfy. Furthermore, friends, verse eight, "And what does the poor man have who knows how to conduct himself before the living?" And so he's tapping into, there's a lot of people who really don't have much of everything that I've listed so far. And so what do they take comfort in? They take comfort and being able to relate to the common man, they take comfort and, "Hey, I don't have that much, but I can connect with people." Or those who are wealthy of means say, "I kind of come from a different place, but I'm going to find out how to actually just meet the common man and live with him." And Solomon, that may was his position, given his birth position. He says that does not work. Lastly, verse nine, control. This is in the middle clause that in Hebrew, it says, "Those with the wandering of the appetite or eyes." There's another group of people that they look upon life, they hear this critique of how everything doesn't work. It doesn't satisfy, but these are people who say, "No. If I were in control, if I planned this, if I had it my way, if you followed me, it would work out." There's a cynical person that thinks, if I could have planned it, it would work. And Solomon says no, it's vanity, and it's a striving after the wind. So, I want to clarify. Solomon's not saying that these specific things are inherently bad. More often, it's better to have these things. You can do great things for the Lord with wealth. You can do great things with children. It's great to have friends, great to have health long life, great to have work and wisdom. But when they become the pursuit of them becomes the ultimate means for our satisfaction. That's when we go wrong. And that's when we are positioning ourselves for the despair and disappointment. I ask you do any of these fields stick out to you? I know this is basic Christianity. This is, don't make idols out of things that are not God, but really we need to check ourselves on this. In my life I say, I love my children, I love them more as Jesus, my wife, my children, but if my children prevent me from watching a Barcelona soccer game, and I'm angry all day, that entertainment, that endeavor, that thing that I think will fill me, it's controlling me, I'm practicing a form of functional idolatry. So what is it in your life? We have to check ourselves season to season, month to month, day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute, our hearts are idol factories, and we misplace the proper love on the good things that God puts in our life. So what is it for you? And really I'm trying to bring you to a point of bleakness. We should be brought to a point by Solomon by this text, by what I'm saying of, well, what's left in this life, in and of itself, what's left that will satisfy? And Solomon found this out the hard way, we can learn from him, but really there is nothing in and of itself. There's no person who can satisfy in and of themselves, who can meet our needs that only in ways that God can. So Solomon brings us to this point of despair. And this is similar to the point of where was Israel during the intertestamental period? Israel had its glory days. It was really a 1000 years before Christ came between the time the temple was built to the time that Christ came, and just very slowly, the Lord stripped and stripped and stripped everything that they could make an idol of way to really prime the hearts to get people to want to have see Jesus come, see the true Messiah, receive him into their lives. So, what is it for you? Do you feel this disparity, do you feel this disappointment in life as I present it to you, the vanity of pursuing ultimate joy in these things. That's kind of the point of this text, and it should lead you to ask, "How am I living? What do I need to ask the Lord to strip away? What is he blocking from me right now that I'm striving and striving, climbing and climbing to get that I need to just stop pursuing and turn and gaze upon him, gaze upon what he's already provided for me today?" And there's an element of the text, it's morbid, it's not the most joyful passage. It talks about death a lot. It talks about having children and having no burial. It's worse than being a stillborn child who never even lived. When we pursue joy and things of the world, there's a restlessness that is created in us, that it's a burning unquenchable fire that in comparison, it's better to not exist at all than to experience that. A lot of you know this, a lot of people pursue joy in things that are not God himself and there's despair. You're left to contemplate. "Okay, what does this mean for my life?" Death becomes a pretty good option. I ask you, if anyone's here today, what are you doing with that? Are you trying to medicate with just vain endeavor of, what's going to fix, be my next fix. What's going to be my next adrenaline rush to distract myself from this disappointment? Furthermore, just on the topic of funeral, Solomon asks, "In the quest of these things and the climb to attain these things that you think will satisfy you, when you pause and think about the way you're going about it, who's going to be at your funeral?" This is just a pointed question, are you living in such a way that God doesn't matter, people don't matter? Just being of service to him in your life, providing a great witness don't matter? Who's going to be there at the end? And as Christians, we need to be really careful not to let the ministry replace our close friends. The people that we know that we can probably minister to the best, because we were raised similar to them, we look like them, we talk like them. We need to invest in them. And now we're brought to this low point and Solomon does, and that's intentional, again, in advent, we need to feel the bleakness of this point. Israel for all of its history, turned everything good that God gave them into an idol. We need to make sure that we're not doing the same as we await Christ second coming. And so what can cure us of our lack of joy? Solomon suggests two things. First he says, that in order to find joy, we must recognize the limits of our own wisdom. That's in verse 10, 11. "Whatever has come to be, has already been named. And it is known what man is and that he is not able to dispute with one stronger than he. The more words the more vanity and what is the advantage to man?" And so what he's appealing to is the creative order. He's preparing for your comebacks for our challenges of, "No, God, if only you gave me this, no, God, if you let me have my way here, I wouldn't be questioning you like this." And he's saying, "Pause, think about God. He's the creator, you are the creature. He has infinite wisdom, you have finite wisdom. And when you submit, you give him the ability, let him be God of your life. You're submitting to his infinite eternal wisdom. You are not God, you don't know what's going to happen today, tomorrow, the rest of eternity. Your wisdom is limited. So when you face a circumstance in your life that you don't like today, don't lash out, pause and see, trust that God's decision, his design, his will is what is best for you." Solomon's trying to bring us believers as followers. He is saying, how can you have joy? You can stop this process of constantly questioning God, let him be God of your life. So if God says to you, you want this thing, but you can't have it because that is not what is best for you. Are you going to receive him well, are you going to kick and scream? I'm the discipleship pastor here, I'm the counselor, and you see years, people hold on to bitterness because God didn't give them the relationship they wanted. God gave them struggles with conceiving children. God just didn't let that company, that endeavor pan out and they carry this bitterness, and they can never truly enjoy God because they're so mad at him. What Solomon's saying is, the path to joy is to take the heart that God is God, his design, his will is good. When you submit yourself to that and try to have eyes for that in your life, that's a path to joy. So a lot of us, how do we experience that? A lot of us, we can look at our lives and be like, "God, in that season of life, I wanted that relationship more than anything, but praise God, you blocked it. That was all you. Thank you. I see your wisdom in that. God, I was trying to build my identity as an athlete, as an artist, as a businessman ... whatever it is for you, and you put up doors and God, thank you, I see now a little bit down the line that you needed to do that to get me to see you as God, to get me to love you as God. You had to strip away these layers of my identity so only you remained, so that all I could look at, all that I could enjoy with all that I had was you. When you bring your faith to this level, this is really what we're talking about here is, Solomon brings us to the point that God says to Job, at the end of Job, God takes Job, another wealthy, honorable man of the ancient world, and God takes away his children, takes away his riches, takes away his honor in the community. And Job essentially discusses with his friends forever about it, all vanity, just argument that gets nowhere. And then God says, "Where were you when I created the world?" There's an element where that's a brutal, brutal way that God engages with him. But when we pause and see that God is our creator, we are the created ones. The original intention of creation was that God was not a dictator who just created us and told us to do, told us to follow him. He wanted to walk in the garden with us. We were designed to interpret life with his revelation, his knowledge at all times. Think of Adam walking in the garden, naming the animals with him. And we understand him, he's a loving Father. He's sovereign, but his good. So you can find joy, because when you look at him, when you start to see, "Wow, God, I see your wisdom in the way that you've opened doors for me, the way that you closed doors for me, the way you've stripped these idols out in my life." You start seeing into the heart of God, himself. You see his wisdom. You see that he is infinite, eternal unchanging, and his being wisdom, power, glory, justice, holiness, and truth. And you start to love him for that. That's something that the world can't take away. He's unchanging. And you can just go into the infinite qualities, the infinite glory, the infinite beauty of God's heart and get lost in it, and you'll never be dissatisfied. And that's where Solomon's trying to bring us when he says, "Stop fighting, let him be God." And really the message of the Bible is that, God can just say, "I'm God, you're not, follow me because it is what is best for you." But he sends Jesus, so he can say, do all of that to say I'm sovereign, I'm God. But he sends Christ to show his goodness, to communicate his heart to us. We have sinned against him, Adam and Eve sinned against him in the garden and all of us since then have sinned against him. All of history points to Jesus is coming. It gives us assurance. God says, Man, you have a problem, you have sinned against me and my glory, majesty, sovereignty, I'm going to be the solution for you." When we see his sovereignty, we see that all history brings us to Christ. We see his providence showing his goodness, and we begin to look at our own lives and we say, "He can work out this situation. This is not what I want. I might not blatantly profess praises for this hard mercy, this hard stance he's taken with me. But I see how he's used all of history for my good, for the opportunity to have peace, salvation, joy with him through Christ. Let me trust him in the moment." And so Solomon shows us that our wisdom is limited, we need to trust God's wisdom. But then furthermore, he says that, in order to bring us to where we can find joy, he says, joy must come from the outside. Verse 12, "For who knows what is good for man while he lives a few days of his vain life, which he passes like a shadow? For who can tell man, what will be after him under the sun?" And so these are rhetorical questions. This is what he answered in verse 10, the answer is God, man in and of himself does not know what is best for him. Man is not eternal, he doesn't know what's going to happen to him. Who decides what's best for him? God. This is not something within ourselves. We have to let God's rule and reign come into our hearts. We have to receive him. And that's what Christmas celebrates. The source of our joy is not anything that we can find in the world in and of itself. There's a lot of good things that we can enjoy and that we can redeem through salvation in Christ. But the source of our joy is the person of Jesus Christ. We have joy because he broke into creation to be the means for peace with God. It was for the joy that was set before him, he came, he endured a humble life, primarily with the purpose of going to the cross for us, that he might be the sacrifice so that we can have peace with the Father. Jesus leaves his heavenly dwelling, the heavenly Mount Zion, where he was worshiped by angels, descends his hill to come to us that our joy might be complete. While we're trying to climb up a hill, climb up a ladder, he comes down for our sake. He exchanges heaven to be born in a little shack, laid in a manger, spend the first 30 years of his life toiling as a carpenter. He never lived the glamorous earthly life with the house, the wife, the children, the prosperity, and many points he was homeless though. Though a heavenly choir attended his birth, he came here and he received insults and slander. He considered it a joy to be sent to the cross, to die for his enemies. He didn't live without wrestling through these challenges, they were real, but he threw it all. He was the most joyful of men, and scripture tells, our joy can be complete with him. And that this connects back to our wisdom is incomplete, our joy is incomplete a part from the person of God. And so if anyone today, if you are identifying, I am building my identity, I am trying to find the deep soul satisfaction that I know only God can offer in something else, I beg you to repent, prevent yourself from the future pain, trust God with it. This basic Christianity, trust that he is better. Some of you think you have good lives, stable lives, but I say, trust the Lord. He's going to deliver more than you can imagine. It's not going to be without struggle, it's not going to be without trial, and Christians we have to really grow in our ability, not just to appreciate what God brings us in salvation through Christ, not just love him for his grace, mercy that we see on the cross. We have to love God for who he is, only learning to love him in and of himself, just digging into his being, digging into his wisdom, digging into what it means that he's internal, infinite, that is where we'll have the sustenance to remain steadfast as we await his return. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we just praise you for just the joy that Christ had to come here to be the propitiation, be the atonement for our sin, for a part of his work, his life, death, and resurrection. We can't have peace with you. We can't have you. We pray, Lord, help us to just cherish the fact that we know that when you save us, you never leave us or forsake us. You provide the sustenance that we need, you arrange all the trials, the triumphs, the traumas, all to your glory and for our good. And Lord, let us not be people who kick against your design, kick against your plan, but let us be people who have eyes to just see you, to love you, to enjoy you through whatever you have in store for us. Holy Spirit, I pray just if anybody is just clinging to just different aspects of this world, different materials, different experiences, different pleasures, Lord, help them, convince them that what you offer to them is better. What you offer in Jesus Christ, let them look into the heart, the person of Jesus Christ in whom the fullness of your Deity dwell, the word of God himself and let them be satisfied in you. I pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.
Love
December 12, 2021 • Tyler Burns • 1 John 4:7–12
Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston and our neighborhood churches, or donate to this ministry, please visit http://mosaicboston.com. Let's jump right into our text. 1 John 4:7-12. It is short. It is sweet. It is powerful. God's word says, "Beloved, let us love one another for love is from God and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this, the love of God was made manifest among us that God sent His only son into the world so that we might live through Him. And this is love, not that we have loved God, but that He loves us and sent His son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love on another. No one has seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us." This is the reading of God's holy and authoritative and fallible word. May he write these eternal truths on our hearts. I said it's about Christmas. I want to make sure you understand it's about Christmas. Not just because I said it because that's what this text is about. The main crux of this text is verse nine, where it says in this the love of God was made manifest among us. That God sent His only son into the world. So, God sending Jesus into the world is His way of manifesting His love to us. We need to understand what the word manifests mean. If you're like me, I picture a magical movie like Harry Potter or something where they just conjure something out of nothing and they manifested it. That's what I think of. That's not what scripture talks about when it talks about manifesting. When scripture talks about manifesting, it's talking about something that has always been there, but you didn't know it was there. And now you know it's there. Where do I get this from? A couple verses real quickly. Mark 4:22. It says for nothing is hidden except to be made manifest, nor is anything secret except to come to light. So again, it's always been there but it's hidden, but it's hidden for the purpose of being revealed, of being manifest, of coming to light. Another example is 1 Peter 1:20. He being Jesus was for known before the foundation of the world, but was made manifest in the last times for your sake, for the sake of you. So what it's saying is Jesus is eternal. Jesus has always been, but we haven't always seen Jesus. But He was sent into the world to be manifest, to be made known for our sake to benefit us in some way. And it was at God's timing that he did this and this is Christmas. It is the moment when Jesus was made manifest to us. It is the moment when Jesus came into the world and made himself known to us. But, the purpose that Jesus was manifested for was so that God can manifest His love to us. So, this is about Christmas and I want us to know when we think of Christmas, we need to be thinking how is God manifesting? How is God showing us His love, a love that has always been there, a love that is eternal, but maybe we don't always see it. Maybe we don't always know it's there. So if you take anything away from the sermon, I want you to take away that God's love is eternal. And even when you don't see it, it's there. And to make this one point, we'll have three points. So I said remember one thing ... remember three things of that one thing. But the first point we have is you are beloved. The second point we have is now love the beloved, and our third point is we need to un-warp our view of love. So point number one, you are beloved. Twice in this text, John says beloved and five times in the epistle of 1 John, he says beloved. He calls the church beloved, and in verses seven and eight and in our whole text, what I want to make clear is that the word for beloved and for love is the same, and word is agape. Now, maybe many of you have heard that there are different words in Greek for love. If you haven't, there are four different words in Greek to explain love. One of them is agape. The others are phileo, which it's called brotherly love. That's where we get Philadelphia from, city of brotherly love, but it's not just brothers. It's not actually about siblings. It's about comradery, friendship. This is companion love. Then, there's eros, which is romantic love. This is what we think of in rom-coms and movies and things like that, this feeling, this emotion, romantic love. Then there's storge, which is familial love. So this is actual brotherly love between siblings or parental love between a father and a child or children to their parents. And it's very important that we understand the difference because God does not say He is phileo. He does not say He is eros. He does not say He is storge. He says He is agape. So, what's the difference. Oftentimes I've heard agape defined as servant hearted love, as a love that is self sacrificial. It is serving others. That is true. That is a huge understatement of the importance of agape love. What it says in our text in verse eight is that God is agape, that He is love and that to know agape, we need to know God. And so, what it's saying is God's love is different than every type of love. So we have to ask what is it that makes God different from us? If His love is different than our love, what makes Him different? And the word that summarizes all of the things between the difference of God and us as the word transcendent. Big word. Really what the word transcendent means is that God is the absolute greatest. The greatest there ever could be. There are no improvements that can be made, and not only is He the best, He is better than anything you can ever imagine. You can say, "This is the best I've experienced, but I can imagine something better," and God's still better than that. And that's His type of love. God's type of love is the best. It is the purest. It is truest form of love you can ever experience, and it's even better than you can ever know. Even once you do experience it, it's still even greater. That's why I prayed Ephesians and why I pray it for me and for all of us, because it says that we will be filled with the fullness of God. I want us to know that there is a fullness of God and I want us to be filled with His love and that we can know there's still more even when we're full. But, because it is the same word for beloved and for God's love, He's telling us this is the type of love I have for you. It's not about you because it's about God. It's God's love. It's agape love. So when John says beloved, he's not saying, "Guys, I love you." He does love them. When I come up here and I say, "I love you," I do love you. That's not what John is saying. He's saying, "God loves you. You are loved by God with the greatest type of love that there could ever be." That's your identity. This is who you are, and it's really important that we understand this as an identity thing because it helps us when times when we doubt it. If you're here today and you're not a Christian, maybe a friend invited you, family invited you, you just walked in, whatever it might be, I want you to know God is constantly pouring out His love, His agape, the greatest, the truest form of love you could ever experience. He is pouring it out on you now, and He wants you to know it. He wants you to see it. He wants you to know it's from Him, that He loves you. He cares for you in an everlasting eternal transcendent type of way. And, if you're here today and you're a Christian and maybe you're doubting, maybe you're questioning. Maybe you're going through a hard time and it's causing you to doubt God. I want you to know your identity is still the beloved. I get this from our text where it says that God loved us, even when we didn't love him. But I also get it from the context. John is writing to a church. We don't know exactly which church, but it's likely the church in Ephesus because John doesn't have an introduction. He doesn't say, "Hi guys, I'm John. These are my credential." So the church knows him. They know who he is. And he writes it in a way that he loves them. It's clear that he loves them in his writing, so it's a church that's very familiar with him. And John lived most of his life during his ministry in Ephesus, so it's likely the church in Ephesus. But, whatever church it is, there's a specific issue going on in this church that he wants to address. And we get this in chapter four, right before our text, in verses one through three where it says beloved. Again, he calls them beloved. It's really important. Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God. For many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this, you know the spirit of God, every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. And, every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. The specific false teaching that this church he is writing to is dealing with, so they don't know that Jesus actually came in the flesh. They're like, "Jesus would have done this for us. It's something He was willing to do. He could have done." It's an expression. It's a phrase that will teach us the type of love that God has, but it's not literal. And what John is saying is if you do not know Christmas as a reality, if you do not know that Jesus came in the flesh as a reality, you're going to question love. You're going to have a hard time with the foundation of love. But remember, John is writing to those people. He is writing to people that are questioning. He is writing to people that are doubting. He is writing to people that are having a hard time, and he still says, "Beloved, if you are doubting, if you are questioning, you have a hard time, you are still God's beloved. That doesn't change it." This is your identity because it doesn't have to do with you, because it's about the God who has given it and said this is who you are. You are His beloved. I want you guys to know this. I don't just want you, I need you guys to know this. I need to know this for myself. We need to know that God loves us, and once we understand that, we understand that we need to love the beloved. The beloved is Jesus. It's God. In scripture, God, the father calls Jesus and he says this is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased. If we want to understand what it means for us to be beloved, we need to understand God, the father's love for Jesus Christ. But the natural response to someone loving us in this way is to love them back. This is in verse 10. It says, "And, this is love, not that we have loved God, but that He loves us and sent His son to be the propitiation for our sins." So even when we don't love God, even when we're passively not loving God and even when we're actively rejecting and not loving God, it says He still loved us. And that's great. That's good. But I want to know ... if you're like me, I want to know how does God love us in those times? What does it look like for God to love me when I'm rejecting Him? And the only text ... not the only text. The main text that speaks this to me is the book of Hosea. The whole book. This is a little weird. Allie, my wife, wasn't in the first service so I could talk about her and she wasn't here. Now I have to look at her as I say this, but she hates when I bring this example up. She's grown on it, but she hates when I bring it up because it's a text about marriage. And so, she wants to make sure I'm not thinking about our marriage in this way, and I don't. But anyway, if you don't know the book of Hosea, it's an intense one. It's a different one than you might say most of scripture is, but if you know all of scripture than you know it's all the exact same anyway. But, the book of Hosea is about God going to a prophet named Hosea and saying, "You need to marry a woman." It's like, "Oh praise God, that's great." He says, "It's not just any woman. A very specific woman." I'm pausing, because I'm looking around. In the first service, there were kids, so I didn't say the word. I don't see any kids. If there are, forgive me. He says, "You need to get yourself a wife of whoredom." Oh my God, why in the world would you say that? God, you use that word in scripture. Why would you tell someone to do that? And he says, "Because you need to understand, this is what it's the like when I love you." He says, "All of God's people are Gomer ..." is her name. And God wants Hosea to know what God feels when he loves us even when we reject Him, even when we don't love Him. And so in the text, Hosea marries Gomer. They have kids, and the whole time, she's cheating on him and going and running away and spending time ... We aren't told how long, but time that they're providing housing and food and clothing for her. So, it's an extended period that she is with other men. And God says, "Here's how I deal with Israel, and here's how I want you to deal with her. Here's how I deal with my people." It says God gets angry at her. God gets mad that she is cheating on him. Then it says that He gets furious at the people she is cheating on him with, and so how does God love in that anger when we have rejected Him? This is Hosea 2:14-15. Therefore behold, God speaking says, I will allure her and bring her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her, and there I will give her her vineyards and make the valley of Achor adore of hope. And there, she shall answer as in the days of her youth as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt. Huh. It's not what I expected. It's not the response I get when people are mad at me. It's not the response I give when I'm mad at people. Why does God love this way even when we reject him? I love it. It says He is going to allure her. He's talking about ... the her is Israel, it's His people. Eh wants to show us that he is worthy. He's like, "Come, let me love you. Come let me show that I am worthy, that I love you, I care for you." In the text it says that Israel, all the people are going after other people and things for satisfaction, for identity and for provision. It says that they're going to other people because they want love. The reason why Gomer is running after other people is she wants her identity of love in people. She's going there and she's getting food and clothing and housing, and she's thinking it's these people who are giving it to her, and God says she doesn't know the whole time it's been me. She doesn't know that ... we don't know ... that God is the one who is always providing for us. When we have food, when we have clothes, when we have housing, when we have love, when we have care, God is providing it to you. He wants you to see it's from Him. And that's what it's doing here. This text might scare us a little bit because we live in a city and it says bring her out to the wilderness. We're like, "God, what are you going to do? That's terrifying." But, what it's saying is God is taking her out of the place where all the temptations are, where the life that she has always lived is where we have always been in the root ... our normal day. And, sometimes we need to get out of our routine to see God and to be with God. This is why sometimes you do need to take a vacation. This is why sometimes you do need to just go out into nature and be alone with God. Because sometimes we just need a change of pace. We need a change of scenery to say, "God, I'm getting out of this every day. I'm getting out of the temptation. I'm getting out of all the things that are vying for my love and I just want to be with you, be in your presence." What does God do for His people when they are in his presence? Here's my vineyards. Here's a whole valley. What does that mean. He's saying, "I provided everything for you. Here's the vineyard from which I provided all your food. And not only that, look, it's a whole valley. It's beautiful. It's majestic. It's glorious. Here's everything that I've been using to bless you with, to provide for you, to give to you to show you that I love you." And, it's only a door to hope. It's not the whole thing. It's just the doorway. You're cracking the door open and you're getting a glimpse into the riches of which God wants to bless us. Please, I beg of you, know that God loves you fervently, gloriously, mightily, with all that He has. He's giving it to you and He is showing that He is worthy of us to love him back. It says that the response for His people for Israel when God does this is that she will answer in the days of her youth as of the time when she came out of the land of Egypt. What is this talking about? It's specifically talking about the exodus and we just have been going through exodus with the teens downstairs, and what is the response of the Israelites as soon as they get out of Egypt? This was last Sunday, not this Sunday because I'm seeing the teen's leaders here being like, "We know what we talked about today but what we talked about last week." They sang an impromptu song. Moses just starts singing and Miriam's like, "That's great, Moses, but you need tambourines and dancing as well." And, they're just joyous and they're celebrating and praising God's salvation. I think of it as wedding day love. The type of love where you're passionate. You remember the first time you felt love and you're like, "This is incredible." In my newsletter that I sent out this week ... If you didn't get it, I can send it to you ... I gave a little study guide, and at the end of the study guide, I gave a list of songs that God has been speaking to me through and that have been an encouragement to me to know God's love. In there, half of them are worship songs and half of them are not. I feel like I need to explain that a little bit because whenever someone who is preaching sends non-Christian songs, I feel like people are like, "What in the world is going on? What's happening here?" So, I want to explain it. One of the songs in there that I put was This Will Be, or Everlasting Love, sung by Natalie Cole. I love this song because one, it's an everlasting type of love. Only God knows an everlasting love. I see a bunch of you singing it in your head. Praise God. But why I put that song in this list is because the whole beginning of the song is her singing about a guy saying you have loved me in an incredible way. You have cared for me, you have provided for me. This is the best feeling I've ever had. I've never known anything like this. And then, before she gets to the end of the song where she just repeats love over and over and over and over, before she gets there, the transition is she says, "I'm going to love you because you deserve it." God wants us to know He deserves our love back. He has proven that He is worthy of our love. That's why I start with saying you are beloved, because I want you to know God loves you because He is trying to prove to you that He is worthy of your love back. And apart from knowing the love of God, that is the greatest joy we can ever have. The second one is having love reciprocated. I bring this up ... again, I say love is a very personal topic so I'm going to be very personal. I'm going to tell a lot of stories about my wife and I, and when I think about this idea, I think about our relationship. We started dating September 28, 2016. I said that confidentially first service. She's nodding yes so I'm good. But before then, we were just friends and I had drove her home one day after church and I said, "Hey, I would love to take you out on a date." Her response shows you a lot about our relationship and why I married her was, "I need to pray about it." I was like, "You know what? That's great. I've been praying about this for months whether to ask you or not, and it's not fair of me to require that in this snap second decision, you have to answer yes or now, so you take the time you need to pray about it." In my head, what I was trying to communicate was that when I was praying about it, before asking her, was that God gave me peace about asking her, gave me peace about saying if she says no, that's okay. I've got God. We're going to be good. If she says yes, it's okay, but don't be overwhelmingly excited because I still go God. That's all I need so I'm good. If we start dating and we break up, it's going to be okay. We both serve at teens, so the things going through our heads were what if we break up? Does one of us have to step down from teens? It would have to be me. She's much better at it than I am. So, I would have to step down so what is this going to look like? We decided ... Well, I decided in my conversation with God that if we broke up, it'd be okay. We could be a good example of what a breakup looks like to the teens, and God knows we need that. We need good examples of that. But praise God that didn't happen with us. And then, the last one was if we go one and get married, then it'll be great. We can show the teens what God's love is like through that, so praise God. That's what I was thinking in my head and trying to communicate to her when I said it's okay, take your time to pray about it. What I literally said was, "It's okay. I've prayed about it and God told me it's all going to work out." I can tell by your laughter you understand that that, to her, said we're going to get married. That's what she thought I said before we ever went on a first date. And, that's not what I meant at all. Women, if you have ever been in a relationship where a guy has done something similar to you, have grace on them. I am so sorry. Forgive them. We are just dumb. There's no other word to describe it. We're just dumb. So forgive them, please. Please. And then, a month later ... It's insane to me that it was only one month later looking back at it and doing some reflection. It shows how insane of a human being I am. A month later I was praying about whether or not I loved her. To say, should I tell her I love her? We've only been dating for a month. We had known each other for a long time. I was praying and I was trying to know is this just an emotion? Is this just a feeling? Is this just affection or do I actually love her? I said in my mind, praying to God, I said, "Do I want to be with her no matter what? That's the question I need the answer to," because if I want to be with her no matter what, then we're good. We've only been dating for a month so there's a whole lot I still didn't know about her, and so how can I answer that question if I don't know so much about her? My thought was if I assume the absolute worst about her in everything I don't know, would I still want to be with her? She hates when I say that, too, but it's true and praise God, it's been great. It's been fantastic. It's not been bad at all, but I wanted to be prepared if I found out the absolute worst about everything, would I still want to be with her? And that day I decided yes. Yes, I do. It doesn't matter what I find out. I want to be with her. I love her. So we had a date. I drove her home from that date. We get out of my car and I say, "Hey, I just want you to know, I love you." And being the gracious gentleman that I am, I said to her, "Please, I beg of you do not say it back to me. I don't want you to say it. I want you to take your time, pray about it. Think about it, see if you actually do, and whenever you feel like it, then you can say it." I did give a full 30 to 45 second pause in between saying that just to see if she would be like, "I love you too," and she didn't so I was like, "All right, I guess I got to say it." No, but that was the end of October. We were dating for only a month. And I told her I loved her. Two months later, praise God it was only that long, Christmas ... We were celebrating Christmas. She was going to be with her family. I was going to be with my family, so we were going to have our first extended period apart. And so, we exchanged gifts and cards and she hand wrote her card. She always hand wrote her cards and drew a little picture on the front, and I still have all of them. And I'm reading the card, and at the end of the card, it says, "I love you, Ally." Aw, not quite yet. I smiled and I turned to her and I just looked at her. She's like, "Hey, did you see what it said?" Literally poking me, I think. I don't know. Like, "Did you read it? Did you see what it said?" And I said, "I saw what it said. I want to hear you say it. You could write things down, but if you say it, I'll know you mean it." And, and she said it and we were great. I was filled with joy. There was so much joy in my heart. Our date was done. She went inside. We said goodbye, and I drove home. At that time, I lived in hour away and I just blasted love songs. And, I was singing them at the top of my lungs. Everlasting Love was one of them. I was prophesying over our relationship. It's going to be an everlasting love. No, I wasn't prophesying. But anyway, I was singing joyfully and I could tell you, I have not experienced that joy apart from the love of God. Because when someone loves you back, when for two months, I've been like, "I love you. I'm trying to show you that I'm worthy of you loving me back. I want you to know that this is real. This is not fake. I love you." And, she loved me back. Oh man, that's joy. That's what joy is. How much more immensely, infinitely so when we return the love of God that has been from the beginning, that is an eternal love. It is literally an everlasting love. I said this in the first service, I used the word literally a lot because I'm trying to teach us what that word actually means. It means it's real. It's practical. We're not just using it lightly, but God's love has always been when we return it to Him, oh, the joy in His heart and oh the joy in our hearts. Amen. I want you to love the beloved, which is why you need to know that He loves you. You need to know you are beloved and then you can love Him back. And sometimes, we don't feel like it. Sometimes we forget. This is why another song I put in that list is September by Earth, Wind and Fire. Great song, great song. I've been convinced that it is a Christmas song. You cannot change my mind. It is. I'm going to read some of the lyrics for you and listen. It starts off do you remember the 21st night of September? Love was changing the mind of pretenders. I love this song because I can sing it to God and I can sing it to my wife, because we started dating on the 28th of September. So instead of do you remember, I say, (singing)? Yeah, I'm pointing at her and she hates it and she's so embarrassed right now. And I sang in first service too, because that's what I do when I love someone. But anyway, I could sing this to God. And what it's saying is do you remember the first time you felt loved? Do you remember the first time you felt loved by God? Last week, Pastor Shane said we needed to write down times we have seen God's faithfulness in our life so that when we are in despair, when we are doubting, we can look to them and remember and be hopeful for the future because of the faithfulness of God in our past. We need to do the same with His love. I don't always write things down, but I have them cataloged in my head. And I remember times in my life when God has expressed love on me. Do we remember the times when God has loved us? When He has had compassion on us, when He has comforted us? Remember them. Do you remember the first time? The second verse says, "Remember how we knew love was here to stay. Now December ..." This is why it's a Christmas song. It says December. I didn't make it up. Found the love we shared in September, only blue talk and love ... I don't know what that line means. Remember. True love we share today. What it's saying is they were in love September, now it's December, they've forgotten about it, but they need to remind themselves. It says, "Remember the love in September." Remember the love of God that you had at first, and remember it here in December. Remember it at Christmas because Christmas is when God is manifesting His love to us, but also always remember it. Whenever you doubt and question, remember God's love. And it says that in December they found the love we shared in September. So in Christmas, in this month of December, rediscover the love you had for God at first. I want us all to do this. I need to do this. We all need to do this. Let's rediscover the love we had for God when we first knew He loved us. And then it says, "Remember, true love we share today." And that line is basically saying we have to remember the true love we had at the beginning. We need to remind ourselves of it when we forget it, because that love is still as true today as it ever was then. So as you remind yourself of the love that you had for God at the first and He had for you at the first, remind yourself, rediscover that love and remind yourself it is true today. It is just as true. Why? Because God calls you beloved. It's your identity. It has nothing to do with you. It's about Him. And so, He is never changing, His love for you will not change, and so you are still beloved today. His love for you has not changed. And once we start loving the beloved, when we start loving God back, we are now able to un-warp our view of love. This is from verse 12 where it says no one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us. It says when God starts abiding in us, He's going to perfect love in us. Why does it need to be perfected? Because we all inherently have an understanding of what love is. You can ask anybody. They'll tell you what love is to them, but it's saying we all have a very messed up view of what love is and we need God to change it. We need God to perfect it in us so that we can see what true love is because He is the source of true love. So what I did is I wrote down 10 ways where we warp God's love, where we warp love in general, and we're just going to go through them. So the first way we warp love is that love is sexualized. Love is about pleasure. It's about sex. My only note for this point is cut it out. If at any point in my sermon that has happened so far, that will happen in the future, you have thought about sex when I've been talking about love, cut it out. It's a clear sign that you are sexualizing love. I told you this is a very personal sermon. My wife told me I was allowed to say anything I wanted to about her, which is a dangerous thing. And the day after she told me that, I was like, "Are you still sure I can do that?" And she said, Yes." She's trying to work on being open with things in her past, and one of the things in her past that has warped her view of love is that there has been sexual abuse in her past. Oh, it makes me angry. I'm crying right now. I cried first service at this point too, but I'm crying even more because I'm looking at her as I'm saying this, but it makes me angry because it has nothing to do with her, but it has to do with people who have had a warped sexualized view of love and this warping of love does harm, does real, real damage. And I don't want anybody to experience that. And so, if this is part of your struggle, there's grace but cut it out. It's going to hurt people. And, if you have been hurt by a warped sexualized view of love, I want to tell you it doesn't change God's love for you. God still loves you. You are His beloved and nothing will ever change that. Do not let what has happened to you warp your view of God's love for you. You are His beloved. I need you to know it. With that being said, the next way we warp love is we emotionalize it. And by this, I just mean that we make love just an emotion. Clearly, love is an emotion. There is an emotional aspect to love. I love my wife. I have an emotional response. I love God. I have an emotional response. I sing and I praise it into worship. I have tissues in my pocket because every single time I've preached this in practice, I've cried besides once when I just didn't tell the stories so that way I didn't cry. But every time I've told the stories, I've cried because love is an emotion. There is an emotion to it, but it's not just that. What happens when there's not an emotion anymore? What happens when we're really being Gomer to God and we're not stirring up an emotion of love, but we're stirring up an emotion of wrath in Him? He doesn't stop loving us. He still loves us. He still calls us beloved. Love is not just an emotion. It's a decision sometimes, and agape love is a decision. God said, "I have committed to loving you before the foundation of the world." I knew I loved my wife when I said I commit to loving you. That commitment is just as true today as it was back then, and God's commitment to loving us is just as true today as it always has been for eternity. So, don't make love just an emotion. Know that it's real. It's tangible. It's something God has chosen to pour out on you no matter what. The next way we warp love is that we make it self-centered saying this is how I feel loved. Where is that in this text? Nowhere. It's not there. What it says is God is love. Love is the identity of who God is. Love is God-centered. It is centered around Him. If you want to know what love is, what true agape love that will surpass every other type of love, just go to God. If you want to know today, I beg of you, cry out to God, pray to Him, ask Him to reveal this love to you because it's better than anything else you'll ever experience. It's true. And when God loves us, He pours out so much of His love that we just overflow and that love falls and pours out on other people. So even in this text where it says love one another three times ... It bookends the text. You need to love people. You got to. It's just in there. You have to. But even then, it's not about you. It's about God. It's not about them. It's about God. Because God is the source of the truest purest love, and He is pouring it out on us that we are overflowed that we want to share that type of love with other people. We need people to see it. We need people to know it because it's all about God. The next way we warp love is we make it self-realized saying I know what love is by the way I love myself. In the ways I feel love, that's what I can identify love as. No. Love is God realized. It says if you do not know God, you do not love right. It's messed up, so we need to have a God realized love where we go to Him, ask Him, "Make us realize your love." I'm saying a lot of things over and over and over again because they're really important. We need to go to God if we want to know true love. Nothing I say up here is going to convince you if we don't go to God. The reason why I'm up here trying to convince you is because I've experienced the love of God, so I want you to know it. The next way we warp the view of love is we make it self-validating. We say, "All I need is to love myself and then I can carry on. What I need to make it through this life is to love myself and to care for myself, and if I got myself, I'm good. I can carry on." No. Revisit, re-listen to the whole point one. You are beloved. God is validating you. He is telling you, you are valued. You are cared for. He loves you. And, it's still not about you. It's about the greatness of His love. He does love you. You need to know it's about you in that sense that God loves you, but God wants to value you. He wants to validate you. He wants you to know you are worthy because He says you are, not because of anything else. The next way we warp love is we say that it is earned. And this one, I think we all deal with but if I can be so bold, I will say I think this is one that particularly our sisters in the church deal with and struggle with. And I say that because this is one I know my wife deals with and struggles with because of the hurt that has happened in her past. There are times she doesn't feel like she has earned love, she has been deserving of love. And, God's love is not earned and it's an identity. God doesn't say you need to do X, Y, and Z before I will love you. He says you are my beloved. That's who you are. If you have a list of things where you say I need to change this, that and the other before God can love me or before any other person will love me, no. It's not earned. God is freely giving it to you. Accept it. Know it to be true, know it as a reality. You're never going to earn it. None of us are worthy of it. It is grace alone that God gives it to us, but God doesn't want us to try and earn it either. He doesn't want us to be like, "Okay, God, I know it's a free gift, but let me work at it so that I can feel validated." No, God says it's free. Don't earn it. Just take it. It's a free gift. Accept it. But, there's a flip side to how we warp love by making it earned and that's saying, "I'm not going to love anybody until they've earned it." We need to stop withholding love. We do. God didn't withhold love from us, so we cannot withhold love from each other. I see this in our world all the time, everywhere around us, and unfortunately I have seen it in our church as well. And so, dear Christian, stop withholding love from other people in this room. Stop withholding love from brothers and sisters in Christ. In your community groups, stop withholding love. Stop saying, "I'm not going to be vulnerable. I'm not going to be honest and loving of people until they've earned my trust." You need to start it, earn their trust. Be vulnerable, love them, care for them. In whatever ministries you serve in, love them. Love the people you are serving. Love the people you are serving with. Do not withhold love. And I said this first service, and I want to be clear, the pastors didn't know I was going to say this and they didn't make me say it. Stop withholding love from your pastors. Stop saying, "I need my pastors to preach like this before I will love them." Stop saying, "I need these programs at our church before I will love them." Stop saying, "When we do this or that or whatever, or when I feel loved and they meet what I want in a church this way, then I'll love them." Stop it. They are beloved by God and you cannot do anything about it. Sorry. So, stop withholding love from them. Stop withholding love from each other. It says, "Love one another," and the one another is talking about Christians. So we need to stop withholding love from one another, but it also says nobody, Christian or not, will understand who God is until they have seen love. So stop withholding love from your friends and families, even if they're not Christians, because if you want them to know who God is, if you want them to know what true love is, you've got to love them first. And a few weeks ago, Pastor Yan in his sermon gave us homework. Full disclosure, I didn't do it. Well, technically now I did because I did it first service but I'm going to do it again later in this service. But, the homework that he gave us was to write out ways that we can defeat arguments that we see in people's lives against God. Whatever arguments there are to be against God, we should be ready to answer those questions. It's absolutely true. It's in scripture. It's just fact. But, I can tell you no one's going to listen to a word you have to say if you don't love them. So amend, adapt your homework and make sure it starts by saying, "I am committing to loving them. I am making that decision now to love them. So that way they can get a glimpse of what the God love, the agape love, looks like. And then, maybe they'll listen. Maybe I will have earned their trust and proven I am worthy to be listened to." The next way we warp love is we say it's unattainable. Sometimes this is because we feel like we haven't earned it, but I feel like a lot of times it's because we feel like I haven't experienced it yet. I haven't felt true love from my friends, from my family, from my church, from anyone else that I know. And if that's you today, oh, I want you to know you are loved. Love is not unattainable. It's the easiest thing to attain because God is already pouring it out on you. I'm going to keep saying it. It's already there. Just let your eyes be open to it. Just receive it, go to Him. If you want to attain true love, cry out to God, pray you to Him for it. He wants to give it to you. And, I want you to know people are going to let you down. If you're hoping for fulfillment and love in people, you're going to be disappointed. And I can say that because I know it from experience. I think we all do. I've shared some of my story many times when I've been here and I'm going to continue to share it, because it's important and love is very personal. But for me, I was very depressed in middle school. That's why I work with teenagers because I know it can be hard. But I was very depressed in middle school to the point of being suicidal. I wanted to take my own life. And what I needed to learn in that time was I needed to stop putting my hope in my friends because why I became depressed and suicidal was I was looking for love from my friends. I went to church. I've heard about God's love all the time. Great. I have parents who love me and care ... I knew they loved me. I wasn't looking to them for love. To my parents, I'm sorry. I was looking for love in my friends and they abandoned me. And when your hope is in friends and you no longer have friends to hope in, you're never going to have hope for love. It just makes sense. And so, I thought love was unattainable because the source in my hope was gone, and it wasn't until I was able to recognize I needed to stop that and put my source of hope for love in God that I could ever change. And, I'm going to get into how that change happened in a little bit. The next way that we warp love is we say it's conceptualized. We make it conceptualized. That love is an idea. It's something we just want to spread across everybody. We just want everybody to have a concept of love. This one also makes me angry. This one makes me very angry because this is what I had done my whole life, and I see the damage it did to me and I don't want that for anybody else. I said I was depressed and suicidal in middle school, and what got me out of there is God sent a friend, a guy named Rich. And Rich came to me one day and he was like, "We should be friends." That was the exact day I had a plan to take my life. And I said to him, "You want to be friends? We don't got a long time." And he said, "Well, why is that?" And so I told him about my plan and he said, "No, no, it's okay. We're going to be friends. We're going to be friends." And that was all I needed to hear in that moment. That was all that I needed to hear to keep me going, to continue on, to be alive. But my hope for love was still in him, still in someone, not in God. And for three years after that, I still battled with suicidal thoughts. I still battled with depression. And one night we were having a sleepover, we were hanging out having a good time and I was thinking, "I'm having a good time here, but I'm so depressed all the other times." And so, I cried out to God. I prayed to him and I said, "God, why would you let me feel this way? Why would you let this happen to me? I've gone to church my whole life. I've started a Bible study in a public school. I started a Bible study where we convict each other of sin with the high school guys in my school. I'm serving you. Why would you let me feel this way?" And God said, "I need you to understand something." He said as clear as day, I'll never forget it. He said, "I am the one who sent Rich to save you. I am the one who sent him." He's like, "And in the real tangible way you experienced being saved from death, even more so I saved you when I sent my son, Jesus Christ to die for you." We need to stop conceptualizing the love and the death of Christ. It is real. It is tangible. That is the issue John is writing about here. It's not a new one. It's an old one. But when we don't believe Christmas is real, when we don't believe Jesus literally came, when we don't believe He literally physically died, it's going to warp our view of love. This is a very hard year for me. This past year, I have lost four people that were really close to me and I have been to four funerals this past year. And that was very hard because it was unexpected, but also it had been six years since I'd been to a funeral. So, it was different. I've changed a lot in six years and it affected me differently. And when I was at those funerals, I was asking myself a question, why do I take death so seriously with my friends and family, but I don't do it with Christ? As I'm there at these funerals, I'm crying, I'm praying, I'm sad because I knew them, because I loved them, because they had an impact on my life and to lose them leaves a void. You feel it. But I know God, I know Jesus. He has had an impact on my life. He has affected me in a greater way than any person ever could. Why am I not broken up that my sin caused him to have to die for me, and by God's grace and God's power alone, Jesus didn't stay there. He has risen from the grave. He has defeated sin and death. Praise God for it. And as I'm standing there at these funerals, I'm wondering and I'm thinking, man, there were people that stood over Jesus like this. There were people that were there, felt the same emotion I'm feeling now, and it was real to them. I need to make Jesus' death real. We all need to know Jesus' death and sacrifices, greatest act of love for us is real. It's practical. And for some reason at funerals in particular, we conceptualize love the most because we're afraid to say what it really is. And this is the part where I do the homework that I didn't do for Yan. I was at my Uncle Tommy's funeral, very unexpected that he died, and at the funeral they said, "No, he's still here. You can just reach out and feel his presence. He loves you." Oh, that made me angry. At my Aunt Carol's funeral ... She had had cancer. Her immune system was done and then she got COVID and she passed away not too long ago. At her funeral, they said, "I don't know Carol," because of course, he don't, "But from the stories you have told us, it's clear that she was kind to people and she loved people. So because of this kindness, I am certain that she is in Heaven today. So, if you want to see her again, you need to be kind to people. You need to love people." Oh, that made me angry. It took everything in me not to get up there and punch that priest in the face and say, "No, this is what love really is." It's God holding me back that I didn't do that. But instead I sat there and I prayed and I prayed and I said, "God, show your love to the people in this room. Help them to know you love them. You really love them. Show your love to them." And so to my friends and to my family ... I'm talking to the cameras and I'm talking to all of you, but I'm talking to my family. To my friends and family that were at my Uncle Tommy's funeral, to Josh, Mar Rose, Thomas, Logan, Damien, Demetrius, I have hope, real hope that my uncle is in Heaven because my parents have been faithful witnesses of the gospel to him. They have proclaimed the gospel to him and he said he knows it. Whether he does or not is not for me to decide, it's for God to decide, but I have real hope that he is in Heaven. Not because of a feeling but because I know what the gospel is. And if you want to see Tommy again, I pray, I beg of you, pray to God, cry out to Him. Ask him to show you that you are loved, that He loves you so much that He sent His son Jesus into the world because He loves you, and Jesus died to save you from your sins so you can have eternity with God. I love you guys so much. I want you to experience the greatest love that I have ever experienced and that there ever is. And to my friends and family who are at my Aunt Carol's funeral, I'm not naming you all by name because you know who you are and we'd be here for another three hours if I went through that side of the family. I want you to know same thing. I have real practical hope that my Aunt Carol is in heaven today because again, my parents were faithful in proclaiming the gospel to her, even when I wasn't, and she has heard it and she has said she agrees, and whether or not she does, I don't know. It's not for me to decide. It's for God to decide, but I have real practical hope that she is in Heaven. And I want you guys to do the same, please. I love you. I want the best for you. I want you to know and experience the true saving love, glorious love of God. Ask Him for it. Ask Him to reveal it to you. He wants to. He's already pouring it out on you. He wants you to know it's there. The next way we warp our view of love is we make it temporary. We say, "This is only here for now. You say you love me now, but what about later?" This is another one that I told my wife I was going to call her out, that I think she deals with this one, because she always asks ... she said I could say anything, so I'm going to. She asks me the question often, "Why do you love me?" I hate that question. I hate it. I used to answer it and say, "I love you because you are beautiful. You are my best friend. You challenge me to love God more. You challenge me to know God more. You know scripture better than even I do. I love you." And, I thought that those were good answers. I thought those were answers that were putting my source of love in things that weren't about superficial things, like you love God more than you love me so I love you. And that's true. That is a fact, but that's not what she was asking in that moment. And I needed to learn what she was actually asking, because for her, those things are temporary. What if she doesn't feel like she is beautiful anymore? Tell her that's not an issue because she always is beautiful, she always will be beautiful. That is her identity. God says it so she is. There's nothing she can do about it. You're beautiful. And to any women in the room, this is your identity. God says you are beautiful. You don't need to change it. God says it. It's your identity. So even when you don't feel like it, know you are. But she wasn't asking, "Am I beautiful?" She's like, "What if I'm not?" She still feels that way, again because of things that have happened in her past, she doesn't always feel beautiful and I need to work and grow in showing her that she is. She says, "I want objective truth. It's your opinion, your subjective." And I say, "My opinion's the only one that matters because I'm your husband." And I say, "If anyone else thinks you're beautiful in a different way, I need to find them and I'm going to get them." No. But she wasn't asking about that. She was thinking what if I'm not beautiful? What if I'm not loving God more than you are? What if I'm not challenging you to grow in your relationship with God? What if I stop being your best friend? What about then? And what I need you to know, and what I need all of us to know, this is not a temporary love. God is eternal. God is everlasting. His love is eternal. It is from the beginning. It's not going to stop. My commitment to you, my wife, was once and I said it and I made it and nothing's going to change it. Nothing. I've committed to an everlasting type of love. God says the same thing to his bride, the church, to all of you, He has made an eternal covenant to love you. It's not going to stop. It's not temporary. The last way we warp God's view of love is we make it limited. God's not limited by anything. God is an all powerful God, an all knowing God, a transcendent God. Nothing can limit Him, so nothing can limit His love for you. He gave up everything. He gave up all of His riches in heaven to come and to die and to save you. He didn't limit it. And that's why, again, I prayed Ephesians 3. I want us to be filled with the fullness. It's an unlimited love. I don't want us to just get a taste. If you don't have a taste, I want you to get a taste of the love of God, but I want you to receive the fullness of it, and then when you feel like you have the fullness of it, I want you to know there's even more. It's never ending. Don't limit God's love. Don't limit love that you have for others, either. I have one last thing to say. I love you guys. I forgot to say this earlier, but when I get up here and I say, "Good morning, church," I started my sermon saying good morning church, and I saw my wife mimicking it in her head, and I saw all of my friends who know that laughing, because it's funny because I'm weird. I get it. But what I want you to know when I say that, I'm trying to tell you who you are. You are Christ's church. You are His bride. I don't want to do this, but I might have to stop saying it because I might have to say what I'm trying to get at. You are beloved. That's who you are. I want you to know it, and the way I show my love for people is I cook for you. I make food. I love to cook. If I've ever made a meal for you it's because I love you. And every single Sunday, we open our house ... I didn't mention this first service. We live in Lynn, so it's a little bit of ways away, but every Sunday we open our house and I cook for people. If you're here today and you're saying, "I like what you're saying, but I'm struggling." You're saying, "I don't know if I feel loved. It's nice what you say." Or, "I've been struggling with knowing I am loved. I want to know more about this agape type love," please come on over. Let me cook you a meal. I'm not going to give my address out right now, but if you want it, come on up. I already gave it to two people after the first service. You won't be alone. Please come on over. It's Lynn. It's far away. We'll find out rides. If we run out of food, we'll just empty everything in the freezer and in the pantry. It doesn't matter. I don't care. We'll order pizzas if need be. I don't want you to doubt that God loves you. I want you to know it. I want it to be real. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, Lord, we praise you. You are good. You are great. Most importantly, you are loving. You have given us, you have poured out, you have made manifest your love to us in this season of Christmas by sending Jesus to come and to live and to die for us. If we do not yet know your love, open our eyes, open our hearts to know your love. Your true love. Your greatest love. If we are doubting, if we are questioning, if we are hurt right now, comfort us, show us your love and help us to perfect our love. Help us to perfect the way we view your love, the way we love others. Help us to un-warp our love, because as we have a warped view of love, we proclaim to the world a warped view of you. We don't want that. Help us to have a right view of love so we can proclaim a right view of you to those who need it most. In Jesus' name. Amen.
Hope
December 5, 2021 • Shane Sikkema • 1 Peter 1:3–12
Audio Transcript: This media has been made available by Mosaic Boston Church. If you'd like to check out more resources, learn about Mosaic Boston and our neighborhood churches, or donate to this ministry, please visit http://mosaicboston.com. I have a problem. Every time I preach, the worship is so awesome. By the time I get up here, my voice is already shot. And so, thank you band and thank you Jesus for being worthy of such praise. If you're new, my name is Shane. I'm one of the pastors here at Mosaic, and we're so glad to have you with us. We mentioned this earlier, we would love to connect with you. We do that through the little connection card in your worship guide. You can fill that out and turn that in either at the little white box there at the back of the room or at the Welcome center. And we have a gift that we'd love to give to you to thank you for being with us this morning. As we begin, would you please join me in prayer over our sermon today? Father, we thank you for Advent. We thank you for Christmas, for sending, for giving your son. And we thank you for putting this season into the rhythm of our year, this time where we can slow down and remember that Jesus Christ was born, that you didn't just make us and leave us. You actually wanted to be with us. You wanted a relationship with us. Even when we were unworthy, even when we were too sinful to be with you, you sent your only begotten son to come to be our manual, to be with us, to die for us, and to deliver us from the wrath that we deserve, to lead us back to you. And Father, we thank you for this unsurpassable gift of grace, from which true hope and love and joy and peace continually flow. And I pray that in this Advent season, we would receive those gifts with glad and grateful hearts. And that they would transform us from the inside out to be more like our Savior, more like your Son, Jesus Christ. It's in his name that we pray. Amen. Well, Happy Advent. It is hard to believe that we're already five days into our advent calendars. And I say, "calendars," plural, because this year we have two advent calendars in our home. Owen and Nora each get their own. I made a decision that this year, that the sadder of the world gets around us, the harder our family is going to celebrate Christmas together. So, we're going all out this year. We got a real tree, which is not usual for us. We went out to the tree farm. We picked, we just bought this massive Fraser fir, brought it home. And the first thing I put it up, I was like, "It wasn't big enough." Next year, we're getting an even bigger one. It's awesome though. Our apartment smells like a pine forest. We have a fireplace, our landlord doesn't let us use it. I know most of you can relate to that, but we decked it out with wreath and the garland, all of that. And here's just a little pro tip. Cedar incense bricks. You can get them in Amazon, instantly makes your home smells like a campfire. Instantly fills the air with Christmas spirit. I'm really excited for Christmas. We had an awesome Christmas Members' Party last night, joyful, jolly Christmas party last night. Thank you again to all the volunteer who put that together. Next Sunday, Mini Mosaic is going to be up here singing a special Christmas song. You're definitely not going to want to miss that. But as we begin this Advent season, I want to just take a moment right now to reflect. And here's the question that I want you to reflect on as we begin. What is Christmas to you? Visualize it in your mind, in your heart. What is the ideal Christmas look like? What comes to mind when you picture the perfect Christmas? For me, growing up, Christmas was combing through the JCPenney catalog, looking for that perfect piece of plastic mechanized, electronic joy to satisfy my greedy little heart on Christmas day. Christmas was hiking through the fields of a tree farm to find that perfect tree, coming home all sticky and covered in sap. Christmas was sledding with my friends. It was snow days, snowballs, and snowmen and snow forts in the church parking lot. Christmas was playing outside until you were frozen and wet, and then coming inside for some hot chocolate and some Super Mario Bros. 3 in my cousin's Nintendo. Christmas was lights and decorations. It was food and fellowship. It was Sunday school pageants at church. It was candlelight caroling. It was opening presents at grandma's house. Christmas was great. And for many of us, Christmas is it's just that, it's something that was. And now, it comes and it goes, and it's maybe just not quite the same. Why is that? When did we stop looking forward to Christmas and settle for just looking back? What changed? Here's my diagnosis. Christmas didn't change. We changed. We grow up, life knocks us around. We get calloused by pain, we calloused by our own sin. We get scared. We get scarred. We get proud, and our childlike hearts get hard. They get cynical. And at some point, we all start taking ourselves a bit too seriously. And here's the problem. Jesus Christ is born, but it's hard to joyfully run into a smelly, dirty stable when you're taking yourself too seriously. It's hard to bow down before a baby lying in a manger when you think that you're all grown up. It's hard to kneel before a child, unless you have the simple, pure, humble faith of a child yourself. The other day, my son, Owen, he randomly asked me a question. He says, "Hey, dad. Is Christmas getting too commercialized?" I'm like, "What are you talking, you're 10 years old. Too commercialized? What have you been watching?" They've been watching Charlie Brown Christmas. When I first became a Christian, I used to rant about the commercialization of Christmas. "Ah, it's not about the parties and the presents and decorations. Christmas, it's just about Jesus. Jesus is the reason for the season. You can't spell Christmas without Christ." Now, the problem with that is it's true. When you take that too far and in your attempt to avoid becoming Santa, you turn into Scrooge. You turn into the Grinch. You become the Christmas curmudgeon. And so, you got the Santa over here on one side, and you have the Scrooge over here on the other. The Santas are all about the celebration, but there's no Jesus, and it is kind of a sad and empty party. And the Scrooges are all about the idea of Jesus, but it's a Jesus with no joy. And it's kind of a sad and empty party as well. They're both missing the point. It's like an awkward middle school dance. You got one side over here, one side here. How do you get these two parties to get over themselves and meet in the middle so that we can all start having a good time? The answer is Jesus, but it's the real Jesus. Because, the Scrooges are right. Christmas is all about Jesus, but because it's all about Jesus, it's all about joy. It should be a season of great joy. So, sing and decorate and throw parties and give gifts and have fun. Luke 2:9, "The angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shown around them, and they were filled with great fear. And the angel said to them, 'Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ The Lord.'" Christmas should be fun. Christmas should be a party. It is good news of great joys so we should make at a party, because let's face it, most of life is not a party. Most of life is pain. And Christmas isn't about sticking our heads in the clouds and pretending that the pain isn't real. It is about joyfully bowing our heads to the ground before the manger of our maker, because here lies the Christ, the one who was born to make everything better. And so, this Christmas, this is what I'm saying. If you're feeling a bit Scrooge-ish, and I'm preaching on myself here because I'm not the most naturally happy joyful person. Christmas is an invitation to be a kid again. Not to be childish, but to be childlike in a humble faith. If you're having a hard time with Christmas, I invite you to be born again, and then come with that childlike faith, come with wonder and adoration before the manger of the newborn king. What I'm saying is the life of the party is here. Hope has been born, and we have a reason to celebrate during this season. If you have your Bible, open up to 1 Peter chapter one. We're going to be walking through verse three through 12. We're going to be focusing on God's gift of hope that was given on Christmas day. And I want to talk about the foundation of our hope. I want to talk about the substance of our hope. And then, finally, I want to talk about the power of our hope, as our three points for our sermon today. This is 1 Peter chapter one, beginning in verse three. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Though you have not seen Him, you love Him. Though you do not see Him now, you believe in Him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls." "Concerning the salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ in the subsequent glories. It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by of the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look." This is the reading of God's holy word for us this morning. Point number one is the foundation of our hope. "What a time to be alive." We've heard that phrase lot over the last couple of years, not always in the most positive sense. But the point of these last four verses, I'm not going to spend a ton of time in these last four verses, we're going to spend most of our time in the beginning of the passage, but you get the point in these last couple of verses, that it is an amazing time for us to be alive. We live at a privileged point in human history, that for thousands of years, God's people we're longing, we're waiting in anticipation for the Messiah to be born. They were eagerly looking forward into this mystery, wondering how it was that God was going to put all of these pieces of his plan for salvation together. And we now live at a place where we don't have to look for that anymore. We have the privilege of looking back. We're not hoping for hope to be revealed. We can build on the hope that has already come through the gospel of Jesus Christ. And we're standing on this foundation. Peter says, "Even the angels long to see these things." The hope has come, the foundation has been laid and nothing can destroy that. And so, what is the foundation of our hope Peter tells us in verse three? It says, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." And notice that there are three things there that Peter mentions that we did not do and that we cannot change. And this is why we know that this foundation is firm. First of all, he tells us that the Father has caused us to be born again, that we didn't give birth to ourselves, that the Holy Spirit sovereignly regenerated our hearts and made us new creations in Christ. We didn't do that. We can't undo that. Second, he says the Father has caused us to be born again according to, what? According to our great merit? No, according to his mercy, that this is rooted in the eternal, unchanging character of God, the Father. And then, finally, he says the Father causes to be born again according to his mercy through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that is surely as Christ is alive, our hope lives. We're standing on a foundation of his finished work and atonement. The basis of the gospel is our hope. We know that, but we need to start there and we need to stay there because this is the hope that our hearts were built for. Until we rest on this foundation, our hearts are always going to be fearful. They're always going to be anxious. They're always going to be restless until we rest on this foundation. And so, the question I want to ask you right now is are you anxious? Are you an anxious person? A better question is how anxious of a person are you? Because, we all have fears. We all have cares and anxieties. And the problem is most of us spend way too much time worrying about the little things, because we put way too much hope in the little things. When I was in college, I struggled with anxiety in a pretty intense way. There were times I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I'd be up all night worrying about things. And it was a constant struggle for me. I started college in the year 2000 to study graphic design. At the time, the whole world was changing. The internet was coming to be this thing that we know it today, was something that I didn't even grow up with at the time. And the design world, there was this shift taking place where the workforce was shifting from designing things by hand on paper, to doing all of these things on computers. And so, there was this huge need for new people to learn the skill and rise up and enter this workforce. And so, I was told this is a great career to go into. And so, I started off college, and then by the four years later, when I graduated, apparently those needs had been met because there were no jobs left. And I was one of a very few people in my graduating class that actually managed to have a design job lined up after graduation. And so, the week after graduation, started this great job at a small ad agency, moved to a new city. I got my own apartment, started paying my own bills for the first time. Kelly and I, we were engaged at the time, had started going back to church together. Things were going great in a lot of ways, but I still struggled with a lot of anxiety and something still hadn't clicked with the gospel in my mind. And forward about six months later, I'm in my new career. Things are going well. And one day, I come into work and my boss calls me into her office and closes the door. I'm like, "Ugh, this is not good." And she tells me that our agency had just lost their biggest client, which made up the majority of our work. And that because of this, the last three people who had been hired on staff were going to be fired. We're going to be laid off, and that included me. And now, looking back, this seems really silly, but I started freaking out. I was devastated. I was crushed. I felt humiliated. The whole world was crashing down, and I started catastrophizing everything. "I'm never going to find another job. Kelly's going to call off the wedding. I'm going to run out of money. I'm going to lose my apartment. I'm probably going to spend the rest of my life homeless and living in a gutter." That was what I was thinking. Maybe not reasonable, but those were the real thoughts that were going through my mind that day. And I remember this so vividly. That night, I was walking through my living room, and all of a sudden, I just fall to my knees and I just started crying. And I cried out to God and something clicked, because I didn't cry out to God and ask him to give me my job back. I didn't cry out to God and ask him to change my circumstances. For some reason, I cried out to God and I just said, "I don't care. I don't care if I lose my job. I don't care if I lose my apartment. I don't care if I lose everything. I just don't want to lose you. I need you, so don't leave me." Where did that come from? I'd never had that thought before. For the first time in my life, I wanted God for God. I truly saw my sinfulness and my need for a savior. And all of a sudden, everything clicked. I confessed. I repented of my sin, of my pride, of all of the ways that I had been trying to rule my own life. And I don't know how to describe this, but there on the floor of my living room, it was like something reached down and just pulled me. I felt physically this weight of anxiety lifted off of my back. And I stood up. I felt life, and I felt this joy. I felt peace that I had never experienced in my life. I had so many misplaced hopes, and the basis for those hopes had always been myself. And you can only live that way for so long before that will crush you. I needed to learn that losing my job was not my biggest problem, money wasn't my biggest problem. None of that, didn't matter. My biggest problem was me. My biggest problem was my sin. My biggest problem was my soul hadn't been reconciled to God, and I'd been trying to build my life with no foundation, a foundation of sand. I opened my Bible that night and I read through the Sermon on the Mount. You get to Matthew 6:31 and Jesus tells his disciples, he's like, "Therefore, don't be anxious, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all of these things will be added to you." We're going to talk about the substance of our hope as Christians, but we can't talk about that until we talk about the foundation of our hope, because hope without a foundation is just wishful thinking. We need something real. What I'm saying is don't assume, as I had done for so many years, that you're okay just because you grew up going to church, or because mom and dad are a Christian. Have you personally experienced Christ for yourself? Do you long for his kingdom and his righteousness? Do you hunger for his word? Are there signs that you indeed are born again, a new creation that the Spirit is working, bearing fruit in your life? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. In other words, do you bear the family resemblance? Are you growing to look more like your heavenly Father, more like Christ, your brother? If so, rejoice, because you have been born again, born again to a living hope, to an unshakable foundation. And once you have that foundation, now we can begin talking about the substance of that hope. Because, what we see is that with this new birth comes a new Father, a new family. And in this new family, you have a new inheritance. This is point number two, the substance of our hope. This is what Peter talks about next. And going back to verse three, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is in imperishable, undefiled, unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time." There are these two really dangerous apps that you can get on your phone. One of them is called Red Tree, and one of them is called Zillow. Now, I've never done this, I'm sure you've never done this, but we've heard about people who have done this. They get sucked into these apps. Begin looking around like, "Yeah, why not? Why shouldn't I increase the filter? Let's see what can you get for half a million dollars, a million dollars, $2 million, $4 million, $8 million." You start looking at all these big, beautiful mansions in Brookline. And then, you see the price of a studio apartment, and you delete the app and cry yourself to sleep. Wouldn't it be nice to find out that you have a rich uncle and he died... And that part's sad, but you didn't know him. And before he died, he wrote you into his will. And he left you a mansion in Brookline, or even just a house with a yard and a washing machine that doesn't take quarters. I'd be happy with that. The bad news is you don't have a rich uncle, or maybe you do. I don't. The good news is you have a generous Father and you have an inheritance that is so much better. Imperishable, undefiled, unfading. It's guarded, it's secure. It's kept in heaven like a treasure in a safe, ready to be given, ready to be received at that last day at the revelation of Jesus Christ. The Apostle John in the book of Revelation, he has a vision that kind of helps us just grasp a little bit of what this inheritance will be like. Revelation 21, beginning in verse one, he says, "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.' And he who was seated on the throne said, 'Behold, I am making all things new.' He said, 'Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.'" "And he said to me, 'It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. And to the thirsty I will give from the spring of water of life without payment. To the one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son.'" And he goes on to describe the completeness of this city, the perfection of this city in verse 22. He says that, "And I saw no temple in this city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no sun or moon to shine on it for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day and there will be no night there." "They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb's book of life." If you've been born again, and your name has been written in that book since before the foundation of the world, and nothing can erase it. Now, imagine an eternity where everything is as it ought to be, where heaven and earth become one, where the battle has been won, and where those who conquer will dwell with their God and see their Savior face to face. The night that Christ was born, the shepherds ran to see the face of their Savior, gentle and lowly swaddled in a manger. The day that Christ returns, we will rise to see the face of our Savior, beaming with power and glory and seated on his throne. This is our inheritance. This is our hope. This is important. Because we are hope-fueled creatures, without hope, we can't survive. But with the right hope, we can do almost anything. Hope gets us out of bed. Hope sends us on our way. Hope keeps us pushing forward until we reach our destination. When you combine the right foundation of hope with the right substance of hope, you get the unstoppable power of hope, power to persevere, power to do the hard things that we are called to do as we ultimately wait for the fruition of our hope to come. And this is point three, the power of hope. Peter continues in verse six, says, "In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ." Theologically, the basis of our hope is our justification. The substance of our hope is the glorification. That's the easy part. Right now, we're in the hard part in between. Justification, glorification, for us, those come easy. The hard part is our sanctification, and this is why we need a hope that gives us power. Because, the question that we're tempted to ask in the hard part is does this cost really outweigh the benefit? Is this worth it? And obviously, we know in our minds that it is worth the pain. But when you're in pain, it's easy for your heart to forget. And you need that reminder. And so, think of it like this. Justification is like conception. You find out you're pregnant, everyone's excited, there's joy. There's celebration. Glorification is like birth. You're holding that little bundle of joy in your arms. Sanctification, it's like all the stuff in between. It's the pregnancy, there's groaning, there's suffering, there's discomfort. It's the morning sickness, the mood swings, the contractions, the pains of labor. And it's not the most fun, but you get through it. And at times, you're even able to make it fun. Why? Because, you know that the pain is temporary and you know the joy that is coming. Peter puts it more like this. Justification is like our cradle. We're newborn babies, born again. We didn't give birth to ourselves. We're just happy to be here. Glorification is like our inheritance. We didn't pay for it, we didn't build it, but our Father has left us this epic mansion. And then, Peter switches metaphors a little bit. Sanctification, it's not just like the demo and the renovation. The metaphor that he uses, he describes it as a crucible, where you're thrown into the fire, where everything that is unholy needs to be burned away until all that is left is pure gold. When you think about suffering like this, this completely changes the way and you think about the trials of this life, that our suffering is not random. It's not meaningless. It's doing something. It can produce value. It can result in things that impact our eternity, that we are going to be rewarded with what we do with it. Peter says that the tested genuineness of our faith will, what? It'll be found to result in praise and glory and honor in the revelation of Jesus Christ. And so, have you ever thought about suffering as stewardship? We all know that if God gives us wealth, if God gives us blessing, if God gives us talents, that we should not let those talents go to waste. What if God gives you suffering? Would you let that go to waste? When faced with suffering, we have a choice. We can be faithless and grow bitter and let those flames burn us up until there's nothing left. And that's no advantage to us. It's no advantage to anyone else. Or, we can face those flames with faith. Not to grow bitter, but to get better, to let them refine us. And to do so, knowing that we will receive the praise of our King and we will hear those words, "Well done, my good and faithful servant. Come, enter into the joy of your master." This is why James, the brother of Jesus, he begins his letter, James 1:2, he says, "Count it all joy, my brothers, when..." What? "When you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing." Romans 5:1 says, "Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through Him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who's been given to us." Have you ever thought about suffering as an investment, with a return both in the long term and in the short term as well? Like, we know we'll be rewarded in the future, but there's something to be gained here right now. James talks about steadfastness. Paul talks about endurance. What is endurance? I'm not a runner. I don't run. Fun run, oxymoron, I don't get it. But, I understand some of you do. And we used to have a woman in our community group who loved to run. She was actually a professional runner. If I were to run with her, I would not have a very good time. I would be keeled over, passed out, gasping for air. She would just be getting warmed up. And in some sick twisted way, she'd be having fun. Miles in, and she'd still be having a good time, not winded, enjoying her run. Why is that? Well, she had endurance. She had run so much in the past that she had grown her capacity to run faster and farther in the present. The question is how do we do this spiritually? And there's two things that you need to do to grow in this kind of endurance spiritually. You need to run, and you need to remember. First of all, you have to run. There's no way around it. You have to go through suffering. And as you go through suffering, you need to remember, to remember God's faithfulness to you. In your walk with Christ, you are going to be faced with trials that seem impossible to endure. And sometimes, they're going to come to you through crisis. Sometimes, they're going to come to you through calling. Crisis is the unexpected. Something happens, your whole world gets flipped upside down. Calling is God's going to ask you to do something that from your perspective seems terrifyingly impossible. And so, here's a little life hack for when you're faced with these trials. You need to run, you need to remember. In order to remember, you need to start writing things down. First of all, you need to write down every time that God has been faithful to you during trials in your past. Our community group had an opportunity to do this this week. And everything inside me wants to share this story, I'm not going to because the people who went through it are going to do a much better job with some day. But, all I want to say is we began a trial last week that ended in a testimony by the end of the week. And that in between, God had done a miracle and showed us again his faithfulness. I'm going to write that down. I'm going to remember. Remember the day that I lost my job? That was a crisis. But, you know what? I think I got saved that day. And following that day, things didn't get better right away. It took three months of constant job searching before I even got a response. Since I had just gotten saved, I would spend my mornings, the first part of my day, finding any job that I could and applying for it. And when I ran out of that, I would spend the rest of my day reading my Bible for hours at a time. I'd never read the Bible before. This was new to me. By the way, there are three really important pieces of evidence that you need to look for that will tell you if you have truly been born again. First of all, you're going to love Jesus in a real way. And that's going to click for you what that means. Second, you're going to love the church. You're going to stop making excuses for why you don't want to go to church, and you start looking for opportunities to go to church, to serve, to worship, to gather with the body of Christ. And then, three, you're going to get hungry for the word of God. You're going to want to just start devouring scripture. And that's where I was at this time. This is a true story, by the way. Three months go by, I'm running out of money. My bank account is about to hit zero as I'm writing my last rent check. The week that I was writing that check, I finished reading the Bible cover to cover for the first time. And I'm not kidding, that week, for the first time in three months, I got three calls and I got two job offers. And by the next week, I'd started working a new job. God was making it obvious that my biggest need was not my job, that my biggest need was him. But, also, that he orchestrated this entire thing from the beginning. It didn't feel good, but he was using it for my good. And looking back now, I wouldn't trade it for the world, but what I needed to learn is that if I'm going to follow him, I need to actually trust him. And so, I wrote that down, I remember that, so that the next time when you're tempted to freak out about something, you count your blessings. You remember, "God loves me, that he was faithful to me here and here and here in the past, and he'll be faithful again." And so, first of all, write down every time that God has been to you through trials in your past. Secondly, write down any evidence of God's providence, of God's present activity in your life right now. I told you about a crisis, I want to talk to you about a calling. In 2012, God called my family to move to Boston to join the mission at Mosaic, and we were so excited. It was the honeymoon phase. We were pumped. We're ready to move to this big city and be part of this amazing thing that God was doing at Mosaic. And that excitement lasted right up until the day that we started looking at real estate in Boston. In the Midwest, we had a four-bedroom house, two-car garage, beautiful yard, privacy hedge. We had a deck with a hot tub right outside of our bedroom, a grill. And we had an escrow, mortgage taxes, insurance, thousand dollars a month. "All right, Zillow, let's see, Boston, Massachusetts, thousand dollars a month. That gets us almost the parking spot in Austin. Oh, it's going to be like that." We started freaking out. "Oh, I don't know, maybe God's not calling us to Boston." What did we do? I made a list. I started writing things down. And I've been thinking about this because after Mosaic's 10th birthday party a few weeks ago, I went back and I found that list. It's still on the notepad on my laptop. I'm not going to read it all for you, but I want to give you a few examples of things that made the list. The first one is kind of silly. We started researching Boston. We want to learn everything about the city, and we started researching the different churches in Boston because we want to know what is the spiritual landscape going on. We came across this church called City on a Hill. You're probably familiar with it. We know them now and we're friends with them, but I had never heard of them before. Seemed like a good church. We're looking at their website, and on the homepage of their website is a picture of my deck. When we moved into the house, I painstakingly, I sanded it down. I stained it. And then, we put these nice little lights up all around the deck, and Kelly took a picture of it and posted it on Splash. And they had found it and they'd used it with their website. I was like, "Huh, that's weird." Secondly, we knew that if we were going to move here, that Kelly was going to have to work, and we kind of assumed she would have to find a new job. And so, she scheduled a meeting with her boss to let her know like, "Hey, we're going to be moving and I'm going to have to step down for my job." And he asked her in that meeting to not only keep her job and work remotely, but in the process, she was offered a promotion. And he said, "If you work an extra hour a day when you know would be commuting, you can stay on a hundred percent full time and only work four days a week." And so, those first couple years, we were able to stagger our days off and only pay for three days of childcare. And if you know, you know. That's a big deal, that saved us a ton of money. And so, I'm like, "Oh, that it was encouraging. I'm going to write that down." I remember the day called Pastor Jan to tell him we are in, we're moving to Boston, it was actually the day before the Boston Marathon bombing. The next day was a little bit like, "Oh man, what did I get myself into here?" But, I called Pastor Jan. We talked on the phone. And after we were done, I called Kelly and I let her know, "Hey, I talked to Jan. I let him know we're going." We hung up the phone, and Kelly's iPod randomly shuffled to the song called The City is Yours. So, we say we're going to take this city because God told us we're going to take this city. But, that's weird. Was that a coincidence, or was providence? "I'm going to write that down." And then, the biggest one was Mosaic couldn't afford to pay us for the first year. That one actually was not a great sign, but by God's grace, we were able to sell our house and raise all the money that we needed for that first year of ministry here in the city. And we did it all in six weeks. And despite never having any experience doing any kind of fundraising before, there were all these signs that, yeah, God was with us and we needed to write them down. And some of them were big and some of them were small, but we put them in a list so that when those fears and those doubts crept in, because it was like a nine-month period of time, and there are so many times we were doubting. "Are we doing the right thing?" We'd pull that list out, we would read it, and we would remind ourselves. "Oh, that's right. God was faithful here and here and here. And we've seen providence here and here. Why would we start to doubt him now?" Psalm 9:1 says, "I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart; I will recount all of your wonderful deeds." The power of hope for our crisis, for our calling, we're recounting God's faithfulness in the past, and we're believing his promises for the future so that we can press on and persevere through our trials right now. Romans chapter eight, we all probably know and love this passage, but we have to go there because it's just so beautiful. It's so powerful. Romans 8:28, "And we know that for those who love God all things are working together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified. It says good is done. "What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?" It doesn't mean that things are always going to turn out the way that we want them to in this life. It means we can march forward with faith, knowing that no matter what happens, God is in control, that he loves us. He's working all things together for our good. Peter concludes in verses eight and nine. "Though you have not seen Him, you love Him. Though you do not now see Him, you believe in Him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls." At the start, I mentioned that we have the benefit of looking back at the gospel, of seeing the things that even the angels long to see, but we don't see everything. There's still a lot that we don't see. We don't see Christ right now, not face to face. We're not always going to see the purpose in all of our pain. We're not going to get answers to all of our questions, but we've seen the love of Christ and we know the power of his resurrection, and therefore, we can rejoice and we can have hope. Hebrews 11:1 says, "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." Awhile back, Kelly and I started reading, we read through The Hobbit with our son, Owen, and a few weeks ago, we let him watch the movies for the first time. Since then, we've kind of been slowly working our way through the Lord of the Rings series with him. And there this quote early on in the first book. Frodo, he's lamenting the crisis in the calling that has been thrust upon him. That the whole world is on the brink of darkness and doom, and the weight, the hopes of the world is kind of resting on their shoulders. And he says to Gandalf, "I wish it need not have happened in my time." "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to these such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what we're going to do with the time that has been given to us." And my prayer for you, my prayer for us, as a church, is not that we would never see such times, but that when we do, we would suffer well, that we would never suffer in vain. I pray that is when we do suffer, that our suffering would produce endurance, that our endurance would grow our character, that this character would result in hope, and that this hope would fuel us to change our lives, to change the city, to change the world to the glory of Jesus Christ. At the first Advent, Mary suffered well. Through the pains of labor, she gave birth to the son of God. Jesus suffered well through the pains of crucifixion, gave new birth to the sons of men. And may we suffer well the labors of our life and calling so that at that second Advent, when Christ returns, the tested genuineness of our faith may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. So that in this time in between, the world would see and know and experience for themselves the reason for the hope that is alive in us. We are celebrating communion today. And like Advent, communion is a time where we look back and we look forward. We look back to the cross of Christ. We remember his sacrifice. We remember the atonement that was made, but in 1 Corinthians, Paul tells us that it's also a time where we look forward and where we proclaim the Lord's death until he comes again. The way that we celebrate communion, hopefully, you're able to grab one of these on the way in. If not, there's some in the back, or better yet, you can just raise your hand and one of the ushers will bring one to you. The bread inside represents the body of Christ that was broken for us. The cup represents his blood that was poured out for us. If you're here today and you're not a Christian, or if you are a Christian and you're walking in unrepentant sin, we would ask you to refrain from this part of the service. It's not going to do anything for you. It's not magical. Scripture tells us that we need to examine ourselves to partake in a worthy manner. But, if you...