Well, it's the first Sunday of Advent.
It's one of my favorite times of year as Christmas comes and we get to light.
At my church, when I grew up, we had that wreath, and you had the four candles around the side outside and the one candle in the middle, and we had those Advent candles, and that's the season that we're in now.
Let me read that last verse that Sam read to us.
O house of Jacob, come.
Let us walk in the light of the Lord.
You think about 2,000 years ago, why do we need the light of the Lord?
Why do they need it?
They were a nation who were under the rule of the Romans.
They had lost their great position as a great nation among nations.
And the Israelites wanted freedom and they wanted a ruler to come.
They wanted God to send his Son who would be the king again for Israel.
But why today?
Why do we need Advent today?
Why do we need light today?
Maybe for you, you've got family members who are gone astray.
Maybe this year you've lost a loved one.
Maybe you've got a child who's not in the fold.
Maybe you've got illness in your family, or maybe you've got financial trouble or a job you've lost.
And you're looking for something beyond what you can do yourself.
We're looking for hope beyond what we can do ourselves.
That's the season of Advent.
Well, it used to be, I love that Brian introduced me, made me cry a little bit or a lot.
We've got a long history, said 15 years.
We used to get fat in the fall.
So we eat a lot of food, you know, it's football season, we eat a lot of food, then Thanksgiving would come and we'd eat more food, and then Christmas would come and we'd eat more food.
And like my brother said, we'd look like we were had uh we were pregnant women by the end of the fall.
And so we thought, let's go for a run uh every Saturday and train for some kind of a half marathon.
So we trained for a half marathon in March or April, and Saturday mornings we go for an hour to an hour and a half run to train for that.
And it became a time where he and I could share life.
We talk about careers and family and stuff going on.
And then it became a time like some of you do with your friends, where it was a time of accountability.
I would share a little bit of what was going on in my life and the things that I was doing I shouldn't be doing and the things I shouldn't be doing that I was doing.
And it was it was a every Saturday ritual.
Hey Brian, man, can you believe I did this this week?
Or can you believe I didn't do this this week?
Or how mean I was to my family or my wife or whatever.
And I would feel like Brian understood me and he would encourage me, and I'd go back and I'd resolve that this week is gonna be better.
And so by the time I got done with my run, I felt great.
And I'd beat my chest and say, I'm a new man, I'm forgiven, I'm ready to go forward and conquer the week.
And usually by Monday or maybe Sunday or maybe Saturday, even, I'd fail.
Like I would fail every week, even though I'd resolved to do the right thing that week.
And accountability really didn't do it.
That my desire, my hope, my attempt to control my behavior didn't work.
Until finally he and I one day woke up and we started saying, We live with so much that God has done for us.
This great God of the universe, the creator of all things, he has given us our families, our wives, our kids, our houses, our community.
Why don't we spend time on this run giving him thanks?
Basically praising him for what he's done.
Let's look to the good things he's done for us.
We quit focusing on the things, the behaviors we were trying to quit, or the behaviors we were trying to start doing, and we began to focus on the God who gave us so much.
And what's amazing is in that change of focus, the behavior started changing.
It was like when we let go of the desire or the need to have control of our little world, we gave freedom to God to come and work in us and through us to change our little world.
And this desire for control is something you see.
I don't know if y'all have watched this new Netflix series, The Crown.
Have y'all seen that?
Anybody?
Maybe some of y'all binge it.
I mean, I think it's fantastic.
In the second episode, Anthony Eden is a minister of parliament.
And he thinks Churchill is old and decrepit and is really bad for the nation and bad for the party.
So he goes to King George VI and says, George, please help us.
Please help us convince Churchill to step down, to step aside.
And George in his wisdom says to him, the PM, meaning the Prime Minister, the PM will step down in time.
Until then, I do have the right to be consulted, to encourage, to warn.
It is better to be patient and get what you desire in the right time than have a high office thrust upon you when you're not ready.
I speak from personal experience.
And George is telling this Anthony Eden, you want to control the situation.
You want to craft how the running of our government's going to go.
Really, you want to be in control.
And until you let go of that and let the right thing happen at the right time, it will fail.
Just like my attempt to control my behavior failed.
And if we go back to the beginning of time, God created the garden of Eden.
And in it he had Adam and Eve and all these great things that we could eat and all these animals and trees and just this perfect garden.
And he said one thing to not do don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
And not only that, don't even touch it.
It's like God saying, don't touch that with a 10-foot pole.
That desire to know between good and evil, that desire to have knowledge and have wisdom is something that you are going to want, but it will kill you.
And the serpent slithers up to Eve and says, Why not?
If you eat that from that tree, you'll know good and evil, and you will be like God.
You will be like God.
You can control your little world and your domain.
It's what we do when we set up frameworks for comparing ourselves to other people and our hierarchies and our social order and our society and how we have rules of engagement with other people so that we can control our situation and our life so we can be like God.
It's why we set up rules for how to deal with addictions and how to deal with hard people and hard children and how to come out from financial bondage because we want to have control of our situation.
Solomon was a very wise man, as you know.
And in Ecclesiastes, he wrote, I said in my heart, I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me.
And my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge, and I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly.
I perceive that this also is but a striving after wind.
For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
Solomon would go on to say, all this striving for knowledge and wisdom and control, it's meaningless.
Without Christ, under the sun, it's meaningless.
And I want to ask you today, what are you trying to control in your life?
What are you trying to get a grip on?
That your attempt to control is failing.
And our attempt to control is bringing death to that situation.
Well, this is my swan song, as Brian mentioned.
I'm going to be done being an elder in five weeks.
And I'm happy because I can come to church and just enjoy it and not worry about it.
But I'm also sad because I've loved it.
It's been a great experience for me and for my family.
But this, uh, when when Russ and I talked about this being the last opportunity I have to come and talk to you, I wanted to share some things with you that I think are very, very important for our church and for me and for my family and for you as well.
Things that I think that must go on should this church continue to do what God's called us to do and who to be.
What do I need to read?
What do I need to do?
This church is preaching Jesus.
You'll hear us talk a lot about law, gospel, and grace, and you'll hear us talk a lot about all these theological terms, but we're preaching Christ.
I don't mean some right-wing evangelical Jesus Christian people.
What I mean by that is simply Jesus Himself, the Son of God, that here is God, as I mentioned, creator of the universe, and he sends his son Jesus to come and live a perfect life on earth.
Everything that we didn't do right, he did right.
But then he went and went to the cross and took all the stuff that we did wrong and took it to the cross and paid that debt on our behalf.
And then gave us that perfect life.
Adopted into his family.
And we preach that that while the world is dark and while it seems hopeless, Russ preaches Jesus every week.
In him is our hope.
In him is the light that Isaiah was writing about.
He is the water that if we drink from, we'll never go thirsty again.
He is the bread that brings us life.
In the garden, he was the tree of life.
Jesus is the answer.
The second thing is we are gonna, some of us love theology, and we're gonna want to talk theology, and we're gonna want to say that this church is theologically better than some other church, that we're not Baptists, and we're not Methodists, and we're not episcopals, we're not Lutherans, we're not Presbyterian, whatever.
We've got this supreme perfect theology that we're preaching law, gospel, it's not law, gospel, law, it's not law.
It's just, and I want to tell you, we are gonna be tempted to hang our hat on some theology in this church.
But again, that's not the answer.
Because theology can become simply head knowledge for us.
And theology can try to create a formula for our lives that says, if you believe this way, if you believe this theological perspective, then your life will have meaning and purpose and value.
But we know, I know from my first point, Jesus is the answer.
I want worth, I want value, I want life, I want hope, I want joy.
That is found in Christ, not in some theological perspective.
So often we can hear and we can think, if I'll just remember the gospel, if I'll remember grace, and that can turn into if I remember this theological position, and that's not what we mean by that.
What we mean is simply there is a God on the other side of that equation who loves us so much that he gave us Jesus.
That when we hear the word grace, when we hear the talk about the gospel, what we mean by that is here is God's love poured out for us.
Here is Jesus given for us.
Here is our hope given by the God of the universe.
So theology is not the answer.
The third thing I'm gonna leave with you, and this is my final point, is that we will want control.
I will want control, and you will want control.
But Jesus is what we need.
Okay?
So what does that mean?
What are you talking about?
You're gonna wake up one day, or I'm gonna wake up one day, and I'm gonna have a problem.
And I'm gonna want an answer.
I'm gonna have a daughter who's crazy, and I'm gonna want to come to Russ and say, Russ, when you preach on Sunday morning, preach something that my daughter will hear that she will go and do the right thing based on your sermon.
Or I'm gonna have a financial hardship and I'm gonna come to church and I want Russ to teach me and tell me, do these three things, and I can come out of bankruptcy.
Or you know what?
I've been longing for my career to change.
If I'll go to church, I can listen to Russ preach, and he'll give me the steps to have a successful and fruitful career.
I'm gonna want that in this church.
Because what I want Russ to do is I want Russ to give me a set of rules, a framework, a guide, 10 steps, three principles that can allow me to control my life.
Just like Brian and I tried to do after our runs on those Saturday mornings, or just like Eve did in the garden, thinking that I can be like God and I can control my life.
And we want that.
We want control.
But Russ is gonna preach Jesus.
He's gonna preach the gospel that says you want control, but that's not what you need.
Your neighbors want control.
They want some hope, they want some practical steps to get out of this situation.
They want some way of finding freedom, and they think it's gonna be doing these three or four things.
And over and over and over again, Russ is gonna say, these things are great for your life, but you need Jesus, and he's already done it for you.
And it's not gonna make sense to our heads.
And you're gonna say, I can't stay at this church anymore.
I need somebody to give me some practical lessons.
But that won't satisfy the deep longing of your soul and the deep need that we have as people for light and for hope and for life.
Jesus is the answer, not theology, and definitely not some set of rules that will give us control.
We need him.
It's so difficult because churches have people who come in with those needs.
And you'll come in that way, and I'll come in that way, and churches want to provide that answer.
And Russ is going to struggle, and the elders of this church will struggle to keep us keep going back to Christ, even in the midst of pressing needs that we want to give answers to.
That gospel, the good news of Jesus given for us every Sunday.
So I want to be like Anthony Eden, who tries to control the future of our government or the future of my family.
I want to be like Eve and be like God.
I want to be like Solomon and chase knowledge and chase wisdom, things that I think will make me smarter and wiser and better at handling life.
And God didn't give me those things with the coming, with the advent of Christ.
That baby in a manger, that little Jesus who grew to be our king, he didn't give us the practical solutions.
He gave us something so much greater.
He gave us life.
And that's the light of Advent for us.
And that's the light of Advent that we as a church preach now.
And that Russ and the elders and you as members and attendees, we will preach going forward.
Because he is who we need.
Let me end with this.
Um this is from 1 Corinthians chapter 16.
It's a it's a verse from Advent, and it's kind of a I don't know, a blessing, but our Lord come.
The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you.
My love be with you all in Christ Jesus.
Amen.