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Religion Vs Relationship Graphic Sermon Series Engage your congregation with our dynamic "Religion Vs Relationship" sermon series graphic. Designed to spark interest and reflection, this graphic helps to visually convey the theme of your series. Key features include: A visually impactful design that captures the essence of the sermon series. Editable text fields to customize with your sermon dates, times, and other relevant details. High-resolution quality, perfect for digital screens and printed materials. This versatile graphic is ideal for promoting your sermon series across various platforms, including social media, church websites, and in-person announcements. Download now to enhance your sermon promotion and connect more effectively with your congregation. Download Files

Bearing the Burden and Beauty Theology Stephanie Delger Podcast Host Mom Guilt Podcast Published On: Human beings are set apart from all of creation in a few different ways. While God simply spoke all other things into existence, this was not true for human beings. Genesis 2:7 zooms in for the creation of human beings and we read, “the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” In this passage we see God taking special care during Adam’s creation. God formed Adam’s body, God breathed into his lungs, and Adam became a living creature. The Bible tells us why God created humans so differently than the rest of creation. In Genesis 1:27 we read, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Human beings are unique in this. Nothing else in all of creation was created in God’s image. Not only are humans created differently than the rest of creation, but Adam, the first man, was given specific instructions from God. God speaks and tells Adam that his job is to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth, to subdue it, and to have dominion over it. Essentially, Adam’s job was to look around at what God had created in the Garden of Eden and use it as a blueprint. He was to take this garden and expand it all over the world. He was to physically create followers of God from his own body, who would go out and create more followers of God. Being made in God’s image means that we are to represent God and to point to Him. Just as God reached into the dirt and created Adam, Adam was to use his hands to create and build. Just as God created Adam and gave Him life, so Adam was to from his own body, create life. As God is our ruler and authority, God grants human beings authority over the earth. Being made in God’s image also means that we would be on display so others would think about God. Humans were designed to look at each other and be reminded of God. They were to be a physical reminder of who God is and what He has done. Humans were to reflect God to each other and all of creation, meaning that we should live in a way, act in a way, and speak in a way, that calls attention to God our creator. Our job was and is, to be like a mirror. The job of a mirror is not to draw attention to itself, but to reflect an image. Just like a mirror, our job as human beings is not to call attention to ourselves, but rather to reflect God. When humans look at each other, they should be compelled to worship God. We are an image bearer of God our creator. Sin’s Distortion of Image Bearers If we are all created in God’s image, why is this not our normal, everyday experience? We look around at each other, or look at ourselves and our first thought is probably not to fall on our knees in worship of God. This is not our experience because sin entered the world and when it did, it fractured God’s good design. Like a broken mirror, an image is still reflected, but it’s not completely as is should be. It became distorted. Adam and Eve’s sin muddied God’s reflection in His image bearers. Their actions impacted all of creation and all human beings after them. What happened in this moment is that Adam and Eve wanted to be like God. Satan tempted Eve with the notion that God didn’t want what was best for her. He placed doubt in her mind, through questions, that God didn’t want Eve to be like Him. Satan convinced Eve that she knew better and should not obey God, but rather should listen to her own desires. Eve was no longer content to just be made in God’s image. She wanted to be God herself. Image bearing wasn’t enough, she wanted to be not the image bearer, but the image itself. It’s like rather than being a mirror, Eve and Adam decided that they wanted instead to be a self-portrait. They didn’t want to reflect God to the world, they wanted to showcase themselves instead. They stopped trusting that God was good and they started thinking that they should be just like God . Adam and Eve thought that they knew better and that they could do better than God. They exchanged the truth for a lie. We were never meant to be the image, but rather the image bearer. Jesus’ Redemption Adam and Eve and all humans after them are now sinners. God in his mercy, didn’t give up on them or us. God would have been completely just to leave Adam and Eve in their sin, to make them pay for what they had done. God could have annihilated the human race. He would have been completely justified in doing so. But rather than leave them in their sin, God instead promises them a Savior. While God is cursing Satan who deceived Eve, God promises that an offspring of the woman, will come and defeat him. God says, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” (Genesis 3:15) God promises that Adam and Eve will not have to live forever, separated from God. God promises that a child, an image bearer, would come from Eve who would defeat Satan. Eve would have never guessed that God would send more than an image bearer, but God himself would come to keep His promise. Jesus is the image of God Jesus is fully God and fully human. Jesus is God incarnate. He wasn’t just made in God’s image, He is God himself. Jesus is both an image bearer (human) and the image (God) himself. Jesus came to fulfill the role, to do that which Adam could no longer do since he was a sinner. Adam, while made in God’s image, was no longer able to perfectly reflect God, his Heavenly Father. Jesus was born to accomplish what Adam no longer could. Jesus is the better Adam. 1 Corinthians 15:47-49 says, “The first man (Adam) was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man (Jesus) is from heaven. As was the man of dust (Adam) so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.” Paul speaks here of the reality that while we are made in God’s image, we also bear Adam’s image. We reflect Adam’s image when we rebel against God and choose to do things our way and not God’s. However, all those who have placed their faith in Christ, also bear His image. We are to live in a way that others should be able to see God by the way we live, act, and speak. They should be drawn to us not because of who we are, but because of who we reflect. Jesus, in his famous Sermon on the Mount, tells those who are listening that they are to, “let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16) An image bearer points to the true image, their heavenly father. This is exactly what Jesus did. We are to live our lives in the way that Jesus himself modeled for us and tells us to live. We don’t have to guess as to what it means to be made in God’s image. We have seen God in Jesus Christ. Our job then, as a Christian, is to go forth and be an image bearer, reflecting the glory of the Lord so that others will be drawn to Him. More Blogs You'll Like Do the Resurrection Accounts Contradict? How differences in the Gospel accounts strengthen rather than undermine the credibility of the resurrection Read More What is 'Probably' Missing From Most Nativity Sets Miracle, Myth, or Meteor? 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Sermon Discussion Questions 1 Title Sunday, February 25, 2024 Withstand Ephesians 6:14 Personal Distractions vs. Truth and Righteousness 2 Overview Main Idea: We are most vulnerable when we are most distracted Sermon Outline: 1. Attention is the antidote for distraction 2. Truth is the antidote for deception 3. Righteousness is the antidote for dishonor 3 Pre-Questions 1. When you think of righteousness, what are some words you use? 2. How did this sermon inspire you toward worship? 4 Questions Pastor Ryan said that attention is the antidote for distraction. Where are you distracted? How would our culture define truth? How does scripture define it? What does it mean to be righteous? Why does righteousness matter? What gospel glimpses do you see in Ephesians 6:14? PDF Download

Proclaim for the Power of our Testimony (Out) Sermon Series: Proclaim Ryan DB Kimmel Lead Pastor Peace Church Main Passage: Colossians 1:9-14 Transcript Today is the day that the Lord has made. So let us rejoice and be glad in it. And everyone said, Amen. Amen. So I got a question for you to start off this morning. I want to see how good you are at your own self perception, how self aware you are about yourself. So let me start with a question here. What is obvious about you? Now, I don't mean your appearance. I don't mean like your race, or your skin color, or your hair color. I mean from your life, what is obvious about you. Like for instance, if you were to complete this sentence, if you were gonna say, if you were gonna say and complete this sentence, I'm wondering how you would fill in the blank. If you said something like this, well as you can tell, I'm, how would you fill in the blank, because something is so abundantly obvious in your life, so clear that people can virtually know it right away. Some of you, many of you, I'm seeing a couple of you, it would be something like, as you can tell, I'm a hunter because I wear camo to church and I'm gone every other weekend on a hunt and I have more pictures of dead animals than my kids on my phone. What would you say? Hopefully for me it's things like, as you can tell I love my wife, as you can tell I love being with my kids, as you can tell God comes first in my life. How would you answer something like that? Now, as a pastor, I have many awesome things about my job, but one of them is that I get to hear so many amazing testimonies from people. And when people share their testimony, I learn some fascinating, amazing, wonderful things that people have done and experienced in their life. But I can tell you this, I've never heard a testimony from a true Christian and was surprised to find out they were a Christian. I'll say it again. I've never heard a testimony I've never heard a testimony from a true Christian and was surprised When they said in their testimony that I am a Christian. I'm a Jesus follower Why? Why? Because when you truly follow Jesus It's self-evident or to put it another way when you truly follow Jesus It's obvious. Now listen, whether or not people actually have the language to say something like, oh I can tell that you've repented of your sins and you follow the risen Lord, whether or not they have the language to say that, what's obvious is that something is different about your life. They may not be able to identify what it is, but they can clearly see that you are different from the rest of the world. You follow a different order, you use your money differently, you treat strangers differently. For those who truly follow Jesus, it is obvious in your life. People can tell that something is different. And today we're going to talk about the power of Christian testimony. So if you have your Bibles, would you please turn to Colossians chapter one. Also really praying that if you're part of the Peace Church family, that you have your devotional packets with you. You can follow along in today's message. So Colossians chapter 1, this whole proclaimed spiritual journey that we're going through is a walkthrough of Colossians chapter 1. If you're using the Bibles we've provided, really happy for you to do that. That's on page 1251. Now again, this whole campaign walkthrough of Colossians chapter one, put your bookmark in your Bible. That's what we're looking at every single Sunday. And so if you are just joining us just for context, as you're turning there, here's some context for you. St. Paul, the apostle is the one who wrote Colossians. It was actually a letter that he wrote from prison because he was in jail for preaching the gospel. It's a letter he wrote from prison to this church, to this Colossian church, which was in what was called Asia minor, but we call it by a different name today, Turkey. Now he's writing to this church. He's writing to give them encouragement, to stay the course. He's going to highlight the power of Jesus. He's going to clarify what it means to follow him. But in our section right now, verses 9-14, Paul's writing to help these people understand who they are in Christ, what it means to follow him and what Jesus has done for us. And I'm going to warn you. I'm going to warn you now. I'm warning you here. I'm warning you who are in the chapel I'm warning you who are in the venue morning you who are online and I'm warning you who are listening later on a podcast. I'll warn you now the things he says about being a Christian are things we can not hide They're too wonderful. They're too powerful. They're too life-altering. It's too obvious. And so with that, would you hear the Word of God? Colossians chapter 1, we're going to read verses 9 to 14. Would you hear God's Word? Colossians 1:9-14 And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him: bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; being strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy; giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. This is God's mighty word. Let's pray and let's continue. But here's what I ask you to do Bible says lift holy hands in prayer So we're gonna pray together, but I'm gonna ask you at least to raise one hand. Can we all just do that together? Let's raise one hand. Father we thank you for being such an amazing God, an amazing God to us. Lord, this campaign is a weighty and heavy thing that our church is going through. We ask God that you'd sustain us and our world is going through a weighty and heavy thing right now. Over in Middle East with Israel and Gaza, Father, we pray, Father, for innocent life. Father, we pray, Lord, that your peace would transcend. Father, we pray, God, for Israel. Father, we pray that everyone over there, everyone across the world would call on the name of Jesus. We pray these things in his mighty and precious and powerful name. It's in Jesus' name we pray and everyone said, Amen. So first fill in if you've got your devotional packets with you is this. It's the title of today's sermon and here's our title. We are to proclaim for the power of our testimony. We proclaim for the power of the testimony. Everything in this message series is we're proclaiming for something. It's some of the big things that we're doing as a church. And today we're talking about the power of our testimony. Church, why are we expanding our building? So we can have more bricks and sticks? No, it's so that our ministry can expand. We wanna see our building expand so our ministry can expand. And we are being reminded today that we are doing this proclaim campaign so that we can hear more testimonies of people coming to faith in Jesus Christ. Amen? This campaign is a spiritual journey. If we're going to see God expand our building and expand our ministry, I'm telling you, our church family needs to spiritually prepare for what that means. And that's part of what we're doing. That's why we as a church family are to be doing our devotionals together throughout the week, so that we can all strengthen spiritually in preparation for what God is gonna do in our midst. And so, here's our main idea for today. Here's your second fill in for your, in your outline. Here's our main idea. The truth we profess must be evident in the lives we live. The truth we profess must be evident in the lives we live. Yup, yup, part of what we're doing is raising money. If you want to boil this all down to just raising money, you're missing the entire point. Yes, raising money is a huge part of what we're doing, but it's not the only thing we're doing. We're spiritually preparing for what God is going to do when this money comes in, and that's expanded ministry. If you only are thinking through the lens of raising money, you're missing half of what this campaign's all about. This is a spiritual journey to prepare us all so that when more ministry comes, we are prepared, but we also understand that it starts with us. It starts with us who are here now, and the truth that we profess must be evident in the lives that we live. And so, as we consider that, here's what we're gonna learn from our passage. The evidence of our lives. 1. Our lives must demonstrate discernment. That's what verse nine says. Our lives must produce fruit. Verses 10 and 11 will show that. And we'll close up our passage by looking at this, that our lives must embody gratitude. So let's just dive in right now. Number one, our lives must demonstrate discernment. You know what discernment is? Let me help you understand. Discernment is having a Christian worldview from which we are able to make decisions about what is right and wrong before the Lord. The sermon is about knowing how to conduct our lives according to God's plan. Let's look at verse nine. It says, Paul writes and he says, and so from the day we heard, meaning the day we heard about the faith in this Colossian church, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you. That's great, thanks Paul, thanks for the prayers. But look at what he's praying for. Look what he says he prays about. Verse 9 continues, We have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will, of God's will, and all spiritual wisdom and understanding. He's basically saying this. He's basically saying, I'm praying that you all can demonstrate your faith in the ways that you follow God because you know what God's will is for your life that You seek the Lord God revealed his plan and will for your life and you follow that according to Scripture according to God's Spirit. So let me ask people in this room and other venues you can play along, too I'm curious here Who here is a parent or a grandparent parent or grandparent raise your hand up? I know bent elbows here loud and proud parent or grandparent. Okay, let me ask you a question here. What's a big prayer you have for your kids? Now, I've spent a lot of time in many different churches, being a part of youth ministry, being a youth pastor. I've seen teenagers and the ways that family operates pretty up close for a number of years. And I'll tell you this, it really seems like, just from the way that parents kind of conduct their family life, and the ways that they go about things, and the ways that they hear their kids talk in youth group, it really seems like a big prayer that families have for their kids is that they'll be popular, that they'll make a lot of money, that they'll be good at sports. Really seems like that's a big thrust of teenagers' life these days, at least as far as I've spent time in youth group. But I know this, whether you are a Christian who prays it or just a good parent who hopes this, we pray that our kids will be protected from harm. I mean, every parent wants that. But if you want to pray for something for your kids, I'm telling you right now, what Paul prays for the Colossian Church is a great guide for what we should should be praying for our kids. He's praying that they'll be able to fully follow God because they'll have such godly wisdom that they'll know what the right thing is to do at all times. You won't always be there for your kids, but the wisdom and the intelligence and the faith that you instill in them, that's what they'll bring with them. So are you training and equipping them now? Christian parents, when was the last time you ever pushed pause on a movie or a show to process what you were watching. So that you can help your kids discern what entertainment is teaching them. Have you ever done that? Or are you just letting them fend for themselves and how to process what the world's throwing at them? We need to be teaching and training our kids to have the spiritual wisdom and discernment that the Holy Spirit wants to make available to us, but parents, we are the conduits to bring into their lives. It's the age old giving a fish versus teaching someone how to fish. I can tell you now, we are among the most affluent people who have ever existed. You have no shortage of resources. The toys at your disposal are great and many. I know many of us, we want our kids to have everything. And so we give them everything, but we're giving them fish without teaching them how to fish. We give our kids, we give our kids the unbelievable, incredible responsibility of having a cell phone before they've demonstrated the discipline to be able to handle the power and influence of a phone. Church, I know you want God to protect your kids. I know you do. But here's what I'm going to tell you It just seems like a lot of us aren't praying for that because here's what I mean The best way to stay protected by God is to stay close to God If you want your kids to be protected by God Then you best be praying that they stay close to God you want protection from God protection is found in the shadow of his wings And that's when we stay close to him if you want God to protect your kids Are you praying that they grow close to God? Are you bringing them close to God if you want God to protect your kids? Are you praying for that? Because here's I'm gonna tell you right now when we train our kids to make God-centered and wise choices That's a form of protection.You 're teaching them to protect themselves from their own bad choices in the ways that you teach and train them To follow God to honor him above all else, to set themselves aside for the glory of God. But here's the question, parents and grandparents, before we teach this to our kids, are we living this ourselves? Does your life demonstrate a godly discernment? You may be asking me, pastor, how do we do that? Pastor, what does that look like? Great question. I'm so glad you asked. Read your Bible. Read your Bible. Get to know God's word. Maybe join a Bible study. Join a small group where you can talk this Christian life out with other Christians. Come to church, not just periodically. That's going to do nothing for you. You want church to mean something? Get involved. Don't just attend. Be connected. Do devotions. We're providing you a devotion for the month that we can all do together Here's the other thing I'd say to you - share your faith with a non-believer. Here's why this is so important because here's what ends up happening Christians end up staying in their own little Christian enclave and you wonder what's really dangerous about that is you can have a false Sense of how strong you are in your faith when everyone around you is a Christian. You want to see where you are at in your faith? Share your faith with a non-believer and listen to the questions and the challenges they bring. That will expose really quickly how strong you are and how knowledgeable you are in your faith. I'm telling you right now, I have a master's degree, I have decades of ministry experience, I'm the pastor of a large, growing church, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When I talk to a non-believer and they challenge me in my faith and they ask me a question and I don't know the answer I'm like let me get back to you on that one and then I search the scriptures and I consult our elders and I talk to the fellow pastors and guess what and guess what not only do I provide them with an answer but I grow in my faith this is why we need to be sharing our faith with a watching lost world because they will challenge you and by their challenge it will help you grow. We need to be doing this and above all pray, pray, pray because the truth we profess must be evident in the lives we live. And this is shown when our lives demonstrate a godly discernment that we know God and we know his will and we act accordingly. And second, our lives must produce fruit. 2. Our lives must produce fruit This is the focus. Listen to the focus and hope of Paul's next section here, verses 10 and 11. He says, So as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might for all endurance and patience with joy. Real simple here, people, real simple. Christians serve God. Real simple, Christians serve God. And when we do that, the Holy Spirit lets good things happen from that, and we call that fruit, spiritual fruit. So let's make sure we're all on the same page. Let's take this phrase by phrase. Keep your Bibles open here. Verse 10, so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to Him. Okay, this is very clear. If you're a Christian, act like it. This makes God happy and it's honoring to him. Walk in a manner worthy of the Lord. If you're a Christian, act like it. Bearing fruit in every good work. Christians in the house, don't answer me, because you have to answer before the Lord. Here's the question, are you serving God? Simply being a nice person and showing up to church every now and again is not what we are talking about. This is about doing things that you know bring glory to God and bring good to other people. I simply ask you, how and where are you serving God? Again, don't answer me. You don't answer to me. You answer to the Lord. But listen to this next phrase, and increasing in the knowledge of God. Here's what I'm going to say to you. You can't just be a workhorse for the Lord. You can't just be a workhorse for God. Here's what I mean. I know my church, I know my community, I know myself. If I was to say to a group like this, if I was to say to you, church, for the next six weeks, we're a little short-handed, I need five guys to come to church early for the next six weeks, and I need you to help stack chairs. By the end of the day I'm telling you I'd have 50 men on that list. But if I said, church, for the next six weeks our church is going through a massive spiritual journey and we need we need people we need men praying. So I'm asking for five men to come to church early for the next six weeks and pray before the service. I I don't think I'd get such a big turnout. Guys, you can't just be a workhorse for God. You have to be seeking Him on your knees, praying and increasing in the knowledge of God. Are you searching the Scriptures? Are you with a group of men helping you to grow in your faith? Ladies, I'm asking the same thing. Teenagers and young adults in the room, I'm asking you the same thing. Look at verse 11, verse 11, so that we are being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might. Okay, this is not just about having the power of believing in yourself. This is not just the power of self-confidence. This is not just the power, so you ladies in the room can say, I am woman, hear me roar. This is more than that. This is the power of God that we are to live in before God. And this is not discovered within yourself. This is not about coming to grips with who you are on the inside. This is an external power that the Holy Spirit places in you through faith in Jesus. And I'm wondering, can you say that you live and operate by the power of God in your life? When you're holding that phone and that temptation comes whether to look at bad pictures or to continue a gossip type thread I wonder do you operate in the power of God and say no in Jesus name I rebuke this because I operate by the power of the Almighty that is what it looks like that's what so many more Christians need to stop start acting like and stop operating that we operate with all power according to his glorious might. This is an external power from God that he gives us for his glory and for our good. Again, why is God giving you this power so that you can be confident in who you are feel good about yourself. No, look at what the passage says verse 11 being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might why here's why? for all endurance and patience with joy. In this world, living the Christian life will take endurance and patience. And let me just give us the Middleville translation here, what this means. Endurance and patience. Here's how we might say this in Middleville, that you have grit for the long haul. That you operate in God's power so that you have grit for the long haul. Endurance and patience. Because here's the thing, in this world men you will be ridiculed when you speak the name of Jesus on the job site. Teenagers, you'll be called terrible names when you stand up for Jesus on social media. But guess what? Jesus was called terrible names. Jesus was ridiculed. And so when you stand ridiculed for the name of Jesus, I'm telling you, you stand with Jesus. That's better company, y'all. But with God's power, here's what the beautiful thing is, that we can go through this life, no matter what hardships you face, no matter what obstacles or heartache, God's given us the ability to go through this with grit for the long haul, but not just grit for the long haul, but grit for the long haul, look at with joy. How can you do this with joy? I'll tell you exactly how you can do this with joy, because God is with you. When you stand up for Christ, God's not distant. He's right there with you. The Holy Spirit is alive within you. You can do this with joy because he is with you. And this leads to a life of bearing fruit. Again, what that means is that we show the qualities in our lives that we live for God's glory, for our joy, and for the good of our neighbor. Christians in the house, hear me. Christians, listen up. You don't get a choice in this. This is what we do. This is who we are. This is the life God commands us to live. You don't get a choice in this. We are to serve God and bear fruit in our lives and it must be evidence. So be challenged. Definitely be challenged. Where are you serving God? How are you serving God? Where can you say there's fruit in your life being born because you follow God? And listen to me, if you're sitting right now and you're thinking, I'm a pastor, later on I'm kind of sick, I don't know. Here's what I say to you. That's okay. As long as you do something about it right now. It's okay. As long as you do something about it right now, that you obey the leading of the Spirit and you respond to the moment God's given to you. So here's the first thing I'm gonna say to you, pray. Pray. Second thing is this, if you are truly ready to start showing a level of fruit in your life, to get connected in our church, I'm gonna ask you, after the worship service, go to our welcome booth. There's a gal named Chelsea. I've spoken with Chelsea. She's prepared to have people come and talk to her about how you can get more involved at peace, where you can serve, where you can maybe join a Bible study, or maybe join a small group, where you can take that next step. Again, we want every Christian who calls Peace Church home to be involved. We don't want people just to attend, we want people to be involved. Now let me just say real quickly, if you've come for a place of her or you need a time out, then definitely come and just attend and hear God's word and experience the love of Christ. But that's a very, very, very, very rare few. For most of us, we need to get connected, involved, and grow so that we can bear fruit, so that it's evident in our lives. And this will definitely result in an outpouring of thankfulness, which leads to number three. 3. Our lives must embody gratitude. Look at verses 12 and 13. It says we need to give thanks to God who's qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light. He's delivered us from the dominion of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, meaning Jesus, in whom we have the redemption and the forgiveness of sins. Let me sum it up for you. We grow in God, we serve God because of who he is and what he's done. And this is the gospel that we have been delivered from our sins. And listen, not just delivered from our sins, but transferred from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. That will be obvious. Not that you're better than anyone else, but that you're different. We've been transferred into the kingdom of his beloved son, and from that we live a life of gratitude, thankful for what God has done. That once we were in darkness, but by the power of the cross, we are now sons and daughters of the King. I'm going to tell you right now, the USA has a president, and I love this country. The USA has a president, but I have a King, and He's whom I serve. And if you follow Jesus, then you are a son or daughter of the King. Listen to me, you are not your failures. You're not your addictions. You're not your criminal record. You're not your past. You know who you are? You are who God says you are. And you are redeemed. Church, this is the type of testimony that we want to see more of at peace. And I want to share with you one such amazing testimony from a guy named Trevor. So would you please watch the screen. Trevor I had this feeling come over me that God was talking to me, telling me not to give up. And this pressure and weight seemed like it was lifted off my shoulders. Before September of last year, I did not know the Bible. I never went to church. I never prayed. My marriage and my business were failing. Everything seemed like they were getting worse every day. In August we had found out we were expecting another child, and September 21st we lost it. It seemed like every day was getting worse, and I didn't want to be around anymore. After we lost the baby, it was the first time in my life I went to my knees, asking God what to do. In the time, I wasn't sure what it was, but I knew I had to go to a church, and we decided to come to Peace Church. I was just going to come and listen. When we came, September 25th, Pastor Ryan came up and the first thing he said was that he had changed his sermon. And the sermon he ended up giving was about what a man should be, what a father should be, and what a husband should be. At that moment, I knew it was exactly what I needed to hear, and I knew I was at the right place. I instantly jumped into the men's Bible study to start learning more and be more surrounded by good Christian men. My life did a complete 180. I continue to grow in my faith every day with prayer and studying the Bible. I'm excited to be a part of the Peace Church Wayland Campus and hopefully help other men come to Christ someday as well. Nate All right Trevor, well here we are again. We've asked you to share your testimony before, and we shared it on video. Thousands of people saw it. It was a really powerful moment. And so when we ask you again to come back on camera, I know it's not your favorite thing in the world, but why are you passionate about sharing your testimony? Trevor I definitely don't like being on camera, but if my story can affect anyone who had heard it, I will share it anytime. I'm just so grateful for what God has done in my life and I'm not just going to keep that story to myself, I'm going to share it to as many people as I can so that they can hear about God and also be transformed in their life. Nate Awesome. Praise God, man. And a lot of people think that your testimony is just that story of the first time you came to know and follow Jesus, but we have testimonies throughout our life, walking with Christ. So since you shared your original testimony with us, what are some more ways that God's been working in your life and growing you? Trevor Definitely. I've joined the Men's Bible Study, which helped me learn so much more about God and just building that brotherhood group up and having other men to go to with advice and rely on. But I've also joined the high school ministries and just helping out with the Wayland launch team. My wife and I also started a community group here in Wayland for couples around our age and it's been awesome. We've been meeting every other week throughout the summer and being a part of these groups has helped me build my faith as I learn more about God and who he is and how he helps in other people's lives too. It's been amazing to just be a part of their journey as well. Nate Trevor, so how would you encourage others who don't feel comfortable sharing their testimony, have never done that before, how would you encourage them to use this powerful tool of sharing the testimony or testimonies of our lives? Trevor Well, when I shared my testimony for the first time, it was very hard, and I was very scared of what the group that I was with would think about that, and they were more than welcoming, especially in Peace Church, with the men's groups that we have here, and even some of them were able to share what their past had been like to me. And I know that it can be very frightening to share something so personal, and I encourage anyone who's afraid to share to just be bold, be brave, and even pray before giving your testimony because God will be with you, the Spirit will be with you when you are sharing that testimony, and people will hear it and also be transformed in their life. Ryan Amen. Church, we want to see more testimonies like Trevor's. Amen. Amen. And this is another reason why we are doing proclaim. There's many reasons, but this is why so we can see more testimonies like the one you just saw. Testimonies of people getting saved. You know, Pastor Nate said it in the interview that our testimony is a powerful tool. That's just not a practical reality. That's a spiritual truth that the Bible itself recognizes. When the when the Apostle John is given a vision of heaven, he sees this like worship service happening and he sees the martyrs, these Christians who gave their life for their faith. He sees them celebrating in heaven and they're celebrating their triumph over Satan and this is what it says. It says, and they have conquered him, meaning the devil, they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony for they loved not their lives even unto death. Church, there's power in the blood of Jesus. Amen? Amen. There's power in his sacrifice and there is power when we share that truth in our lives. Here's the thing I need you to know. Testimony is what a witness does. Okay, we're not asking you to be a lawyer or argue anything. We're saying that you as a witness, you just share your testimony to what you've seen God do in your life. Because we proclaim for the power of our testimony. We wanna be challenged. Challenged that the truth we profess, that it's evident in the lives we live.And so every sermon in this series, we end with a focus on a spiritual challenge for our finances as we consider how much God's calling us to give towards this campaign. We're gonna look at our finances through a spiritual lens. And so let me just give you one challenge for you to think about this week. This spiritual and financial challenge. Is our financial testimony, how you use your money. Is your financial testimony declaring to the world that we care about their lost souls? Because make no mistake about it, part of our fundraising is not just to see more bricks and sticks, it's to see more people in heaven. That's part of what we are doing and why we are doing it. Peace Church, did you know that from two years ago until last year, from two years ago to last 400% increase in the amount of adult baptisms. That is amazing. Somebody said yeah, here we go. I Love that but who wants to see that continue Church, let me hear you. Do you want to see that continue? Yes or no? That's why we're doing this. So we're asking you to consider what your part is to play in this If you call Peace Church home, here's what I want you to do. I Don't want you to ask God. How much do you want me to give? I don't want you to ask that. I want you to alter that just slightly and here's what I want you to ask. God, how much do you want me to sacrifice for this? Giving keeps us comfortable, sacrifice makes us uncomfortable. Ask God, how much are you calling me to sacrifice for this. This is why we are doing proclaim so that we can see more testimonies of people like Trevor coming to faith in Jesus. Church, I'm telling you, if you have salvation in Jesus' name, then you have a testimony, and Christians share your testimony. And you know what Christians do? We respond in worship. Amen? Amen. So let's do that now. Would you please stand? Would you bow your heads and let's prepare our hearts to worship. Father, we come before you. Father, we are thankful that our testimony, our salvation is secure because it's about what Jesus has done, not about what we do. So Father, I pray God that you would fill this place with the power and presence of your Holy Spirits, that we would respond as people who are saved, thankful for our salvation in Jesus' name. And Lord, as we sing this old hymn now, blessed assurance. Let it come from voices of your people who are filled with the Spirit, who respond to the truth of our testimony that you've given to us, that because of Jesus, our salvation is secure. Because of Jesus, we have blessed assurance. We pray these things in his mighty name. We pray these things in his mighty name. And everyone said, Amen.

A New Day Dawning Sermon Series: Ryan DB Kimmel Lead Pastor Peace Church Main Passage: Lamentations 3:22-23 Transcript Today is the day that the Lord has made and be glad in it. Amen. Today truly is a new day dawning for Peace Church. If you didn't know this, this year, Peace Church actually turns 60 years old. This June, we're going to have a worship night celebrating that, but we turn 60 this year. But I'll be honest with you. Today feels like a new birth. Today stands as a testament to God's faithfulness to this church. Not just because, as Pastor John said, not just not just because we have more sticks and bricks or more steel and concrete and cement. Or not even because we have more space, what we have is a new opportunity, a new day dawning to do even more ministry in the name of Jesus Christ. That's who we are all about here. Amen. So let's celebrate today for what it is. It's a new day dawning. So let me ask you this. Who here is a morning person or who here is a night person? You're the first service. So I think I probably know, but let me just see real quick. Who's here. The morning people. Yeah. Well, let me see night people. Where are you at night people? I used to think of myself as a night person. I used to be young and hip. I used to go to movies that started after eight o'clock PM. Crazy. If I'm not home by eight o'clock PM, I'm grumpy the entire next day. I, in my old age, I've become a morning person. Here's the point, whether you are. Hear me, every day is a day to be reminded of all that we have through God and Jesus. Whether you enjoy the morning or night, every day is a reminder of God's goodness to us. So let's be reminded of that right here and right now. Would you please turn to the book of Lamentations. Lamentations chapter three, if you wanna use the Bible to be provided, we always have those available for you. Grab those at any point. That's on page 873. Now, lamentations, what even is that word? It comes from the word lament. What is a lament? Lament is a passionate expression of grief or sorrow. You see, the book of Lamentations was more than likely it doesn't specifically say, but more than likely Lamentations was written by the prophet Jeremiah and was written in response to the destruction of God's city, Jerusalem. In 586 BC, Babylon came in and destroyed God's city, Jerusalem. We talked about this a few months ago, if you remember, if you're with us, when we walked through the book of Obadiah. Obadiah was also in response to the destruction of God's city. But what we see here is the prophet Jeremiah looks upon what's happened. He looks at the desolation of the city. In all likelihood, he's probably seeing people carted off into exile. Jeremiah looks at what's happening, and he weeps, and he cries, and he laments over what's happening. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, this is an odd book. Lamentations is an odd book to preach from on what is to be a day of celebration. But here's what I'd tell you. Here's what Lamentation reminds us of. Lamentation reminds us that it's not primarily the circumstances of our lives that causes us to give thanks to God. We give thanks to God for who He is and what He's done for us, and even more so now that we know the light of the gospel of Jesus. So, whether we are lamenting over the fall of the city or we are celebrating a new sanctuary. We worship God for who He is. And so let's read our Bibles. Would you please stand if you are able for the reading of God's Word? The Word of the Lord, Lamentations chapter 3, verses 22 to 23. Would you hear God's Word? word. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. Amen. This is God's word. Let's pray and we'll continue. Let's pray together. Father in heaven above, thank you for this new day dawning. A day that seemed like it was a long time coming. But father, by your good timing, it is here, here and now we pray, Father, that you would send the Holy Spirit to be with us now as we worship you and as we learn from your word for it's in Jesus name that we pray these things and everyone said, amen and amen. You may have a seat. I'm curious. Have you picked out this seat as your new seat from here on out? I I'm really like right now my mind's really being messed with because I'm seeing nine o'clock people, nine thirty people sit where eight o'clock people sat and eight o'clock people feeling like you're not in the state. I'm just as disoriented as you are. I'm just saying that, OK? So today we're going to study God's Word. We are at the start of a new season, the dawning of a new day. This is a day to think about all that we have in God every day. I want today to be a reminder of what you have every day in God. So let me give you this one main thought to work through here today, and it's simply this. This new day dawning reminds us of what we have every day in Christ, God's love, God's mercy, and God's faithfulness. And everyone said, Amen. So let's spend a few moments celebrating this by being reminded of what we have in Christ. And church, if you know me, you probably guessed I was going to preach from the Old Testament on day one of the new worship service. And so we are. This passage, I want to pull out three things from these two verses. And the first one is this. This new day dawning reminds us of God's unfaltering love. Our passage starts out, always, if you have them, keep your Bibles open. It says this, the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. Now, if there's one thing that I need to work on in my life, if there's one thing I really need the Holy Spirit for, and men, you can tell me if you sympathize with this, if there's one thing in my life I really need help with, it's patience. I thought I was a patient man. I thought I was a patient man until I had children. And then I just realized then how annoying it is to have to say the same thing twice. Anybody know what I'm talking about? Like in this day and age where kids' face are in a screen, you're trying to get their attention, it's like trying to get the attention of a rock. Just not gonna happen. So you say, hey kids, go wash your hands, get ready for dinner. Okay, now I have to say it twice. Holy Spirit, now I need you. Kids, go get ready for dinner, go wash your hands. And like they're coming out of like comatose, like what? Don't make me say it a third time. I realized after having kids how annoying it is to have to say things multiple times. I need God's patience. But then I see the Bible and I see how many times God has to repeat himself until we get the message. God can't just say it once, he has to say it multiple times because guess what? You are just like kids with an iPad in their face. You need God to say it multiple times because for some reason we don't listen the first time. The verse says, the steadfast love of the Lord. It says that. And then look at the second half. The second half of this one verse, the steadfast love of the Lord, it never ceases. God's word says it twice. The love of God is steadfast and it's unceasing. Do you hear this? God's love is unfaltering. It's enduring. It's endless. It's unwavering. His love for his people is something that does not tire. It does not grow weak. It does not falter. It's unstoppable. God has unfaltering love. Here at Peace Church, if you are new, hearty, hearty welcome to you. But one thing you need to know about Peace Church is that we will speak the truth here. Amen? Now, listen, we always seek to do this in love. We speak the truth in love. We will not shy away from hard and unpopular truths. But again, I want to emphasize, we always seek to do this in love. So that's the motivation of our heart, to share God's truth in God's love. And so, I just happen to believe it's more loving to be truthful. Anybody agree with me? It's more loving to be clear, even if it's hard to hear. And so let me give you a clear, hard truth that may be hard for some of us to hear this morning. I'm gonna give you a truth bomb here. Prepare your heart. The greatest movie of all time is the Princess Bride. I don't care what you think. Facts are facts. Jack greatest movie ever produced in cinema. One of the best lines that comes from this movie is when Wesley, he saves princess buttercup. See the princess. I'm sure you've seen the movie. She was forced to be engaged to an evil prince, but she loves Wesley and he loves her. But she thought that Wesley had died at sea years ago. So when Wesley returns and he saves her and he finds out that she's engaged to another man, he says to her, I told you I'd always come for you. Why didn't you wait for me? And she goes, well, you were dead. Do you remember how he responds? You see the movie, remember how he responds? This is amazing. This is the type of romance a man can get behind. He says this, he says, death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while. My friends, that's the gospel truth right there. Death being unable to stop true love is seen most powerfully in the gospel. For God so loved the world that he sent his son to die for us so that we could be cleansed from our sins, that we might know God's unfaltering love. Death only delayed Christ for three days. From the third day after his death, Jesus Christ rose from the dead in what is to date the most important event in all of human history. Death cannot stop true love. When Wesley says this, when he says to her, death cannot stop true love, Buttercup, the princess, responds by saying, I'll never doubt again. My friends, the unfaltering love that God has given us, that we have seen through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, when you understand this, may you never doubt again. May you never doubt God's love for you. The cross is God's great I love you to a world that's rejecting him. Lamentations chapter 3 verse 22 says the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. In this we see God's unfaltering love, but our verse continues. Verse 22 continues it says, his mercies never come to an end. Verse 23, they are new every morning. And that's the second thing we're gonna see. This new day, Donnie, reminds us of God's unfading mercy. You don't have to be in a Bible study very long before you come across Lamentations chapter three. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. So back to you morning people who here loves waking up to the smell of a home cooked breakfast. French toast, maple syrup, bacon, sausages, cinnamon rolls. Listen here. I don't know how anyone can wake up in a bad mood when you wake up to the smell of a home cooked breakfast and all God's people said, amen. My friends, you wake up to something even better than a home-cooked breakfast every single morning. You wake up to God's new morning mercies every single day. How could you ever wake up in a bad mood? When we wake up, we wake up to God's new morning mercies. They are new every day. Now, listen here. This doesn't mean that every day is going to be the best day of your life. Certainly not. But what it does mean is that you wake up and the first thing you can know is that God has given you new mercies. Not old mercies, new ones. New ones that you need for this new day. And what's mercy? Mercy is getting what you do not deserve. What we do deserve is God's judgment for our sins, but what we get instead is God's goodness from his heart in the form of mercy. We get mercy from God. What we get is a constant reminder of God's love for us in the gospel and strength through the Holy Spirit. But listen here, don't forget the context of our passage. Don't forget what's going on here. This passage was written after a foreign army came in and decimated God's country, God's people's country and the capital city. This passage was written as men, women, and children were probably being exiled, carted off in slavery, exiled into a new land, something they never, ever wanted, something they feared. How can Jeremiah say in the midst of this? How can he say his mercies never come to an end? They are new every morning. I'll be honest with you. If I was part of that group back then, and this was happening to me and Jeremiah comes on the scene and says, God's mercies are new every morning. I'll be honest with you. I'd be like, hey, yo, Jeremiah, nothing about what you are saying or writing feels true right now. I don't feel God's mercies. In fact, I feel God's absence. My friend, this is where we must remind ourselves of something about God's mercies. And somebody who said it best was Pastor Paul David Tripp. I'm going to read you what he said about this passage. He said, mercy not only meets you in your struggle, but guarantees that someday your struggle will end Mercy is what this sin broken world groans for Mercy triumphs where justice can't if God only offered justice. No one would run to him Isn't it is the knowledge of his mercy that makes us honestly face ourselves and gladly run to him Sometimes these new morning mercies come on days like today, where we stand in joy and happiness and celebration, a day marked by newness and gladness. But sometimes those mercies come on different sorts of days, not on glad days, but gloomy ones. And in those days, we have to remember this one thing, the gospel, the gospel, where God's love, justice and mercy collide. And it's called grace. And we see this through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and therein lies our hope, no matter what the day brings. The gospel shows us this one last thought, that God has unfailing faithfulness to us. It's unfailing. Verse 23 says, great is your faithfulness. Or probably, how it should be said, great is thy faithfulness. It's almost like it should have been written in the old English, right? When Jeremiah's world has literally fallen apart, he is writing a book of sorrow and lament that will echo through the ages. And yet in the midst of this, Jeremiah still says, great is your faithfulness, great is thy faithfulness. And yes, it reminds us of that old him. Great is thy faithfulness. Oh, God, my father, there is no shadow of turning with thee. Thou changes not thy compassions. They fail not as thou has been thou forever will be great is thy faithfulness. Morning by morning, new mercies I see. Did you know that that him draws his inspiration right from this passage. Do you understand what we are saying, what we are singing when we say, great is thy faithfulness? It's unfailing. It will not fail you, meaning God will never fail or compromise his promises towards us, his love that he's given to us, the hope that he extends to us. Not even death could stop God's faithfulness towards us. We can stand here in a new room that God has most certainly provided for us. We can confidently say, Lord, great is your faithfulness. But I'll tell you now, this new room was built to declare that the tomb is empty. That is why we are here. And if you wonder about God's faithfulness, it is seen through the resurrection of Jesus after he gave up his blood so that we could have life forever more. When Christ died, it was a dark day, but that dark day led to a new day dawning, where three days later, when the love of God, the truth of Christ, and the hope of salvation was made secure in his resurrection. Yes, Peace Church family and friends, I most certainly say to you on this day, this new day dawning reminds us of what we have every day in Christ, God's love, mercy, and faithfulness. Amen. Amen. Let's pray. And then we'll celebrate this love, mercy, and faithfulness by having communion together. And then we'll celebrate this love, mercy, and faithfulness by having communion together. Let's pray together.

Healthy Families Sermon Series: A Biblical Vision Kevin Harney Lead Pastor Shoreline Community Church Main Passage: Ephesians 6:1-4 Transcript So where does faith get passed on to the next generation? Where is a godly family built? Where does a young person learn to know and love Jesus? Well, I'll talk about some chairs. The chair you're sitting in right now. Downstairs there's little first grade, second grade chairs, there's different sized chairs. On this campus there's lots of chairs, and one of the places where faith is learned is in the church among the body of Christ. Someone say amen. That's a good gift. Keep doing that. There's lots of, there's hundreds and hundreds of kids that are part of this church and there's no better place for them to be than among God's people learning from God's Word. And so yes, the chairs at the church are part of the learning journey and building a godly family. The unfortunate thing is for some people they think it ends there. Well I brought my kids to church, they should love Jesus now. I remember when I was a youth pastor years ago, I'd have some parents come to me and they'd say, you know, why can't you fix my kid? You've got him an hour and a half a week and in my mind I'm thinking, yeah, you've got him a whole lot more than that, so why don't you fix your kid? But I wouldn't say that, but I would think that. But there was a sense of, okay, I bring them to church. That's good, that's great, that honors God, keep doing that. But I want to suggest that if you're going to pass the faith on to the next generation, whether it's parents to children, grandparents to grandchildren, aunts and uncles influencing your little nieces and nephews, or maybe you serve with a children's ministry or the youth ministry or you teach at a Christian school, you do homeschooling, you get to invest in the next generation, there are a lot more chairs than just these chairs. And if you look at this is the only part of investing in the next generation It's not gonna go great This is not enough See, there are all these aspects of life and the Bible is clear that faith is learned all through life And so this chair here your faith begins When a mom is sitting and she's what the Bible says great with child She's eight and a half nine and a half months along and she's young can sit in there and she's praying Lord Jesus. I Pray for my little girl. I Pray that she'll love you and follow you. I Pray for the young man someday that I hope she would meet even now if he's not born or if he's in someone else's one would you bless that little guy and Grow him to power into a powerful man of God? She's praying it It's when that couple is laying in bed and the husband reaches over and puts his hand on the on belly It means to pray for his son or for his daughter to know Jesus. Faith begins in those kinds of places. Faith carries through all of our life and if we're going to pass our faith on well, we have to understand all the different places we live. And so in the living room where you're hanging out with your family, now unfortunately, now too often the family's together in the living room and this is what they all do. And we're staring at all, staring at the same monitor and we're consuming some kind of media, but we're not talking with each other. We're all in the same room, but we're not interacting. But when we push those things aside and shut those things down and interact, it's where games are played and conversations are had. This is a place where faith is passed on to the next generation. Where is faith passed on to the next generation? In the back seat of a minivan. Somebody's missing a seat in their minivan. But, you know, Sherry has told me many times about how our boys, our three sons, one of the places they learned to pray was in our minivan, going to church. Because I'd go early in the morning and Sherry would come over with the boys once they were all ready before the first service started. And so when they were driving, a five-and-a-half minute drive from home to the church, they'd pray together. She'd say, hey Zach, would you pray for the Sunday school teachers at church today? And he'd pray. Hey Nate, would you pray for the senior's group? Josh, would you pray for Dad as he preaches the Bible? And they learned to pray. And she'd say, and you know, boys, you don't even have to close your eyes when you're praying because mom's not going to. Good thing. And just teaching them in the, going from place to place. That's where faith is learned. It's just how about this? How about, along the sidelines of a soccer game or a field hockey game or in the risers for a basketball game? When first of all, the kids look and their parents are there. They show up, they're there for them, but also they watch and they see. Because how we live in the flow of life teaches our children. They're watching all the time. So, so say perhaps you're a dad and there's a referee or there's an official and they're blind and they're for the other team obviously and they don't know what they're doing and they have no clue how to referee a game and how dad responds is teaching. Does faith impact those moments? Because it needs to, right? And then how about just around the kitchen table? You read the Bible and so much of Jesus' teaching happened around meals. If you did a study in the Bible of just conversations about faith and meals, it's all over the place. So as a family sits together, as they share a meal together, as dad or mom read a scripture or say a prayer or ask one of the kids to read a scripture and say a prayer, all of these are places where faith is passed on to the next generation. And what we're going to be thinking about today is just that reality that there's a calling to pass faith on to the next generation. That this is part of God's plan, this is part of God's design, and too much in our world, too many Christians are sort of abdicating that and just leaving it for someone else to do. But what I hope and pray is that God's Word will come alive to you today and that you will begin to get a vision and a picture that yes, yes, bring your kids to church, yes, do that. Have them come to youth group, have them come to go to camps, all those kinds of things, but understand that so much of what happens in the formation of the faith of the next generation happens outside of this place. We're only here a couple of hours a week, but Jesus is present at all times. So, Lord Jesus, this is our prayer as we open your word today as we think about what it means to build a godly home, a godly family, as we think about what it means to pass on the faith to the next generation, whether it's parents to children or grandparents or aunts and uncles, whether it's church members here who are teaching a children's class or a youth class and they're investing in the next generation. Lord, will you show us that passing on faith to the next generation doesn't just happen because it happens? It happens when we enter and follow your lead. So speak to us through your word and by your spirit today, we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Faith and family are inseparable in the heart of God. Faith and our family, the next generation, are locked together in the heart of God. We oftentimes don't see that. We don't recognize it, but we need to. And so listen to these words. If you have your Bibles, turn to Deuteronomy chapter 6. In Deuteronomy chapter 6 we find what is called the Shema. Shema is a Hebrew word for listen or hear, pay attention. If somebody says Shema, it means tune in, focus, pay attention. The ancient and present Jewish people refer to this passage as the Shema because look at how it begins. Hear, it's the first word. Verse 4, Deuteronomy chapter 6, 4 “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. We are a monotheistic people. We believe in one God. One in being, revealed as Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Three in person, one in being, but we believe in one God. We're monotheistic. 4 “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. If you want to pass on your faith to the next generation, make sure you have a faith that's deep and real. Make sure you don't just go to church, occasionally read your Bible or at least know where to find it, but that you actually love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might. We can't give to the next generation what we don't have. And so we need to grow in that. 6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. It kind of sounds like all the time doesn't it because that's what it is when you when you rise up and then versus 8 and 9 get a little strange because there's a cultural distinction here that I'll unpack a little bit for you but verse 8 says you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and you shall put them as frontlets between your eyes you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. So write them wherever, you know, where you'll remember them. And it's interesting because in the first century, the religious leaders, the Pharisees, took this literally, so they would take, and back in the ancient world, a paper or little scrolls or parchment was very expensive, but they would take a little parchment and they would put on it, like the Ten Commandments or some of the Ten Commandments or the Shema key passages, and they would roll it up and they would actually strap it with little leather pieces on the back of their hands so they literally had the scriptures on their hand. And then they would make these things called phylacteries. A phylactery was like a little box and in that box they would have little key scriptures in there and they would take that and they would put a little leather strap around their forehead, a little thing holding it, and they would put that little box right on their forehead so they would literally put it dangling between their eyes. But the problem was it had become a show instead of being real faith. So when Jesus said to the Pharisees, and now you'll know what he meant by this, you make your phylacteries broad. And you're like, let's just move along. I don't know what that means, right? So what he's saying is you make these big boxes, the bigger the better, because you're showing off. You strap the scriptures on your hand and you're doing it as a show of religiosity, just like they gave their offerings for a show. Giving offerings is good, but do it for the Lord, not for a show. They prayed to put on a show, and Jesus questioned them about that. We should pray, but not to put on a show. And what the Scripture says is that the Word of God should be on your hands. The Word of God should be in your mind. So everything you do with your hands, it's like the Word of God is there, and you're going, is this on our God? Is this consistent with what the Scripture says? The Word of God guides our hands. The Word of God our minds, our motives, our thoughts, that we keep God's Word on our minds and on our hands. But that's the call, is to live this out. And so here's the challenge in our world today. There are way too many Christians, Christian parents and grandparents, who have bought a lie from our culture. And that is, hey, your job is not to tell your kids what to believe. Your job is not to try to force them to accept anything. You just throw them out into the world and throw them out to the wolves and let them figure it out. I've heard parents say, oh, I'm not gonna pressure my kids with faith. I'm gonna let them just make the decision on their own. Hey, you don't do that with your favorite sports team. We're fans, we're in. You don't do that with their academics. I wanna help them. You don't do that with their sports. You guide them, you direct them. Hopefully you're not forcing them, but you're leading them and you're teaching them How much more do we need to do this with our faith? So don't believe the lie or that somehow you're doing your kids a favor if you say well I'm not gonna pressure them with anything about faith now We can't force them to believe and if you were raised in a home where your home life was one was a mess and then when you went to church you all faked it and acted a certain way and You thought there's a hypocrisy and I don't want to do that to my kids. Well, don't do that to your kids. Live an authentic faith, but share that faith with the next generation. Teach them, encourage them, cheer them on, and watch what God can do. And so we can't sort of abdicate these things and push them off to somebody else because the somebody else in our world is not going to do a good job with it. And so then now look with me another passage, turn to Psalm 78, and I want you to understand there are consequences if we do or don't strive to pass on our faith to the next generation, living out this call of the Shema, teaching our children wherever we are, teaching our grandkids, pouring into their lives. There's consequences if we do it and consequences if we don't. Look with me at Psalm 78, beginning at verse 4. Psalm 78, 4, we read these words, and it's talking about what comes in the second half of this verse, the glorious deeds of God, His might and His wonders. We will not hide them, these great things that God does. We will not hide them from our children to tell to the coming generation, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord and His might and the wonders He has done. If you have your Bible open, just put your finger right there on verse five and think about this. We will tell the next generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, the amazing things He's done, His might, His power and the wonders He's done. If you walk with Jesus, if you know Him and love Him, you know He shows up, you know He's present, you've felt His power, you've seen Him do amazing things. Tell those stories to the next generation. Tell those stories, aunts and uncles, to your nieces and nephews. Tell those stories, Sunday school teachers, to the kids you work with. Because you know what happens? When they hear your stories of God's presence, God's might, God's glory in your life. They think, maybe God is real and can do that in my life. And He is real and He can do those things. We share those stories so they see something they respect and that person is walking with Jesus. They experience His power and His presence in the great times, in the hard times. God is there. And so we tell those stories. Continue on in verse 5. He established a testimony and Jacob appointed a law in Israel among his people. God gave his law. He gave a direction for our lives, which he commanded our fathers. Now listen to this, which God commanded our fathers to teach to their children. That's forefathers, that's dads and moms, but I'll tell you what, dads hear this because a lot of dads will say, well, the church will do it or my wife will do it. But there's this call, which he commanded our fathers to teach their children, another generation, and arise and tell them to their children, verse 7, so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments. Linger there on verse 7 for a minute. What can happen if we will teach the next generation the things of God, if we'll share his word if we'll pray for them and pray with them if we'll tell stories of God's faithfulness what might happen well verse 7 says they that they might just end up putting their hope in God that'd be great that they wouldn't forget the works of God because they hear about him consistently and they would want to keep his commandments and live for him that's what can happen if we gently but strongly and consistently pass on our faith to the next generation. But if we don't, there's also consequences. Look at the last verse here, verse 8. And then they should not be like their fathers, that's forefathers, those who have gone before. They should not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation. A generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God. See, we point them towards Jesus. We teach the next generation to love Jesus the best we can. Because when we don't, they're gonna wander. Now, here's, can I tell you something? There's no guarantee. You could do everything right as a parent. And things may not turn out exactly how you want it. We'll talk more about that in a minute. But you can do the right things and bring your kids to church and sit in these chairs and learn together. You can, in every place of life. And you're not guaranteed it's all gonna go perfect and smooth. But can I tell you something? If you don't do those things, I can pretty well guarantee you where it's going to go for your kids. There's very little chance if you throw them out to the wolves of the world and say, well, you just find your own way in the sea of philosophies and lies that are floating around our world, and I hope you'll sort it out. But don't ask dad or mom. We're not going to be a part of that. No. That's an invitation to disastrous things. And what we have to understand is that from generation to generation to generation Our call is to tell God's stories to share his word to pray to live out our faith to model it to teach next generation The Holy Spirit has to touch their hearts and they have to decide you can't make them believe in Jesus You can't be nice if you could but we can't but we can do that all we can to show them what a vibrant faith looks like and what it looks like to walk with Jesus and If you read through the Old Testament, you read through the time of the kings, in the time of the divided kingdom. In the southern kingdom, in Jerusalem, there was a series of kings. And it's really interesting when you read through it and study, if you kind of isolate each of the kings and you follow them, you realize there'd be like a good king and a good king, and then there'd be a really bad king. Kind of like it almost came out of nowhere. Where there's this king that, you know, it was a good king, good king, and then there might be a bad king and a bad king and all of a sudden there's a Josiah whose father and grandfather were horrible and he sought the God from the time he sought the Lord from the time he was seven years old became officially king at about 17 or 18 according to the law but all of a sudden from two generations of people running from God he sought after God so God can jump into the process anywhere and do what he wants to do but do all you can to pass on faith to the next generation. One more passage for you. And this says to know your kids and their faith journey. Proverbs 22 6. Proverbs 22 6, one of the most misunderstood passages in the Bible for church people. And so Proverbs 22 6 says this, train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it. It's a great passage but here's how a lot of people have been taught to interpret it. Get your kids to church and they'll become Christians. You make them come to church, do your religious duty, get them to church, and then they'll follow Jesus. That's not what the passage says. And actually I learned this when Sherry had an opportunity quite a while back to work with a guy named Charles Swindoll, Chuck Swindoll. I think one of the best pastor scholars of the end of the last century, the beginning of this century, an amazing thinker, great and godly man and teacher, and Sherry got to work with him on a couple of projects. And on one of them, dealing with a book he wrote on family stuff, she was studying this stuff. Sherry grew up in the church, and so she had kind of views of certain passages that were just kind of like, well, that's how our church sees it. And so she came to me and she said, I was studying this stuff, and working on this stuff with Chuck Swindoll, and she said, this passage doesn't mean what I always thought it meant. I thought it meant if you bring your kids to church and do the right thing there, then they'll become Christians. But what this passage actually means, if you go back to the Hebrew and really interpret it, it means raise up a child, each child, according to their bents, according to their personal wiring, how God has made them. Raise them up according to how God's made them, and when they grow old, they will become the person God wants them to be. Because you're raising them according to how God has made them. It's not bring them to church and they'll become a Christian. It's study your children. Watch them. What's their passion? What's their interest? How do you connect them in a way that works for them? We grew up raising... we raised three boys. They're now 36, 34, and 32. I figured out just recently, we have over 200 years of parenting experience between the two of us. Because I've parented three boys for 36, 34, and 32 years. That's 102 years, I think, if you add it up. And Sherry's done the same. Interestingly, she's been parenting exactly the same length of time that I've been. Think about that. And so, and so, we've got a lot of experience, but we're not experts. We're still figuring it out. And here's the deal. Our boys in our 30s, if you here have kids in their 30s or older, let me ask you here, are you still investing in them as parents? What's the answer? You're still there. You're still walking with them. That's part of the journey But so this passage is train up a child in the way you should go when he is old He will not depart from it and as Sherry and I this is kind of earlier in our marriage when our kids were younger We started looking good. Okay, how do we raise each one to love Jesus in a way that fits them? See some parents go. I don't know what happened I raised all my kids the same and they turned out different Well, don't raise them all the same. Be fair, but you can't raise them the same. Why? Because they're not the same. So like our oldest son, Zach, and our youngest son, Nate, if we gave them the Bible, we're talking about reading the Bible, they'd read the Bible. They love reading the Bible. Our middle son, Josh, good reader, doesn't really like reading that much. He likes listening to the Bible. So when he was young, we got him this listening thing, this whole Bible listening deal. And he got a lot more to the Bible because he could listen to it. And a couple of years ago, we were at our house for Christmas, and all three of our boys and their wives were there, and I had prepared a kind of a reading of the whole Christmas story, and I broke it up into parts for each one of us, so everybody would read a part of it, and so our sons and their wives shared, and I would each read a part, and so we're reading through it, everybody's doing their reading, doing their reading, and Saxon comes across for Josh, and Josh just goes, holds up his phone, pushes the button, and it reads the passage to us. And I'm like, yeah! And we all kind of laugh. That's Josh! Every morning when he wakes up, he listens to the Bible. That works for him. But when he was young, we didn't say, no, you've got to sit at a desk with highlighters and pens and study the Bible. We figured out what worked for him and then we tried to connect him to God's Word in a way that fit him. And so, each child, this is saying, study your kids, know your kids, and then raise them according to how God has made them and watch what happens. Watch as they become who God has made them to be. But it doesn't guarantee, it's not meant to guarantee that if you do your best it will all come together and everyone will be exactly how you want them to be. There will be challenges along the way but do your best. I remember our son Zach, we asked him each what kind of Bible would you want at different times. We would spend money on buying them Bibles if they had one that they were interested in. And Zach said, I want the archaeological study Bible. He loves history. He's a student of history. So even as a younger kid, he wanted this Bible because in it there would be maps and diagrams and pictures of digs in different parts of the world that showed where they said, well that city doesn't exist, it never existed, the Bible's wrong, and all of a sudden they're digging up, there's the city. And he loved that kind of stuff. Our other boys weren't interested in that kind of Bible. But we tried to kind of figure out each one. And so parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, people influence younger kids. Watch them. How do they connect with God? And then you try to connect them in ways that they feel God's made them and they can grow into the person that God wants them to be. I wanna just like I did last week with marriage, I wanna just kind of rapid fire some ideas, some thoughts about how you build a God honoring family or how you pour into the next generation. And I'm just praying you'll have one or two of these things you go I can do that I can start doing that So here's the first one praying for and with your children and teaching them how to pray To pray for them to pray with them to find opportunities When your child comes to your grandchild comes and says hey, I'm going through this. It's really hard. Don't you say? Oh, that's hard. Don't you say I'll pray for you later Say come here. You put an arm around him and you just start praying. I don't ask my kids, can I pray for you? I pray. I just pray. And so just to connect, I had a grandpa come up to me after the first service this morning and he said to me, I wish I'd heard this sermon 55 years ago. He said, I missed it with my kids. I've missed it with my grandkids. So I didn't pray with him. He said in my home when I was growing up, my dad would read the Bible at the table. He'd pray, but he never asked us to pray. He never taught us how to pray. He didn't invite us into it. He said, I missed it. I said, how old are your grandkids now? He says, they're in their 20s. So I looked at him and I said, this is just a couple hours ago, standing right here. I said, in the next few weeks, if you're with one of your grandkids and they share a struggle or a challenge they're facing, I said, you just come alongside of them and you put your arm around, he's a big guy, so put your arm around him, you pull him in and you just start praying. You just pray that God will protect them, that God will lead them, that God will, I said, you become the grandpa who prays starting today. And I prayed that for him, and I looked at him, I said, that makes you nervous, doesn't it? He goes, yeah. So I'd never done it. I said, in the next week or two, you're gonna have an opportunity, and the enemy's gonna whisper, don't do it. But I said, you step in, and don't worry about the words, you just pray, you just be grandpa who prays from his heart. They will come to you and start asking you to pray for them. It's not too late to start right now. And so bring prayer in. I had a chance to, one of the reasons we come here a lot is we have grandkids here, our kids are here, our grandkids are here, lots of family here. But I had a chance to have a paw and Piper day. Last time we were in town, Piper is a middle grandchild with our son who lives here. And she's about two years old. And so I was gonna have a Pa and Piper day, and the kids call me Pa. And so we got together and I had about two hours to be with her. And I said, Piper, let's make a list of all the fun things we can do together. So we made a list of like 15 things. And so one of the things she says, Pa, put on the list, snuggle, snuggle. Now I raised three boys. I never had any time where any of them asked me to plan on some snuggle time. But I got a granddaughter now. So I wrote down snuggle. And I said, oh Piper, I got a good idea. Can we put on here, we'll pray together for our family. She said, no Pa, you said we were making a list of things that were fun. She's a little girl, right? And I said, okay, okay, so we didn't put on the list. But a little later on we got a chance to snuggle. I should explain to me how it works. Okay, well Pa, we're gonna sit on the couch over here and then I'll sit by you and we'll get a little blanket and we'll just sit together. Like, okay, great. So we're sitting there and I said, hey, said, Piper, could you, how about right now while we're just snuggling here, why don't you say a prayer for Maga? I think they call it Shere Maga. When Cohen first tried to say grandma, he got it backwards, Ma, Maga. And then when he laughed, he thought, so that became, she's Maga. So I said, would you, Piper, would you pray for Maga? And so she did. I said, I'm gonna pray for your daddy and mommy. I prayed for them. I said, now Piper, could you pray for your little sister, Isla Grace? So she prayed for her, went back and forth. That's a few months ago. So a couple of days ago, we were here, and we were with, Sherry and I had time with Piper, and she wanted to snuggle, so we said, we're gonna make a Piper sandwich. We're gonna put each of us on the sides of the, she's just a little teeny thing. You're gonna go in the middle here. So we're sitting there, we got a little blanket, and then she says, Pa, can we pray? It took one time for her to connect snuggling in prayer. But now this time, we sat together and Sherry prayed, and I prayed, and Piper prayed. Their prayers are beautiful. They're little girls' prayers, but they're beautiful. See, how do you... You can't learn that in Sunday school. You learn that in life. And some of you are like, I've missed my opportunity. No, you haven't. Those doors are gonna open. Step through those doors. How do you build a God honoring family? And how do you build God honoring relations for your part of the next generation? Modeling and teaching a love for the scriptures. To really, to just show the next generation that you love this book. See, Christians, we have one book. I always tell people, we got no extra books. And other groups have extra books. We don't. We just got one book. It's a compilation of 66 books over an extended period of time, inspired by the Holy Spirit. We have one book. And so I love to study the Bible. When I first became a Christian, got my first Bible, I loved studying the Bible. I like to study kind of at a desk with some notes to write with and with a journal or with my computer open so I can study things and take notes. But when our boys got to the age where they could notice, I moved my daily Bible study from my study to the living room. Why? Not to put on a show. I wanted my boys to see their dad with the word of God sitting on his lap and me reading the scriptures every single day. I wanted them to see that that's how we live, that's what we do. We are people of this book. And so I began, and then Sherry and I would find ways, there was a season where Sherry would wake him up 10 minutes apart in the mornings and she'd send him to me for a little 10 minute time where we'd read the Bible together and talk about it and I'd get 10 minutes with each of the boys. There was times we did around the table, around meals. There's times where we'd, we'd just, all the way through the years, how do we figure out how to say being in the word of God is part of who we are? When they have challenges and problems, we don't just give them wisdom and advice, we give them scriptural wisdom and advice. And so bring that into your home and you'll pass it on to the next generation. Number three, how do you build a God-honoring family? By making grace central in the life of your home. How do you make grace central? You learn to say you're sorry. You forgive quickly. They watch dad and mom, and when dad and mom have a little struggle over something, and it happens, first of all, they don't air it in front of the kids, but if the parents pick it up, they understand that it gets resolved pretty quickly We forgive. When you mess up, and you will, when you mess up, to go to your son or your daughter, your grandson or your granddaughter and say, hey, you know what, Dad really messed up, and I'm sorry for how I got too mad. I pulled away. I did this. Will you forgive? Can you forgive Dad for that? And you teach them how to extend grace and how to receive grace. But you bring grace to the home. Because you can't be graceless in the home and say, hey, I want you to meet this graceful Jesus. They need to see it, right? They need to watch it in your home, in your lives. And so make grace central in your home life. How do you build a God honoring family or a port of the next generation? By speaking words of consistent and honest blessing. Man, bless every chance you get. Speak words of encouragement, of hope, of kindness, of beauty. Tell your son, tell your daughter, every good thing you see in them. Remind them. They need to hear that from you. And they need to hear that God delights in them. And as I was thinking about this, I thought about a friend of mine who's a pastor. He's about my age, and he shared this with me years ago. But his dad was a pastor. I learned a lot from him because I grew up in a non-believing home. He grew up in this pastor's home, in a wonderful, healthy pastor's home. So I learned a lot about how to do family stuff by talking to him through the years. But he told me that his dad would quote, would bless him with Aaron's blessing from Numbers chapter 6, whenever he left the house. And here's these words, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace. And I love what comes next. It says, and so they will put my name on the Israelites and I will bless them. See, as they spoke the words of blessing, God came through that and blessed the next generation. Isn't that beautiful? So, Ken told me, whenever I leave the house, my dad would do that. So, he said, when I started raising my family, I thought I'd try the same thing. He said, when they were little, if they were going out to play, they would just run over to me and he said, I would just kind of grab them and I'd say, I'd look at them and I'd say, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine upon you, be gracious to you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and bring you his peace. Have fun playing." Off they go. So then when they got to be kind of teenagers, he'd have to say, come here, I'm going to do the blessing. And they'd be like, oh, all right. And they kind of stop and they'd like roll their eyes, just do it. And he would, you know, do the blessing and they're like, oh, okay. They're at that age. But he told me, he said, when his son went off to college, he came home to visit one time, just there for a couple of days. And he said his son was going to go off and take off for the day and so his son came over to him and said dad do it and he'd be the son of a gun long enough to use like wasn't he's do what he says give me the blessing he asked for it and so on his young adult son he just took his shoulders and made a lord bless you and keep you may the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you may the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. He said, Off the sun went. Your kids, your grandkids, your nieces, your nephews need blessing in this world that's filled with cursing. Bring that blessing and bring it as often as you can. Find your own words, find your own blessing. Use something like this but bring that blessing. Number five, how do you build a God honoring family? By setting boundaries and saying no. One of the greatest gifts you can give to the next generation is a loving, kind no. By putting parameters on certain things. Don't let them just completely run wild in this crazy world. I remember when our kids were little and we lived on a cul-de-sac. And how many boys under like 12 were on our cul-de-sac? 11 boys under 12. So we'd go out in the front to play and within like 30 seconds there'd be a dozen kids there. And so, at one point one of my boys said to me, Dad, can we ever just play with you? Because when we go out, we turn it into a neighborhood game. I said, oh, and I realized that they wanted some time with Dad, so I said to the neighborhood kids, hey, sometimes we're gonna come out and it'll be a neighborhood playtime, but sometimes it's gonna be a Harney family playtime, and so if it's a Harney family playtime, we don't want you here, we want to just have family time. They didn't get their feelings hurt at all. From that point on, they'd run over and they'd go, is it neighborhood playtime or Harney family playtime? And I said, Harney family playtime. How long? Give us an hour. Okay, and off they go. And then I would have time with my boys to focus on them. Boundaries. You should have some times in your home where you say no to all technology. Shut it down. Hey, tonight we're gonna hang out as a family. We're gonna play board games or we're gonna do this and we're gonna just turn our phones off and I'm gonna take my watch off because it feeds texts and data into me and we're gonna just put all that away. The first time or two you do that with your kids, they're gonna hate it. They're gonna say, I can't turn my phone off, my friends will think I died, you know, and I can't, I need it all the time. But after one or two times when you say, hey, we're gonna do a no-tech time, there's actually something that's like, let that go for a little bit. But put up boundaries so that you can be a family together. That will help you have those moments you can pass faith on to the next generation. Number six, how do you build a God-honoring family? How do you pour in the next generation? By being present and slowing down. By being physically present. If you're not, how can you pass faith on to the next generation if you're never with them? Make time to be together. So be present, but then also be present. Don't just be there, but again, push the distractions away. You all know the feeling when you're talking with somebody and they do this. Yeah, uh-huh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And they kind of glaze over and they're somewhere else, right, the phone, the watch, whatever it is. And so make sure that when you're present, you're fully present. I remember a time where our kids were talking to us about, you know, can you, they actually said, you know, when we're playing the game, can you not, you know, do laundry, can you not do this or do that? Can you just, can you just focus on us? Oh, good message. Make that decision. Be present and be fully present. And that creates opportunities, again, to just instill faith and to go deeper in life. Number seven, build a godly, God honoring family by teaching the next generation to think, debate, and articulate what they believe and why they believe it. Don't just tell your kids, this is what you're supposed to believe. And if they come to you with questions, don't shut their questions down. They come with a question about sexuality. They come with a question about heaven and hell. They come with a question, is it true that people only come to God through Jesus? Somebody told me that wasn't true. And they come with these hard questions. Don't say, well, no, we just, this is what we believe. Just believe it. Say, that's a great question. Maybe we can study that together. Call one of your pastors and say, my kid asked me about this. What's a good biblical resource that we can study together? And then as you study that together, you're instilling faith, but you're learning stuff. You're sharing with them. You're having spiritual conversations. If your kids come with questions, welcome those questions. I remember when our son, Nate, who's a pastor here, when he went off to Moody Bible Institute, he came back up, came home after like a month and a half for a little visit. And he said, Dad, you didn't teach me like all the Bible trivia stuff. He had these friends that were in homes where they basically, they learned to memorize all these things. They knew all the genealogies and who's the father of who and who's the mother and all this stuff. And he said, Dad, you didn't like teach me all that stuff. I said, no, Nate, we taught you to think biblically, analytically, to grapple with things. As he continued on his education, he came back and he said, yeah, I can look up the trivia, but I had to learn how to think and grapple with things biblically. Teach your kids to ask hard questions and think because when they leave your home, they will be asking those questions. Let them ask them now and know that you have the openness to talk about those things. And one last of many things we could talk about, but how to build a God-honoring family by creating space for fun and laughter in your home. Create a space for fun. Create a space for laughter. Of all the places in the world, the most joyful place should be the church and Christian homes. Amen? Because the Spirit of the Lord is there, because God is there. So make your home a place that's fun. Parents, this is another thing we learned from Chuck Swindoll years ago when our boys were little. Say yes as often as you can. Don't be no-machines. Say yes. Now, you're going to have to say no to some things. So I remember our boys came and said, Dad, do we have to wear these suits to bed? These little suits with a pocket and like these matching pants and shirt kind of thing? Pajamas. We're like, no, if you don't want to, you don't have to wear them. At one point, one of the boys came and said, dad, do I have to have my mattress on a pedestal? Can I just push that away and just put it on the floor? We don't have rats gnawing at them or anything. It's like, sure. We said yes when we could, so we could say no when we had to. One time, our oldest son, Zach, came and he said, he said, dad, dad, the back of our lot line was a little, on a pond that had like five or six homes. We called it a pond, it was really a county water retention area, but it was a pond. So it was clean enough, and there's a little fish in it. So, but he came and said, dad, can we build a ramp into the pond, going up the pond, so I could take the, or we could take the bike from up here, right down the hill across, and then jump off the ramp into the water and like try to do cool stuff. And so I said, well, yes, but hang on, Sherry, I said, Sherry, go in the house and close the door, don't look out here for a while. And so we had moments like that with three boys. And I said, okay, I said, so we'll do it. But I said, I have to be here when you do it. You have to have, I wanna have some supervision. I wanna give, I said, I'll step on, I'll sit there and I'll be your lifeguard from there. But, and it was a thing of beauty. I mean, we built this ramp and they're going, first they're just going to the water, then they're trying to do back flips and stuff. One time they tried to put two people on the bike, do it at the same time, and the thing snapped down, they went head first and flipped right in the water. It was beautiful. They're fine. But it's just a blast, right? And then after a while, Zach comes running to me and says, Dad, do we have a couple of life jackets? And I said, I'm a dad, I have no idea if we have safety gear. And so I said, ask your mom. So they went and got him a couple of life jackets. And so, and then they ran out in the yard and they tied the life jackets to the bike. Not on them, why? They were sick of diving to the bottom of the pond and dragging it back up again. But they weren't thinking safety, they were thinking fun, right? But this is a moment where I could say, yes, have fun, I'll be part of it with you. If your home is a place where it's sort of locked down, no smiling, rules and regulations to the point where kids can't have any fun, that doesn't show the spirit of Jesus. Your home should be the funnest place in your neighborhood, if you have kids, if you have grandkids. Work for that, because the joy of the Lord is our strength. See, these chairs are good for spiritual growth. They're wonderful. But the faith is passed on, day in and day out, through all of life. So Lord Jesus, this is our prayer, that our lives will be bound up with you so closely. We would know you so well, we would love you so much that every part of life, every chair we're in, every place we go is a place for faith. Everything we do opens the door for us to be able to walk with you, to love you, to know you, to follow you and to share your goodness with the next generation. So that's our prayer, that every one of us that can have influence on the next generation would do it. And little bits, day by day, moment by moment, until faith becomes real in their hearts. I'm going to invite you to stay in this place of prayer. If you're able to stand, if you're physically able, would you stand with us? And the song we're going to sing as we close the service is one that if you could teach this song and the words of this song to your children and grandchildren, you would teach them the gospel of Jesus. As you sing, pay attention and understand that every time we sing, we're also teaching the next generation. Sermon on Healthy Families

Frankincense; Jesus is God Sermon Series: Fit for a King Ryan DB Kimmel Lead Pastor Peace Church Main Passage: John 10:22-31 Transcript Words today is the day that the Lord has made so let us rejoice and be glad in it and everyone said Amen. So, you know the thing about being an adult at christmas time as opposed to being a child is nobody asks you as an adult what you want for christmas Kids, it's the number one question. They get this time of year adults. We never get asked. What do you want for christmas? So here's what we're going to do. We're going to turn to your neighbor and ask them what do they want for Christmas? Go ahead and take a moment and do that. Lot of talking. I knew you wanted something. I knew you had something on that list. All right, so I'm willing to bet of all the gifts that you just heard that people wanted from around your circles and in your area of all the gifts that I think you heard about, I am willing to bet no one in here said, do you know what I'd really like for Christmas? Some frankincense. Willing to bet nobody said that. What I have here is actually, I have some frankincense here. It's incredibly hard to find. You can really only get it on Amazon, so it's, you know, it's, it's actually, for how much we talk about it and how much we venerate it it's fairly easy to find but we talk about it every Christmas because it's common knowledge I think even the world at large you don't have to be a churchgoer to know that the wise men visited the baby Jesus and they gave him gold and golden frankincense and myrrh and so you know we talked about frankincense a lot at Christmas time. But here's the question, what actually is it? What is this stuff? So here's what frankincense is, it's actually, it's a resin. It's a hardened resin. And how you get it is you strike the bark of what's known as the Boswellia tree, I'm pretty sure I'm saying that right. Boswellia tree that's found in the Arabian Peninsula and as well as like Northeast Africa, you'll find these trees. And what you do is you strike the bark and the sap that oozes out, you let it ooze out and it gets hard. And when it gets hard, you chop it off the tree and that's frankincense. Now in the ancient world, it was extremely expensive and it was a very, very expensive thing. And it was used in many different purposes, but primarily it was used in religious and ceremonial purposes. Now some would say that it was actually worth its weight in gold. It was a very expensive thing. And what you have at time is you have records of like leaders and like kings burning tremendous amounts of frankincense simply just to demonstrate their wealth. That they're so wealthy they could just burn this whenever they wanted. It was used again in religious purposes and ceremonial purposes. It was also used for embalming in ancient Egypt. And you'll find actually in King Tut's tomb, when they opened up King Tut's tomb, they found jars of frankincense. You know, when we talk about frankincense, obviously we immediately think of the birth of Jesus, but it was mentioned in much more places in the Bible other than the birth of Jesus. In fact, you'll find the reference for frankincense a lot in the Old Testament, particularly the book of Leviticus. Now this is important because the book of Leviticus shows us how the ancient Israelites were to worship God. It was the worship instruction manual of the Old Testament. And you'll find many times where there's a call to burn frankincense as an offering to God. So you'd burn the stuff and the smoke would rise up in your worship to God. But here's the other question I think that when you think about the gift given to Jesus, this gift given to Jesus kind of begs the question, was this a gift that you'd give to newborn babies in the ancient world? And the answer is no. This is not typically a gift you'd find on a baby's gift registry in the ancient world. But you have to remember, the wise men were not looking for just any old child. The wise men knew exactly who they were looking for. The wise men said they were looking for the newborn king. And so of course, these wise men came with kingly gifts. Gold, obviously a kingly gift. Frankincense and myrrh. Again, frankincense was highly expensive. Now myrrh, actually we'll look at myrrh next week. We're going to have a guest preacher with us, Pastor Kevin Harney will come and teach about myrrh. And I'm going to tell you now, it is fascinating, the place of myrrh in the arc of the life of Jesus. You will not want to miss next week's message. But frankincense is an interesting gift that they gave to the newborn child. Yes, yes, because of its worth. But what Christians have done throughout the centuries, out of tradition, is we've looked at the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh as kind of symbolic to represent different aspects of who Jesus Christ is. Now the Bible doesn't make that direct connection with the gifts, but the things that we say the gifts point to are things that the Bible does teach about Jesus, that he is King. Gold means Jesus is King. Frankincense, as we're going to see today in probably the most controversial of all the messages frankincense in many ways reminds us and points that to the fact that Jesus Christ is God in the next week as we look at the place of murder again which is a fascinating study we'll see how mer points to Jesus as savior but this notion of Jesus as God is one of the most controversial messages that we could bring. Now, a common question that I think often gets asked in religious circles, especially when we turn our attention to like evangelism, we'll ask a question like this. We'll say, who is Jesus Christ to you? Now, I'll be honest with you, I love and hate that question because in our culture, even with Christians, you're going to get so many different answers. He's my friend. He's Savior. He's a great religious teacher. He was a moral instructor. You'll get many different notions about who Jesus is. But I wonder, Christians in the house, with that question, who is Jesus, or even when you think about Christ, do you remember that Jesus is God? So pop quiz pop quiz, I want you to answer this right away you don't get to think and you don't get to Google this Who won the World Series this year Yes Good job, my man, the Texas Rangers won the World Series this year. They beat the Diamondbacks four games to one. Pretty decisively, Texas Rangers were the World Series champs this past year. Now, does the question of who are the Texas Rangers to you really make any sense? In the sense of like, if I was to ask you, do you think the Texas Rangers are a good baseball team? It's kind of a meaningless question because they were the best team this past year. How do we know that? They won the World Series. So the notion of like, who are the Texas Rangers to you just really doesn't make any sense. Because we can tell you who the Texas Rangers are. They were the best baseball team last year and they were the World Series champs. So when we come to this question of like, who is Jesus Christ to you? Listen to me. If Jesus Christ is God, with all due respect, it doesn't matter who he is to you. What matters is whether or not that statement is true, that Jesus is God. Because if Jesus is God, then that changes the conversation, puts it in an entirely different category. The notion of who is Jesus to you is meaningless in the face of the fact that Jesus is God. Who is Jesus to you? At this point, if Jesus is God, it doesn't matter because you're not the arbiter of who Jesus Christ is. At this point, it's simply upon you to recognize whether or not Christ is God or not. And so that's what we're looking at in our passage today. But before we get to that, I just want to make mention that this notion of Jesus Christ as God This isn't something Christians have thrust upon Jesus unwillingly This isn't something that the that Christians point to that the Bible doesn't say Jesus says this and scriptures reveal this that Jesus Christ is God In fact one of the most famous Christmas passages Tell us this right away in the first pages of the New Testament It says this in Matthew chapter 1 starting at verse 20 It says: Matthew 1: 20-23 20 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 take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: 23 “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel" (which means, God with us). I'll be honest with you, I love that little add-on, which means God with us. I didn't put that in there, that's actually in scripture. Scripture takes precious space to actually clarify what Emmanuel means. It's like the Bible is saying, hey y'all, just to clarify here, so no one makes a mistake about this, Jesus is conceived by the Holy Spirit. What that means is he's not just the son of God. It means that he's actually God with us. He's Emmanuel, which means God with us. The Bible wants to make abundantly clear who Jesus is right from the moment of his birth, his conception. See, in our world it's safe, it's so safe to talk about Jesus as the world's greatest example of love. It's easy to speak of Jesus as a truth-telling martyr. It's not safe and it's controversial to speak of Jesus as God, but I'm telling you faithful Christians, that's exactly the space that we need to be in. We're not the ones who seek out safe spaces. We go into the space where there's truth and that's an unsafe place. We go to the space where we tell people that Jesus is not just a kind, loving person. He is God incarnate. He is God in the flesh. He is Emmanuel, God with us. Christmas is not just a cute little story. Christmas is where God stepped into his own creation. So we're going to look at one of the clearest and best examples of Jesus saying that he is God. Would you please in your Bibles turn to John chapter 10. Now as you turn in there, a couple of quick things. If you want to smell what frankincense smells like, I'll have this up here if you want to come join us after join me after the service But as you're turning to John chapter 10, I want to set the stage for you I want you to understand exactly what's happening in this little story. So here we are John chapter 10. Here's what's going on Jesus is in his third year of ministry his third and final year of ministry Actually, he's in his third year of ministry and he's at the height of his popularity. For the last three years, Jesus has gone about teaching truth. He's gone about performing miracles. He's saying what's going to be happening. Now, in all likelihood, Jesus Christ was crucified in the spring of 33 AD. And so this portion of scripture actually takes place in the winter before that. And as you're gonna see in a second, there's a festival that's mentioned. We know when that festival happens. And so in all likelihood, the passage that we are going to read happened during the week of December 18 in the year 32 AD in Jerusalem. I say this to you just to remind us all that when we read the scriptures, we're not just reading a religious text. You're reading real accounts of history, things that actually happened, and we have great detail surrounding this. And so, would you hear God's word? John 10:22-31 22 At that time the Feast of Dedication took place at Jerusalem. It was winter, 23 and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the colonnade of Solomon. 24 So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.” 25 Jesus answered them, “I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father's name bear witness about me,26 but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep. 27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father's hand. 30 I and the Father are one.” 31 The Jews picked up stones again to stone him. Amen, this is God's Word. Let's pray and we'll continue. Let's pray Father God in heaven above Lord We confess that we believe in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit three in one. And so Lord, we need you today to help us with this passage that we might be those who have the ears to hear such amazing truths about our King, our Savior and our God. And it's in his name that we pray these things. And everyone said, amen. Amen, so church, here we are week two of Advent. If I was gonna give you a main point for today, here's what I'd give to you, it's this. Jesus is not just our King come to save us, he is our God with us. And so to drive this point home, as we look at our passage today, I wanna pull out three things for you to be thinking about. Jesus is clearly God because of... 1. What he did 2. What he said 3. What he risked. 1. Jesus is clearly God because of what He did Okay, number one, Jesus is clearly God because of what He did. And what did Jesus do? Performed miracles, amazing miracles. So let's keep our Bibles open here this morning, go to verse 22. It says this, at that time, the feast of dedication took place in Jerusalem. Okay, so the feast of dedication. This is not an Old Testament festival. You will not find this recorded in the Old Testament. When Jesus celebrated this, this celebration was only about a couple hundred years old at this time. The Bible records it as calling it the Feast of Dedication, but it was also known as the Festival of Lights, which we more commonly call Hanukkah. So Jesus was in Jerusalem celebrating Hanukkah. Now look at this detail. Look at these little interesting details here. This can seem like such a flyover verse, but there's something really important going on here. End of verse 22 going in 23. It says it was winter. Jesus was walking in the temple in the colonnade of Solomon. Listen, I'm willing to bet you don't know the, the blueprint structure of the temple, but here's, I'll tell you the, the, the, the, the colonnade of Solomon was in a part of the temple that was covered. So it's interesting that the Bible mentions it was winter and Jesus was walking in the temple in the covered part. It just has beautiful little details to help bring out the historicity of what's recorded here to remind us that we're not just reading abstract thoughts. We're reading a historical narrative. The writer here, John is telling us where this happened, when this happened, what the season was like, what the day was like. You could go and double check this. Was Jesus there at this time? Again, when you read the Bible, people remember you're not just reading a philosophical treatise. You're reading a historical account, account of something that actually happened that Jesus truly lived and walked and did these things. These, these details. I know that for us, Western Americans, we just like, this doesn't seem like an important stuff. The Bible is saying double check. It's citing its resource, it's citing what's happening and going on here. And so let's continue. Now again, as we're going to read verses 24, 25, and 26, remember this happened in Jesus' third year of ministry. For three years, He's been preaching, teaching, prophesying, performing miracles. He's at the height of His popularity. There's a crowd following him. Verse 24 says, So the Jews gathered around him and said, How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly. It's like they're saying to Jesus, Hey, man, we've been following you for three years. Would you just come out and say it already? And I love how Christ responds here. Verse I answered them, I told you and you do not believe. The works I do in my Father's name bear witness about me. So the Jews are like, Jesus, would you just say the words I am the Messiah? Would you just say the words I am the Christ? Would you just come out and say it already? And Jesus is like, have you not been watching me for the last three years? Have you not been listening? You haven't listened to what I've said? You haven't seen what I've done? Who else do you think I am? What else could I do? I've told you, I've performed miracles, I've done it all. Listen, Jesus has fed the 5,000, he's cast out demons, he's raised people from the dead, and not only this, he's done teachings about who he is. And as you read the story, I'll tell you right now, I was reminded of, and I think this reminds us something about people. People will never believe what they don't want to hear. They've seen it, they've heard it, and they still won't believe. People will never believe what they don't want to hear. Listen, I know, I could give you lots of examples from our culture right now about people and groups of people that just won't believe the truth. I don't want to distract us, but I can tell you right now that people are people, whether they are first century Jews or 21st century Americans. We have thick skulls and it's almost impossible to change someone's mind once they have it set in stone. And so here's what I'm going to challenge you on right now. Don't be thinking about someone else. Don't be thinking about another group of people or don't be thinking about anyone other than yourself right now. I want you to look in a mirror right now and think to yourself, what would it take to change your mind once you've been fully convinced of something? Is your mind so easily changed? People will never believe what they don't want to hear. We need to be the people whose minds, whose hearts, whose lives, whose worldviews will be changed by truth. And truth is so abundant, but yet so many people just cast it off because they're already committed to what they want to believe. Jesus is saying to this crowd and he's saying to us, he's saying, I've said it. And more than that, I've shown it. I've done miracles in the name of God, miracles that show you everything you need to know that I am the Christ. I am the Messiah. Jesus is clearly God because of what he did. 2. Jesus is clearly God because of what He said And secondly, Jesus is clearly God because of what he said. And what has Jesus said? I'll tell you right now. Jesus has made truth claims. The type of truth claims you don't get to walk back from. Look at verses 26 to 29. Jesus says, but you do not believe because you're not among my sheep. My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life and they will never perish and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My father who has given them to me is greater than all and no one is able to snatch them out of my father's hand. I'm gonna take a moment and help us to understand the incredible weight of what Jesus just said. Jesus, again, made truth claims right here that you cannot walk back from. Let's summarize. Verse 26 and 27, Jesus just said, "'If you don't believe me, "'it's because you don't belong to me.'" Whoa, I thought this was this ever-loving, all-inclusive hippie. What do you mean if you don't believe him, that means because you don't belong to him. Verse 28, Jesus just promised eternal life. Listen people, you don't get to say that unless it's true. You don't get to say that and be mistaken about that. That is too weighty of a term, of a claim. You don't get to be mistaken about this. And then look at verse 29. Jesus equated his work with God's work. And add to that, he just claimed God as his personal father in ways that entangled his work and God's work, making them indistinguishable. And by that, promising eternal life that could never be taken away. You don't get to make claims like this and be wrong about it and still be seen as a good person. So let me make this clear. Jesus Christ cannot simply be a good guy. Why? Because you don't get to say the things that Jesus said and those things not be true. If Jesus was lying, this makes him one of the worst people to have ever lived. You don't get to promise eternal life to people who follow you unless you can truly offer it. You don't get to equate your work with God's work unless it's actually true. If Jesus Christ is not God, if Jesus Christ is not God, then let me tell you something about the cross that he died on. A horrendous death, by the way. If Jesus Christ was not God, then on the cross, he got what he deserved. If you're lying about that, you deserve to die for the claims you just made. 3. Jesus is clearly God because of what He risked If Jesus Christ is not God, all time or was he God well I think Jesus is clearly God because of what he said because of what he did but also because of what he was willing to risk what did Jesus risk everything what did Jesus give up everything he laid it all I think one of the great things that we have here in America is freedom of speech. It's one of our great freedoms that we have, where supposedly there's nothing that we can say that is going to get us the death penalty. And so what that means is, for as beautiful as it is, I think it needs to be defended. But what this means is that for us as a people, we don't necessarily have to think about sticking by our words to the point of death. No one's worried about saying something that they actually have to hold on to, to the point of your own death, or not just the things you say, but the things you post. But in Jesus' day, you could be killed on the spot for saying the wrong thing. Listen to me, killed on the spot, not after a fair trial against your peers, on the spot. You could be killed on the spot for saying the wrong thing. And so if you were going to say something that could get you killed in Jesus' day, well, then I guess you actually really believed it. You believed in it too. Look at verse 30 and 31. Jesus said, I and the Father are one. Jews picked up their stones again to stone him. So follow this. The crowd went from impatiently waiting for Jesus to say he was the Savior, and what did he just say? He doubled down, said, Savior, I'll do you one better. I am God. Jesus just said, I am God, and they went from excited anticipation to murderous anger in a second. Why? Because they knew exactly what Jesus just said. See, we have a different way of thinking about things. We're like, well, Jesus didn't say the words, I am God, so therefore he didn't say that. That's a faulty way of thinking from our broken worldview. The Jews knew exactly what Jesus just said and the most profound way Jesus just claimed himself to be God Jesus said that he and the father are one what they heard they heard correctly and what they heard to their ears was straight-up blasphemy this guy just claimed to be God and they're going to kill him for it now notice notice though notice Jesus did not say, I am the Father. Notice Jesus didn't say, I and the Father are the same thing. Rather, he said, I and the Father are one. One God and Father and Son. And as we see later develop through the pages of scripture, as theology is continued to be brought to light through scripture, the Holy Spirit completes the Trinity. One God in three, Father, Son, and Spirit. Now listen, I will tell you this right now. The doctrine of the Trinity, the theological understanding of the Trinity, how there's one God in three, we'll never fully understand that. That is without question the hardest doctrine to understand in all of the Christian faith. I had a conversation with a kindergartner the other day about this, and I was like, I don't even fully understand it. Because the reality is, is that we are three-dimensional beings. How in the world are we gonna fully understand a infinitely dimensional God? So what we do is we take what the scripture has said and that's what we believe, even though we may not have the entire capacity to understand it. Jesus didn't say, I am the Father. He didn't say, I am the Father of the same thing. He said, I and the Father are one. Again, alluding to the doctrine of the Trinity, one God in three, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But make no mistake, Jesus just claimed to be God and the Jews were ready to kill him on the spot for it. Now remember this this story takes place in December. Jesus knew his time to die had not yet come. It was to come that spring. And so Jesus avoids his death, at least for now in this story. But this passage reminds us that Jesus is clearly God because of what he did, because of what he said, and because what he was willing to risk. And if this wasn't enough, because we have the full, complete pages of Scripture, the final proof we have is the resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus is the final proof that Jesus Christ is God, that our Emmanuel did come and died in our place, and three days later, he rose again from the dead. Church, Easter shows us that Jesus is God, and Christmas reminds us that Jesus is God with us. Jesus is not just our King come to save us, He's our God with us. My daughter, because she's awesome, she did ask her daddy the other day what I wanted for Christmas. And I gave her the typical dad answer and I just said, you know girl, I just want time with you and your siblings and your mom. That's what I want. I just want time with family. And she said, oh, come on, dad. There must be something that you really want or something that you need. You know what? I gave her another dead answer. This time I add a little bit of a flex to it. I just said, you know, girl, at my stage of life, if I need something, I just go and get it. You laugh, but dad, is that not the truth? I just don't get it, you know, but here's what I tell you about Christmas. Christmas tells us and shows us something and helps us understand something about the gospel. See, what we need, all of us, what we need most in life is to be saved from our sins because our sins separate us from our Father. Our sins separate us from God. What we need most is to be reconciled to God, for our sins to be removed and us to be brought back to our Father. And I'm gonna say something to us all, but especially to the men in the room. You cannot earn this. You cannot buy this. You cannot work for this. Salvation in Jesus' name is a gift to be received. There's nothing you can do to earn this. God in his infinite mercy, love and grace has to give it to us. And Christmas reminds us that our salvation can only be given to us. This is why we call it grace. Grace is receiving something you cannot earn or do not deserve. It's a gift. And did you know, biblically speaking, the word for grace and the word for gift are connected. So here we are in week two of Advent, and I want to give us all an Advent application, something to be encouraged by as we journey towards Christmas. No grand challenge today. No go out and do something. Right now, at this point, for us all, I want you just to hear and be reminded of the great gift of Christmas, and let that encourage your heart. Let that fuel your celebrations. Let that remind you what it truly is, the Christmas spirit. So here's what I'd say to you. For whatever you want for Christmas, Emmanuel, God with us, the greatest gift is already given to you. Did you know that the most popular Bible verse of all time is actually a straight up Christmas verse. John 3.16 says this, for God so loved the world that he, what's the next word? That he gave. There it is. The greatest gift you could already be given, you've already been given. The greatest gift you could be given, you've already be given. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life." There it is. For God already gave to you the greatest thing that you could possibly need. And what is the greatest thing there is? Well, it's God Himself. And so the greatest gift God gave you was Himself. You've received the greatest possible gift, Emmanuel, God with us. And not only that, the gift of salvation with it. Church, Christians, this Christmas, do not forget what we are actually celebrating. You are celebrating the fact that you have already received the best Christmas gift imaginable, God himself to be with us, to save us. You know, this is one of the most true things that I could possibly tell you, that for whatever you want for Christmas, Emmanuel, God with us, the greatest gift, is a gift already given to you. I know, it sounds so hallmarky, but it's true. And so church, this Christmas, remember that Jesus is not just our King come to save us. He is our God with us. He is our God given to us. He is our God with us. And so this Christmas, when you think about frankincense and again, come on up and smell some, if you've never gotten a chance yet, when you think about frankincense, frankincense, let it remind you of what child this actually is, what child it is that you're actually celebrating. You are celebrating the gift of Emmanuel God with us Amen, would you please stand? Just please bow your heads Father we come before you would you just ask God that your spirit would be with us now Holy Spirit You are the third member of the Trinity. We ask that you'd fill this place. You'd fill our lungs with the breath to praise you Father, we are thankful for the greatest gift. You've already given to us in the gift of your son, Emmanuel, our God with us. And so, Father, as we sing the words of what child is this, Father, I pray that we are reminded that this child is our King. He is our Savior and he is our God. And it's in Jesus' name we pray.

A Season Is Ending And Beginning Sermon Series: Ryan DB Kimmel Lead Pastor Peace Church Main Passage: Ecclesiastes 3:1-15 Transcript Today is the day that the Lord has made. So let us rejoice and be glad in it. And everyone said, Amen. Today we are seeing a season come to an end here at Peace Church. Today we are letting go of this space, this room being our worship center. But please, please do not confuse this building or this room with Peace Church. We are Peace Church. And this is where Peace Church meets, at this building. For the last 20 years, God has given us this room to worship Him, but in three weeks, we'll start a new season at Peace Church, where we worship in a new space, where we, Peace Church, worship in a new space. For today, a season is ending, but also one is beginning. And a beautiful passage that reminds us of this is found in the book of Ecclesiastes. Would you please turn there now? We'll jump to chapter 3 and we'll read verses 1 to 15 together. If you want to use the Bible as we provided, that's on page 705. Now as you turn in there, a quick word about the book of Ecclesiastes. Very important book of the Bible. This book is the teachings of a man who is as successful as a man can be and he's also as wise as a man can be. This is gold-level teaching for the Bible. And yet through all his wisdom and through all his success, he has found this simple truth that everything is ultimately meaningless until we learn to live unto God and enjoy Him in our everyday lives. And in chapter three, we are reminded that the passage of time produces good things and hard things, but through it all, God is in control. And so I invite you to please stand for the reading of God's word. As we read Ecclesiastes chapter three, verses one to 15. Would you hear God's word? For everything, there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven, a time to be born, and a time to die, a time to plant, and a time to pick up what is planted, a time to kill, and a time to heal, a time to break down, and a time to build up, a time to weep, a time to laugh, a time to mourn, a time to dance, a time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. A time to seek and a time to lose, a time to keep and a time to cast away. A time to tear, a time to sew, a time to keep silence and a time to speak. A time to love, a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business of God that he has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time, and also he has put eternity into man's heart. Yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from beginning to end, I perceive there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live, and also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in his toil. This is God's gift to man. I perceive that whatever God does endures forever. Nothing can be added to it nor anything taken away from it. God has done it. So the people fear before him. That which is already has been. That which is to be already has been, and God seeks what has been driven away. The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of the Lord remains forever. Amen? Amen. Let's pray, and we'll continue. Let's pray. Father of glory, 20 years of ministry have happened in this room, over a thousand sermons, countless baptisms, and today, Father, we give thanks to you. Thank you for giving us this space that has been used to share your love and your truth. As we retire this space from being our worship center, may it continue to glorify you through fellowship as people gather here to still share your love and to grow in the gospel. For we pray these things in the power of the Spirit and in the precious name of Jesus our King. And everyone said, Amen. Amen. You may have a seat. All right, church. Let's be reminded of this one thing here today, and it's this. Whatever season we are in, what matters is that we glorify God forever. And as we look at this very famous and maybe even infamous passage, let's consider two thoughts here today at Peace Church, and here's the first one. Two thoughts. A season is ending because nothing lasts forever. Verse 1 says this, for everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. This is one of the hardest things about life. And the more we grow, and the more we age, the more we learn this lesson. Things change, things come, things go. Babies are born and grandfathers die. This is the way of the world, at least until Christ returns to make all things new. So if nothing lasts forever, how can we believe in things like hope or truth? Well, here's what I'd say to you. Don't try to outthink the Bible. Scripture tells us something very important. Verse 1, For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. We change, but God does not. And so, yes, on this side of eternity, there are seasons that come and there are seasons that go. As the Bible says in verse 2 and 3, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to harvest, a time to build up. These verses remind us of the ups and downs of life, the changing of the seasons of life. And I will tell you, I think this is a great challenge, especially to us here in America. On the right side of things, conservatives want to maintain. We want to hold on. We don't want things to change. We want to, as our name implies, we want to conserve. On the other hand, on the left side of things, progressives always seemingly want to be moving forward, although most of them can't tell you what the destination will be. All that matters is that they feel like they are progressing. And God is reminding us here, this is not about holding on to what won't last, and it's not about moving to the future. Life is about seasons. Life has cycles. God is saying to progressives, there's nothing new under the sun. God gives us seasons and we at Peace Church, we are in a season that is ending, which means we're also in a season that's about to begin. And that's the second thing that we see. A season is beginning because God reigns forever. All this talk of seasons coming and going leads to the natural question that we see in verse 9. Hopefully you have your Bibles open here today. Verse 9 says this, what gain has the worker from his toil? Translation, if nothing lasts forever, then what's the point? And I love how the Bible so often asks and answers the questions that we all are thinking. It does that if you would just keep reading. Just keep reading and you'll end up finding that actually, actually the Bible tends to answer the questions we're all thinking. Verse 10 says this, I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Meaning, just because seasons end do not mean they are not meaningful. It just means their time is done. As the Bible says, He has made everything beautiful in its time. Friends, this is a sobering reminder that all things are part of God's plan. God is not part of our plan. We are part of His plan. And His plan is bigger than ours. It's eternal. And there's part of our heart. I would say in all people that know this. Verse 11, He, God, has put eternity into man's heart, yet so they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceive there is nothing better for them, for humans, than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live. Also, that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil. This is God's gift to man. Let me summarize that for you real quick. In our hearts, we realize that there is a grander purpose being played out in the universe, and we understand that it's bigger than we can comprehend. And since we know this, since we know there's a bigger plan, since we know that it's bigger than we can comprehend, then what are we left to do? Live a good life and enjoy it, and give thanks to God along the way as we take comfort knowing that He is in control of His eternal plan. As we've been reflecting on this morning, no matter the season we are in, what matters is that we glorify God forever. Glorifying God, hear me, glorifying God is the ultimate purpose of every action of our lives and even the ultimate purpose of creation itself. And so, with the end of an era, let me give you a few ways that we can glorify God, both now and forever more. First one is this, we glorify God by respecting the season God has ordained. Who is a lifelong West Michigan native? Let me see, lifelong, lived here forever. Then you know like I do, one of the most wonderful parts about living in West Michigan is that every season makes itself clearly known in all of its glory. We have the sunniest summers, we have the snowiest winters, we have the most beautiful autumns, we have the most colorful springs. But you know and I know that we cannot enjoy a season without the previous one coming to an end. And this should be a reminder that God has ordained the changing of the seasons, and so don't curse what God has ordained learn to embrace it a season is closing at Peace Church And we are thankful to God for what has been amen and listen for many of us Maybe your pastor here for a moment for many of us Who know and love Peace Church who have been here for years, if not decades, there will be an adjustment. There's an adjustment coming for us all, but I would say particularly for those who have been here even longer than myself. And here's what I'll tell you, an adjustment is coming and that's okay. It's okay for things to feel new. It's okay for things to feel a bit foreign, but let me get ahead of us for here for a moment. There will be those of us here who think, as we go into this new space, and it's beautiful and it's bright and it feels fresh and it feels clean, there'll be those who walk in and think, is this even Peace Church anymore? And listen, that's a natural question. That's a natural way to feel. But with that, my loving encouragement and challenge to you as your pastor is in that moment, you must remember Peace Church is not a building. We are a people. And one of the most beautiful things about this new space is that you're going to be able to see more of the people of Peace Church. Yes, an adjustment is coming, and that's okay. And so when that moment comes and you feel more lost than excitement, challenge yourself and say, Lord, I am thankful for what you're doing. I am thankful that I get to see more of the people of Peace Church. I am thankful that of churches dying in America, that we get to see you do something amazing, that we get to see you grow this church to the point where we need a new worship center. I understand that moment will come. And I'm telling you, I'm anticipating that in my own heart as well. I've only been here for the better side of a decade, and I'm preparing my heart for an adjustment. And that's okay. Space is important, but what matters more is the people who fill that space. Amen? Amen. All the renovating, all the changing of our space is the season that God has ordained for us here and now. For everything there is a time. So don't curse what God has ordained for us, but embrace this season. And when you do, you'll not only glorify God, but you'll see the beauty in what He's doing. That's the second thing we're gonna look at. Glorify God by recognizing the beauty that God has created. Verse 11, God has made everything beautiful in its time. Now as a pastor, I have had the blessing of interacting with literally thousands of people, and I've noticed many consistent things among all types of people, but there's one thing in particular that I'll confess that I also know to be true in my own heart, and it's this, it's easier to be overly critical of the now and idolize the past. I think we tend to think the past is better than what it actually was. I think we tend to think what's happening now is worse than it actually is. Is God on the throne? Then let's be excited. We need to learn to see the beauty in the moment that God has given to us, because life goes too fast to live in the past. And as we close up this season at Peace Church, we will thank God for what He has done, because He's done amazing things. But we will not long for this season that we are letting go of. We are letting go of it with thankfulness, but I am telling you, as a pastor here, we will not sit and lament and long for the past. We will embrace the season that God has given us as we see him do amazing things now. Amen? Amen. We will recognize the beauty of what God is doing in the here and now because this is what God is doing and it's been his work all along. And that's the third thing. We will glorify God by revering the works that he has done. Verse 14 says, I perceive that whatever God does endures forever. Nothing can be added to it. Nothing can be taken away from it. God has done it so that the people before people fear before him. This is so, so simple, but so, so easy to forget. God's works are his alone. This is why he alone gets the glory of what happens at Peace Church. Not me, not you, not our elders, not our staff, not our great volunteers. God gets the glory. Psalm 127 says, unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Our new worship center, our expanded parking, our renovated space, unless it's ultimately God doing this, I'm telling you, I want no part of it. But if it is God who's doing this, I'm all in. Who's with me? Amen. Our new worship center is going to be exciting, but at Peace Church, we're going to give God the glory for all of His work. And so let me give you one more way to glorify God. A very Peace Church thing to say, but I'd also say it's a very biblical thing to say. Last thing I'd say to you here now is this. Glorify God by receiving the truth that God has revealed. Our passage says in verse 15, that which is already has been. That which is to be already has been. And God seeks what has been driven away. The truth is this, that God is in control of everything even time itself. Now Bible study real quick, this last verse is notoriously difficult to translate into English and that's why you're going to see most English translations translate this last verse differently. Go ahead and cross-referenced it later when the Bible says here in the ESV in the English Standard Version when the Bible says God seeks what's been driven away remember this is in the context referring to the passage of time and so this is about reminding us that even though the past is gone God will still hold things accountable his justice will prevail God is in control and because he is good he will make all things right in the end, even things that have been passed. And so this is the truth that is revealed. Because God is in control, you can have hope. Hope in God, hope in what is to come in this next season. So put your hope in the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which we are going to celebrate right here and now by having communion for the last time in this space. And so with the end of an era, let me remind you, whatever season we are in, what matters is that we glorify God forever and ever. Amen? Amen. Amen. Let's pray and prepare our hearts for communion.

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PODCAST That's a Good Question Why Didn't God Keep His Promise to Me?: A Conversation with Shannon Popkin November 18, 2024 Jon Delger & Shannon Popkin Listen to this Episode Hey everyone, welcome to That's Good Question, a podcast of Peace Church and Resound Media. You can find more great content for the Christian life and church leaders at resoundmedia.cc. That's Good Questions, a place where we answer questions about the Christian faith in plain language. I'm John, I serve as a pastor as well as part of this show. You can always submit questions to peacechurch.cc/questions . And today I'm here, as always, with Mitch. And we have special guest Shannon Popkin with us. Hey, it's so good to be here. Yeah. Shannon is an author and speaker. She's the host of the podcast Live Like It's True, which is part of the Resound Podcast Network. So we highly, highly, highly recommend that you go listen to that. And she's also come out with a brand new six-week Bible study called Shaped by God's Promises. And we're excited to dive into a little bit of that and talk about that some more today. Yeah, well I'm so thankful for ReSound Media and the opportunity to collaborate with you guys. So grateful for all that you're doing and just getting the word out about truth and fighting back the darkness. Amen, that's what it's all about. That's why we love getting to be on a team together, going to events together, having to create resources. Yeah. Yeah, it was so fun to have you this summer, you and Stephanie. Yeah, yeah. Came to an event and brought, and then being at TGC, handing out coffee mugs, that was awesome. Yeah, we've been having a blast, yeah. Looking forward to doing some more of that. And Speak Up, you're coming to Speak Up. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Are both of you gonna be at Speak Up? Yeah, probably. Okay, that'll be great. Yeah, it should be fun. Cool. Well, today we're gonna have a conversation kind of around the question of why didn't God keep his promise to me a Question that people ask from time to time a question that probably all of us feel from one time to another You know whether we feel like we should feel that way or shouldn't feel that way I think all of us think that at times of why isn't God keeping his promises to me? So we're gonna kind of talk about that question Shannon You have a great book that kind of talks about that question. You want to talk about that for a quick minute? well, sure, it's a look at the life of Abraham and Sarah and how God entered the scene making these promises to them, but it looks like God wasn't keeping his promises, you know, and so Them grappling with this. How did they respond? You know What did they turn to instead of to God and instead of waiting instead of faith? At times they responded in faith to God's promises that other times they didn't. But I think, yeah, their story is just a great backdrop to contemplate some of these questions that we struggle with too. Yeah, totally. So as we're getting into the topic, can you share just what are some examples, people that you've met or situations that you've been in or thought of, when do people feel this question of why isn't God keeping his promises? Yeah, I think it's like those times in life where there's this great disappointment. We have this expectation of what we expected would happen, you know, who God was gonna be, how he was gonna, how my story was gonna turn out. And there's a divorce or there's a death or there's infertility or a miscarriage. It's like those, we're grappling with disappointment or, you know, it's taking too long. Yeah. We're waiting on a spouse. We're waiting on a baby. We're waiting on our country to respond in the way, you know, sometimes it's bigger scenarios in life, all encompassing, whether it's worldwide things, you know, like the pandemic or, or things that just affect us nationally or affect our community. And it just feels like it's taking so long. Where is God? Why is he not doing what he promised? I think it's sometimes where we land. And so I think the first question that we have to ask is, well, what actually did God promise? And so, you know, we have a Bible that is full of promises from God. It's wonderful. And we, as God's people, we love the promises. But there's a problem when I think we misappropriate the promises and claim, you know, there are some promises made in the Bible that are not for all people living in all different spots on the timeline. Yeah. So it's important that we think through that carefully. Yeah. What would some of those examples be of promises that we can really misappropriate. Yeah, well, can I share a funny story first? Yeah, absolutely. I was reading the little notes in my Bible one time, and, you know, the little study notes at the bottom, and I read it said, many will become pregnant without having sexual relations. And I thought, when is that? I don't remember hearing that prophecy. Well, I looked a little closer and it said, Mary will become pregnant. So I was like, Oh my gosh, I got to wear my glasses. But so like, there's a bad one, you know, maybe like, pull out and hang on your wall or something, you know? Oh, my goodness. But I had a moment of being disoriented, like, where is that promise? And I think, you know, Mary had a promise that she would have a baby. Sarah had a promise that God would make of them a great nation. So by implication, she would become pregnant. But I've heard of a woman speaking to a large group of women saying, claim God's promise to you for a baby. Well, there is a problem when we claim a promise that was given to one person or we turn a principle into a promise? I think that's one that I hear a lot is, you know, train up a child in the way he should go and when he's old, he will not depart. And so then we have these prodigal children and we're claiming the promise, right, that this child will return to the faith. Or and you know, that's a principle. It's not a promise. Or you know, back to like certain people or certain time places on the timeline, God promised specific things to the nation of Israel that, you know, I mean, in a sense, he has promised to us as children of Israel. And yet, you know, there, we have to keep an eye on where, how's the story unfolding. And so, you know, the health and wealth gospel is this claiming God's promises that you'll have, you'll be healthy and you'll be wealthy and that you'll have all of these blessings in the here and now, whereas, yes, you will have all of those blessings as a child of God. And yet, I think sometimes we get the date wrong, right? We claim things now that belong to the there and then. Right now, we live in this darkness, the brokenness of this world. And it's very appropriate for us to go to God and say, why God, how long, oh Lord. And yet to claim a promise that my life here now, that all of these promises will be realized, it just sets me up for great hurt and disappointment. Yeah, I love that when you said we get the date wrong. Yeah, that's exactly it. Sometimes we talk on the show about the already and the not yet. Some of God's promises are just that. There's a sense in which they're already true, and then there's a sense in which they're not yet true. So on the one hand, we are saved from our sin by Jesus, and yet at the same time, we're not yet fully with him in heaven, in the new heavens and the new earth. We don't get to experience the fullness of the blessings of our salvation. And so, yeah, we get the timeline wrong. It is true that we will be one day healthy. We will have everything we could ever desire, namely God, but that's not yet. That's not this life. Yeah. So, yeah, in the back of the Bible study, Shaped by God's Promises, I made lists of God's promises, but I listed them out by here are promises for here and now, and here are promises that are for there and then. And what was interesting to me is looking through all of, and it's not a complete list, but looking through all of the promises for the here and now, we don't really have a lot of tangible promises. You know, so if you're looking for that verse that tells you the cancer is going to go away or the relationship will be restored or you will have the number of children that you were hoping, there is no verse like for the here and now. But we have lots of tangible promises for the there and then. So I was recently talking to a girl who was in a wheelchair, and this was really hard on her husband. He had lost his faith because she had an accident, she was paralyzed, she was living in a wheelchair. And he's doubting, he's one of those people saying like, God hasn't kept his promises to us and to our family. And I said, well, let's just think of it this way. What if you got up out of that wheelchair and you were able to, I had asked her, like, what's the thing that you miss most living in a wheelchair? And she's like, I just want to run upstairs. I haven't been able to run upstairs, you know? And I said, what if you could get up out of that wheelchair and run upstairs a dozen times? Like, would that change your perspective on God? She's like, well, yeah, and I said, well, there is coming a day that the lame will walk the blind will see like there is coming a day where you will get up out of that wheelchair. And so like to judge God prematurely on what you are experiencing in this moment is like you there's great room for you to be disappointed. But it's also a maligning of who God is, you know, to say that he has not been faithful because you're living in a wheelchair. Well, let's wait until we see the full extension of how God is going to respond to his promises in the there and then and judge in that moment how faithful God has been. Like, let's not prematurely judge that. Yeah, I love how you said that God's promises aren't for every person and every time. I think that's such a helpful thing for us to understand because our perspective can be so narrow sometimes in how we see what it means to be a Christian in just our context. As soon as you get out of America, as soon as you get out of some of these more privileged areas, the idea of what it means to be a Christian can become way more clear. I even like, you know, the idea of, you know, not every promise is for every person in every place. I mean, the promise for a child is not for me and Jon. You know, like we're men and stuff like that can't happen for us, right? That would be crazy for us to claim that, right? That was an important biology lesson you just gave us. Hey, actually, Mitch, you were talking earlier about a specific verse that we sometimes misuse in this way. Yeah, I think our favorite verse to misuse and our favorite verse as pastors to come after is probably Jeremiah 29 11, right? That's so easy for us to, I think we see that all over the place. It's on every, you know, it's in Hobby Lobby on every, you know, wall decoration. I know the plans that I have for you, right? Plans to prosper you and to give you, what is it? Yeah, to prosper you and not to harm you, not to harm you. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And what's interesting is the you in that verse is it's more like y'all, you know, I know the plans I have to prosper y'all, right? It's collective. So that's one thing. But it's also this is we're talking about Israel. So as pastors, how do you respond to that? And when somebody is quoting Jeremiah 29 11. One of my favorite things to do is I had a professor do this for us in one of our one of our first terminated classes. He had us read Jeremiah 27 through 29. And I remember reading it going, what in the world is this about? Like, I don't understand what we're doing here. And then I got to Jeremiah 29 11. I started laughing because I realized how out of context we pull it because it is clearly about Israel. It's clearly about God's people, a group of people, and not me, Mitchell, sitting here in Middlethorpe, Michigan. It's so much bigger. And so I always like to ask people, why don't you read the chapters around it and just see if you still see it that way. Well, and even Abraham and Sarah and their descendants were still, they died in faith, not having had all of the promises realized in their lives. Like Hebrews 11 tells us that, that they died in faith. They were looking forward to the city that has foundations. I love that part that it has foundations, like, because heaven, it talks about having foundations, right? So they're looking forward to this heavenly city that is different from where they lived. You know, they, they walked a thousand miles. They lived by faith they walked a thousand miles into the unknown and And it was in response to these big grandiose promises from God Genesis 12 God steps into their lives and he says I will I will I will And and they respond to those promises not them making promises to God, but them responding in faith to what God had promised to them. And they go, they go walking into the unknown. And I mean, if I'm Sarah, I'm thinking, I'm probably going to get pregnant on the way, right? And we're going to get there. It's going to be this big unclaimed territory. That's what I would have been thinking. And Abram's going to build us a house. We're going to start filling it with babies. This would be great. never having lived in, you know, living in a tent. The only property that they ever owned was her burial site, right? And so she did not get pregnant on the way. There's this extension. I like to think of God's promises like a set of parentheses, you know, in grammar. You have one parenthesis and you know the second one's coming, right? And that's how God's promises are. If we have the promise, we know the fulfillment is coming. Yeah, often there is this much wider stretch than we were imagining. And so when we start doubting, right? When we're in between that stretch and we start doubting, what God wants us to do is to look forward to that fulfillment and to live as though it will come true. And then I think the harm that we do to our own faith when we claim promises that don't belong to us is by, you know, we're putting down parentheses and we're messing with God's accuracy rate of keeping his promises, right? Yeah, absolutely. That's so good. When my kids were in high school, there was this guy they followed, do you know who Blake Harms is? I think I got his name right. He's from Hudsonville, which aren't you from Hudsonville? And he was a meteorologist. Yeah. Yeah. Well, back in high school, he started doing this thing where he would predict how many predict snow days like. Yeah. And he had this like 95 percent accuracy rate. And so they would watch, you know, are we going to have a snow day? Blake says we're going to have a snow day. You know, and now he, I think, is a meteorologist. But God has 100 percent accuracy rate. Right. He has 100 percent accuracy rate. If he says this is going to happen, you know that you know that you know it will. And yet, look at what happens when we start saying, I know the plans I have for you to prosper you. God says I'm going to prosper. And here, I am in debt, and I can't pay off my student loans. What we start doing is detracting from God's faithfulness, you know, his character. And we don't want to do that because that's not only bad for us, because we're supposed to be these people walking by faith, making these huge, taking huge risks in response, like Abraham and Sarah walking a thousand miles. That's who we're supposed to be. And if we're not sure that we're sure that we're sure that the fulfillment is coming, well, that hurts us. But it also, like I said, it misaligns or it maligns God's character. It detracts from his faithfulness. Yeah, I feel like we forget some of the harder stories in the Bible, too. I think we think about, you know, the Bible is about me. It's for me. It's these promises that I can claim. You know, you look at, you know, the apostle Stephan who gets stoned to death, right? Was that promise for him that he was going to prosper? And to some sense, yeah, but... Yeah, he will. He will prosper. He died, you know, and then you go, you know, going back to the gospel, like, do you think God's promises to himself, you know, does he keep his promises to himself? Well, you know, his son went to the cross and died. You know, was that, was that prospering? You know, yeah, absolutely. Yes. But it doesn't look like. Yeah, I mean that was anguish that was, you know, terrible, but yeah. One of the things I think we get wrong is just collapsing the story. You know, look at like if I looked at my Bible, like let's say this is Genesis 3, and then this is the first mention of the gospel, right? Well, the fulfillment of the gospel is not here's Matthew 27. It's like look at that. Yeah You know this represents a lot of thousands of years Right, and we like to collapse that down go from sin to the Savior all in the same Sentence the same song the same moment, right and we forget all of those thousands of years of waiting And where God did keep his promises. He did fulfill I mean Sarah got to experience just like 25 years of that waiting. But for us, it can feel like an eternity. So I think it's helpful to look at the ways that these people were waiting on God, and it looked as though this could, might never happen. And yet they lived by faith in between, you know, those parentheses, as we do. But, but so two things happen over time. Over time, we see God's faithfulness. You know, we don't learn his faithfulness in a minute. But the other thing is, it changes us in that time frame. When we are walking by faith, believing that this promise will come true, it changes us. Like I mentioned, we take great risks. Our lives have a different focus when we're living focused on God's promises and believing that they'll come true. So we've talked about getting the subject wrong, right Jeremiah or Jeremiah talking about Israel not us We've talked about the timeline one of the other ones that you brought up that I kind of want to go back to for a minute is the genre so Talking about a proverb versus a there's the promise, right? Would you mind talking a little bit more about that about how we because that the one you brought up is when I hear so Commonly because it's such a heartache for parents right when when your child goes astray from the Lord goes astray from you and your family. So you might talk a little bit more about how, how is a proverb and a promise, how are those two things different? Yeah, well, I mean, proverbs are generalities. It's like, these are the truisms of life. They're in general, these are the things that if God has set up his world in a certain way, that if you do this, this will be the outcome. And those are absolutely true. And yet it's different to live by the Proverbs versus to live by the promises. A promise, you know that you know this is going to happen. And so like, for me, I think it's been most helpful in those seasons of life. Like I said, we don't have a lot of promises for the here and now. So then how can I be shaped by God's promises and the waiting when I don't know if my prodigal son is going to come back. I don't know if my daughter who's struggling with her sexuality, which neither of those are true right now in my life, but I don't know if, you know, my husband is going to come back to our family. You know, when those, when I'm grappling with that sort of heartache as a woman, especially when the relationships in my life are strained, well, what do I do? There are, however, you know, I don't have any promises about the outcomes. I do have so many promises, and this is different than a principle in Proverbs. It's a promise that, for instance, God will be with me, that he hears my cries, that he will, I think one of the most important ones for me in the waiting is that I'm forgiven. And I know that maybe doesn't immediately sound like it would bring peace to your heart. But when you're grappling with the hardships of life, I think most often. I don't know if this is how it is with men, but with women, we're like, did I do it wrong? No, did I cause this? Did I get the formula wrong? I raised them this way, or I invested in my marriage or whatever it was. And so like to know that God sees me as a forgiven daughter and that this is not him punishing me because it's not going the way I hoped. Like, knowing I'm forgiven, it just is such, it's so, to cling to that and to know that, that does shape me. That gives me a whole different perspective on the things that I'm asking God for. Yeah. Yeah, along those lines, I think of Romans 8, 1, there's therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Yeah. So, when you think about a parent raising a child, none of us are perfect, so we know that our own imperfection played some kind of role. It doesn't mean it's your fault, it doesn't mean it's our fault that your child went astray, but of course none of us did parenting perfectly. But even in spite of that, we come to the gospel and we hear Romans 8 1 and we realize there is no condemnation. I am forgiven in Christ despite this outcome, regardless of how much or how little role I had to play in the whole thing. That is a truth, that is a promise to hold on us, that we are forgiven. It's an important thing to remember, especially for young families and for married couples. I've heard so many parents say when their child is acting up, well, that's your kid. Exactly. Your daughter is... I feel like I've heard that before. Yeah, right? Yeah. Yeah. I've maybe heard that directed at me. That's because my kids' naughtiness is very similar to my naughtiness. So I think, you know, you bringing up young parents, I think. There's sometimes we twist it into like, I'm going to keep my promises to God as I'm raising this family, right? Versus being reminded that he's going to keep his promises to me. We just so often twist that and then when it doesn't go according to my plan, I feel like, oh, I let God down. I didn't keep my promise of being a good wife and mom or a good dad, you know, raising my family in the way that I was supposed to. And yet, like if God's promises hinged on our obedience, I mean, that would be a completely different story. Yeah. Right. Abraham and Sarah did interject some self-reliance into the story, didn't they, with Hagar? And yet, Galatians tells us very clearly this baby born to Hagar was not the child of promise. This was not the product of faith, of them trusting God to keep his promises. This is the product of self-reliance. And maybe it looked like, for a time, that they were keeping their promise to God, you know? It's so interesting in Genesis 16, you know, Genesis 12, God says, I will, I will, I will. Genesis 16, Sarah says, perhaps I can. Yeah. Right. So she's turning to self-reliance and for a while they have this baby. And I think it probably looked like they had done their contribution and that this baby was the result of God's promises and, you know, young parents, man, that was me. I was like, I am going to produce this godly family. And I'm going to, you know, like I was, oh my goodness, I so much self reliance. And so much heartache when my kids didn't follow the way that I had set out for them. And so much heartache when they turned and said, you know what, mom, you are the reason that I, you know, that I struggle with my faith in this. Oh my goodness. But that's self reliance for a time looks like me keeping my promises to God and yet God wants us to know that we know that we know that he keeps he's the promise keeper, not us in the in the equation. It's him keeping his promises to us and so that's that's why Hagar's baby was not the child of promise. God wanted them to know that this was something only he could produce in their lives. Yeah, that's so clearly in line with what our Christian faith is. I was talking with someone who used to be Muslim and they do evangelism to Muslims and one of the things that he brings up is talking about, you know, you can make a good Muslim by brandishing the sword, by, you know, coming down and willing it and, you know, you can teach obedience and you can make a good Muslim that way, but Christianity is the opposite. You can't. There's no way to do that. It's only by heart change. It's only by God. Only God can produce a child of Abraham, right? Even Abraham is there could not produce a child of Abraham. Only God could do that. That story always blows my mind. I recently talked about it in a teaching I did. But, you know, we try to normalize it a little bit. We say well historically that happened sometimes at that time, but it's crazy that you know, Abraham and Sarah are like we can't have a baby. Let's bring in another woman that you're going to go and be with in order to produce a child. I mean, that's a pretty crazy idea. Yeah, yeah. Sinful on a few different levels. Yeah, but I mean this child, I think it's important to tie it to the overarching meta narrative. Like this isn't God just promising a baby to a couple. He's promising the Savior to the world. And so if this is a story of self-reliance, I mean it tempts us into believing that we can keep promises to God, right? And that is just so common among us, like us taking on the burden of self-reliance or control as, you know, as parents. We're trying to control other people into the faith. And God wants us to know that self-salvation is not possible. And so that's what that extension on the timeline with that shows us is they were to the point where it was laughable to think that they would have a baby. And that's when God's like, yep, you can't, but nothing is impossible with me. And so it's, I think when we have little kids, I've, I've felt like it was really possible for me to, you know, like maybe like a Muslim would think to indoctrinate my child into the faith. It felt like, and I don't think it's wrong. I think we should have that mindset of we're training and we're teaching them the truth. And yet, that's maybe in one hand and then the other is complete and utter reliance on God. I can produce what might look like a godly child, but I cannot produce a true child of God. Yeah, you can't force someone to become a Christian. Yeah, it just doesn't work that way. And then back to the idea of promises, like we don't really have, I know this is so hard to grapple with as a parent, but I don't have a promise from God that every one of my kids will follow him. I don't have that promise. There is no formula. But what if there was? What if I did have that promise that if I do X, Y, and Z, my kids will become Christians? what kind of controlling, self-absorbed, obsessive parent would I become? You know, what angry mom, like, pointing at them, my Bible is, like, you will do this. Like, I mean, that's not who I want to be. That's not who God wants me to be. He wants me to be someone who's shaped by his promises of what he will do, where he says, I will, I will be faithful, you know? So that's, it's a hard thing, though, to grapple with. Yeah, before we go any further, we want to let you know about an opportunity that we have with Moody Publishers. But before we even get to that, I want to throw it to Shannon because I think you've got some news about Moody. Yeah, I'm so excited. I just signed a contract with Moody for my next book. Oh my gosh. So book number six I'm getting to work on with Moody. So thankful, I love Moody Publishers. Yeah, both Jon and I have been so blessed by Moody Publishers and the content that they've created. If you're looking to dive deeper into your faith and grow in wisdom, discover books that inspire change and transform with Moody Publishers. From trusted authors to fresh voices, Moody offers resources that equip you for life's journey with Christ. And right now we have an offer for you just for that's a good question listeners. If you use promo code RESOUND40, you'll get 40% off with your next purchase. Whether you're searching for devotional study guides or impactful reads, Moody Publishers has something for everyone. So don't miss out. Visit moodypublishers.com and use promo code RESOUND40 at checkout. Enrich your faith today. It's hard to, you know, teach someone to enjoy love and worship God by being angry at them, you know. It's, you know, such a great way to hurt someone's view of God by doing that. And I did that, you know. I mean, I'll be the first to say I did that. As parents, haven't we all? I mean, it's such a hard thing. But when you model how much you enjoy God, that's, I think, such a beautiful thing, not just for children, but for anyone we're around. And if I can just have my faith is in God, not myself, right? I have this peace and security and joy because I know I can't, but nothing is impossible with Him. Yeah. Yeah. So, you shared the story earlier of a couple and the woman had ended up in a wheelchair. So coming back to that couple and thinking about that, so how would you counsel them to try to reshape their thoughts on God's promises? How could you, how would you redirect their vision of God's promises? Yeah, so that's kind of what I was trying to do as I was talking to her. I said, like, what if you could get up out of that wheelchair? You know, so I think what I had in mind is like, let's picture the there and then. Like where all of God's promises will come to fruition. And what would it look like to live now the way we'll know with our eyes then, right? Now, faith is not seeing and yet believing. And so I think just imagining and, you know, believing, picturing, I think it's really helpful to picture the new earth, like picture the day where all sickness will be gone and where our bodies will be renewed and where our relationships will be restored and where we will be with God and we will be made new. We'll have no more sinful tendencies. Where you know, like a whole will be made right everything and it's not, you know, it's not the floating in the clouds thing. It's like it's the new earth where we'll get to experience all the things we missed out on here. Like that's one of our promises is that he will restore what we've missed out on here. And I don't know exactly how that works, you know, with opportunities lost, but we can trust that it's going to be good and it's going to be, we're going to know then when we look back at these long stretches of asking why God, why haven't you kept your promises? We're going to, when we're standing on the new earth and looking back at this life, we will know with all of our hearts that God has been faithful, that he has done everything that he said that he would, that he is a promise-keeping God. And that we won't have missed anything, right? That we'll have more than we could have ever imagined. Oh, it's so true, right? Yeah. Let me just ask, what would you say? Like, any thoughts that you would add to that as pastors? Someone who's going through something unthinkable, something really hard. Yeah, I think what you shared is beautiful. I think that's the perspective you want to try to encourage. And in my experience, you know, myself going through some hard stuff, talking with other people who go through some hard stuff, I think we're all sort of ready to hear that at different levels. You know, I think sometimes somebody's just not ready to hear certain parts of that. So it sort of takes a journey to get there. Tim Keller has an awesome book on suffering that was really helpful to me in the midst of some hard stuff. I'm trying to think of the name of it off the top of my head, but Keller's book on suffering, but he kind of tries to take a few different perspectives at it and just think it through from different lenses. Like you've had, like you've done, you know, what if it, you know, what if you did have it, what would that do to the way you think about, you know, how do you think about it if you, you know, from the end, from eternity, from the new heavens, the new earth, some of those different perspectives. One of the things I've tried to try to capture in my own mind is just the overall timeline of Scripture of creation, fall, redemption, and just remembering that I'm in the broken part, the messed up part in the middle. You know, we got the Garden of Eden in the beginning, it was right, it was perfect, it was good. At the end, when Jesus returns, it'll be right and perfect and good. And it's not an accident that I'm in this broken, messed up part in the middle. This is part of the timeline. This is how the story works, is that we're between Genesis 3 and the end of Revelation, you know? The world is broken and sinful, and things are not the way they're supposed to be, but someday they will become right. So, I don't know, for me, that's really helpful, just to put myself in the right spot on the timeline and realize where I'm at. Yeah, yeah, for sure. My husband I went to this restaurant recently and on his birthday and I Asked to use this coupon that they have for half off the entree well It wasn't the right it wasn't his birthday, right and I didn't know how to be on his birthday But what what if like in that interaction? I like started getting out my phone and leaving a Yelp review. Like this is really bad, you know, this restaurant, they don't keep their promises. Well, I just got the date wrong, right? And so I think getting, yeah, finding my place in the overarching meta-narrative, like sometimes I just think we get the date wrong, right? We acclaim these promises and they will come true. There is a second coming, right? And the first coming- And that's a promise we can, you know, bank, right? Yes, that is one of the biggest promises. He's coming back. But Jesus, you know, he did heal people and he did restore relationships while he was here. And there were like little appetizers for the kingdom. And so we get tastes of it now. And he does sometimes do miraculous things in our lives. But all of the fruition will will come in that there and then. Yeah. Would you say that that, maybe even part of getting the date wrong, is how we view Scripture? Yeah. You know, seeing the Bible maybe as a story about us rather than a story that we get to have the opportunity to be a part of. Yeah, well, I mean, if you're living in the broken world trying to create the new earth out of the broken pieces, right? That's, I mean, isn't that sort of egocentric? Isn't that sort of like you're the main character in the story and you've only got like 70 years or so to get this story on track, right? But if you can like lose your life, you know, Jesus says you lose your life to gain it in part of this give yourself up to this meta narrative, right? Where creation, fall, redemption, new creation. Well, then your life has so much more to anticipate, so much. And it's not about you. It's about enjoying him. And you know what? One more thing I just thought of is when we get to the there and then, we won't need faith anymore. Like that's when we'll have the sight. The only time that we get to walk by faith is now. This is, we only have a few short years to walk by faith and to believe that it's true that God will keep his promises. Yeah. For me, I feel like that concept right there is really helpful to me to just realize that something is being done that matters during this hard time. That yes, God has a meaning and a purpose for my suffering. And also one of those meanings and purposes is that I'm being shaped and transformed. My faith is growing, or I think of how James chapter one says it, the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. So for me, just that word steadfastness has always meant a lot to me that that I just try to remind myself that's what God is doing in the midst of this hard, hard time, that something is being developed in me that matters, that's important, that wouldn't happen any other way. I know that's valuable. Yeah, that's one of the things I really love about Sarah's story is we see this huge shift in her character in somewhere between Genesis 18 and Genesis 21. 18 is when the visitors come for lunch and they say Sarah will have a son within a year. And then Genesis 21, she has the baby. Well, but she's laughing in the tent at the idea of having a baby. And then by 21, she has the baby. So what shifts? Well, Hebrews 11, 11 says that by faith, Sarah herself conceived a son, had the power to conceive a son, when she considered him faithful who had promised. And so what changed was her considering. Like she didn't consider, she thought the promise had already been kept, you know, by her self-reliance. She saw herself, you know, if you picture those parentheses, she's on the outside looking in, right? She felt like irrelevant to the story, she's worthless. Like having a child at age 89, that's ridiculous. Well, something changed between her laughing, scoffing in the tent and holding that baby. And what changed was her belief that God would do what he promised. Yeah. She took a huge risk. You know, I mean, can you imagine saying to your husband at age 89, after a lifetime of infertility, want to try for a baby? You know, because God said so, like that took, that was a lot of risk and it took a lot of great faith. Yeah. You know, in seasons of hardship, the question that is helpful for me is, you know, what if this doesn't get better? What if this gets worse? Will I still be obedient? Will I still follow? Like, you know, I think a good question to ask yourself before hardship happens is, what if part of God's plan for me is for him to destroy my life. What if it's for me to lose everything? What if that, in that act, God is most glorified? Would I still be faithful to him? Would I still follow him? Would I still love that kind of God? And I think that's a really good question to ask yourself. It's a hard one, you know. Would I still be faithful if I lost my whole family if I lost my health if I You know, whatever it is. I think that's a it's a good question to See where our idols are but also to prepare ourselves for when a hardship comes Yeah, it's not a fun question to think about but well, it's it's sort of like inevitable. Don't you think I mean, yeah Life is not gonna all it's not like it's not gonna all get built up to this beautiful culmination moment on your deathbed. You don't know it's death, right? So, it's not going in the right direction. And so, but not only contemplating on the front end, but all throughout, right? Am I gonna still be faithful? Am I going to be faithful now? Am I going to trust that God will be faithful to me in this, even if, right? That's a really good point. Yeah, it's not a crazy scenario. I mean, that's what happened to our hero, our Savior. That's what happened to Jesus. Yeah. I just always like to ask that question. What if it gets worse? Like, are we going to reject the faith? Am I going to just go, yeah, nah, this is too much for me? And you also said, what if God decides that, you know, I think we like to use the language God allowed this. You know, he allowed this to happen. But the Bible doesn't allow us that, you know, that sort of, you know, softening of it. Joseph, like, look at the story of Joseph, he says God three times, I think it's in Genesis 38, he says, God sent him. That's an active verb, right? He sent him there with good intentions and yet was Joseph gonna be faithful every at every point of the story, you know, he has these it goes up and down the narrative But yeah, I think Joseph had to ask that question Hundreds of times. Yeah, am I going to? Yeah, we've got it very clearly at the end of the story right in Genesis 50 You meant it for evil and God meant it for good. Same word. So the brothers, in the same way that they meant, intended, premeditated and then carried out this plan to put Joseph in a pit and then sell him into slavery. In the same way, God meant it, he planned it, he executed a plan for Joseph to be sent into slavery, but ultimately for it to be for good. Yeah, I mean, that's so clear at the cross, right? And I think it's easier to somehow, easier to say that God did that in the case of Jesus. Like, it's almost like the exception, right? Because he had salvation in mind. But like, yeah, we see it. There's a consistency in Joseph's life and in so many others where we have to back up and consider the overarching meta-narrative. And that's where we see, yes, our God is faithful and we can trust him. Amen. So Shannon, as we are wrapping up, love to ask where people could find their book or if there are any projects that you're working on that you're allowed to share with us. Oh, sure. If you're working on anything that we should be looking forward to. from Sarah on Fear and Faith, Genesis 12 through 21. But I also have a free download that you can do of, it's called Praying the Promises, Pray the Promises, where I've kind of like delineated those different lists of promises for the here and now, promises for the there and then, and inviting you to just fill in the blanks with what your situation entails and praying back to God what he has promised to you. So I'd love for you to check those out. And you can find both of those at Shannonpopkin.com. Yeah, and we'll link everything that you just talked about in our show notes. So the free download and where to go to get that. Yeah, yeah. And also a series on Sarah at Live Like It's True. So if you're interested in some of the stuff we talked about. Yeah, another great podcast at Resound Media. Yeah, at resoundmedia.cc . Well, thanks so much, Shannon. We appreciate it a lot. Yeah, thanks. It's been a great conversation. Thanks everybody for listening. We hope you all have a great week You can always find resound media at resoundmedia.cc or follow like subscribe on social media. Thanks everybody. Have an awesome week!

PODCAST That's a Good Question Spiritual Inquiries: Biblical Insights on Meditation, Hypnosis, and Upholding Beliefs in Relationships May 7, 2024 Jon Delger & Logan Bailey Listen to this Episode So Hey everyone, welcome to That's a Good Question, a podcast of Peace Church and a part of Resound Media. You can find more great content for the Christian life and church leaders at resoundmedia.cc . That's a Good Question is a place where we answer questions about the Christian faith in plain language. I'm Jon, I serve as a pastor as well as be part of this show, and I'm here today with Pastor Logan. Howdy. Great to see you Pastor Logan and also for the very first time introducing him with this title. Hey Pastor Mitchell. Hey everyone Mitch has been serving at Peace Church on staff and as a producer, but was it last Sunday or the Sunday before? Yep, you got ordained as a pastor. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so now you know all the answers to all these questions. Yep, when I pray it matters more all that kind of stuff. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Oh, nice. Awesome. Well, hey, we're excited today to have an episode that I'm just gonna call like a mailbag episode. We're gonna combine together a bunch of questions about very different topics. We're gonna talk about things like yoga, hypnosis, and some other stuff, relationship advice, things like that. Yeah. Should be good. Yeah. So let's get into it. Yeah, ready for the first question. Here it is. Where does yoga fit in your thoughts? Should Christians participate? Can stretching positions be done without the Buddhist spiritual aspect? So I've got a couple questions just to start off with. How about we just say like, what is yoga? Where did it originate? And why might it be bad? Why raise the question? I think that last question is really key. There's the crowd that's listening right now that's thinking, how could it be bad? Yeah. And there's some right now thinking, I've looked into it, how could it be good? Right? And so I think it is good for us to dialogue a bit about like, how could it be bad? What would be the concerns for a Christian to say, I don't want to have anything to do with what yoga is. Well, I just don't want to because I don't like to stretch. I'm kind of out of shape. I asked Brian, producer Brian, if he's ever stretched before, be careful. Well, so my understanding is from, I'm no expert in the field, but a little bit of research, my understanding is that the word yoga actually means union and that the idea kind of originally was to, you know, it comes from Buddhists, it's the idea is to unite with the greater sort of spiritual realm, the Brahman. You know, Buddhism is a pantheistic religion and so God is in everything and so through yoga, you know, we can kind of prepare ourselves to become spiritually a part of God and enter into the divine and some of that kind of stuff. So I think… Is that Hindu too? Maybe. I'll be honest, I don't know the answer to that. I don't know. But the Eastern... Eastern religion, yeah, yes, yes, totally. So I think originally it has some very spiritual connotations, you know, kind of combining the physical with the spiritual. But in the U.S., I think we have, a lot of people practice it just as a physical exercise kind of thing. Yeah, I guess there are, when we use the word, people use it differently and hear it differently. And I think those would be the two most accepted uses of it. One party just thinking, I thought yoga was just certain stretches. Another party thinking, well, Eastern pantheistic monism, like unity is the focus of the religious belief and yoga is the way to be united. You know, there's like that deep religious background to it too. Those are the two primary ways people use the word. And there's some people that don't have any realization that there could be another usage of the word that they're using. Yeah, so I think basically what I've said to people, so I've been asked this question before, and basically what I've said is, I think, Christian's asking, can I do yoga? And I guess what I would say is just don't call it yoga. You know, if you want to do stretching, great, you know, stretching can be healthy and, and um, you know, I've, I've learned some, I do some stretches in the morning cause I'm getting a little older and it's a little tighter in the morning when I get up out of bed. So, uh, I do some stretching, some of which I've learned from yoga videos and stuff like that. But you know, don't participate in the spiritual aspects of it. That's bad. So, uh, one quick story I had, uh, I had a pastor friend mentioned to me that they were, he told me about, he engaged this, he had somebody in his church who wanted to start a Christian yoga class at their church. And he just explained to them, you can have a Christian stretching class, we're not gonna call it Christian yoga. And I think that gets to the point of it, is that if you wanna do stretching and learn some stuff from people who do what they call yoga, fine, but yeah, don't participate in the spiritual aspects of that whole thing. The best practical advice I think we can give for sure. Yeah, I think. Yeah, I just I've known people that have heard there's a religious side to it and they've got what I had no idea. I've also heard people that have an Eastern background that have converted to Christianity. They have family members that are Hindu or Buddhist and things and they've heard that yoga could mean something non-religious and they've gone what I thought it could only mean something religious. And so there's people on both sides of that. I do think practically speaking, that is the best advice we could offer is, hey, let's just not use the word yoga, call it stretching. And if you wanna learn from people that are just doing the stretching side of it, there's maybe some valid stuff there about muscles and how they stretch and things. But absolutely stay away from the religious pantheistic side of it for sure. So let me ask this question. Could a Christian go to a yoga class at their gym, sign up for that, if they're not participating in the religious aspects and rejecting that aspect of it? I have some scripture I'd like to read that I think would be a good answer. Romans 14. I'm going to skip around Romans 14 a bit. As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions. One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables. Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains. And let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who eats, for God has welcomed him. Basically trying to stay over matters of indifference. I've heard it said, I read R.C. Sproul actually recently talk about matters of indifference, and there's sometimes differences of opinions. We don't want to unnecessarily quarrel over things that is a matter of conscience. Because Romans 14, verse 12, each of us will give an account to himself, to God, of himself to God. So I think the most practical thing is let's try to avoid some of the religious stuff. So if someone can do that and avoid the religious stuff, maybe that's okay. But if you can't avoid the religious stuff, then maybe it's best not to I think yeah If you're going to a class and they're saying what one now, let's you know participate in these You know Religious practices and we're you know doing these things in order to connect with our inner. I'm out, you know, it's like okay Maybe that's not a great one. But if it's a maybe if it's a yoga class that is Physically only doing stretching and that's what that meant by it. Yes Yes. Yeah, I would just go back to that. I agree. Yeah, I mean, I've seen some yoga stuff where the person's saying, all right, now we're going to do this move and we're going to breathe in. And as you breathe in, picture yourself joining with the divine, you know, that kind of stuff. That's just not the stuff you want to be a part of. Yeah. All right, let's jump into our next question. I believe hypnosis is wrong. Not being in control of our own thoughts and mind would be against scripture. Having been in counseling, we did participate in mindfulness slash breathing exercises, focusing my mind on things above. Breathing with the breath of life has given me a controlled manner to calm myself, repeating positive and biblical things to calm myself and change my negative and anxious thoughts. For me, there's a difference, and these things have helped me greatly as a trauma survivor. I want to be sure that these are not dabbling in the spiritual world. What would you guys say to that? We'll be right back after this break. Hi, I'm Elizabeth, one of the co-hosts of Mom Guilt, a podcast with new episodes every Monday. Mom Guilt is a podcast about the daily struggles of motherhood. Stephanie and I share real experiences of Mom Guilt and how we have found freedom from that guilt through the gospel. Listen to us on resoundmedia.cc or wherever you find podcasts. I think right away we are spiritual being like the spiritual there's a side of reality that's spiritual so you know dabbling in spiritual isn't necessarily wrong but what this person means is dabbling in like demonic occult sort of thing. Yeah. Did you write notes on this? I read ahead on some of the notes you wrote and you had a really good point. I don't know if it was you or Pastor John. Just the difference between Christian meditation and Buddhist meditation. Yeah. I saw one of you wrote that down. That's a really good point to make. Yeah. I was just going to ask, what is the difference between that because oftentimes we hear meditation or mindfulness and that can mean something in an eastern context, but also the Bible talks about this idea of biblical meditation and, you know, what's the difference between those things? Can we meditate? Is that an okay thing? Absolutely. Blessed is the one who meditates on the law of the Lord day and night. Yeah, right. Meditation is awesome. It's good. Yeah, as I read the question, I've got it right here in front of me, is I sort of see two different things. You know, talking about hypnosis and the person says they believe it's wrong. And I, yeah, I agree. I think, yeah, my understanding of hypnosis is that you're putting yourself in a state in which you can be deeply influenced by something else to even, I mean, I was once at a large event, I think I was in high school, and saw mass hypnosis happen. I don't know if it was real or not. I asked some of the guys afterwards who were part of it, and they claimed it was real. I don't know. Yeah. But where people are being hypnotized and doing things that they normally wouldn't do, acting like animals, making fools of themselves. So yeah, I think scripture pretty clearly doesn't want you to open yourself up to that kind of influence. I even just think of the fruit of the spirit, Galatians 5, says that self-control is one of the fruit of the spirit. So being in control of yourself is something God wants for us. The person filled with the spirit is in control of themselves. They're not opening themselves up to demonic influence or even the influence of somebody else without your ability to discern and filter those actions. So that's one thing I see in the question, but also I think mindfulness or breathing exercises doesn't have to be the same thing as hypnosis. I'd say those can be two very different things. I think some breathing exercises for somebody who maybe struggles with anxiety or something like that can be a great thing. I mean, I just personally, yeah, there are moments that I feel stressed out and I will stop and I'll say, I'm just going to take some deep breaths for a few minutes. I don't have any specific maybe exercises that I do, but I would say that's me just sort of taking a pause and you call that meditation, you call it breathing exercises, whatever you want, but I think those things can be really helpful. I would say if you're a deep diver also, breathing exercise is a very good thing for you. A deep diver. It's very good. Fair point. But I mean, I think, you know, everyone enjoys, you know, deep breathing. That's a good calming thing and that's, yeah, that's something that we can, I think a lot of contemporary hypnosis too isn't this kind of older idea of hypnosis, maybe that we see on TV and stuff like that. But a lot of modern, what they call hypnosis is really just getting people into a very relaxed state so that they can maybe remember things better and have that experience in a therapeutic session where you're not under a trance, you're still in control, but maybe you're laying down on a couch and you have headphones on, or something where it's just very relaxed. And I think that's different than, hey, I'm out of control, I don't remember what just happened, I was acting like an animal, versus, no, I was just laying down and I could remember more. Right. Well, and the goal is important, too, so this kind of actually goes back to the yoga thing shares what I would say is a very godly perspective on meditation, which is they're repeating positive and biblical things to calm themselves and change negative or anxious thoughts. Yeah, I mean, memorize scripture and in moments of anxiety, pause, breathe, and repeat scripture. That's a great thing to do. I have two verses I'd like to read that I think are really valuable to the discussion. and just to make that point of kind of a some people would consider meditation kind of in an Eastern Hindu Buddhist way which would be clear your mind empty your mind Buddhism is all about kind of removing desire because by removing desire you remove suffering whereas a Christianity is like let's go through the suffering yeah Jesus went through suffering for us Buddhism meditation is let's empty our mind nirvana is basically a state of nothingness, right? Christian meditation is let's focus on something godly and good. Christian meditation is filling yourself with something not emptying yourself of something. Yeah, absolutely. So the two verses I think of is Colossians 3, 2, set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. I think that complements really well with Philippians 4, 8. Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, even if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. Yeah, yeah. And it's clear that that's what Christ did too, right? He filled himself up with Scripture to the point when he was on the cross. That's what he bled out. I mean, when he was under the most scrutiny of his life, the most anguish of his life, he cried out scripture, right? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's a quote back to Psalms. He's quoting and going back even in his most intense moments. And that's why Christian meditation and filling yourself with scripture is great. Yeah, and to address kind of the last sentence there of the question of you want to make sure you're not dabbling in the spiritual world. With both yoga and hypnosis, that is a real danger. If you're opening yourself up to being influenced and you're not able to discern and filter the influence coming into you, then you have just opened yourself up to the ability to be influenced by the enemy. Ephesians 6 tells us that our battle is not with flesh and blood, but with spiritual forces, evil spiritual forces. And so don't give them the opportunity to do that. Yeah. Reminds me of test the spirits. Yeah. Just about that. Like we don't blindly go into influences. Yeah. All right. So next question. We've gotten a couple of questions and we get these questions quite frequently about the end times, tribulation, rapture, that kind of stuff. And so we do try to do an episode on that every few months. I think I was looking back at the schedule recently and we have. We've done an episode on that every few months. And so we can't keep doing those episodes all the time. So I do want to point people back. If you've been asking questions about the end times, tribulation, rapture, that kind of stuff, February 12 was the last episode we did on that. Also, if you go to Peace Church or if you listen to our sermons at peacechurch.cc , we are in the midst of a series right now called The Church Never Preaches On. And we do have one of the episodes in that series, one of the Sundays, is gonna be on the end times. So that's coming too. So if you're looking for resources on that, I wanna point you just to those things. Yeah, that's great. All right, next question. My significant other and I have been together for almost five years. I've deepened my relationship with God over the last year and have attended every online service on Sundays since the beginning of the year. I would like to attend in person, but he does not want me to go and doesn't want me to go alone because it would quote unquote look weird. I told him although I would love for him to join me, I don't feel weird attending alone. Am I doing the right thing? I pray for him daily multiple times a day. Often I send him a text of what I've prayed for in regard to him. He has sent me texts on hard days asking for me to pray for him or that he has prayed and felt God actively did something that made him believe more. I'm hopeful that without pressuring him, slash giving him an ultimatum, he will find the love slash guidance of God and seek more of it. He will see the changes in me and desire to want the same lifestyle. Who doesn't want all the love and guidance from Jesus? It's the best thing ever. I can remember feeling lonely and unfulfilled. Now I have a best friend and his name is Jesus. We talk all the time. I never feel lonely or unfulfilled. I always feel guided and seen and heard. Should I do anything different other than live my life through Christ, pray for my significant other, and send him those prayers? That's an awesome question. It really is. Thanks for reading the whole thing, Mitch, because I think it was worth hearing the whole thing. Yeah, that's awesome. I love the heart and the direction. I wanna, right away at the beginning, actually jumping off point, I think there's actually two very different answers I would give to this question, depending on a stipulation in here that I caught. There's kind of more than one question, even, in it, too. Sure, yeah, yeah. But right away at the beginning, it says, my significant other. So I just wanna pause there and just say, my answer to this question is totally different depending on what that means. So if we're talking about your spouse, somebody you're married to, we're gonna go, I want to go ahead and address the question both ways, but we'll talk about passages like 1 Peter 3, 1 Corinthians 7, and what it says, what the Bible says to somebody who is married to somebody who's an unbeliever, and how to, and my short answer would be that you're doing all the right things of trying to live a godly life, be a great example, trying to just gently just pray for the person, point the person to Jesus. That's beautiful and awesome. And there's a lot of people that I know that are in that situation and it's tough, it's challenging, but it's a beautiful thing. Now on the flip side, I just want to say if my significant other means a boyfriend or a girlfriend, then my answer is very different. If you are dating somebody who is not a believer, but you are a committed believer, then I would say that you're in a spot you really don't want to be in. I think Scripture is pretty clear about the fact that Christians should be partnering themselves with other Christians, especially the most important partnership in your life, your marriage. You don't want to be unequally yoked, as 2 Corinthians 6 says. That passage talks about partnerships between Christians and unbelievers. And you don't want to be partnered closely, that closely, like a marriage, with somebody who doesn't have the same values, doesn't have the same beliefs. Going in a different direction. Yeah, you're headed in two totally different directions in life. You're pulling at each other in ways that are going to just hurt you. Yeah. Yeah, but this is also if you are dating someone or engaged to someone who isn't actively wanting to lead you in this way This also is the best circumstance for you because you haven't made a covenant yet with that, right? Totally, that's heartbreaking for someone to hear but I think it's the council that the Bible would have us give. Yeah, yeah The person asking this question might be shocked to hear us say this and I get that and that's hard, but we say it because we care about you and we don't want you to end up in a lifelong commitment. That's what marriage is, a lifelong commitment that is going to be extremely painful where you're going to spend your whole life pulling somebody in a direction that they don't want to go on their own. And you'll be pulled in a different direction. Yeah. That is the best for you. Yeah. I'd also say anyone who's telling you not to go to church is asking you to break what God has commanded us, right? Right. Hebrew says that we should not neglect to meet together as that is the habit of some, but encouraging one another all the more as you see the day drawing near, right? We are commanded to meet together as Christians, to meet together as—so whether, even if this is your spouse and someone's commanding you not to meet, this is an area where you can say, no, I have a higher command and I can, this is something that I can obey the one who I must submit to in all things and that's my God. That's the point, exactly. Like wives are commanded to submit and respect their husbands. Husbands to love their wives. And if your spouse is very explicit about like, I don't want you to go to that movie or that rodeo or that boys night or whatever it's like yeah it's not like because you want to go you have a right love your spouse well mm-hmm but to for your spouse to say don't go to that thing in place that God has told his covenant people to go to on a weekly basis and worship him yeah that is where it would come down to you have a higher calling to submit to God's law and God's Word and so if this anyone yeah, I just got interjected Is this a regular conversation in your household that your wife doesn't want you go to the rodeo? No, I just was thinking of like the did like a No, I did not see that example coming I don't know Kentucky Derby was recently I was just thinking of horses. I don't think they call And bulls and whatnot only trying to think of manly cowboy things uh... Jon way to take a look at the reality i think that i could think about all of my faces are at that's what i have a very creative guy yeah i love that you are not a very very very very very very very very very very yes and i'm trying to get better examples i can't think of a very husband says you don't want to to that underwater basket. Exactly. Yeah. So, I was on a roll. Yeah. Point being, if you are someone that consistently is watching the online service, I think that's awesome. I would say, I hope you feel encouraged and invited to come and worship in person. I do think that's something that God would want for you. If someone's listening, and they're actually unable due to physical needs or something like that to come to a service, then we would love to know. We could have a care, you know, one of our zone elders come, or someone from our care team, our care pastor, come and visit you and make sure that you still get a taste of the community that we're meant to have as Christians. Yeah, and now that I can say this because I am a pastor, but pastorally, this would be another thing is I think I've seen too many women in bad relationships with bad men who aren't going to lead them and they feel this weight, this pressure like I cannot find, I won't be able to find someone else. And I think that's such a lie that Satan wants especially young women to believe or just women in general who are in these types of relationships saying, well this is the best I'll be able to get. I promise you, that's not the case. In fact, even being single, rather than being actively led to do something that isn't godly and to go into a different way would be a better situation than to be in a bad relationship like this. And I truly believe that there will be someone even better than this. And there's two ways that God goes about that right he says either find someone new or you know changing the heart of people who are against him and so obviously that's our prayer that this guy would you know have his heart changed and be transformed by the gospel and right this would be a godly man who could lead lead someone but I also don't want to leave a wife and kids. Yeah, right. Yeah. I mean, you talk about kids like that's the hard part. You think about getting married to someone who isn't a Christian or isn't willing to go to church with you. Man, I couldn't imagine now if you have kids, how much more complicated does that get? Right. You know, this is the family that you're a part of. That is the most important is the family of God and then the physical family that you're a part of next. And so that can be such a hard thing when those two things aren't the same. That's really good stuff, guys. So let's give- Even the rodeo part. Even that part. Even the rodeo thing. I thought it was great. I loved it. My favorite part, actually. So let's talk quickly about if the person is talking about a spouse. Let's just say that that's the case. So I want to just read a passage. This is 1 Peter 3. So this was not an unfamiliar idea situation in the New Testament. The Bible addresses it in a couple of places. So here's one. 1 Peter 3 says, Likewise, wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word. Okay, so it's talking about wives who are married to a husband that's not a believer. So even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives when they see your respectful and pure conduct. Just by the actions of a godly wife. Yeah. So countless men have come to Christ because of a godly wife. Totally, totally. And it's not saying that you can't use words, by the way. I think some of the things that were listed in the question of praying for them, offering, discussing about going to church, that's all really good stuff. But yeah, just being a great godly wife who loves her husband, who offers prayers. I underlined a couple things in the question here, just that the question asker said that the husband sent texts asking for prayer at a certain point. That's a beautiful turning point. If you've got some kind of relationship with an unbeliever, I've had some of those friendships where all of a sudden it finally does turn to where they're asking for prayer. I mean, something's happening in their heart at that point. That's an awesome thing. Yeah. It's awesome. It's also beautiful to, I can hear the passion in this question asker. You know, she is just loving what Jesus has done in her life, you know, saying, I've got this best friend and it's clear that this, this love is just pouring out of her. And so I want to just commend, like, continue to bring that joy into every relationship that you have. I mean, that's the kind of beauty that is so attractional to people who don't know the gospel. Cool, yeah. Keep after it. Yeah, and this is really hard, but you know. Yeah, and to the questioner, please reach out. And we'd love to talk more with you specifically about your situation. Either a pastor or our women's director and coordinator would love to connect with you as well. All right, let's jump into this next question. What is the biblical stance on loving people who sin or aren't good for you and setting boundaries with them? Quote-unquote, love like Jesus is everywhere and it seems unclear because Jesus did in fact have boundaries. What do you guys think? And a part of me thinks like if you love like Jesus, you're actually going to have a lot of enemies. Yeah. Yeah. That's funny. Oh man. I think this is an awesome question. I actually frequently will tell, part of my role is to work with student ministry and young adult ministry and I'll tell both in those two ministries, I'll tell them, I think it's probably most wise for you to have an 80, 20, 90, 10 ratio. If like 80 or 90% of the people I spend the most time with are Christians and 10 or 20% aren't. And it takes a, I actually say it takes a very special person to have a 70, 30 ratio. Yeah. Or a 60, 40. And don't assume that you are that person. Like we need to be primarily influenced by our Christian community and loving and being loved by our Christian community so that we can be filled up to then go and spread the good news and share the gospel. And you mean specifically like your close friends, right? Because somebody might spend a lot of their time at work with unbelievers. But you're saying like 80% of friends, people who are influenced. In terms of your influence, what's the 90 or 80% of your influences? Like the quantity of influence. Yeah, yeah. The weight of it, yeah. So, those are good boundaries. I think that's the start of the conversation about boundaries. Yep. So, what should we do with people who are sitting in, aren't good for you and sitting, how do we set boundaries? What's another way that we could set boundaries with them? I really do love this question. There's so many ways we can take it. And I think you almost alluded to this, if someone, someone might say they're a Christian, but they never go to church, or someone might say they're a Christian, but they don't follow the word and they're actively living in sin. The Bible would instruct us, like assume that they say who they are, believe it, and go to them and say, like, hey, as a brother, or as a sister, I want to bring this to you and point out sin in your life that I'm concerned about. And you can do that lovingly and there's more guidance on that in scripture obviously of making sure that you check the log in your eye and everything. But if that happens and they continually live in sin, the guidance would be to treat them like a non-believer. Yeah, this is a caveat to the start of the conversation as well, yeah. Which means that they're now somebody that you're trying to share the gospel with, turn to Jesus. They're seen as the 10 or 20%, not the 80%. Yeah. I think there are two extremes on this, right? There's a, hey, I'm never going to put any boundaries up with people and let everyone and anything influence me. And then there's the other end that says, you know, oh, you know, the Bible says that, you know, we should avoid such people from 1st Timothy 3 and like the list that that goes before that is like You know, that's that could be anyone right and both groups will claim their loving like Jesus correct, right? So so how do we avoid maybe both of those extremes? to find the truth here well, I think Yeah It's rightly recognized that the quote-unquote love like Jesus is an easy to say motto without a lot of clarity as to what to do. It's easy to self-define too. Yeah, sure. I'm going to love like Jesus. What does that mean? What that means is what I say it means. Yeah, there's a lot of people today using that to make up their own version of what that means. I'm looking for an example, I think of Mark chapter one, by the way, of Jesus setting boundaries. Jesus retreats from healing people and preaching and all that kind of stuff to go alone to be with his Father. So, Jesus does give good examples, I think, of saying, yeah, there's a really helpful ministry that I could do by continuing to stay here and heal people all day and all night, but that's not what I'm going to do. The best thing for me is to go spend time with my Father. So, I think that's a great example. Yeah. So like you said, there are two extremes and maybe I don't have a super perfect answer to this question, but I think maybe the easiest thing to do is just to rule out the extremes. Yeah. That if you spend all of your time, all of your closest friends or majority of your closest friends are people who are don't love Jesus and are leading you in the wrong direction. That's not healthy. If the opposite is true and all of your friends are people that you go to church with that are Christians, then you're existing in a bubble and you're not on mission. So either one of those extremes is not where you wanna be. You talked about this preaching, it was really good. Yeah, I just got to preach about this recently on Sunday. I said actually in West Michigan, where we're from here, it is easier I think for us to end up in a bubble. A lot of people are born here, raised here, they stay here. So if you get involved in a church and you have a great Christian family, then it's really easy to just, the people that you spend time with during the week, on the weekends, year after year, you can end up in a Christian bubble. And if that's the case, then I think what I said was go to a park or somewhere and make new friends. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, if you have a friend that is in that 80, 90 Christian part of your life, the gospel is what you should be chasing after with them. That can be the guiding factor in your relationship with them and that can help set boundaries. And then if they're in the 10, 20, if they're in your friend group and they don't know Jesus, then share the gospel with them. In either way, the gospel is the thing guiding us and how our relationships are oriented and the boundaries that we set. Yeah. I also think Paul set a really good example for us. He got arrested and then he got to proclaim that to, you know, a judge and maybe that's a good option for you if you're in trouble with the law a lot. No, I'm just kidding. You're saying if you're having a problem sharing the gospel, you should get arrested first. Get arrested first. Okay. Yeah. I got you. Very interesting advice. Uh-huh. This is Master Mitchell, by the way. It's 2024, I feel like I have to say maybe this is a joke. I just want to be clear. I'm joking. Good point, yeah. Awesome, well hey, great questions, everybody. Thanks so much for sending those in. Mitch, Logan, thanks for the conversation, guys. Great stuff, great biblical answers to these questions. Hey, you can always subscribe to That's a Good Question at resoundmedia.cc or wherever you find podcasts. You can also follow Resound Media on Instagram to stay up to date on the latest. Have an awesome week. You can find That's a Good Question at resoundmedia.cc or wherever you listen to podcasts.