Good morning. Let's uh let's just pray. Jesus, we love you. You are uh you're everything. There's no end to the number of words that we could uh we could add to describe how beautiful, how amazing, um, how intimate, how how powerful you are. And we just we just want to say thank you for loving us like you do, for choosing us to be uh a part of your family, and for giving us a uh a group of people that we can worship you with and grow closer to you, Holy Spirit. Please speak through your word this morning. Uh you know, if it's just me talking, it's just words, but if if you speak to our hearts, it's truth and it changes our lives. So please just speak to each of our hearts exactly what we need to hear. We ask all this in your name. Amen. We've got a few quick announcements before we jump into what we're gonna talk about this morning. First off, next Sunday, next Sunday's a big deal. It's Tailgate Sunday. Yes. It is appropriate of a few woos for sure. If you've never been here on a Sunday that we do Tailgate Sunday, it's a blast. As soon as we're done with the last song next week, there's gonna be a ton of stuff going on outside. First and foremost, we have a chili cook-off, and that is always a huge highlight of Tailgate Sunday. There's two categories there's uh outside the box, and there are usually some really interesting, different chilies you'll taste there. And then there's traditional, which uh, you know, is what you would think it would be, and they're all amazing. It's always so much fun to go through, taste all of them, vote for them. We have a ton of food. If if you want to bring your own stuff in Tailgate, you can do that. The Salisbury's will be, you know, they'll be setting up shop like normal, and they always they always turn out some incredible stuff, so that's always a good time. We have stuff for the kids. We've got face painting, football toss, field goal kicking, all kinds of stuff. Uh it's gonna be a great time. And then the big thing is that one o'clock when the Falcons play, we get to watch the game in here on the big screen. Uh, and I think this is the biggest screen in Cherokee County, so that's that's good. That's a good thing. The next Sunday is an even bigger Sunday. The Sunday after that is uh is Baptism Sunday, and that is yes. Honestly, it it's uh we do it twice a year, and every single time it is it's incredible. I mean, it's really hard to actually find words for it because Sundays like Tailgate Sunday, those are big events, and and those are a great time. And actually, it would be a great Sunday for you to invite people to next week. There's uh there's just something about all of us getting together afterwards and hanging out together that's that's a real indicator of who we are and what we're about. Baptism Sunday, though, is not a big event. It's it's 50, 60 big events. For every single person getting baptized, that is a momentous occasion in their relationship with Jesus, and we want to support that. We want to celebrate that. And so if if you want to get baptized, if you're ready to take that step, you can sign up in the lobby today. Or if someone that you know or in your family, maybe a child wants to get baptized, they've had that conversation with you with you, please sign them up as well. You don't have to do that, it just helps us know what to expect. And then as soon as we're done a couple Sundays from now, you can uh you can you can be here. I'd encourage everyone, if you can, to stay and to cheer the people on as they get baptized. There is something powerful about seeing 50 people go all in with Jesus. It is it's incredible. Umly other thing I want to announce real quick before we go into what we're gonna talk about is is it's kind of a thank you, is is to everyone who gives financially and gives your time and your talents. We are we are not a huge organization. We're we're a bunch of volunteers. We're a volunteer church. And so everything that gets done here is done through your generosity, your time, your gifts. And so uh number one, thank you for doing that financially. We want to thank everyone for helping us out with that. We are not a church, if you're here for the first time, that's gonna pass a plate or pressure you to give. We want it to be something between you and God, something that's a part of your worship with him. Um, and he blesses it. When we trust him with our finances, he honors that, he blesses it. So if that's something you feel led to do this morning, there's four columns at the back of the room. You can do it there or online, or we even have an app that you can use if you want to as well. For the last several weeks, Steve has been talking about rest. It's been very nice. It's been good to hear. And even though he's out of town this morning, we're still gonna stay on that subject because it's a big need in all of our lives, and it's something that, at least for me, and I'm guessing for most of us, doesn't come as naturally as we'd like it to. We have we have a tendency to overload ourselves. We get overwhelmed, we get stressed out, and we're much more likely, even in those moments, to add something to our loads than to let something go. It's amazing how we can do that. We can all agree that rest is important. We can all agree that God wants us to have rest in our lives, but when we get home today and the to-do list goes back to the top of our minds, it is hard to just stop and rest, at least without feeling guilty. I know it is in my house because if one of us takes a nap, we feel like we have to prove to the other one why we deserve it. Is anyone else like that at home? You take a nap this afternoon, you're like, I am not feeling well. I have had a crazy week. It is, it's been nuts. I'll come home sometimes, I have a two and a half year old, and I know how hard that is. And if Megan took a nap, she'll just be like, you do not understand. He was crazy today. He was crazy. I have to sleep. Why is it that we have to prove to ourselves and other people that we deserve something as simple as a nap? It's hard for us to rest. And Jesus knew that. He's compassionate, he saw our tendency to overload ourselves and the difficulty that we have to just let things be and rest a little bit. And so in Matthew 11, 28, he says, Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens. I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, let me teach you, because I'm humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light. That sounds so nice. If you ever read that same verse in the message, it sounds like Jesus is inviting us on a vacation. He says, come and get away with me, and you'll recover your life. Sounds so good. Over the last few weeks, we've talked about things like being able to appreciate every day that God gives us, not getting so caught up with next week or tomorrow or even next year that we we don't have the ability to enjoy every day that we have. We've talked about figuring out how we can have a Sabbath, we can take a real rest, a time of just unproductivity. Those things can be hard. This morning, I want to talk about another aspect of rest. And it's something that's really subtle. It's a very small observation, but it's one of those things that if we take it and apply it, it has huge, huge implications on our relationship with God, and it's incredibly restful and freeing. As I was getting ready this morning, I was trying to think through some of the more stressful situations I've been in in life. And like all of us, there are plenty to choose from. Plenty from last week, plenty from this year. One that popped into my mind, though, had to do with when I first started dating my wife, Megan. We were high school sweethearts, so we were very young. I was 18 and she was 17. And I'll never forget how stressed out, and I really can't emphasize that enough, how stressed out I was the first time I went to pick Megan up for a date. And I was anxious about the date itself. I wanted it to go very well. I was, you know, I was crazy about Megan. I wanted there to be a second date for sure, but that that is not what had me stressed out. What had me stressed out was what I anticipated happening when I picked Megan up for the first time, and that was a sit-down conversation with Megan's dad. Megan and I met playing basketball at the school that we went to, and everybody on the basketball team, all the guys, we all know who we all knew who Megan's dad was. Because you couldn't miss him. He's six foot five. All right? And he's not a scrawny six foot five either. He's a big man. I'm not six foot anything. I'll go to the doctor. I was actually at the doctor this week, and they'll say, uh, we've got you down at 5'9. I'm like, 5'9 and three-quarters, actually. And I would appreciate for you to change that on your chart, okay? I mean, I'm not six anything, and Megan's dad's six' five, and so there's just the physical imposing you know difference there. But on top of that, I had a good friend that had dated Megan for a little while before me, and he told me this story that when he picked Megan up for the first time, he had a conversation with her dad in the living room while he cleaned the shotgun. And so that didn't help at all. Didn't help. I was stressed out of my mind driving to pick her up. And I remember in the car going through all these potential scenarios, like, okay, if this happens, here's what I'll say, here's what I'll do. I practically had a speech prepared. I might as well have brought a resume. I was so, I was so ready, so nervous, so so anxious. And when I arrived, what happened was the last thing I expected. What happened was I pulled into the neighborhood to pick Megan up, and I see driving toward me Megan's dad. And at first I was like, oh no, how did he know that this, what's going on? As the car got closer, he slowed down, rolled his window down. So I'm like, do I just keep going? Or, you know, no. Like, oh, I didn't see you, I'm sorry. I did what you have to do, okay. I gotta slow my car down, roll the window down, and he leans in, and this is what he says. He says, Hey, have a great time, have her home by midnight. All right, that was it. And I was relieved, I was relieved in a sense, I was like, okay, that wasn't that bad. And then we had a date, it went well, but the second date came around, same tension. I was like, oh no. We never had that talk. I heard the story, I know it's gonna happen. Now it's gonna be this time, and and the second date it didn't happen, and the third and the fourth, and and so in a way it was great, but in a way it was terrifying because I never knew when that moment was gonna happen. I I knew it was coming, though. I knew it was coming. And the first time that I anticipated greatly, like this is definitely gonna be when we have a long conversation, was about four months into our relationship. Megan's parents asked me to go on vacation with the family. And I said yes, of course, and I was excited, but I was crazy nervous because from that point, you know, before that point, it was just a conversation here and there. And this was vacation. This is gonna be car rides and dinners and all kinds of opportunities for me to mess everything up. So I was I was nervous, I was anxious. When I when I was growing up in my family, uh vacations needed to go very well for everyone to be happy. If things went wrong, we got lost or whatever, there was always a lot of tension and arguments in the front seat and all kinds of stuff like that. This vacation that I went on with with her family was probably the least smooth vacation I have ever been on in my life. It was amazing. We had bad weather. We went to this thing called the Highland Games, and it's basically the Olympics for Celtic people, and the fog was so bad, we had really bad weather, the fog was so bad you couldn't see 10 feet in front of you. So you're sitting on the field trying to watch this. It was supposed to be our whole day, and all you could see was there's some kilts and some hay, and I don't know what's going on. So we left. That was a whole day that was shot because of weather. We took a canoe trip that was supposed to last an hour and a half, and it ended up lasting four hours. And no one put on sunscreen with four hours in mind. And so all of us got burnt, especially Megan's sister, who I've honestly never seen someone that badly sunburnt. She she literally looked like a strawberry for the rest of the trip. It was bad. It was bad. All of us got burnt. That didn't go well. Someone left a window open upstairs, and bugs got in the cabin like crazy. That was bad. The worst, though, the worst was something for me. I uh I'm just gonna be honest, I clogged a toilet in the upstairs bathroom. And and I'm not, I mean I'm not being crass or anything like that. I just I just remember so clearly flushing it and and it and the water not coming back up and me going, oh no. Like, what do what do I do? And the options were pretty simple, right? You go downstairs and say, hey, can I need a plunger? Or or you just don't say anything, and you hope either A it fixes itself, or B somebody else it's it's it gets blamed on them, whatever. So I chose the coward's way out. I didn't say anything. And later that night, one of Megan's siblings used the restroom, and when they've when they flushed it over, flowed so badly that water leaked through the floor down the ceiling into her parents' bedroom. Okay? So naturally, as the boyfriend, you know, I I got towels and I'm up there wiping it, and I remember Megan's mom was like, You don't have to help with this, and I was like, No, it's the least I can do. You know, it's and and for years, actually, this is true, for years she she would bring that up sometimes and be like, I was so impressed that you just helped out with that. I'm pretty sure I I think I waited until about two years into our marriage to confess. I was like, there's there's something that's been eating at me for years. I'm so sorry. So with all that, with all that, this incredibly unsmooth vacation, I had an amazing time. It was, it was actually, it was incredible. Because all that happened on top of just my my fear and anxiety over being the boyfriend and all that kind of stuff. And the reason it was so great was because of Megan's dad. Going into that vacation, I had a formal relationship with Megan's dad. You could not get more formal. It was father of beautiful teenage girl, teenage boy romantically interested in beautiful teenage girl. That is a formal relationship. That is a handshake relationship, that is not a high five relationship. And rightfully so. But on that trip, Megan's dad never treated me like the boyfriend. He treated me like part of the family, really treated me like a son. And as time went on, I was able to relax, I was able to be myself, and actually rest. All of us have relationships that are formal, relationships that are not close and intimate, that are very, very much about circumstances, pretenses, whatever you want to call it. And it's impossible to rest in those relationships. When you're around a group of people that you have a very formal relationship with, you can't rest because you cannot just be yourself and relax. You have to be on, you have to be focused. Every word is deliberate, it's tense. But when you're surrounded by people that you love, that love you, that know you, that are informal with you, there is a rest that comes from that that is very, very deep. It's very freeing. And that's the way that Megan's dad treated me on that trip. Now I'm actually part of the family. And it's funny because if I were to call him Mr. Richardson, it would it would be odd now. It's much more natural for me to call him Lewis or Dad, even, than to call him by that formal relationship title. And that's because now I'm in the family. And it's informal and it's awesome. Every time we go over there, if I want to take a nap on the couch, I can. You know, it's it's it's great. And it's it's actually a pretty cool picture of our relationship with God, or at least my relationship with God and how that's sort of played out. When I was young, I was intimidated by God. He's bigger than me. And I'd heard some stories of some intimidating situations in church and Sunday school that had me a little bit more nervous to be around God. But then when I got to know God, I found out he wasn't who I expected him to be. Yes, he was big, powerful, he was incredibly loving, incredibly gentle, smiled a lot, just like Megan's dad. And eventually God brought me into his family. Now he's my dad. And the relationship that I've I have with God has gone from being one that's incredibly formal to an informal one. In Ephesians, this is what it says, chapter 1, verses 4 through 5. It says, long before he laid down earth's foundations, talking about God the Father, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love to be made whole and holy by his love. Long, long ago, he decided to adopt us into his family through Jesus Christ. What pleasure he took in planning this? He wanted us to enter into the celebration of his lavish gift giving by the hand of his beloved son. God's desire is to bring us into his family. And it's very easy for us to picture our relationship with God to be a very, very formal one. How can you get more formal than God? What do you wear if God invites you over? I mean, he's God, right? Surely, and this is what religion teaches us. Approach him the right way, say the right things, do the right things. It's a very formal relationship. And when a relationship is formal, it's fragile. It's cold, it's distant. And even though religion teaches us that that's the relationship God wants, Jesus taught us differently. And I believe very strongly that God's desire for all of us is to have an informal, intimate, close relationship. A relationship that we can find rest in. A relationship that we can relax and be ourselves in. Where our greatest rest doesn't come just from taking a day off and taking a nap. Our greatest rest actually comes from spending time with our dad, with God, and being ourselves with him. And more so than in any relationship on this earth, resting. Because it's unconditional. In the beginning, in the Garden of Eden, God had a very informal relationship with mankind. We were naked for one. That's very informal. And God did not seem to mind. You never see in Genesis God going, they're naked, it's really awkward, but all right, whatever. It wasn't until we chose a formal relationship with God that things changed. We chose that when we ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Another way to say knowledge of good and evil would be religion. And mankind chose religion. And when our relationship with God became religious, it became extremely formal. That's the first time anyone ever worried about what they wore in God's presence. Adam and Eve chose leaves, and over time, what we've chosen to wear to church or wherever, it's become more elaborate, much more expensive. And that hasn't stopped. That's why there's there's still debate in churches today. Should we be able to wear jeans? Do we have to dress up and wear suits? And even if you're at a place like this where it's jeans, do they have to be nice jeans? Do it have to be stylish jeans? Or can it just be jeans? You know, what is it? There's there's still all this, you know, all this talk about what should we wear. That's when it became important what to say around God, what words to use. The Jewish people in Jesus' time wouldn't even call God by his his name because their mentality was that he's so holy, he's so great. If we're if we use his name as mere people, we just call him by name, it's going to offend him. Sometimes we have a hard time just calling Jesus what he called himself. Jesus. We have to put a title in front of it. There's nothing wrong with that. He is the Messiah, he is Christ, but but he's Jesus, and he called himself the Son of Man. Twenty times more than he ever referred to himself as the Son of God. He chose the informal title. But we assume that God wants a formal relationship with us. We assume that. And I think what we'll find is that if we can get back to that original relationship, the freedom in that, the rest in that, it's so it's so great, it's so freeing. Religion's a kind of a tricky thing to shake, it's confusing. It makes us think things like we have to we have to approach God carefully. The religious spirit, it's a very tricky one to get rid of. And so the thought is better to be safe than sorry, better to err on the side of being too formal with God, and at least he knows we we worship him, than be too informal and overstep our bounds. So there's all this confusion. How informal is too informal? The great thing about confusion is that God has a great way of clearing that up, and that's Jesus. If we're ever confused about anything with God, we can look at Jesus. He clears it up. Hebrews 1 3 says, the sun radiates God's own glory and expresses the very character of God. Colossians 1 15 says we look at this sun and see the God who cannot be seen. We look at this sun and see God's original purpose in everything created. So if we want to know what God is like, we look at Jesus. He's the clearest picture we will ever have until the day we're looking at. God, face to face, of who God is and what he's like. If we want to know what's important to God, we look at what was important to Jesus. And so on this whole formal, informal relationship thing, it's very simple to clear up what did Jesus do in that arena? Did he have a formal relationship with God? Did he have a passion for religious formality? And the answer is kind of a resounding no. There may have never been a group of people that have ever lived that treated their relationship with God more formally than the Jewish people did in Jesus' time. It was kind of incredible. Especially the Pharisees and the religious leaders, there was no living easy around God for them. When Jesus said, Hey, come away with me and you'll find rest, it'll be easy. That was a foreign concept to the Pharisees, right? Their life was about religious rules that had to be followed to a T, and if they weren't, you were in trouble. You were in trouble. They had so many religious ceremonies and practices that they would do in that mindset. And Jesus pretty much breaks all of them. And he gets himself in a lot of trouble doing it. One of the most extensive rituals they had was a hand washing ritual. They're actually kind of ahead of their time in understanding how germs worked, but they weren't being hygienic. It was all about spiritual things. They believed in a kind of spiritual contamination that was very contagious, where if you're a spiritually clean person and you come in contact with someone who's spiritually unclean and touch them, let's say, that spiritual uncleanness is now transferred to you. And then if you touch something else, it's spiritually unclean. If you grab a piece of food, it's spiritually unclean. If you eat that food, you have put something spiritually unclean in your body, and now you're in real trouble. Pretty accurate with how germs and sickness spreads, but that's how they thought of spiritual things and God. So they had this hand washing ceremony to spiritually cleanse their hands before every meal because who knows what you touched. And this was not a simple, you know, put your hands under the water, rub them together, a little soap. This was very, very elaborate. A few years ago, I was reading a book that went into detail about it, and here's what it had to say about the ceremony. It says the hands, to begin with, had to be free of any coating of sand or mortar or gravel or any such substance, no dirt. The water for washing had to be kept in a special large stone jar so that it itself was clean in the ceremonial sense, and so that it might be certain that it had been used for no other purpose and that nothing had fallen into it or been mixed with it. First, the hands were held with fingertips pointing upward. This was important. Water was poured over them and had to run at least down to the wrist. The minimum was about one and a half eggshells full of water. While the hands were still wet, each hand had to be cleansed into a fist and washed the other. The fist of one was rubbed into the palm and against the surface of the other. This meant that at this stage the hands were wet with water, but this water was now unclean because it had touched unclean hands. So you had to get new water, and the hands had to be held with fingertips pointing downward, and then water had to be poured over them in such a way that it began at the wrist, ran off at the fingertips, and after all of this had been done, the hands were clean. It gives a whole new meaning to wash up before the meal. It's like sounds exhausting. But this was not an optional practice for the Pharisees at all. In fact, Jesus' disciples got in trouble because the Pharisees thought they were a little too loose with the hand washing. They didn't do it quite right. So imagine how frustrated they would be if someone skipped it altogether. That's what Jesus did. In Luke chapter 11, it says as Jesus was speaking, one of the Pharisees invited him home for a meal. So he went and he took his place at the table. His host was amazed, other translations will say offended, to see that he sat down without first performing the hand washing ceremony required by Jewish custom. Jesus just skips it. And that was offensive. It was honestly scandalous in his day. This is not the only example of Jesus not having too much respect for religious formality. Throughout the Gospels, I mean he breaks those rules left and right. You've got the time that he heals on the Sabbath. He didn't fast like the Pharisees said to or pray like they did. He touched lepers, he treated women differently than was religiously prescribed. He hung out with sinners. The list could go on and on. If you ever want a big one, when Jesus turned water into wine, the water he used was the water stored in the ceremonial jars for hand washing. And he made enough wine to be the equivalent of about 900 bottles of wine in our day. I'm guessing if the Pharisees were there, they would have been at least slightly offended. Slightly. But does that mean we can approach God the same way? Does that mean we can approach God informally? I'm gonna take a look at something else. In Matthew 6, Jesus is taking a shot at how the Pharisees make their prayers into a big deal. They turn them into these big, fancy, long-running monologues. And he tells us how to pray, and he keeps it very simple. He prays, Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy. May your kingdom come soon. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today the food we need and forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us. And don't let us yield to temptation, but rescue us from the evil one. It's a very short and simple prayer. It's not long, but is it formal? Prayer is kind of an interesting modern-day example of what we're talking about. This whole, how do I approach God? Do I do it the right way? If I were to ask any of us to pray, maybe we can do this like old school and just raise hands. How many of us would say that we get a little nervous when asked to pray in front of other people? Is there anyone in the room that's like that? Okay, that's actually most of us. Now, why is that? Part of it is probably just because we don't like speaking in front of people, we don't want to look dumb in front of people. I'm sure that's part of it. That's pretty normal. But I think it goes deeper than that for a lot of us with prayer. Are we nervous about praying out loud in front of people because we believe somewhere inside of us that we can mess it up? Can you mess up a prayer? Well, it depends on what a prayer is. If a prayer is a religious ritual, an exercise for the right words for the right occasion, then absolutely you can mess up a prayer. Several years ago, I was visiting my family in Missouri for Thanksgiving, and my nephew Jacob was three years old, about the age that my son is now. My son's a little bit younger. And he was asked to pray before our Thanksgiving meal. And he said, Yes. So we all huddled around in a circle, and all of us bowed our heads, but we also kept our eyes open because it was it was cute. We had to watch. And this is what Jacob's prayer was. He said, God, I love God. And that was it. He shrugged his shoulders. That was it. He goes, I love God. I'm done. No amen. No, oh heavenly father. He shrugged his shoulders. Now, the question is, did Jacob mess that prayer up? Religiously speaking, he did. And he needed to be told what to do next time. And I know we can all look at that and we can say, he's a three-year-old. He's three. We're not gonna, okay, how young do we look to God? At least that young. Probably more. If a prayer is a religious formality, yes, we can mess it up. If it's a conversation between a child and his or her dad, an intimate, close relationship, it's pretty hard to mess that up. That takes some of the pressure away. When Jesus said this prayer, he began with our father in heaven. And that sounds pretty fancy and formal, but it wasn't at all. It wasn't. We have all these different words in English that we use for dad. Some are formal. Father would be a formal one for us. Some are very informal. And we use them for different situations. If you're a 16-year-old boy and you want $100 from your dad, you might call him father. You're gonna go formal, right? Father, you you you worked so hard. You are so. You're a 16-year-old girl and you want $100 from your father, what do you say? Absolutely. All the girls in unison just said that. And they said it because they've done it and it works. Automatic, Daddy. Try to channel a four-year-old as much as possible. You know, the voice gets higher, kind of make yourself smaller. You say, Daddy, and it works. And Jesus' language was no different. They had words for father that were extremely formal, dignified. They had other words for father that were very, very informal. When Jesus said, our father in heaven, he used the Hebrew word Abba for Father. Steve said this before. Abba was the most intimate word to use when talking to your dad. If you were walking down the street in Jerusalem, you would hear the word Abba hundreds of times, and it would be little kids calling out to their dads. It was a respectful word. It definitely signified a respect for your dad. It wasn't like calling your dad Pops or something like that. There's anything wrong with that. But it was intimate. The closest modern-day word that we have to that would be Papa or Daddy. Our daddy in heaven has a different sound to it than our father in heaven. And that is what Jesus said. Now, in the Gospels, Jesus addresses God as Father about 170 times. 170 or so. How many of those times do you think he calls him Abba? Every single time. Every single time. It's always Abba. It's always Papa. It's always Daddy. It always gives me a new perspective when I think about that of how offended the Pharisees would get when they would hear Jesus talk about God because they had this formal idea of God. And here Jesus is saying, My daddy and I are good. I had to shock them. And it was true. So you look at Jesus' life and you ask the question, does God want a formal relationship with us? It's easy to look at Jesus and say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's Jesus. That's different. But let's not forget a few things. Number one, that prayer that Jesus prayed that, where he said, Our daddy in heaven, that was him telling us how to pray. That was people saying, How should we pray? And he said, Pray like this. Our daddy in heaven. Romans 8, 15, Paul wrote, So you have not received a spirit that makes you fearful slaves. Instead, you received God's spirit when he adopted you as his own children. Now we call him Abba Father. God sees us 100% as his kids, not like his kids, but exactly his children. Speaking of being kids for a second, I want to go back to my relationship with my father-in-law. And actually, if the worship team wants to come up, you guys, this would be a good time. That vacation was over 10 years ago. I've been an official part of the family for the last seven years, and I was treated like that long before we got married. Like I said earlier, it would be weird for me now to call Megan's dad Mr. Richardson or Lewis. We have a much more informal relationship. It would almost be like a step backwards. God's desire is to have a close, intimate relationship with you where you can be yourself, where you can rest in him, around him. He doesn't want formality. There's this fear that we have, and it's a religious fear that we don't want to show disrespect to God by being too informal. I still respect Megan's dad greatly, more so than I did 10 years ago. He's still 6'5. But you know, if I if I needed advice from him, and I've asked for it several times, the last thing I would worry, would worry about was wording my advice the right way. So I'm talking to a dad. It can be hard for us to live that out. I'm always amazed how the thoughts and the messages that seem like they're the simplest or the hardest to live out in my day-to-day life. Rest is definitely one of those things, and this is definitely one of those things. Because we all have religious experiences and life experiences that get in the way of that, that make it uncomfortable for us to be informal with God. My relationship with my dad growing up was not informal. I love my dad, but he did not prioritize allowing us to be ourselves around him and just enjoying time with him. You had to say the right things in the right way, and he had a very short temper, and if you got on his nerves, he'd snap at you and chew you out. And so being around him was never informal. It was never restful, it was always tense. Never felt like I could just chill out and be myself around my dad. So it can be hard for me to do that with my dad God. And all of us can relate to that. All of us have had experiences that make it difficult for us to approach God the right way. But guys, here's the thing: Satan wants us to settle for a lesser relationship with God. He's saying, Let me be your dad, your daddy. Jesus said, I now call you friends. And what religion says is, no, no, no. Trade that in to be a worshiper or a servant. And those are all great things. But Jesus did not come and die for worshipers and for followers. God had worshipers and followers long before Jesus came. He came and died to gain children and friends and lovers and people that would be so connected to him and intimate with him that he calls us now his temple. We're his dwelling place. That's the intimacy that he wants. So we should never settle for a lesser relationship with God out of some sense of religious formality that Jesus showed us doesn't matter to God at all. So how do we live that out every day? Well, it starts with Jesus. If you don't know Jesus personally, if you don't feel like you have that kind of relationship, just ask him. It's not a formal process. You don't have to walk down an aisle and fill out a card or anything like that. Just tell him where you're at. Pray right now. Jesus, I want that. I want you in my life. If you want to talk with someone about it, there's people in the prayer room afterwards and they would love to help you out with that. But just ask him to come into your life and ask for that kind of informal relationship to be adopted into the family. He will not say no. If you already have a relationship with Jesus, it can be so hard, at least for me, to just treat my relationship with him like a relationship. I don't schedule meetings with my best friends. I hang out with him. It's hard to hang out with Jesus sometimes because I feel like it's not formal enough. It's not clear cut. Just treat your relationship with him like a real relationship. It will have a profound effect on your life. Talk to him like you would talk to anybody. Cry with him, laugh with him. When you're angry about something, express your anger with him. Just treat your relationship with him like it is the closest, most intimate relationship you have because it can be, and that's what he wants. Try calling God daddy when you pray. I've been trying that for the last month. It's been really hard. Steve one time talked about worship, and he grew up in a church where worship was not an expressive thing, and he remembers the first time he ever worshiped and like turned his palms over. And he was nervous. He's like, oh my goodness. And I think all of us can relate to that. That's how I feel when I call God daddy. Daddy? Lightning, no? Okay, good. Um. And it's not some experiment, it's what he wants, it's what Jesus did. Let's pray this morning and wrap up. I guess I'll end it just by saying this. I have a two and a half-year-old son that I adore. And it's funny because uh two weeks ago we were talking about something similar with our college and young adult group that meets on a couple times a month on Tuesday nights, and uh Liam was being watched by someone that was doing childcare for us, but they needed to go early. So I'm I'm sitting on the stage in there and I'm talking about God wanting us to call him daddy, and this is such a God thing because as I'm talking about that, Liam turns the corner into the coffee shop. And when he sees me, he yells, Daddy, and he runs and he hugs me. He calls me daddy all the time. You know how much desire I have for that to stop? None. I would trade a million sirs and feeling respected and all that. I would trade all of that in a heartbeat for the intimacy and the love of daddy. That's what God wants. That's what Jesus earned for us. So if you ever have a question in your mind of what gives me the right to call God that, Jesus does. Because he earned it for you. So don't settle for anything less. Jesus threw that formality out the window. He gave us intimacy with God. So let's just honor that and be his kids and call him our daddy and enjoy it and find rest in our relationship with him. Let's pray. Daddy, we love you.