Speaker 1 0:43

Well, it's great to be with you all today. If you're with us virtually in line, welcome as well. We are ready when you're ready. And we got some comfortable spaces for everyone to join us today. We're going to hop right in we're in the middle of a , not even the middle of the beginning, the very beginning of a conversation through the book of Matthew in the new Testament. So of your Bibles, we're going to be Matthew chapter two. If you have this little journal that we made up, we're on page 25. And if you're ever confused where you're are , you want to catch up with us if you're new with us and you want to hop in, it has the dates of each week and the topic . So you can go back or you can go ahead and use that as a resource. So want to go ahead and get you guys there today. The title you can see there is treasure kids in persecution, and I would actually add something as I went through this last week. You can maybe even paranthetically put underneath persecution, you can put conviction. We're going to tag that one a little bit. I think that's something that we can unpack. So last week we ended in around verse 11 or so, and Matthew chapter two, where we just finished and the match I had just showed up and met this baby toddler Jesus, and had this interaction that literally we talked about how they were transformed. They had a transformation experience because they met Jesus and they, we ended up showing actually a video of a student recently who had a similar encounter and went off to camp and had their first Jesus experience. And it transformed just even their daily routine and who they are just even as a student. And so we get to see this great opportunity for life transformation when we actually have an interaction where we meet Jesus. And so that's really who we are as a church. That's what we're all about. We're all about here in our mission, going from this uncharged or far from Jesus or far from God to being a whole hearted follower and to see transformation. And we talk about that through our vision statement, through pursuing God. And then, so we can have an interaction. We can have a meetup with him and building community where we can serve together. We can have fun. We can have friends, we can follow Jesus and learn something new and unleash compassion. That's the whole point. That's the whole point why we gather as a faith community, we don't just kinda come here and try to get new information and sing some songs and some theology and some doctrine and feel good. And what we do is we want all of those things to actually translate into transformation, a transformation story in our own lives at every moment. That's what we're really excited here at north gate. So for those of you who are new, my name's Larry, I'm the lead pastor here, and it's so good to have you. And like I said, we're going on this journey through Matthew next week, we're actually going to finish chapter two, we're flying. It's going to be so great. Really looking forward to next week. We're going to unpack a lot about king Herod, who maybe isn't somebody that you know that much about, but that's really the heartbeat of everything that we do is when we lift up Jesus, we want to show everyone who comes in has an encounter here. That he's actually the solution for every problem that we could get to a place that we can understand. Jesus is actually the solution for every problem that we have. He's the one who defies our problems. And he gives us this definition of what true joy is and how we can live and be a people that walk around that are full of joy. And that's the power of transformation that we're talking about. And so we ended up last week in chapter two, verse 11, we'll have a brief re-look at this. It says, this is when they, this is the magic or the Wiseman . They saw the star. They rejoiced exceedingly with great joy. Again, that's the happiest lime you see, I think together rejoiced, exceedingly with great joy. And after they came into the house, they saw the child with his mother, Mary and they fell down and they worshiped him. This word right here, isn't translated any differently than worshiped . It's not worshiped . Like when we come here, we sing songs. It's literally like they fell on their face and saw this baby toddler child as a worship , as a deity, as a king, then they opened up their treasures and presented him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. And after being warned by God, in a dream not to return to Herod, and we'll talk more about him next week, as we wrap this up, the magic I left for their own country. By another way, this was by another way that they came in one way. And there was a transformation that happened that caused them to fall down, bow down. They were full of joy. They gave gifts and they went a different direction than what they had been asked to do. And so just to highlight again, the kind of transformation that we're about here, I want to show you another transformation story.

Speaker 2 5:36

Um , so before I started following Jesus, I , uh , I noticed this kind of like cycle of just being in relationships, like the super habitual, like I would this date to date to date , like I would be in a two year relationship and break up and be in another two year relationship. And this probably started maybe like when I was like 15. So that was kind of like my life from like 15 til about yeah, 25. So during that time, I never really gave myself a break from just being by myself though . I think when I started getting into relationship, I was always looking for that other person to make me feel like I had worth make me feel like I have a purpose. And like that I am super love , make me feel full when really that was like, at the end of the day, when that person is gone, you have no substance. You have no, you have no idea of who you are. Um, but yeah, that was like my huge motivation of like, I'm gonna be with this person. I'm going to help them grow that I'm going to find so much fulfillment in that. And that's what my, my drive was When I became a follower of Jesus. I had just gotten out of a relationship and , um, that's what prompted me to go to church. And so during that time, I was like, you know, I'd just gotten out of a relationship and I'm like, okay, I'm not going to dig for a year. I'm looking to get myself a year. And I started following Jesus. And I like started to learn about just truths about who Jesus is and how he created me and that he has a plan for me. And that, you know, like my hope was completely placed in other things. And like , um, you know, just things that weren't going to fulfill me as a person and really give me that satisfaction of what it looked like to live a purposeful life. God has like really redeemed my life. Like completely. Like I can compare it back to like two years ago. Like I've had certain opportunities and certain blessings that I completely missed. Everything kind of hit the fan. And so now that I'm like following Jesus and I get to like, know, seek his guidance before I do anything on my own, I've seen him give me the same opportunities in a different light. And now I have like a complete change of heart and like, God , what do you want me to do with this? How do you want me to pursue this? And I have these huge grand ideas, but at the end of the day, I'm like, if this is God's will, then he'll have it before me. And I've even come to terms with like, if God wants me to be single for like the rest of my life and just pursue other people and pursue him and really be a disciple of God , then you know, then I'm going to accept that like where I am right now. And like, oh my God, I can't wait to get married. Or like, I want to have kids and like, be like a bomb wife. Right. And so , um, I've even given that up to God, like it's really his plan and I just completely faithful that he's faithful and like that he just loves me more than I could have ever wanted somebody else to love.

Speaker 1 8:36

That's great. Yeah. And, and who doesn't want to be a bomb wife, right? That's legit. I'm so into that, but that's, that's exactly who we are. And those are the type of things that we see. And we knew witness all throughout scripture of these moments and interactions. When you truly experience who Jesus is, there's this thing that happens. And last week we kind of unveiled for this next phase or this season as a church that we want to be people that are for , you're seeing a lot of people rocking the four stuff. And that's exactly what we're here for last week. We saw a story of a student. We are for students. We are for families. We are for reengaging and redeeming relationships that you have that are broken we're for your marriage. We're for your grief or for your celebrations. We are people that are for you, right? And we're for the community at large. And over the next couple of months, we're going to unpack and talk about how we get to actually live that out. Because we are people that experienced interaction with Jesus and has transformed us. And therefore we get to go out and share that with others and let them know that God has for you, that he's not against you, that he didn't come here to condemn you, but to save you and to care for you and give you hope and love and grace. And so we're a people that are for that rather than, I mean, quite honestly, a lot of you guys know there's more discussion about what we're for, not right, what we're not for, but we want to be a people that is for everyone around us. And so you can put your own stamp on what four means, and that just know that you sitting here today, you know, even in your singleness, we're for you in any circumstance, we are for you. So treasure kids and persecution. There's a couple of things we're going to pull out. This is a small little spot of scripture. I'm going to go and hop in at verse 11. And we're going to just take one more peek out of this. And there's a couple of things we're going to pull out. And then that's going to kind of wrap it all up with this treasurer kids , persecution paranthetically then conviction. And then next week, like I said, we'll do king Herod. So it says after they came verse 11, they came into the house. They saw the child with his mother, Mary, they fell down, they worshiped him. Like we just said, then they opened up their , what does this say? Treasures? And they presented him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. So now here's what just happened. They just met Jesus and now track this. Then they open up their treasures to him. So here's the first thing that I'm pulling out of this. It's really simple. You want to write this one down our treasures, follow our faith, our treasures follow our faith essentially puts your money where your mouth is. Right. I've talked to a lot of pastors at a lot of churches and they go, dude, I don't want to talk to my church about money and it's embarrassing or it's weird, or it's awkward. And I say, listen, your treasure is my treasure. Our treasure is actually connected to our discipleship, this transformation experience of following and understanding what our faith is connected with. And so if I don't talk to you about money or we don't talk regularly as a church and even celebrate the goodness of this, we wouldn't be discipling you. I wouldn't be discipling you. Well, if I didn't talk about your treasure, because later Jesus is going to say this fascinating thing, this radical thing, he's going to say, so where your treasure is there, your heart is also, so I want to get to your heart. If I want to get to that, if I want to really get to what you love, right? We would take a look at where we use our treasure, what we really worship and disciple you to being the image of Jesus. We've got to get to our money. We see this just right here at this scripture, you continually see this in the new Testament. Even see parts of this in the old Testament. I got to tell some of you, this is just the honest talk that your money has not followed your faith at all. It's just the truth. We're going to sit here and have a conversation about a transformation experience and how we see that our treasures follow our faith. There's some of you in here that your money just hasn't followed your faith at all. Now I'm not talking to you if you're just exploring Christianity or you're just checking out this following Jesus thing, you're just here. You're wondering, I'm not talking to you for reals . I'm not having that conversation with you. I want you to be able to explore this who I'm talking to is people who say they love Jesus. They follow Jesus, Mike, myself, your money needs to come along with that loving and following Jesus. Meaning we as a church, we do ministry. There's all kinds of different ministries we do. And it costs money to do ministry and all the way through the new Testament. You see this, you see this in acts where the church is constantly giving their money to other churches, to be able to continue to go and to do ministries and throughout Paul's letter in the new Testament he talks about and they collect money to do this because he says, you guys, we need to pay for ministry. We need to pay to take care of our students and the other missionaries that we're supporting and our kids and making a safe, comfortable place for new people to come in and experience what it's like to be a grace filled community because it takes money to do that. And so Paul has this whole theology and second Corinthians eight and nine. So if you wanted to go look at that on your own, later in second Corinthians eight, nine, he lays out and unpacks these things. And he's saying, listen to here . He literally says this in chapter eight. It says, but since you Excel in everything in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in complete earnestness and in love, we have kin kindled into you. See that you also Excel in this grace of giving. I am not commanding you, but I want to test the sincerity of your love by comparing it with the earnestness of others. That's like a heavy statement right there, but it's right to the point for us, he's saying, Hey, you're excelling. And all these things, you're a new follower of the way of Jesus. And you're in faith. You have faith in speech and you have knowledge about who God is and a complete earnestness. And you love this love. That's been kindled in you. You see that also, but do this. You need to Excel in this area of the grace of giving. And again, it's not this command. This is what you have to give, right? And you can read that even in those other chapters, it talks about give us a cheerful giver and you become cheerful by doing it. Cause it then over time begins to feel good because you're participating in seeing these transformation stories. It says, but what I want to do is I want to test the sincerity of your love. I want to test essentially what he's saying right here is our treasures is follow. Our faith is yours. That's what he's asking right now is yours right now, following this so quickly not to sit on this for really much longer at all. What are some really simple ways that you can do that? One is just make a plan and start and understand and say , this is actually a part of my faith. This is a part of seeing and participating in a faith community to see ministry being done, cause a cost to do those things. One of the simplest ways you can do this and we've talked about this past and if you've been through some of our own like growth tracks , starting point stuff, you've seen those thing called a generosity rockstar. It's really simple. We asked for people to be a generosity rockstar as like a great first step and to be a generosity rockstar. And we send people a little pins that say, congratulations, your generosity. Rockstar is just for planning for ministry. We say, Hey, you're going to commit to making a reoccurring online gift . So we know it's coming in to do this ministry of $20 a week, super low, simple. And that's going to cover your dollar club and all of the 16 different mission organizations that we support here locally and globally things like our children's ministry, student ministry is just what it costs to do ministry. And so maybe for some of you, that's a first great step to say, Hey, my treasure is going to follow my faith. For some of you, your generosity rockstar , isn't, you know , $20 a week. It's a hundred dollars a week or whatever that looks like as you're a cheerful giver. And again, I encourage you to go to second Corinthians. You can write that down in second Corinthians chapters, eight and nine. I think Paul lays it down really well for us. And we will see as we continue to go out through Matthew, how Jesus uses money to get at the heart of things, because he knows that something that weighs heavy on us and how we look at it and how we use it and how we see it. So first thing we pulled out was our treasure follows our faith. Let's continue on. So verse 13, it's jumped back into Matthew. Now when they had gone, this is the magic I behold an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, get up, take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt and stay there until I tell you for Herod is going to search for the child and to kill him. What's the next thing I would pull over this. And this would be talking about treasure and I want to talk about kids. So this thing right here is, is , uh , this isn't an uncommon thing. Now that Joseph exists is experiencing where he's had an interaction or a dream or an angel come and spoke to him. We saw that in chapter one at the end there, or at the beginning of chapter two, where he had this interaction and he was obedient to who God was and what he was asking him to do with Jesus. And so now he has this dream says, get up, take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt. So right off the bat, you would sit there and just as a human connection, you would go, what is he thinking about? Like, what is he feeling? And what has changed? The thing that has changed is it's not him in , in Mary anymore. He has a what a kid, right? How many of you guys have kids? Okay. Handful of it . You're not excited about it was an interesting decision. I wasn't totally voting for it, but it happened. So you know, that kids change everything, right? Like everything like where you vacation, what you eat, like how much of it you eat, right? What you can afford, you all these things. And that's, this is what's happening right now is we're actually getting a glimpse into the life of Joseph in this moment. And we don't get much else beyond this, except for when we wrap up next week of Joseph in what his legacy is, we don't get other stories of Joseph. We get his mom, Mary. She participates in through the rest of Jesus's life, but we don't know a lot of people think that in shortly after these times, he's going to end up passing away after Jesus was a teenager or sometime around then, because we just lose track of him. There's nothing that talks about him. But when we get a glimpse into his to see that he is challenged to do something, and then he does it because it's like, what matters. And so I think we can pull out of here is that when we have kids and we collectively, as a faith community, have kids that we needed to do whatever it takes to care for our kids. So what does that look like? It looks like a whole bunch of different things. Some of you guys maybe have been here and experienced when we do baby dedications or child dedications, where we're dedicating them. And then we give a charge to these parents and say, are you going to care for this kid? Are you going to bring them up in a loving relationship and teach them about who God is and what grace is and what hope is, and really what transformation is. And even honestly, we've even had those conversations and let them see and experience your own struggle. So they know how to deal with that struggle and where they can go to and find an anchor in their life in . Then if you've been here, we do this really sneaky thing. We say, Hey, it takes a village or a church to raise a kid. And so then we do the sneaky thing and we charge everybody else here. And we say, Hey, do you, do you commit to praying for coming alongside of caring for these families, lifting them up, coming alongside of them and their celebration and also their difficulties and their trials and tribulations, and even letting our treasure follow our faith . So we can do killer children's ministries and student ministries and have these experiences where they're discovering their identity. And most of the time we trick you all into saying I do, right? You're like , there's just what we do. We just say I do. Okay. We did it right. But what are some other things that we can do? We're just as individuals, I want to tell you right now, one of the most simple things that you can do is pray for your kids. You can pray for your kids. You can just lift them up in prayer. And maybe you just start like for the first time and be like, God, I don't even know what to say right now, but I'm praying for my kid. He knows you're coming alongside of him and a really special experience as even, you know, when you're around your kid, you don't have to like, let them know. You're praying for them . Cause it's like awkward. And I'm like, what are you doing? Like a kid loves it. You know? Like a kid runs it in the morning and they want to like snuggle. So they hop in the bed and then you could be like, oh, I'll use like one of my kids example like, oh, I'll see, Hey, do you want me to pray for you? Can we pray for you? They're all giddy about it. They're like, yeah , that's the age. But when they're like teenagers, so like I'll use my Malakai or my Maddy . And I'm like, Hey, you want to pray for me? They're going to be like weird. Right? So it changes. So you, don't got to tell them , you can just do some weird, like little touching things like, ah , right. Or just when you're in the car, he'd be like, Lord help him . Right. You can do those things. But praying for them, lifting all of these things up towards them and for them, whether they know it and experience it or not, that's so important. What else can we do for our kids? We can sacrifice for them . This is going to be a sacrifice because Joseph's going to be going like, wait, you want me to take, go where? Like he had a carpentry business. I don't know what he mean , Egypt. We're going to flee to , he was already in a town where his namesake had come from. But now he's being asked to flee that area and go, because now someone is threatening to kill them. We got to go in the witness protection program here. And how long is that going to be? Right. Um , this experience we learn right here is that we got to sacrifice and many of you have done this, our own needs. And once for our kids and sacrifice, quite frankly, doesn't necessarily mean working more to provide something for them, right? We can get stuck in this where we're just gonna work harder and I'm working all the time. You know, cause dad or mom's going to take care of you. So you can have this house over your head and all those different things. We can figure it out. It's showing up in sacrificing to spend time with them because you were given this gift. You were given this responsibility with a child that God's saying, Hey, take care of this child and raise them in these ways. Then the last one, and just spend time with them to spend time with them, like take them on a car ride and let them do the windshield conversation where they don't get to stare at you because it feels awkward, right. To sit down and they can just talk about their day and they can just do their thing. And you can have these conversations too , or sit down with them the end of the day and actually show interest in what they're doing or what they're discovering. Right. Not to discover because you want to correct them or you want to manage them and make sure, but just like who they're becoming, like how it's , it's really intense. You can go really deep and just ask like, how's your heart? What does that mean? And explain them, how's your soul? What do you mean? Explain that to your kids . Spend those times with them. So moving on real fast. So we have this happen. He says, you need to go. So Joseph got up and this is actually showing us, this is where he's saying, I got a kid. Now I got to do these things. He got up and took his child and his mother because that's what he has to do. Now. He has this responsibility of a child of whatever it takes. And the Well's still night . They left for Egypt, leaving everything that he had saying , I got to start over this. Isn't just about me. This is about a kid. Now this is about what I'm being asked to do. And so he left in the middle of the night for Egypt and he stayed there until the death of Herod. This happens so that there had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet Hosea, which was the prophet that we're talking about here would be fulfilled, which was out of Egypt. I called my son now in the original prophecy here in Hosea. It was , uh , Israel. But Jesus is the new Israel are representing this larger group of people, which includes Gentiles and us and everyone. And so we see that he actually in action did this. This friends is Joseph's legacy. We don't hear much about him . And what we see right here ultimately is that he has a conviction. There is a persecution that's going to be going on and we'll dig into that the rest of the way next week. But there is a conviction that is going on in him that causes him to do these things. And what is a conviction? I think that conviction simply is defined like this. A conviction conviction is deeply held belief, a deeply held belief that guides your life and opinion is something that we argue over a conviction is something that you will live and die for. We argue about opinions all the time. Should I go? Is Egypt a good place? You know, am I going to get what I need there? Is it really just about this other thing, but a conviction. It's a deeply held belief that will actually guide your life. And so what's Joseph's conviction here is that God's ways are better. His conviction. His moment is that God's ways are better. You're telling me to do this thing. I don't even understand it, but your ways are better. I do understand that. And you've shown your faithfulness already to me, into my family and out of obedience and a conviction. This deeply held belief. I'm going to actually let you God guide my life and I'm going to take steps. And so maybe some of us here today are going to experience an opportunity to take steps into God's better ways. And actually hang on to that conviction. I think simply acting it out, could be in this statement that my responsibility is to obey God and leave all the consequences to him. That's what Joseph did. His responsibility was just to obey God and say , I'm going to let you guide my life right here, but I'm going to leave all the consequences of what this means to you. Cause I surrender all. I don't have anything left. I don't completely understand this, but I've had a transformational experience because of what you've done in my life and what I can see for the future. There is a really cool painting from a guy named Brighton . Riviere it's from 1892. I'm going to put up on the screen right here. Um, 1892, this is an oil painting and that's pretty famous. And this is depicting , um, Daniel and the lion's den. And there's lots of these types of stories throughout scripture. You see? And so if you look at it really closely, you see Daniel sitting there and the lion, Dan , you see the lions, you see some bones on the ground, but where is Daniel looking? What is he not looking at the lions, right? He's not looking at the lions. This is a depiction of Daniel, looking up to God and saying, Hey, my conviction is, I believe that your ways are better. Where many times friends isn't this . So yes . Where , what would we be doing? We'd be staring at all the lions that are in front of us. And many of us are even experiencing those things right now, where we're just stuck and we can't move to the next thing. And we can't have that next encounter by pursuing God, we can't get into community. We can't allow our treasure to follow our faith. We can't care for the people that are around us because we're sitting there staring all these crazy lions and then we're getting stirred up and upset about it. And then we get opinions about the lions, right? But not a deeply held faith and belief in who God is and what he has for us. And so may we friends experience a transformative moment this week as we look to God and we pursue him and he shows us what discipleship is all about as we live it out, would you stand and worship with us.