"Grace Before Rhythm" Pastor Nick Tawa September 27, 2026

If you please stand if you're able for the reading of God's word.

So scripture passage from this morning comes from Ephesians 2, chapter 2, verses 8 through 10.

You're welcome to listen, close your eyes, or follow along in your Bibles.

If you like to use the Pew Bibles, it is on page 1013.

Ephesians chapter 2, verse 8 through 10.

Ephesians 2:8–10

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves.

It is the gift of God, not of works.

Thanks for coming today to worship.

I don't know if anyone felt the earthquake a few minutes ago.

Kind of appropriate, I guess.

When I first started the Book of Revelation series, which took us through 13 weeks of some fairly intense study, part of the reason was I started to get these questions from people in our congregation of are we living in the end times?

And historically, over the past 2,000 years, every generation of Christians has asked the same question.

And anytime there are things like earthquakes, natural disasters, geopolitical instability, existential threats like artificial intelligence or nuclear warfare, there's inevitably this human tendency to just ask, is this it?

Is this the end?

And what do we do in response?

And I think the human response, a lot of times, unfortunately, is we need to hoard resources or buy guns or buy gold or vote a certain way.

And part of what I think is so abundantly clear from our study is that it wasn't any of that.

It is simply to keep our eyes on the slain lamb, the one who conquered death by giving his life sacrificially and then being raised to new life through the resurrection.

And that is the same call for Christians that we have.

And so, just as a reminder, in the midst of chaos and turmoil and injustice in the world, we receive this instruction from this profound prophet.

Revelation chapter 14, verse 12, this calls for patient endurance on the part of the people of God who keep his commands and remain faithful to Jesus.

Revelation 14:12

So no matter what you're experiencing in the world, no matter what you're experiencing in your own personal life, the calling is the same.

To follow Jesus with faithfulness, paying attention to his commands.

And if you were to boil down Jesus' commands, it's to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

And as we saw last fall in our sermon series called A New Era, when we look at the old covenant and the new covenant, Jesus boils us down into this beautiful, simple statement: love God.

Love others the same way that you would want to be loved and treated.

And it is beautifully simplistic.

You think about the Ten Commandments, you think about the law of Moses, you think about all the laws that sometimes local church congregations have in order to measure godliness or morality.

All of that is summed up in can you simply love?

And that is the way of Jesus.

It is simple, yet it is in many ways far more demanding, far more challenging.

And that is where we need the Spirit of God working in our lives.

It's where we rely on the mystery of God with us, revealing God in the details of our lives.

Whether that's unemployment or weather patterns disrupting travel plans, whatever that is, there's something really beautiful about the way that God shows up in the details of our lives.

And so we're starting a brand new sermon series this week on this very question, this invitation of what does it mean to be faithful to Jesus in practice?

Pastor Kevin and I are calling this series rhythms of grace.

Rhythms of grace.

Previous generations would call this spiritual formation or sanctification or spiritual disciplines.

What are the things that we are invited to practice throughout the course of our lives in order to drink deeply of the grace of God found in Jesus?

How do we live faithful lives?

What does that look like?

In certain Christian communities, the idea of rhythms of grace or spiritual disciplines can oftentimes get misconstrued if it's removed from the core doctrine of grace, which is what we're going to be talking about this morning as a primer.

So before we get into the actual practices, things like prayer, silence and solitude, generosity, fasting, community, study, we need to understand the very core of why we do all of these things.

And it is this core, basic Christian distinctive that we call grace.

The unearned, unmerited favor of God, flowing from the generosity of God's heart.

And because all that we do, all that we practice is an outflow of this grace, one of the ways that I think about spiritual disciplines or rhythms of grace is that all of these are mere invitations or windows into God's grace.

We're not earning it, we're not climbing a ladder, we're not putting stars on a chart because God values us more, we're not getting graded, in other words.

All of these practices are means to an end.

And the end is knowing God more deeply, both in this life and in the life to come.

One of the core practices, I don't have a slide for this, but this is just in the DNA of spiritual formation, is that when we talk about eternal life, we're talking about not just the place you go when you die, but the quality of our life in the here and now.

What difference does Jesus make in our lives today?

And so I want to read from John chapter 17, verse 3.

John 17:3

And this is how Jesus defines eternal life.

He says, Now this is eternal life.

That they know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.

So there's a simplicity to Jesus' words here.

And this is shortly before he goes to the cross.

He's praying for his disciples.

He's saying, This is eternal life, abundant life, to know God, to be in relationship with God, and to know Jesus as the Son of God, as God incarnate.

And so our passage this morning comes from this letter that this apostle named Paul wrote to this early church.

And I want to unpack just a little bit of it this morning because this is so central to our practice of the spiritual disciplines.

Just out of curiosity, how many of you are familiar with the spiritual disciplines?

In some form or fashion?

Okay.

Maybe that's good.

Maybe there's like a blank slate here.

So all right, so this is the Apostle Paul explaining in very simple terms what is this gift that has been given to humanity?

Ephesians chapter 2, verse 8.

Ephesians 2:8

For it is by grace, so here's this core distinctive of the way of Jesus, by grace you have been saved.

In the first chapter at Ephesians, he's explained that.

What does it mean to be saved, to be forgiven, to be reconciled before God, reconciled to God?

We experience salvation both in this life and in the life to come.

It's the same word and imagery of healing, that we are healed through faith, through trust.

It's a relationship.

And this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.

So this is so important that Paul points out this is not of yourselves.

This is not because you are more disciplined than other people, it's not because you are better than anybody else, it's not about your morality.

You're not climbing a ladder.

It's a gift, something that you receive.

Verse 9, not by works, so that no one can boast.

And this is where the gospel gets really countercultural.

Because every other aspect of our lives, for the most part, is based on merit and competition and scarcity.

I think about the way that our economy works.

It's competitive.

As Westerners, we glorify competition.

If we want results, we set up a competition.

If we want to be entertained, we go to a competition.

There are winners and there are losers.

And it is deeply ingrained, at least within American society, that we are winners.

But this is not the way of Jesus.

The way of Jesus says this is a system, an economy, in which you receive because you are poor.

Because you are in a needy state.

And so those that receive this gift of grace, there's no boasting.

There's no trophies.

There's no, I did it, I'm here because I have been a better Christian than you.

And this is what is both countercultural and deeply beautiful and freeing about the gospel.

And this is important for us, even in Christian subcultures.

And we're creating our own Christian subculture.

And I understand every church will have its own subculture.

And no church is perfect, no community is perfect.

But every community has sort of their unspoken value system.

And this is so central, I think, to confronting some of those value systems.

Whatever that might be.

If you grew up in an evangelical church, say you went to youth group as a teenager, what did you observe?

What did you experience about what was more valuable and what was less valuable?

What made you a more important value of that community?

One of my observations as maybe a 13-year-old was the coolest, most valuable people in this youth group are the worship leaders.

They're cool, they dress cool, they sound cool, they have this emotional spirituality.

So Kevin Yap was uh one of the worship leaders when we were in high school.

We go way back to junior high.

And that's unspoken.

Nobody preaches that.

You're not gonna find that in the Bible anywhere.

But if you showed up to any given youth group in the 90s, that would be the implicit message that got preached.

And so I say that because I want us to become a people who are self-aware of some of those hierarchies and to dismantle those with grace.

And that we would experience that.

We would experience that freedom, that you are accepted here because God has been gracious to you.

Because God sees you, He values you.

Even if you don't dress like everybody else, even if you don't sound like everybody else, you are still recipients of God's grace.

And that's a beautiful thing.

And it's a beautiful thing because it takes away any boasting, any pride, any arrogance of I am here because I earned it.

Because I have been religious and holy and faithful.

Faithfulness is something that the gospel turns upside down.

Those that have received the most love the most.

And I love this.

This is the order in which Paul explains this.

Verse 10.

For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

So Paul isn't negating the necessity of spiritual disciplines, of good work, of finding these rhythms and these habits, of living into the promises of God.

These are part of God's good gift.

But there's an order here.

Through the conduit of faith, humble faith.

In order that you may then live out the calling that God has ordained before the creation of the world for you to walk in.

There's purpose, there's goodness.

It's what Jesus calls the kingdom.

When he announced the good news, he said, the kingdom of God is here, meaning the reign and the influence of God is here to restore all that has been lost.

So the way that we live, our ethics, the rhythms that define our everyday lives, not just on Sundays, but from Monday to Saturday, these matter to God.

And these are the rhythms, the practices that we are going to be looking at in the next few weeks.

Not something that we earn, but as a window into God's grace.

You know the drill, the battery life is going, uh needs to be reset more uh often, and it just kinda gets clunky and the technology gets in the way rather than helping me in uh the tasks that I have.

But I'm the type of person, I don't know about you, but I rarely buy new things.

I'm not a tech person and I don't love the idea of spending a ton of money on these needs, perceived needs that are marketed to me.

Like phones, for example, like I have an iPhone 12.

Um I know it's relative, so for some of you, this is super old.

For some of you, it's like, well, I've got an iPhone 6, what are you complaining about?

Um my cars are the same way.

I've always driven used cars and I run them into the ground.

I have about 185,000 miles on my car, and it's like, oh, I can still ride this for at least another five years.

Um I'm not one to buy new stuff.

And when I buy new stuff, it's fairly minimalistic.

But here's this person in our community who said, Hey, Pastor Nick, I heard that your laptop is dying.

Um we have this brand new 16-inch MacBook Pro with all the bells and whistles, with more memory than you could ever ask for.

And it's unopened.

We haven't used it for what we thought we were gonna use it for, we want to just give it to you.

And I was just blown away.

I thought, well, you you're just gonna give it to me.

And so I went over to the house this week and and we hit had a good, we shared a meal, I mean, they fed me dinner.

Um I was blessed.

It was nothing but me receiving from them.

Now, the way that I receive this laptop says something about the way that I understand grace.

So I could refuse it and say, you know what?

No, I either I'm not worthy or I can't receive accept this gift.

And it has this air of humility, but really there's sort of an unwillingness to receive if I were to refuse the gift.

Or say I did receive it, I set it up this week, and it is amazing to have a new computer that works.

And I'm gonna use it.

I'm I'm grateful.

Every time that I open it up, use it for ministry, and prepare sermons and have these online meetings, it's this exercise, this recognition that this person, this family has been gracious to me.

I've received something from them.

And it's not something that I bury, like, hey, it's too nice, I'm not gonna use it, or like, hey, I don't want to mess it up or download viruses or drop it, so I'm not gonna use it.

No, there's an invitation here to use the laptop as it's been intended, and it gives me joy, it gives the giver joy.

But there's this recognition that I didn't earn this, I didn't do anything to deserve it.

It's not because I'm an amazing person that they gave me this laptop.

It's like, no, we we want to bless you.

Here's a gift.

And the same is true of the grace that we receive from God the affirmation, the relationship, the restored status with God the Father.

It's a gift, a pure gift that we receive and that we then live out of.

Another passage to form our time as we think about spiritual disciplines comes from John chapter 15.

John 15 · chapter mention

This is one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture because it's a tangible image.

I'm not going to read the whole passage.

Uh, verse 5 says this I am the vine.

This is Jesus speaking to his disciples.

You are the branches.

If you remain in me, and I in you, you will bear much fruit.

Apart from me, you can do nothing.

Now, there's a whole rich theology from the Old Testament on Israel as the vine, and when the vine does well, then it's flourishing, but when it's not doing well, then it's a it's um indicative of unfaithfulness and God's judgment.

Um Jesus is actually speaking into this deep theological imagery, which as non-Jewish people, it a lot of times it's lost on us.

But even if it's lost on us, I think the beautiful thing is we still, even as city folk, understand the way that plants work.

That a plant thrives because its roots are deep and its branches, its its core, its trunk, its vine is strong.

And if we are the branches, if we are ancillary to the main vine, then we'll we'll thrive as long as we receive the nutrients, the water, the stability from the source.

And the source is Jesus.

Jesus is our vine.

I have this plant in my office, the church office, that is doing really well.

And every now and then I'll prune it because there are too many branches, their branches are dying.

And that's part of what keeps it healthy.

But another part of what keeps it healthy is that in order to grow, this particular plant needs structural support.

It needs a trellis.

And one of the conversations within the school of spiritual formation is that the rhythms of grace, these spiritual disciplines, serve as a trellis that then support the growth from the vine.

The source is always Jesus.

The source of grace and life is always Jesus.

But it is these rhythms of grace that provide the support for the plant or the vine to thrive.

In other schools of thought, we call this a rule of life.

When you sum up all the spiritual disciplines in your life and put it together, it becomes what some call a rule of life.

Now, I do want to clarify, for some, this feels confining.

You hear the word rule and you think, oh, wait a minute, that sounds like legalism, that sounds confining.

But the same thing with the word discipline is that it's not meant to be confining.

It's not meant to breed any sort of legalism or a hierarchical structure of merit.

Rule and discipline are words of freedom.

It's structure that provides freedom and greater life and greater growth.

And a rule of life is defined simply as this: it is the combination of the practices in your life to define and breathe life into your relationship with God.

And as we studied in, as we looked at John 17, 3, eternal life is defined as knowing God and knowing Jesus.

And so as we look at these different um ways that we structure our rule of life.

The core question is, how does this draw us closer to God?

How do we experience the mystery of God in our own lives as we navigate jobs and relationships, health challenges, pleasure?

These all come together.

And the reality, it's not a binary of either you have a rule of life or you don't.

The reality is each one of you already has a rule of life.

There is a rhythm to your life.

There are habits that you employ on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis that then have given you the life that you are now leading.

And so throughout the course of these next six, seven weeks or so, the invitation is to ask the question: how do I tweak this rule of life?

Where is God perhaps inviting me to shape this rule of life?

And it's not meant in any way to be legalistic.

These aren't stars on a chart, these are windows of grace.

And so the invitation is for you to begin to craft your personal rule of life.

What are the things that you do on a daily basis or on a weekly basis?

Monthly basis, quarterly, seasonally, annually.

For many, historically, coming to church on Sunday is a spiritual discipline of corporate worship and of community.

That's already there.

That's part of your role of life.

I think I have a slide after this.

Can we go to the next slide?

Okay, go one back one more.

I think I erased it.

Go back one more.

Yeah, here we go.

So this sermon series is not gonna be exhaustive by any means.

If you follow different authors, uh different faith leaders in the Christian tradition, there are different lists of spiritual disciplines.

And we're gonna cover maybe four or five of them.

And one of the things that I deeply appreciate about working with Pastor Kevin Wu is that in seminary, he had the opportunity to study at a very specific program called the Institute of Spiritual Formation at Biola University.

We both have the same graduate degree.

Uh, if you're familiar with Christian education, it's called the Masters of Divinity.

I mean, it's a little bit of a weird term if you're not in church circles, but it's called Masters of Divinity.

We both have the same degree.

But I studied more general pastoral.

Pastor Kevin had the opportunity to study spiritual formation as a practice and as an art from a scholarly perspective.

And so there's a really deep well that Pastor Kevin is drawing from.

And even though I'm going to be preaching most of the messages, a lot of what I'm saying draws on his experience, his expertise.

And so just to know, if it sounds a little bit clunky, it's it's me.

And if there's something deep and uh profound, uh you can ask Pastor Kevin about it later.

Uh Pastor Kevin will be preaching on October 24th.

Um so I encourage you to come.

Um there's there's a depth to his his knowledge, and it's it's tied in in many ways to kind of his calling, his unique calling as a person, as a as a disciple, as a as a pastor.

One of the spiritual disciplines or the rhythms that God has kind of placed in my life for this season, I want to share with you, and it's unique to me, kind of in this season or this leg of my journey in ministry, is to go back to school.

So you can go back to the next slide, go to the next slide now.

So I've had this opportunity to be a part of this doctorate of ministry program at Fuller Seminary, which is not where I attended seminary, it's where my dad attended.

A number of us uh leaders in our community attended here.

But there's something unique at Fuller that has developed over the past few years called the Asian American Center.

And this is fairly unique, I think, in the world of seminary training.

What the Asian American Center does is that it takes a deep dive at looking at the intersection of ethnic studies, psychology, and theology, specifically through an Asian American lens.

And I've had just a taste of this in a cohort a couple years ago that I joined, and I found it really compelling.

And so I was invited to apply to this doctorate of ministry program, which is a practical ministry degree.

It's not a PhD, I'm not trying to become a professor somewhere.

This is a program designed for working pastors.

And the dissertation centers around a particular question that has to do with your particular ministry context.

So, in other words, you.

We're gonna be exploring something, and I don't know exactly what that dissertation will be, but something that will feed directly into the life of this church community.

And so the way that I'm kind of looking at this is this is an opportunity, uh, this is a gift for both me as a leader to continue to grow and to learn, and a gift for our congregation to dive deeper into some of these areas of areas of theology and Asian American identity.

Uh, just as an example, oftentimes people ask me, what is this?

What is Asian American theology?

And one of the questions I get is, Asian American culture is so vastly diverse.

What does even say Chinese culture have to do with Japanese culture?

And as someone who's half Chinese and half Japanese, I can say there's not a lot in common.

There are some commonalities as far as Confucian roots and uh religious similarities, but culturally they're very, very different.

But in the United States, and I'm fourth and fifth generation, and so I'm quite far down the generation line, there are similarities for the Chinese American experience and the Japanese American experience based solely on the way that you look.

From the Chinese exclusion acts to the Japanese internment camps, there is a commonality in the way that we have been othered.

And this has largely been unspoken in many of our cultures, in many of our family histories, and it has inevitably affected our theology, the way that we see God, the way that we experience Christianity.

And so the way that the term is racialization, so the way that we have been racialized uniquely in the United States is our commonality.

And the way that the Chinese American community and the Japanese American community have risen or fallen based on the United States' relationship with the mother country has profoundly affected our lives and our families and our faith communities.

And so, all to say, that's just a small example of why this work is important.

Globally, the invitation is that all of us are invited to worship God, to live into our callings with all of who we are.

And that includes your family history, that includes your ethnicity, your culture, the language that we speak.

And so part of this journey is to cultivate a certain self-awareness so that we can love God with all of our heart, all of our soul, and all of our mind.

And I understand that this is taking, for many of us, an unspoken code and putting language to it.

And there's something scary about that, there's something subversive about that, there's something disruptive about that.

But as I've journeyed in my own faith, I think that oftentimes that disruption is good, that it provides space for God's spirit to infuse different aspects of our lives and of our community.

And so I share this uh simply because this will be a big part of kind of my ministry and my calling, but also to ask for for your prayers.

It's been a long time since I've been in school, and I just had orientation this week, and it was like, oh my gosh, thinking about uh grades and more reading than I can feasibly do uh in my personal ability, uh writing papers and presenting, it's it's just it's not in my wheelhouse anymore.

And so I covet your your prayers um and invite you to kind of journey with me along the way as part of my rule of life, at least for this next season of life.

All right, so back to our series.

What I want to do is I want to end our time this morning with the practice.

So next week we're gonna lean a little bit more into this practice of silence and solitude.

And these are ancient practices that Christians have been doing for hundreds of years.

And that's what I love about it.

In this age of AI, there is something that we get to tap into that has been practiced for generations upon generations.

And we live in a noisy, loud society.

And so to simply carve out time to listen to God, to sit still before God, I think is both a deep need and a precious gift.

So we're gonna be doing more of this next week.

I'm gonna kind of unpack some of the theology next week.

But this week I want to just whet your appetite just a little bit.

So we're gonna have five minutes of silence.

So I want you to kind of find a good posture, think about your breathing, think about your physical presence in this world.

You are an embodied being here.

Close your eyes if you feel comfortable, and just be with God.