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Well, my name's Harley Rethel. I'm one of the pastors on staff here at Point. And uh just wanted to um point you to something actually inside your listening guide as you get started this morning. Uh like Alex said, all of you should have grabbed that. Inside there, you'll find a little note about a thing we're having this afternoon, this evening, called Membership Lab. And that's from 5 to 7.30 here at the church. Um that you guys are gonna be over in the building over here, right? So uh that's gonna be just the time for anybody who's has questions about who we are as a church. If you're new around here or if you've been coming for a little while and want to take a next step, that's a great next step to take, okay? Coming along to a membership lab, hearing a little bit about who we are, who where we've come from, where we are right now, and where we believe God's leading us into the future, okay? So if you have if you want to come along to that, just let us know so we can have some food for you. We will provide food and child care. And the way you can let us know is just by going to the back table, and uh there's a little sign-up sheet there I think we have that you can just put your name down and let us know that you are coming along to that. So it'd be great if you could do that and just remember to do that at the end of the service. I'm gonna ask, I know we just prayed, but I'm gonna ask for us to pray again. I really do want um God to lead us through this time this morning. I don't take lightly uh what what happens here in the next few minutes. Uh our time, I believe, is all valuable, and so I really would like for God to lead us through this time. And so, really, when we pray here in a moment, what we're doing is asking God to lead us, that his Holy Spirit would guide us through the next few moments, okay? So if you wouldn't mind just bowing your heads, closing your eyes, um, we're gonna pray one more time. God, thank you for bringing us here this morning. I know that all of us have come in uh probably from very different places um physically and emotionally. And so, God, as you bring us into this room and we have this moment to open your word, but also to hopefully open our hearts and examine our own lives. God, I pray that you would use this time, that it wouldn't be us going through the motions, but God, you really would speak to us. And so, God, I pray that you put our hearts in a right spot posture right now. Um, God, we pray that you would uh take away and minimize distractions and that you would really lead us through this time. Thank you. Amen. I'm gonna wager a guess this morning that all of you, Christian, non-Christian alike, wherever you are spiritually in this room, that all of you in some sense struggle with grace. Now, some of you in the room may have a church background, and you may know every single word to the song Amazing Grace. You may have heard a dozen different sermons on grace or more, you may have even read books on grace, but just going from my own experience, that's my own experience. I've got a church background, I've spent a lot of time around church, I still struggle with grace. The idea that I would get a pardon for free, that there's nothing that I really bring to the table, is in some ways nonsensical, and it's hard for me to get my head around that at times. And so I struggle with grace, and I believe that as Christians, we struggle with grace. But even for those of you who would not identify yourselves as Christian today, you struggle with grace too, right? I mean, this idea that a God would come and that he would die for your sins so that you were saved. Like, for some of you, that sounds pretty preposterous as well. You struggle with an idea that sounds to you unnecessary. You're like, okay, this idea that a God would come to save me, that doesn't, I don't feel like I'm a bad person. I don't need saving. And if you're not a Christian, that may be the posture you have. Another posture you may have if you're not a Christian is the exact opposite of that, where you believe that you were just too messed up, that you're too bad, that you're too far gone, too far out of the reach of grace, that God couldn't accept you because you were just too evil or messed up for the grace that we proclaim every week here, hopefully every week here from this pulpit on a Sunday. So I believe that grace is something we all struggle with. So the question we really need to ask ourselves this morning, what is grace? What is this that we're talking about? Because again, we could be coming from a whole bunch of different backgrounds this morning and not on the same page when we use that word. So I started to look that up in my study, and and you know, as you can imagine, a whole bunch of articles and thoughts and theories on grace started to come up, and and there's like lengthy explanations and all these, like, you know, going into the Hebrew and the Greek and all this stuff, right? There's all these different illustrations of what grace is, but there was a common thread that I began to see throughout all these different materials. And the common thread was this definition that I'd love for us to use today. Grace is God's unmerited favor towards man. Grace is God's unmerited favor towards man. I know that's really simple, but I don't think we need to get much more complex than that because there is some great depth in that definition. Unmerited, what does that mean? Well, it means undeserved and unearned. As I think about that, as I got to thinking about this definition, Ephesians chapter 2, the scripture that Alex talked about a few minutes ago, was the scripture that came straight to my mind. Maybe that was because we have been memorizing it like uh like Alex mentioned, but that's the one that says, for you were saved by grace through faith, not from works, and it's not from yourselves, it is God's gift, not from works, so that no one can boast. I'm still working on the defin on the memorization. Grace is a gift from God, it's not something that we earn. I love this definition because it really points us towards the fact that it's an absolute gift from God. I put to you this morning that grace is the glue that holds the Christian faith together. Without it, the whole thing comes unraveled. If you don't have grace, you don't have Christianity. And I know that for some of you, that's not the view of Christianity you hold. For some of you, you're like it's just another religion where you do a certain set of things and you earn God's approval. That is not the Christian faith. That is not the message of grace. Grace is God's unmerited favor. There's a guy named Douglas Gresham, and he is the stepson of the famous author and scholar C.S. Lewis. And uh he tells a story about his stepfather at one point walking into the common room where you've got all these intellectuals at Oxford hanging out talking about high ideas, right? Imagine the conversations that go on in the common room there. And so he walked in one day into the common room, and there's these intellectuals having this conversation about what is it, if anything, that makes the Christian message unique from all the other faiths and other religions. And so I'm sure that there was a hotly contested debate, probably some different ideas and things being thrown out. And so they kind of yelled out across the room to me as he walked in and said, Hey, what's your idea of it? Knowing I'm sure that he would have an opinion. He said, Well, that's easy. It's grace. He nailed it like right out of the bat. Grace is what makes the Christian faith unique, the Christian message unique, but it also makes it offensive and beautiful. I want to talk about these three words quickly. Grace is unique because no other faith is centered on God rescuing humanity. It's unique. If you look at all the other faiths, they always are set up on some sort of all other religions are set up on this idea that there is a God, there is some sort of deity or deities that you're reaching out to, that you're clambering your way to. You have to do certain things, you have to obey certain things. The Christian message is unique in that that is not the message. The message is that the God figure, Yahweh, the God who created everything, came down and sent his only son to come and to die for us. That is a unique message. Don't let somebody tell you that all faiths are created equal. They're not. The Christian message is unique because of grace. But it's also offensive because of grace. There's something in us as humans. Our human nature tells us that we want to bring something to the table when it comes to anything, I think. There's something in us that says, I want to earn this, I want to deserve this. And so when it comes to grace and this message that says, hey, you don't have to do anything to deserve this, that's a little bit offensive to us. There's something in us that says, I don't know about that. I'll give you a quick example of what that looks like. I don't know if you've ever had this experience, but you say to somebody, hey, uh, why don't you and your family come over for dinner? And they're like, okay, great. You know, you figure out a time and then they say, What can I bring? And you say, No, no, no, you don't need to bring anything, just bring yourselves, okay? And they're like, no, no, what can we bring? You're like, no, seriously, just bring yourselves. And so they come to your house and they bring something. It's like flowers or something to drink or dessert or whatever, okay? Because there's something in us that says, I want to bring something, I want to contribute. And that's not necessarily in that circumstance a bad thing. That doesn't mean that it, you know, I hate it if you bring chocolates to my house or whatever. But what I'm trying to get at is when it comes to faith, that's how we behave towards God oftentimes. We struggle with this idea that is unearned, unmerited favor. That's offensive to us. The idea that we come to God with absolutely nothing, and he gives us his grace. But it's not just offensive to us, it's also beautiful. For those of you who have experienced grace, in whatever capacity, if you have truly experienced grace at some point in your life, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Grace is like this knife that cuts the burden of shame, of guilt, this weight of sin that you're carrying around on your back. It cuts it off your shoulders, and this weight is gone. All of a sudden you're free. Grace is beautiful. If you have experienced grace, if you know what that feeling, what I'm talking about is like, you're like, yes, I know exactly what you're talking about. If you haven't yet experienced that, it is an incredible feeling. Grace is beautiful. Another way to think about grace is like this. This is five dollars. Now I know for most of you you are like, it's uh that looks like monopoly money. No, this is real money, this is Australian currency, five dollars. We've got a beautiful lady on the front. Anybody know who that is? It's the Queen when she was younger. Okay, so this is five dollars Australian, okay? So I happen to have this at home and I busted it out. It obviously looks very different from American currency. We have colors, it's made out of plastic, there's this cool little see-through thing on it. But this is five dollars Australian. Now imagine with me that after church today I say, hey, let's go grab some coffee, I'll buy you a drink. And so we go to the coffee shop, we line up, we make our order, and I bust this out of my pocket. How do you think the server's gonna respond? They're gonna be like, uh, is that monopoly money? What are you doing? Like, like, that's that's not cool. I can't accept that, that's not okay. You know, it's gonna be a very awkward situation because this kingdom in which we live, the American world, lives and operates not on Australian dollars, but on American dollars. And what I'd like to propose to you this morning is this is that the kingdom of God operates on the currency of grace. And the problem is that oftentimes we come to God offering the wrong currency. We're like, God, look at me, look at all my work and my energy, look how good I did at reaching out to my neighbors today. That's not the currency of his kingdom. Look how good I did. I've been reading my Bible all week. God, check that out. God, I've really been studying, I've been really seeking you. And so oftentimes we're dealing in the wrong currency, not understanding that his kingdom operates on the currency of grace. Our seat at his table, and this is what we're gonna talk about this morning, is bought by the currency of grace. And it's free to us, but it's very costly to him. You've got to understand that. This currency of grace that buys us a seat at his table is free to us, but it's very costly to him. It costs the blood of his son who died for us. And so I want you to think about that this morning in light of the table, like we've been talking about in our series over the last couple of weeks. We're talking about the table, really focusing on this idea of what is the table? How is it used in scripture to really define Christian community, the community that we can and should have with God and with his followers? And so we've been going through this series talking about uh the table, and last week specifically, we talked about connecting at the table, how we should love and serve one another, how there should be a healthy bond in Christian community. It was great, great time talking about that. Well, today specifically, we're talking about experiencing grace at the table, and I want to take you to a story found in Luke chapter 14 that I think is very appropriate for our conversation today. So if you guys wouldn't mind turning there, Luke 14, and I'll give you a little bit of backgrounding as you're turning there. Luke 14 is interesting because it's a story about a table being told at a table. Okay? So Jesus is at the table with some Pharisees. Now, it's interesting to note, I well, it was interesting to me to note this. Uh, I've been reading through the first four books of the New Testament in the last coup in the last couple of weeks in my own personal time. And as I've been reading that in the mornings, there's this one thing that's stuck out to me recently. I've always thought of Jesus eating at the table with like tax collectors and sinners, you know, all the people that are the, you know, nasty people. And so that's how I've always pictured him eating. But the thing that's really stood out to me in the scriptures that I've reread, there's several times that he's sitting at the table with the Pharisees, with these religious leaders. And so what I've I've really come to see is that Jesus sat at the table with lots of different types of people, just like we've been talking about in this series so far. Okay? So Jesus is here and he's at the table of some some Pharisees, and the text actually tells us that it's the leaders of the Pharisees' table that he's at. So these are some really important people, okay? So he's sitting at their table, and an interesting thing happens because as he's there, there's this person who the scripture says is swollen up. Okay, this person's all like swollen and sick. And it's a Saturday, it's a Sabbath day, which they kept holy. They didn't do any work on a Saturday, on the Sabbath day. And they're watching him, wondering what he's gonna do. And Jesus looks at the guy, he's like, Well, I gotta heal him. So he heals this guy and sends him home. And these these Jews, these Pharisees are like, I can't believe he did that on the Sabbath. So there's this back and forth. He knows that he's offended them, and he's like, hey guys, which one of you, if your son or your livestock fell into a ditch on a Saturday, on a Sabbath, wouldn't drag them out? He said, How much, I mean, we've got to look after people. And so he he starts to teach them that, and then he just switches gears and he starts teaching them in his next story, um, telling them about how people shouldn't jostle for position, be the most important position at a table. So he starts telling them about that, and then he goes on to another story, starting to tell them that when they do get a table together of guests, they shouldn't just invite all the important people and all their friends, they should invite the down and outs. And so he's saying all of these things that are kind of offensive uh to this group of people that he's eating with. And so that's that's where we come, that's how this scripture is set up, as we read in verse 15 of Luke chapter 14, and we'll read it together, verse 15. When one of those who reclined at the table with him heard these things, which again were probably a bit offensive, he said to him, The one who will eat bread in the kingdom of God is blessed. Then he told him, A man was giving a large banquet and invited many. At the time of the banquet, he sent his slave to tell those who were invited, Come, because everything is now ready. But without exception, they all began to make excuses. The first one said to him, I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it. I ask you to excuse me. Another said, I've bought five yoke of oxen, and I'm trying I'm going to try them out. I ask you to excuse me. Another said, I just got married, and therefore I'm unable to come. So the slave came back and reported these things to the master. Then, in anger, the master of the house told his slave, Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the city, and bring in here the poor, maimed, blind, and lame. Master the slave said, What you've ordered has been done, and there's still room. Then the master told the slave, Go out into the highways and the lanes, and make them come in. Not one of those men who were invited will enjoy my banquets. Okay. So as we read this scripture, it's it's interesting to note that there seems like there's this awkward context right there at the start. So Jesus has kind of been talking to these guys and saying, Hey, you guys are doing this all wrong, the way that you're even hosting this party. And it's like this awkward situation, and this guy blurts out, I don't know if you noticed it there, but he's like, Well, uh, the one who will eat bread in the kingdom of God will be blessed. It's like this guy's trying to like still the mood at this table. And as he does that, Jesus just goes straight into a story about the kingdom of God and the table of God. And that kind of sets up the context for a parable. Now, I know most of you probably already understand this, but a parable is a story. There's hidden meaning in a parable. So let's dissect this parable a little bit. The first element of the parable, God is like the man throwing the banquet. And he's invited a whole bunch of people. Now, what we gotta under we have to understand is that the banquet is a desirable place to be. This is the sort of place that you want to be. It's a place of joy, food, acceptance, celebration, and fellowship, okay? So it's a whole bunch of good things. It's not like the banquet's a really lame party that this guy's inviting these guys to. No, they would have seen this in their culture as a very good and important place to be. Okay, so that's that's kind of the context for it. And then he he, the master, invites these people. These are his first round of invites, but all those who are invited officially they they come to him and and they decline with these weak excuses. I don't know if you saw what they said, but the first one's like, hey, I uh bought a piece of land and I need to go and see it. I don't know why he didn't go and see it before he bought it, but he uh he's like, I I gotta go see this piece of land. The other one's like a yoke of oxen that I gotta go try out. It's like somebody wanting to test drive their new car. And and then there's this guy who's like, yeah, I got married a little while back, and so, you know, I I can't really come to the wedding right now. So you got all these excuses, and they're not terrible excuses, but they're not good excuses either. And what I want you to see here is I read this, I'm just reminded in and of myself of the things that we get distracted by. There's just stuff in life. You know, I'm working on my house, I've got this to do, I've got to take care of that. Like, there's stuff that we just get distracted by, and that stops them from coming to this beautiful banquet table. And so what happens next is the master sends out this second round of invites. And so he invites a whole bunch of people that you normally wouldn't invite to a feast. Okay, so if you go to verse 21, you get this list of the unclean and the undesirable people that you wouldn't want at a party. It says this Verse 21. Uh go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the city and bring in here the poor, maimed, blind, and lame. And so the master just totally changes things up. He gets this new group of people that he invites, and so his slaves come back and say, Hey, yeah, we got all of those. What do you want us to do now? There's still more space. And it's like, go find more. The invitation is spread out further and further. So, what's the meaning of this parable? Why does this parable exist? Well, a little bit of context for you. Jesus was warning these self-righteous religious leaders about what was about to happen. You see, Israel were God's chosen people. If you read through the Old Testament, what you see is that God was choosing this special people to bless the whole world through. And we know that that blessing came through Jesus, okay? But they they saw themselves, they kind of wore that as a badge a little bit. Hey, we're the Jews, we're God's special chosen people, God's gonna bless the world through us. And what Jesus was doing here with this parable, he was speaking prophetically about what was to happen in a few years or not even just a few months at time. Jesus was pointing them towards the fact that they, Israel, were gonna reject the grace that was given to them, and that the grace was gonna be offered out to the Gentiles, to everybody else. That's what a Gentile is. If you're not a Jew, you're a Gentile, okay? And so there's a whole bunch of scriptures that talk about this, how the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone, and that's talking about Jesus and the grace and how it's been extended out past Israel. So all of us now can be God's chosen people. Jesus was pointing them towards that with this parable. If you go to John 3.16, a scripture that most of you probably know off by heart. It doesn't say, for God so loved the Jews that he gave his only son. It says, For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should have life. And that's what Jesus was pointing towards. He's saying, Hey, you guys are gonna reject me, but that's okay because the invitation's gonna get spread out. So my question for you is. As we read this today, is who do you see yourself as? Are you like the distracted invited guest, or are you like the later invited guest receiving grace that you did not deserve, that you do not deserve? You're either one or the other. The parable warns us to be people who respond to the invitation of grace. And so I really want to challenge you this morning. Are you responding to the invitation of grace? You see, the offer for grace is extended to everyone. I know I already said this, but you've got to hear this. No matter who you are, where you are, God's offer for grace extends to all of us. Grace can take you, can take me from being in the gutter to being at the table of the king. That's what grace is. I love that about this story because these guys are on the corner. These are the like the guys that don't have a home. These are the guys who are rejected, are taken to this beautiful banquet table. And that's what God offers us: a transition from the gutter to the table of the king. Listen to some scriptures that really talk about this. There's a few scriptures that are just beautiful pictures of this. Corinthians, sorry, Colossians 1, 21 is the first one I want for us to look at. And as I read this, I'm gonna ask you to either read it along with me on the screen or even just close your eyes so you can really let what we're saying sink in. Just think about these words for a second. Nobody will look at you like you're weird, but just really think about this this morning. Once you were alienated and hostile in your minds because of your evil actions, but now he has reconciled you by his physical body through his death to present you holy, faultless, and blameless before him. How incredible is that scripture! Did you guys hear what it said in that scripture? It says, once you were alienated, that means like totally foreign from God. You were hostile in your minds with your evil actions. And the scripture says, because of grace, you move from that posture to being, listen to the back end, holy, faultless, and blameless before him. How strong is the wording in that? I don't know about you, but as I hear that, I'm like, yes, thank you, God. Without you, I have nothing. And as I think about this, I'm reminded that we will never appreciate grace without first understanding our sinfulness. As you read this scripture, you've got to understand that you are that first line. If you don't see that you're that first line, you're not gonna understand grace. You were once alienated because of your evil actions. We are all sinful. We have all fallen short of the glory of God. And so I just want to encourage you this morning, see yourself as sinful, but also see God as good. A couple more scriptures. Romans five, here's another one. Just take it in slowly and really think of it in light of our conversation this morning. Romans five, verse six. For while we were still helpless, at the appointed moment, Christ died for the ungodly. For rarely will someone die for a just person, though for a good person perhaps someone might even dare to die. But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. That's the gospel, guys. That's the power of grace at work. Ephesians 2, let's go back there. Verse 13. It's a really good chapter, by the way, if you haven't cottoned on. We've talked about Ephesians 2 three times now. Ephesians 2, verse 13 says this But now in Christ Jesus, you who were far away have been brought near by the blood of the Messiah. Like I said earlier, it's free to us but costly to Him. It was the blood of the Messiah that brought us near to God. And for those of you who have been exposed to the message of Christianity, have heard the message of grace before, I'm hoping that as you hear this this morning, you won't just be like, oh yeah, grace is good. I've heard this before. That's cool. No, this is amazing grace. This is amazing truth. This should produce great joy in us. As Christians, we should be the most joyful people. That doesn't mean that we don't go through hard times or moments of mourning or suffering or different things. But as on the whole, Christians should be the most joyful people because of this, because of the truths of the grace of the gospel. My hope is that all of us would pause here for just a moment and to have a really strong and clear heart check this morning. Ask yourself have you truly experienced the grace of God? Are you sitting at his table of grace today? There's only two responses in the parable. You're either at the table of grace or you're not. Are you at God's table of grace? Now, when you've answered that question, the next question for you is this What happens when we experience the grace that God has offered us? How should we respond when God has given grace to us? And to answer that question, I'd love for us to go to 2 Samuel chapter 9. Now, I'm not going to read the story word for word out of the text. I'm going to tell it to you. There'll be a few little excerpts from 2 Samuel 9 that I'm going to tell you. But I want to kind of recast the story to you that we find there. It's a story about David, and it's a story about his kind of on the back end of him coming to the throne. You see, David was the second king of Israel. Saul was the first king, David was the second king, and Israel, again, was God's special and chosen people. Now, what you've got to understand, I know that there's going to be a little bit of backstory, but if you don't get the backstory, you won't get how significant this story is. The backstory is this David and Saul were probably not on the best of terms, okay? First king of Israel, second king of Israel. The problem with Saul was that he chose in his pride to reject God, to reject God's wisdom, to reject God's grace. And God said, Saul, I'm going to tear the kingdom away from you and away from your family. And I'm going to give it to somebody new, somebody whose heart is after mine. And that was David. Okay? But the backstory is this: Saul, that was a long process. It happened over many years. And Saul saw it happening. He saw David rising up in his kingdom into more and more power and position. And as he saw that, his heart became envious. He was jealous of Saul. And so he started to try and hate. Well, he didn't try. He started to hate David. And he started to try and kill David, like literally assassinate David. Like all these crazy stories of him hunting him down, throwing spears at him, all this stuff. You can read through the story. It's crazy. But as you read through this story, you get this picture of Saul's envy and hate. But mixed into that is this interesting dynamic because Saul's son, Jonathan, was David's best friend. The heir to the throne, the guy who should have been the next king of Israel, was best friends with the guy who was going to be the best, the next king of Israel, and he knew it. I don't know about you, but when I look at Jonathan's life, I'm like, that guy was incredible. Because Jonathan, that's the posture and heart that he had. So you've got this weird relationship thing going on. You've got David, you've got Saul and his son Jonathan. Saul hates David, Jonathan loves David, and there's just this really weird dynamic. He could actually make a really good movie out of it. So, anyway, or maybe a TV show. Anyway, you've got this dynamic going on. And what happens is Saul and Jonathan both end up dying sadly in battle one day, in the same day. And some sometime after that, we imagine, you know, quite a bit of time after that, David finally comes to be king on the throne of Israel. And as he's there in this posture, we see that David is on the throne and he's seeking to honor God. Because David, I think, is probably thinking back to his story and realizing that he has a classic story, a classic example. He's a classic example of grace. He realizes that he's gone from being a shepherd, being the youngest in this huge family in Israel, to being the king of Israel. And as he's thinking on that, as David reflects on these things, he asks this question in verse 3, and he says, Is there anyone left of Saul's family that I can show the kindness of God to? Now, without the backstory, that statement doesn't make sense and it doesn't sound significant, but knowing that Saul had tried multiple times to kill David, like that's a significant story statement that David would even think that way and be like, who can I show kindness and the love of God to from Saul's family? And so David sets out on this quest. He brings in Saul's former servant, a guy named Zeba, and he says, Hey, Zeba, is there anybody left from Saul's family that I can show kindness to? And so uh Zeba tells him about Saul's grandson, Jonathan's son, a guy named Mephibosheth. Now that's a tongue twister right there, but Mephibosheth is the character that I really want you to learn about because Mephibosheth is this young man who is a cripple. The reason he's a cripple is the day that his dad and his grandfather died, his nurse picked him up, somehow dropped him, or something happened in that whole process, and both his legs were broken, and he became a cripple. Okay? So Mephibosheth's this cripple, and he's the only one who's really left of Saul's family at that moment. And so David gets, sends for Mephibosheth, has him brought from way out on the corner of the kingdom close to him, and he brings he's brought before the king, and Mephibosheth understandably is very afraid. Remember, in this world and in this culture, if you're brought before the king and your family had a claim to the throne in the old kingdom, that usually meant that your life wasn't going to last much longer. And so he's fearful coming before David, and David says, Do not be afraid. Mephibosheth, I intend to shine show you kindness. I want to show you love and mercy. And so as he summons Mephibosheth, he starts to talk with him, and what he does is incredible because he offers him both place and position. This downcast cripple who wouldn't have had a lot that he could have done in society. He would have been on the fringes of society. He's brought back in and he's given position. What David does is he says, I'm going to give you all the land that was Saul's, and I'm going to give you Saul's servant, and I want him to be your servant, and he's going to work that land for you so you can earn a living. But I want you, Mephibosheth, to come and to eat at my table every day. And there's this beautiful, beautiful text in verse 11 that tells us this. It's a very simple sentence. It says, Mephibosheth ate at David's table, just like one of the king's sons. Isn't that a beautiful picture of grace? Isn't that story just a picture of grace? David points us, I think, in this story, towards Jesus. What we see here is a type of Christ. That's what a theologian would say. Just basically saying this is a reflection of what Jesus looks like and what Jesus does in our lives. As we see the way that he reaches out in love to this undeserving cripple, I think that it should remind us of the way that Christ reaches out to us, to all of us, when we're crippled by sin. David, understand this, David was not the be all and end all. He was just passing on the grace that he himself had received. And it reminds us that as we receive grace, our natural response, or maybe I should say our only natural response, should be to give grace. As David was dealt the currency of grace, he was giving of the currency of grace. And so I really just I know that sounds simple, but guys, as we receive God's grace, we're not called to stuff it in our pockets and bundle it up for ourselves. We are to be carriers of this grace to whoever God has put us around. In setting out to work through this message, I had two main thoughts that I want us to focus on. The first was the question that I asked you, are you truly experiencing God's grace? And the second was, how, if you are experiencing God's grace, how are you responding? And I believe the questions are appropriate for us no matter where we are spiritually right now. Obviously how it fleshes itself out will be different. But if you're a Christian or you're not even a Christian, if you're exploring faith, if you feel like you're someone who is backslidden, if you're somebody who you feel like you've distanced yourself from God, no matter who you are, the questions apply. Are you experiencing God's grace? Another way to put it is are you at God's table of grace? Are you dining, feasting on his grace? The answer is yes or no. Don't try and mix your words this morning. Don't be honest with yourself this morning. Maybe you feel like God's grace isn't really necessary for you. Please reconsider if that's how you feel. Maybe you feel like you're putting in a lot of effort and energy to earn God's grace. Please stop trying. That's not how grace works. Maybe some of you feel overwhelmed with shame and with guilt. Please stop shrinking God's grace and magnifying your sin. Remember that the invite is totally open. Come and experience the joy of God's grace today. The banquet table is a great place to be. But are you being distracted or are you making excuses so that you're not there? Really think about that this morning. Where you are in your relationship with God today. Secondly, if if you are already feasting on God's goodness, if you are at the table, the second question really applies to you. How are you responding to God's grace? Uh, to put it another way would be to say, Who are you inviting to your table? As you receive grace from the table of God, who are you bringing into your table, into your life? As Christians, we should be known for our grace. Who is experiencing grace in your life because you've experienced the grace and the love of God? You should be reflecting and giving of that love and that grace to whoever you've been placed around. What greater witness is there to those who are rejecting God who may be around you than us showing them the love of God, being living illustrations of grace to them in their lives. That's as Christians what we're called to. So I really want to encourage you guys to get these things solidified in your mind this morning. Wherever God has you this morning, think about am I experiencing God's grace? If you're not a Christian, we can talk about what that means. I'll be up here in a moment. If you want to come and talk with me or with Nick or somebody else, somebody who brought you along, what it means to really experience God's grace, we'd love to talk to you about that. If you are a Christian and you're wrestling with some of the things that we've talked about today, or even if you're not a Christian, remember that this has to be in the right order. We don't earn God's approval, we don't earn his um his grace and then he blesses us and gives us his grace. It's the other way around. We first receive grace and then we respond. Please don't leave this room this morning without considering God's grace and its implication not only for your life, but also for the lives of those that God has placed around you for a reason. Let me pray for us. God, thank you for your grace. God, we can talk about grace in church a lot, and that's a good thing that we do. But when we hear it a lot, sometimes it can begin to lose its form and its power in our lives. And so, God, I just pray this morning that that this very simple message would have power in our lives. God, I pray that the message that you love us and that there's nothing that we do to earn that or deserve that, that that would break through into our tough hearts. God, some of us are distracted, some of us are angry, some of us are bitter, some of us just have excuses going on. God, would you break through those things and remind us that you love us unconditionally, that while we were still sinners, you died for us. That even though we were alienated by our evilness, God, that you have made us holy and righteous and full because of what you've done for us. This message is amazing. It is unique, and yes, it is offensive to some of us. But God, remind us this morning of its beauty. God, I pray that this week, that as we engage people around us, that we would be vessels of grace to them. Maybe that's to our neighbors, our co-workers, our families, friends. God, may even the words of this message or the story of Mephibosheth come to our mind and remind us, God, you have put me in this place to be a vessel of your grace. And I'm I'm gonna uh show and love your love in a gracious way. God, would you use us this week? Continue to do our work in our heart, even as we process these things out in these next few minutes. Thank you. Amen.