The Harvest | Recognizing The Field You're In

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To learn more about Gateway Franklin Church, including our service times here in Franklin, Tennessee, visit us online at gatewayfranklin.com.

And now, here is this week's message.

Good morning, everybody.

So good to be with you today.

So good to be with those of you who may be watching from the student sanctuary, or those of you who are watching maybe on your way back from fall break, wherever you're watching from, are so glad you could be a part of what God's doing here at Gateway.

My name's Tori, I'm the associate pastor.

Um, and I'm excited because we're gonna be starting a new series today.

We uh we've spent the last 14 weeks in a series called the Songs of Ascent, and I'm looking forward to leading us back down the mountain in a new 14-week series called the Songs of Descent.

Um that's a joke.

We're gonna be starting a short a short little series uh bringing it back down to earth.

Now, this is a three-week series uh on the harvest.

And so if you've been at Gateway uh for a while, you may know that this year we're in a theme called sowing and reaping.

It's a word that we believe that God has for us at an individual level, but also at a corporate level.

And throughout the year, we've been uh having many touch points back to this theme.

And in the beginning of the year, we talked a lot about sewing.

Uh and in our conversations on sewing, we kind of led with the principles of the harvest.

Uh, I thought this was really fascinating.

It's simple truths that I think intuitively we all know, but when presented in this clear, succinct way, it really has a way of just illuminating and helping us make sense of where we find ourselves.

And I want to give you those principles this morning as kind of we reach back before talking about this new subject.

But the principles of the harvest are as follows: you reap what you sow, you reap more than you sow, and you reap later than you sow.

And so in the beginning of the year, as I mentioned, we talked a lot about sowing, and as we kind of come to the end of the year with a little fall crisp in the air, uh I want us to change our conversation to reaping.

Um, you know, understanding how the harvest works is one thing, but we also need to learn how to recognize the fields that we're in.

Uh, who went to a pumpkin patch this weekend?

Anyone?

I saw a lot of a lot of pictures on Instagram, Facebook posts, going doing all the fall things.

If you found yourself in a field, you might have looked around and saw some corn or something else that was growing.

But when you find yourself in a field and you and you see these things, the truth is somebody didn't wake up that morning and just decide that that's what's going to be there, right?

Whatever we're observing around us, somebody made a decision long time ago to break up that ground, to plant seeds and faith that that was what was going to be there in the future.

And while this is nice to have kind of clear, delineated seasons between this is a sowing season and this is a reaping season, when it comes to our life, it's not always that clear, is it, or that linear?

Because at any given moment, we are always reaping something that was sown earlier.

And so it's nice when it's clear that you can say, hey, I did this, and as a result, this came about.

But there are times where there are things that we are reaping in our life and we're not even sure what it is that we're reaping or why we're reaping that or how we got to this place.

And so in this series, I want to talk about how to recognize the fields that we're standing in.

And so we're gonna talk about three different harvests that I think we often fail to recognize.

But the first one that we're gonna dig into today is the harvest you didn't plant.

A few years ago, in the summer of 2018, Forbes magazine ran a cover story on a 20-year-old named Kylie Jenner.

You might be familiar with her.

Um Kylie Jenner is a f household name in the culture at this point.

Um, she was at the time as well.

And when the headline came out, it caught a lot of people's attention because the article was all about how she was on track to becoming the first and youngest self-made woman billionaire in history.

Now, this may surprise you, but I've never met Miss Kylie Jenner, but I'm sure she's a uh a lovely lady.

Uh there's a lot of complimentary things we could say about her.

We could say she's kind, we could say that she is smart, we could say she's creative, we could say that she was ambitious in her work, uh, you could say she's pretty, you could say you could say a lot of things about her.

But if I was describing this lady I've never met, of all the words available to me in the King's English, the phrase that I would not reach for first is self-made.

And so there when this article came out, there was a lot of pushback, particularly from people who would consider themselves safe, self-made people, that were like, hey, hey, hold hold on a minute, right?

This woman is not self-made.

She she's one of the part of the most famous families in the country at the time.

She was on reality TV before she even graduated high school.

The conversation got so big online that even dictionary.com joined the conversation.

They tweeted underneath the story their own definition of self-made, which is uh, I thought that was kind of funny, you know, just kind of a I've never had the dictionary correct me publicly, but I hope they don't.

Um so Forbes responds to this pushback, and instead of saying, Yeah, you know, we probably could have reached for a better word, or you know what, someone else is more deserving of this title, they doubled down on it and they said, No, no, no, no, no, you don't understand.

Everybody's self-made, just some people are more self-made than others.

We actually have a scale that we use to evaluate people and how uh self-made they are, from one being someone who inherits everything to ten being someone who really just pulls themselves up by their bootstraps.

And you would think that this would kind of explain it, but it didn't.

All the people who had previously been featured in Forbes then got really defensive and said, wait a second, so you're telling me that there's somebody in a New York City office who gets to sit there and judge how deserving I am of the things that I have in my life?

What could that, what could the columnist possibly know about my long nights or my early mornings, or the risk I took, or the sacrifices I made, or the connections that I had to foster?

What who are they to decide what I deserve and what I don't?

And an honest faith, I mean, it is offensive, is it, when you think about it, particularly if you were directed at yourself, right?

If they were writing an article about you, right?

Who are you?

Right?

Who are you to come into my life and tell me what I deserve and don't deserve?

Who are you to decide whether or not I put in the proper hours or whether I got more handouts than the guy next to me?

Now, while most of us are not writing articles for Forbes magazine, and most of us aren't doing this publicly, I have noticed that we all have a tendency to kind of do it quietly.

This is interesting, right?

How many times have you passed someone's house or you saw someone who got a promotion or you saw someone on social media and their business was taking off, and almost without thinking it, you start to score how deserving they are of the thing that they have.

To say, yeah, you know, like uh that's nice, but you know, her dad really owns the company, so we shouldn't be too proud of her.

Right?

Or, well, he really married into money, didn't he?

Right?

Or, you know, I'm so proud of what they're doing.

But if I had had the opportunities and breaks that they had, I'd probably be doing a little bit better.

Right?

Isn't it amazing how we look around and we want to take people down a peg when the self-made label is applied to them, but often, paradoxically, we're very quick to want that label applied to us.

Right?

If Forbes called and said, I want to write a self-made article about you, Tori, what's not gonna come out of my mouth is we know my character was really developed in the third grade by my English teacher, Miss Watson, who caught me cheating on a spelling test.

And, you know, instead of disciplining me with too strong of a hand, she gave me grace and it really taught me.

I'm not gonna reach for people to give credit to, right?

I'm just gonna say, Thank you.

You're right.

As a matter of fact, I am a self-made man, I've done it this all myself.

Right?

So we're quick to judge when this label is applied to somebody else, right?

But we're but we all wouldn't mind wearing it ourselves.

So what's so why is it that the self-made label is so attractive?

What what is it that draws us?

Well, I think for starters, the self-made label flatters us.

Right?

If I am a self-made man, then my success is my virtue.

I recognize that every story needs a hero, and well, if it's my story, it might as well be me, right?

Well, I think the second reason is that it justifies us.

Because if I have a lot, then I don't need to feel any guilt or obligation with that.

What I have is mine and I earned it.

If I want to give it away, I can give it away because it's mine.

If I want to keep it to myself, you can't say boo about it because it's mine, right?

What I have is what I own.

On the contrary, when you have uh very little, you can also use it as a justification.

To say, well, hey, at least what I have, I earned it.

At least I didn't take a handout.

Right?

At least I didn't cut corners to get ahead like some other people.

At least I am proud of what I own because I did all the work to get this.

And so why is it that self-made sounds like a compliment, though, right?

It sounds like a compliment, but when we talk about accepting help from somebody else, that almost sounds like a confession.

Well, I think one of the reasons that this self-made myth, the reason it's so deeply embedded in our desire and drive is because one, it's part of the American ethos, right?

It's a it's woven into the way that we talk about history.

Pioneers heading west with everything they own packed in a wagon, immigrants stepping off the boat with nothing but a name and a work ethic, right?

The American dream is if you work hard enough, even if you have nothing else, that you can build a life from nothing.

Most of us were raised on that story.

Instinctively, we're taught to admire that story, the person who really doesn't ever accept help from anyone, the John Wayne type character.

But like most things that are good, right, this has some trappings in it because there is a lot of good in a self-made story.

It does elevate certain values like hard work and sacrifice and grit and overcoming adversity.

And I would argue that scripture argues for those values too, that it praises those as things that we should want to have in our life.

So it's not that the self-made story is wrong about the individual, it's just that it doesn't tell the whole story.

Because inevitably, when you tell a self-made story, it's gonna leave out the people who came before you.

It's gonna leave out the people who co-labored alongside of you.

Most importantly, it's gonna leave out the God who was writing the story before you were ever thought of to be conceived in it.

Right?

It's not that the self-story, self-made story is wrong about you, because it's easy to get defensive and say, are you saying I don't deserve it?

No, I'm not saying that at all.

What I am saying, the self-made story is correct about you.

It's just it's just wrong in the fact that it leaves out everybody else.

So the Bible warns us about the dangers of viewing the world through the self-made lens.

It presents the self-made lens as a product of our pride.

Right?

Near the end of his life, Moses is preaching a series of sermons to Israel on the edge of the promised land, and and these series of sermons have been collected.

We know them as the book of Deuteronomy.

And in chapter 8, Moses is looking into the future of the people of Israel as they are preparing to inherit this good gift that God had promised to their forefathers, and this is what he says: he says, Beware.

Beware.

Poke your neighbor in the side and say, Beware.

Lest you say in your heart, my power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.

Right?

The word gotten is just the ordinary Hebrew word for make.

So Moses is literally saying, beware of saying, My power made me this wealth.

In other words, my power made me, self-made, in so many words.

And notice where Moses says this happens first, not publicly, but in your heart.

Right?

He's warning them about taking on a private belief that they are responsible for every good thing in their life.

So why would Moses need to warn them about this?

Well, to understand that, you have to have the context of who it is he's speaking to.

By the time Moses is speaking to the people of Israel, he's not talking to the generation that saw the plagues or crossed through uh the Red Sea on dry ground.

He's he's talking to their kids and their grandkids.

Right?

By this point, most of the people who saw those miracles in the Exodus story, those people are mostly gone, if not all gone.

And he's talking to children that were either kids when they were leaving Egypt or born somewhere along the way.

So when he talks about the Egypt story, this is really the story of their parents.

But he's saying, you guys are gonna have a different challenge.

Your challenge isn't gonna be the hardship of getting out of Egypt.

Your hardship is gonna be dealing with abundance.

Your parents had to learn to trust me when they didn't have anything.

But you've got a new lesson to learn.

You're gonna have to learn to trust me when you have everything.

Now, here's where it's easy for us to miss the lesson in this story, particularly those of us who have kids or um or we're we would say we're not a part of the younger generation, right?

When we hear this story, most of us want to cast ourselves in the position of the parents.

When we think about our lives, we think about all the work that we've done to get to where we are.

Right?

If you've got kids, particularly if you have an adult kid, right?

You think about what you've done in your life to lay up for them.

To think about what sacrifices have you made along the way that they would have a better life.

We would much rather tell the story of our hardship than tell the story of our privilege.

I want my kids to be the most privileged kids that I can possibly make them.

I want them to have every advantage afforded to them.

You want the same for your kids.

And that's not wrong.

I know the word privilege kind of gets a lot of political baggage right now.

So let me put it into uh maybe some biblical terms.

I want my kids to be blessed partly because of me and not in spite of me.

I want my kids to have a better life because I was obedient, because I sacrificed, because I did the things God told me to.

I want them to have more wealth, I want them to have more opportunities, I want them to have all the things that would give them a better start than what I had.

And guess what?

Your parents likely wanted that for you too.

But for some reason, there's a pride part that kicks in where if anyone wants to throw a label of blessing or privilege at us, we're we're kicked to kind of push back against it and say, well, I don't know about all that.

I worked for what I got.

No one's saying you didn't.

Right?

And I've had enough conversation with many of you, right, to hear your stories.

I don't want to gloss over the fact that some of you have childhood experiences that no one should have had to ever go through, especially kids.

So I'm not taking away that some of you had a very, very rough start and it's been God's grace in your life to get you to this point.

But I think if all of us were to kind of reflect on our lives, people across every generation, not just the younger generation, most of us have had a starting point that was better than our parents and our grandparents.

Right?

Even the eldest most members of this congregation, right?

Think about your parents and grandparents.

They lived through a Great Depression.

Some of them fought in one, if not two, world wars.

Right?

It was your parents and grandparents that were called the greatest generation.

I mean, just materially speaking, we are the most prosperous people that have ever lived on the face of the earth, and that's because of people who went before us.

Not six generations ago, we were living in log cabins.

Okay?

The world, at least on a material level, has improved dramatically.

Because there were people who went before us.

There are people who made sacrifices, there are people who worked hard, and guess what?

Now we have the privilege of doing the same.

So it's not that we should think bad about ourselves.

We should think highly of ourselves.

We should see this responsibility as something to steward, but we should acknowledge, right, that that my life is just it's not simply the product of my own making.

And so, Moses, when preaching this to the next generation, um, he's wanting us to learn this message.

He's wanting us to remember that that everything we have and where we come from, it's not the product of just ourselves, that we are somebody's next generation.

And listen to how he describes what this generation is going to walk into.

He says, When the Lord your God brings you into the land that he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you with great and good cities that you did not build, houses full of things that you did not fill, cisterns that you did not dig, vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant.

You see the rhyme here?

Right, cities that somebody else had to lay the bricks for.

Right, houses with stocked pantries that you didn't have to go to Costco for.

Right, cisterns that you didn't have to dig.

Dig is a very generous word when referring to a cistern.

If you don't know what a cistern is, it's not like a hole in the ground, it's a hole in a rock, with the bottom still being rock.

Right?

Because you needed somewhere when the rain fell, it would catch the water and it wouldn't just seep through the soil.

So that's a lot of hammer swinging in the heat to dig one of these things out.

On the olive trees, when you planted a vineyard in an olive tree, when you planted a vineyard, according to tradition and best practice, you can't even take the fruit from the vine for the first five years.

An olive tree takes years to produce anything that would be considered a meaningful harvest, yet, once established, it can feed people for centuries.

And so when Israel is walking into the promised land, it's not that God has just given them this blank canvas and said, have fun, guys.

They are stepping into other people's decades.

They are inheriting the hard work of someone else.

And the truth is we do the same every single day.

When we think about the things that we love in our life, the blessings, the daily practices, the places we like to go, the things we like to eat, all the things that make this community what it is, why people from all over the country want to come and find a home in Franklin, Tennessee.

Like on the way to church today, think about the restaurants you passed, or the storefronts you passed, or the neighborhoods, or the churches.

Every one of them at some point was somebody's dream, somebody's risk, and somebody else's passion.

We are surrounded every single day by harvests that none of us planted.

And so we go back to the warning in chapter 8, because right after Moses says, Don't say in your heart, my power made me this wealth, he says, You instead shall remember the Lord your God, because it is he who gives you the power to get wealth, to confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers as it is this day.

Now I find this verse fascinating because when you break it down in the Hebrew, they really are parallel passages written out almost word for word, exactly the same.

It's the same power, it's the same uh work, it's the same wealth, but the only thing that changes is the source, who gets the credit.

Right?

And so if you feel on the defensive as this message is being preached, what I want you to take away is that it's not that God wants to deny your very real effort, but he wants to correct your source.

And there's a reason for that, because the takeaway is that that whereas we might be drawn to a self-made view of our life, I believe that God wants us to have a grace-made view of our life.

And it's not because God is petty or jealous or narcissistic or sitting up there in heaven with his arms crossed and saying, they didn't say thank you the way that I wanted them to say.

It's because God knows that a self-made view of your life inevitably leads to pride.

And pride leads to separation from God, and separation God results in nothing but death.

But on the contrary, a grace-made view of your life leads us to worship, and worship leads to relationship with Him, and in Him is the fullness of life and everything good.

He's calling us to lay aside this view where we are the main thing and the main event, and rather to look at our life through the lens that everything we have is a gift.

And when you believe that, when you live with this grace-made view of your life, right, it it sets you free.

It turns your attention off of yourself and it turns it upwards.

So, with the rest of the time we have, I want to talk about the grace-made life.

What does it look like?

And we'll start with what it's not, because I think depending on your background, you might bring some um assumptions to it, and I want to clear up some of those.

The first assumption I want to address is grace-made doesn't mean lucky.

Harvard professor Michael Sander wrote a book called The Tyranny of Merit, and he argues that the problem with viewing the world through perfect meritocracy is that it banishes all sense of gift or grace or luck.

All right, the reason he was writing this book is he's trying to explain why two people in two different parts of the country can do the exact same work with the same idea exactly the same way and end in totally different results.

William Gladwell, I was talking with Micah this week.

She was telling me about how he makes a similar point in his book, Outliers, if you've read that book.

Basically says it's not really helpful to compare yourself to the outliers because there's so much um intangibles, unquantifiables that you just can't replicate to get what they have.

It's just a matter of luck.

And and there's a lot of people who would be humble about how much they have and say, you know, well, it is true, I just got lucky.

And but I want to point out uh a distinction here because while it sounds humble, look back at verse 18 because it doesn't say that they'll be lucky.

It says he gives you power.

Right?

There's a he in it.

And the difference between luck and grace is luck has no giver.

So luck can make you humble, but it can't make you grateful.

But grace has a giver, which means it doesn't just produce humility, it produces worship, it produces a sense of awe, it allows us to reflect on what we have and then turn and look to this God who.

Gave it to us when we were undeserving, and just say thank you.

And it and it causes us to get out of this bubble of thinking about us exclusively and recognize that every good thing is from above.

The second thing that grace made is not is grace made does not mean passive.

Maybe the Apostle Paul says it best in 1 Corinthians 15.

He says, But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain.

On the contrary, I have worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is within me.

So Paul is like very confident that he has put in the work.

Right?

He is confident that you could put his effort up against anybody else, and yet he still gives all the credit away.

And here's my observation of grace-made people.

When I look at, because there are many of you sitting in the congregation, when I look at your lives, I've noticed that people who truly live with a grace-made view, recognizing that the strength and power and resources that they have come from God, they're some of the hardest workers in the room.

Because they recognize that God has not given these things to them by accident.

And that there is a stewardship responsibility to say, God, if you have blessed me, then you want me to be a blessing, and where would you have me?

So Grace made isn't passivity.

Grace made is picking up the call and recognizing that we have a mandate.

Here's the third thing Grace made is not.

Grace made doesn't mean collectivism.

This is surfacing a lot right now politically.

Some people hear you didn't build that alone and immediately jump to the conclude conclusion, so you don't have a right to it.

Right?

Or if I was involved in any part of it, then I deserve a share of it.

And the problem is it's not that they're not observing something true, that you didn't build something alone.

Right?

They're just drawing the wrong conclusions.

Because when we look at Moses and what he has to say on the subject, right, he he's very clear that God is the one who gives you this land, but he also says, don't move your neighbor's landmark and don't covet what he has.

Right?

Moses is not anti-personal property or wealth, right?

But he's trying to point out to people that a self-made view of your life sees everything as seized, like I went and took it, I got it, I earned it, I worked for it.

But a grace-made view of your life says, Yeah, it's still mine, but it's not from my own effort.

I received it.

God gave it to me.

And because he gave it to me, I'm not going to hold on it too tight-fisted either because I recognize that I'm not the one who earned it.

I can receive and I can also be open-handed in my generosity.

And we'll talk more about that in just a minute.

So Paul wraps up this whole idea with one question in 1 Corinthians 4 7.

He says, What do you have that you did not receive?

If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?

Right?

If everything is received, then boasting doesn't really make a lot of sense.

I mean, imagine opening up a birthday present, holding it up to everybody and saying, guys, look what I did.

Right?

No one's going to do that.

My kids might do that, but they're five, three, and one, right?

And so you don't want to be like a five, three, and one year old.

You can be grateful for a gift, but you can't be proud of a gift, right?

It's a category error.

It doesn't make any sense definitionally.

Right?

And if we get past wealth and opportunity and gifts and accomplishments and all the measurable ways that we look at through kind of an earthly lens on the grace that we've received and how our life is really a product of something not our own.

Of course, the greatest example of this is our salvation and a relationship with God.

Right, like we sang about in that second song, right?

Who is worthy?

I love that song because it tells the story of Revelation chapter 5 when it's the only time you ever see crying in heaven.

Revelation 5 · chapter mention

People are weeping because it's giving you heaven's perspective of Calvary.

And they're weeping because they see the Savior of the world dead.

And they're holding the sealed scroll that contains in it all the names of those who will be saved.

It represents salvation.

And they're looking around the room saying, if he's dead, who can open this up?

But it says they turned and they saw a lamb, the Lamb of God, soaked in blood, approaching, and all of heaven begins to erupt.

He is worthy.

He is worthy.

He is worthy, right?

In Ephesians chapter 2, Paul delivers this promise and says, It's by grace that you've been saved through faith.

Ephesians 2 · chapter mention

This is nothing of your own doing.

It is a gift of God that's not a result of work, so that anyone could boast.

We skip down to verse 10.

It says, For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.

Right?

So here's the truth I want you to cling to today.

You are made, just not self-made.

You are his workmanship, you are his masterpiece, you are a product of his grace in your life, and you were made before the foundation of the world with good works that were predestined for you so that you could advance his kingdom forward.

That's better than being self-made.

And when you recognize that, it changes how you live.

Because if you live this self-made life, you're going to live thinking that everything's on you.

But when you take on a grace-made view of your life, you realize, no, no, no, I'm blessed.

All this isn't from me.

I play a part in it, in the sense that I receive it and I try to be a good steward of it.

But Lord, if you'll bless me, then I'll bless others.

So practically it just changes the way we live.

And so I want to make this real practical today and talk about four benefits that come with living with a grace-made view of our life.

The first benefit is that a grace-made view of your life makes you grateful, not entitled.

We talked about the vineyards and the olive trees a minute ago.

Here's the next thing Moses says pertaining to them.

He says, When you eat and are full, take care lest you forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

I thought this was fascinating.

Think about when he's commanding the people to be careful.

Not when they're hungry, not before they prepare for prepare for battle.

Not in a really hard season of their life, but when they're full.

Right?

The image here is of you on a Saturday think you've been you've been out enjoying that cooler weather, but you've been doing a lot of yard work you've been neglecting because it's hot.

You come inside, there's a big dinner ready for you.

You sit down, you have one helping, you have a second helping, right?

And you eat the food, and you push the plate back, you lean back in your chair, you sit, you over to the living room, sit down in your big lazy boy, kick back that stand and turn on your college football and you watch your Tennessee Valls take care of business.

Alright?

The world is at rest, right?

Like things are as they should be.

And scripture's saying it's at that moment.

It's at that moment that you bless God.

Right?

And here's the lesson for us hungry people tend to pray, but fool people tend to forget.

When you're desperate, when things are falling apart, nobody has to encourage you to pray.

Right?

You're not asking when the next prayer meeting is, you're asking when you can schedule one.

Right?

Because you got things that got to get dealt with.

Right?

No one has to prompt you to get on your knees or seek after God because you need him.

But fullness, blessing, prosperity, these things have a way of erasing our memory of need.

And so Moses gives them a remedy.

Back, jump into chapter, eight.

He says, and you shall eat and be full, and then you shall bless the Lord your God for the land he has given you.

Think about this.

How many of you pray before you eat?

Alright, this isn't a this isn't a test.

There's no extra credit for raising your hand.

Just judgment if you don't.

I'm kidding.

Alright, so we've tried to help our kids pray before dinner.

It's a practice we have in our house, and usually they end up warring over who's going to get to say the prayer, and it's a nasty fight, and it just ends chaotically and eliminates the whole reason we're doing it in the first place.

But I guess they get half credit, right?

So it in the Jewish tradition, there is a blessing that's said before the meal.

It's a single line.

Um, but I thought this was fascinating.

When you look at scripture, the only prayer that's actually commanded is the prayer that comes after the meal.

Right?

In the Jewish tradition, it's called the Birkat Hamazon.

And it and it comes from this exact verse, and it's four blessings that you pray after the meal has concluded.

And you thank God for the food, you thank him for the land, you pray for Jerusalem, and you thank him for God's goodness.

You eat, you are filled, and then you bless the Lord your God.

And you remember him.

Right?

Because if we fail to remember, we will forget.

And God commands us to thank him at the exact mo, the exact moment that we're least likely to feel like we need him.

Now, sadly, that's exactly what Israel did.

A few hundred years later, the prophet Hosea, speaking on behalf of God, says this.

He says, When they had graze, they became full, they were filled, and their hearts were lifted up, therefore they forgot me.

Verbatim.

Exactly the warning Moses gave them.

Right?

If we fail to remember what God has done, we will forget him, our hearts will be lifted up, and we will become prideful, and it will lead to the end of the blessing.

Because after all, he's the source of it, anyways.

You see, when gratitude leaves, entitlement moves in.

Entitlement is what happens when you forget the giver but keep the gift.

Right?

And gratitude says, look what I was given.

But entitlement says, look what I'm owed, right?

When was the last time that your direct deposit paycheck hit your account and you called your boss to say thank you?

You don't do it, do you?

Why?

Because in the proper sense, you were entitled to the payment that you received.

There were terms and agreement you put in the work and they offered to pay you, and like it's a transaction.

Right?

But when we think about the gifts that God has given us, right, if we just assume that, yeah, I really am owe these things, we're not going to say thank you.

We're just going to act like we deserve them.

And then we're going to be totally confused when they disappear from our life, because after all, we deserve them, right?

So this is exactly why it's important for us not just to remember it, but to make sure we do what he commands parents to do, and grandparents in Deuteronomy chapter 6.

Deuteronomy 6 · chapter mention

He says, When your sons ask you in time to come, then you shall say to your son, We were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt, and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand.

Like we have a responsibility, parents, grandparents, those of you who just attend the church and see all these young kids running around.

Any opportunity you have, tell somebody about the good things God has done in your life.

What does this look like in our family?

Okay.

We go to the grocery store, we come home, we put the groceries in the pantry, we have our kids help us carry in the bags.

What do we tell them?

Hey, isn't God good that He gave us all these groceries?

But mom and Dad, you went and got the groceries.

Yeah, yeah, but God, God made it possible for these groceries to happen.

Right?

You know, there's people who don't have all these groceries, Morgan or Palmer, and and you know, we we have a responsibility to help those people, but but look, when you see that full pantry, I just want you to remember like God is good, isn't it?

He's given us a full house.

When we go on vacation, right?

Isn't it so good that we can spend time together?

Right?

I think sometimes we want to draw attention to the big things, but really what he's commanding us to do is remember God in the small things.

Because there are so many millions of little miracles, right, that we're surrounded with every single day that we just forget that God has been good to us and we are a blessed people, and we should act like it.

All right, here's the second benefit.

A grace-made view of your life makes you gracious, not judgmental.

In chapter nine, Moses gives Israel a second warning about what they'll say in their hearts.

He says, Do not say in your heart, It is because of my righteousness that the Lord has brought me in to possess the land.

Know therefore that the Lord your God is not giving you this good land to possess because of your righteousness, for you are a stubborn people.

Just call on it like he sees it.

So, chapter eight, he's addressing the pride that they might have in their ability.

But in chapter nine, he's addressing the pride that they would have about their own virtue.

Right?

Moses saw both of these coming.

He says, Look, on one level, you're going to be tempted to say that I'm strong enough to do this, but on the other side, you're going to say that I'm good enough, that I deserve for this to happen, because of my righteousness.

And what he's trying to establish is God isn't doing this because we deserved it.

In fact, I can't tell you why he's doing it at all, because we don't deserve it.

And if he's doing it, it's because of his own goodness directed towards us.

And notice what Moses is guarding against.

It's not just thinking too highly of ourselves, it's that we would also take this kind of view of our life and we would then look at other people around us and we would assess that our blessing proves that we're better than they are.

Jesus tells a story about this in Matthew 20.

A landowner hires workers for his vineyard at dawn and then nine and noon and three and five, and at the end of a day's work, he pays them all the same.

You've probably heard this story.

Who are the most offended people in the story?

Well, obviously the people who have been there all day, right?

Because they recognize that what they're paid is the same as somebody who hasn't put in the work of them, and Jesus is making it clear like, hey, this gift that you've been given, it all belongs to me.

Who are you to think you have any claim over it?

I will give out what I will give out, and I will give it out according to the way that I want to give it out.

And so, yes, I appreciate your hard work, but recognize that this is a gift.

Now, I think most of us have a tendency to make assumptions about other people's harvests, right?

When someone has less than we do, we just assume that they've obviously made some poor decisions or done some things along the way to end up in that place.

Um, and when someone has more than we do, we tend to assume they did something bad to get there because ain't no way they outworked us, right?

They've obviously cut a corner or done something wrong, right?

But both assumptions come from the same place.

It's a self-made view of our life where we see the harvest as a verdict on the person who's standing in it.

But a grace-made view of our life, recognizing that we have received every good thing that we have from God above, it just makes us charitable.

We stop looking down on people who have less than us, and we stop resenting people who have more than us.

We recognize that God blesses people differently and he does so in different seasons for different reasons.

And I can appreciate the blessing that God has done in somebody else's life.

And I can recognize and be grateful for the blessing he's done in my life.

Instead of worrying about everybody else, I can just say, God, what would you have me do?

I can live free.

Here's the third benefit a grace-made view of your life makes you grounded, not anxious.

One more thing that Moses is trying to address in them as they prepare to enter the promised land.

He says, If you say in your heart, these nations are greater than I, how can I dispossess them?

He's saying, You shall not be afraid of them, but you shall remember, again, we're getting back to remembrance, what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all of Egypt.

That's the other side, kind of the negative side of the self-made life, right?

When things are going well, like I am the man, right?

Like I am a king, I am a god amongst these mortals, right?

Look at me, make stuff happen.

But when things are not going well, right, and you're trying to explain or cover up or hide, because you're you realize that if I produce or present failure, then that's an indictment on me that I am a failure.

Right?

When we view our successes as relative to our virtue, then we live with this pressure, this full weight on us that if I'm winning, I'm I'm successful.

If I'm a failure, then I'm a failing, I'm a failure.

If I made it, I have to keep it.

If I build it, I have to hold it up.

And and I look around the room, I know what a lot of you guys do for work, and I can just say, like, I admire so many of you.

You're smarter than me and and and better than me and more disciplined than me, and you could outwork me in so many different areas.

But can I just tell you, honestly, that is a really exhausting way to live.

I'm not even sitting here today saying you can't do it.

Some of you are an example that you can do it.

Live with the weight of the world on your shoulders.

I'm just saying if you do that long enough, eventually there's cracks that are gonna start to form.

And you have been invited by Jesus into a different way of living that says, my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

That I don't have to worry about all of these things, that I can just be a steward of what's in front of me and allow the Lord to bless me as he sees fit.

And I'm not gonna judge my life and my standing with God based on what the harvest looks like in a particular moment.

I'm going to remember that it's not by my strength that all this has happened.

And when I'm standing before things that I don't know how I'm going to conquer, I'm going to realize that it wasn't my strength that got me here, anyways.

That the same strength that got me here is going to be the same strength that's enough for what's next.

And so Moses reaches back to a story from their time in the wilderness to try to make this point clear.

This is Deuteronomy 8.3, and it says, And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

Here's the thing about manna.

I want to give some context that this story might be new to you.

Of course, when they leave Egypt, one of the first questions everybody starts asking is, What are we going to eat?

My stomach's growling, I'm hungry, and there's a lot of us here, and we're in a desert.

And so they wake up one morning and there's bread all over the ground.

Right?

Describes as like this light, honey, sweet-tasting wafer.

Um, kind of like my grandma used to have at her house.

You know what I'm talking about?

Those little wafery cookies, right?

I don't think it had the icing, but it was a wafer.

And so when they see it, they do exactly the thing I would do, which is like, all right, buddy, we ought to build a team.

I need somebody collecting over here, somebody collecting over here.

You guys are on silo duty.

We need to store this stuff up while we can.

That way we've got something to eat tomorrow.

So what do they do?

They eat the food, they store the food, they wake up the next morning and it's completely rotten.

It's like got maggots in it, it's nasty, it stinks.

And they realize all this work they put in yesterday was in vain because the manna can't be saved.

And so they realized, oh, wait, we gotta live in this anxiety every day of wondering if we've had food tomorrow.

It just took them 40 years to realize that, oh, wait, we don't actually have to live anxious because God is faithful.

It took a long time for them to get that lesson.

But but what God was trying to instruct them was, right, and this is what I love about Deuteronomy 8.16, he's trying to help them make sense of the season that they've just come out of.

And he says, to do, he did this to do you good in the end.

Right?

He's teaching you lessons that you have to learn in the empty years because they're the only things that's going to keep you grounded in the full years.

Right.

Centuries later, Jesus is out in the wilderness, he's gone 40 days without food, and the devil comes tempting and says, Hey, why don't you turn those stones in front of you into bread?

And what does Jesus say?

He says, It is written that man shall not live by bread alone, that by every word that comes through the mouth of God.

He's quoting Moses.

Here's the difference between Jesus and us, though.

If we could turn rocks into bread, we would.

We didn't have that, we don't have that power.

But Jesus shows that even with that power, it's better to not be self-made.

It's better to live dependent on God.

Jesus refused to take on an independent way of living and instead said, In everything, I'll be submitted to the Father.

Here's the last benefit.

A grace-made view of your life makes you generous, not tight-fisted.

I'm gonna go all the way back to the very first verse that we talked about today.

God is clear, he says that you will be given wealth, but for what end?

That he would confirm his covenant.

I mean, I think about just how much blessing is all around us.

Right?

A lot of us in this room, you look at your life, and you could not have imagined when you were a kid that you would end up in the place that you've ended up.

The good things that God has given to you over the course of your life.

But you can look back, and maybe there's a few milestone moments where you think, man, I didn't see it then, but but the goodness of God has followed me as long as I've been alive.

Why did he do that?

Not because he had to, but because he wanted you to recognize and know that he loves you.

He wanted to confirm some things to you.

But not just so you could build bigger houses or build bigger barns or have more than the person next to you, but so that you could take this abundant blessing, that you could be a blessing to those around you.

Right?

When God gives, he always gives with purposes beyond ourselves.

And Moses makes it practical, skipping ahead to chapter 15 of Deuteronomy.

He says, Don't harden your heart and shut your hand against your poor brother, but but open your hand to him.

Literally, he's saying, Don't be tight-fisted, don't be like this.

You see, the thing about living life like this is you can't be generous.

But you know what else you can't do?

You can't receive either.

We are called to live with a freedom.

Right?

It's not that the money is the root of all evil, you've heard this talked about.

It's the love of money, it's it's feeling like I've got to capture as much of it as I can.

Because if I don't get it, then I'm going to miss out on something or I'm going to not live the full life.

It's just saying, you know what?

I'm going to let all that go.

God, whatever you bring me, if you bring me a lot, thank you, Jesus.

I don't deserve it.

Let me share it with somebody else.

We're going to talk more about generosity in the coming weeks, but I think the heart of what God is trying to get us to is seen in 2 Corinthians 9, 7.

It says, each one of us must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.

This is about rules and statutes and what you should and shouldn't do, and guess what?

What you have with your stuff?

No one else gets to decide what you get to do with it.

Right?

But it's about living with a grace-made view of our life to say, God, if you've given it to me, what would you have me do with it?

I don't answer to any of these other people, but since you're the giver, what would you have me do?

You see the difference?

What you've received, you can release.

Now, years after Moses preaches those sermons, Joshua gathers his plate, his people at a place called Shechem.

This time I want to invite the ushers, if you guys want to begin passing the plates, we're going to celebrate the Lord's Supper as we close today's service, but I'll let them pass that out while we're moving through this last point.

Years after Moses preaches those sermons, Joshua gathers the people at a place called Shechem.

And he's speaking to the same generation that Moses spoke to before they entered the promised land.

Only now they're settled, and they're living in the cities, and they're eating from the vineyards, and they're enjoying all the things that God promised to give them.

And Joshua stands up and he speaks for God to the people, and he says, I gave you a land on which you had not labored and cities you had not built, and you dwell in them.

You eat the fruit of the vineyards and the olive orchards that you did not plant.

Right, Deuteronomy 6 says the promise, Joshua 24, is God giving the receipt.

I did the things that I said that I would do for you.

And then Joshua follows up this with this statement.

Says, now therefore, right, conjunction, junction, tell me your function.

Fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness.

Choose this day whom you will serve.

As for me in my house, we're gonna serve the Lord.

Right?

In other words, in light of everything that you've been given, now that your eyes have been illuminated to this loving, good, generous, and faithful God that we serve, you have a decision to make.

Will you respond to the gift with gratitude and humility and generosity and a willingness to give your life back to him?

Or will you look at all that's taken place around you, forget the giver, and say, by my own strength, I made this happen and I'll do with it what I want to.

No one gets to decide that for you.

Right?

You have to make that decision.

And it's not even a decision that you make one time, it's a decision that you have to make every single day.

Every morning, His mercies are new every morning, right?

Every morning I wake up and I've been given another opportunity, another gift, another grace from God, and I have to decide what am I gonna do with it?

As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

What would you choose?

Now, as we close today, I want to do one last act together that I think perfectly encapsulates what we're talking about, about this life that we've truly inherited, and that is the Lord's Supper.

Reminding us that the very greatest thing in our life, right, our relationship with God, wasn't because we made our way back up to Him, it's because what we did is He came down to us.

And he loved us and He served us and He taught us.

And ultimately He died on our behalf that we might know Him.

And so on the night before Jesus is crucified, Mike, if I can get one of those.

Thank you.

On the night before Jesus is crucified, he meets with his disciples, and he holds up the bread at the table, and he says, This is my body broken for you.

This represents new life.

This represents a consequence that really you should be doing.

But this is my gift to you.

That it would be broken on your behalf so you don't have to pay that penalty.

Take and eat.

Can we take the bread together?

And then he would have held up the cup and said, This wine, it's not just wine.

This represents my blood shed for you.

The new covenant that I make with you, the new promise that I give you, it's sealed by this.

And not only will I give you new life here on earth, but this is my promise that when all of this passes away, you'll have life with me forevermore.

So we take and drink to the gift of God.

I leave you with a choice today.

Whom will you serve?

As we spend some time in worship, I would invite you just to spend some time reflecting on the goodness of God in your life.

That's one of the most worshipful things that we can do.

It's just to be mindful of him and the things that he's done.

And so as we sing and as we pray, I hope that your heart would be filled with gratitude.

And this morning, as we sing, if there's anything you'd like us to pray with you about pertaining to this message or not pertaining to this issue, we're gonna have prayer partners down in front on this side of the sanctuary.

And on this side of the sanctuary, we'll have kind of an open altar where you can spend some alone time with God.

But however you choose to come forward, if that's what you'd like to do, we we invite you at this time.

I'm gonna pray for us, and then we're gonna sing.

Heavenly Father, we just thank you for the gift of your son.

We thank you for the gift of salvation and new life that we have in you.

My prayer for this church, Lord, is that you would never let us be found ungrateful.

God, that you would open our eyes to the goodness of God that surrounds us each and every day.

And as we take in your goodness and your power and your infinitely involved specificity to which you work in our lives and in ways that we we don't always perceive.

Lord, I pray that as our eyes are open to that, that anxiety would fall away, that fear would fall away, that doubt and self-worth issues, that those would fall away.

Like that in your presence, Lord, as we recognize who you are and what you've done for us, that we would recognize that the safest place to be is with you.

And your invitation to us this morning is just to come.

And so, Lord, we come.

Holy Spirit, move and do your work amongst us today.

And accomplish the work for which this word was sent.

We thank you in Jesus' mighty name.

Amen.

We hope you were encouraged and challenged by today's message.

Again, to learn more about Gateway Franklin Church, find us online at gatewayfranklin.com.

Thanks for joining us today.