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Amen. Would you pray with me? God, thank you for being such a good God. Thank you for being gracious and merciful to us. God, as we open your word this morning, would you prepare our hearts? Would you prepare our minds? Would you open our ears so that we can learn for more about you and how we should respond to you? Pray all that in your son's holy and matchless name. And everybody at Family Church said, Amen, amen. You can be seated. Good morning, Family Church. If we haven't got a chance to meet before, my name is Christian Rodriguez. I get to serve as one of the pastors here on our staff, and I am so excited to be here with you this morning. If you don't know my story, 15 years ago, I was a high school student in the area, and I got invited to Family Church for a dodgeball tournament by some of my closest friends. Then a few years after that, I started attending a Bible study on Sunday nights in Wellington with a group of students from Family Church and some men who were leading that group. That's the first time I ever read the Bible on my own, was with that group of young men. Then as a college student, I got the opportunity to be an intern here at our church, and I got to be grown and developed into a young man of God. And now my wife and I, my wife's name is Victoria. We get to build our family here. We have a 10-month-old son named Santiago. I brought a picture because he's really cute. He's just adorable. Coolest baby in the world. And we are so excited that we get to raise our son here. And we're really thankful for our church family. Really thankful for the pastors at our church. Super thankful for Pastor Jimmy, Pastor Derek, who have influenced me. And a lot of the reason I'm the man that I am today is because of them. And I'm thankful to be at a church where we develop young leaders who have a desire to serve the Lord. And I love getting to teach the Bible. I'm really excited to share with you from God's Word today. We're going to be studying the book of Joel. So, but as I said, I grew up in the area. So as a student pastor now, I get the opportunity a lot of the time to visit my old high school. And I try not to go too often because we all know that weird alumni that goes on campus too much, you know, you probably can think of their name in your head. But whenever I do get to go, uh, it's really exciting because I walk through the halls and I kind of reminisce on all the memories that I have. I walk through uh the hallway where my old locker was, and remember that I walk by my old favorite classrooms, and one of the things that comes to my mind most vividly are the conversations that me and my best friends would have in the hallway. They were always the same conversations. We were always planning how we can prank each other. And we had a list of different pranks we would do. So sometimes we would steal a backpack and turn it inside out with all the stuff in it and put it somewhere. In the 10th grade, we learned the miracle that is the zip tie, and we would uh zip tie each other to the desk through the belt loops and all that. And we had a lot of fun. But the issue with us back then, and the issue with a lot of our high school boys is that there's a line, and when you cross the line, bad things happen, there's some consequences, and high school boys have no idea where the line is. But every once in a while, we had a feeling we were getting close to the line, but we didn't think we were crossing the line. And a friend would come by and he would he'd he'd gather us up in the hallway and go, He knows. Like, who knows? The dean. He pulled me aside today and said, We gotta stop, or he's gonna call us into the office. And when we'd hear that warning, we'd have two decisions to make. Number one, listen to the warning and stop. Or number two, ignore the warning, roll the dice and see what happens. Today, as we study the book of Joel, when we study this book, I want you to think of that friend in the hallway. That friend in the hallway who's giving you a warning that if we continue living our lives in this hurting way, making these wrong decisions, that there's a day coming when we're gonna have to face consequences for those decisions. And I think as we study the book of Joel, there's a main idea that we're gonna learn about today. It's that Joel tells the whole, all the people, hey, the day of the Lord is coming. It's a day where there will be judgment for sin, there will be consequences. But God is sending you some warnings, and it is never too late for you to repent and be restored. So go ahead, get your Bibles out as we get ready to read from the book of Joel. It's a little bit more than halfway through. It's the second minor prophet that we're gonna be covering this summer as we go through our summer in the minors. And we're gonna teach the whole book. It'll only take you 10 minutes to read on your own, but we're gonna read a couple different passages from a couple different chapters, and then later we'll pull out four things that we can learn about God and the way that we should live our lives from this text. So, would you guys uh follow along with me as we read this from the book of Joel? The word of the Lord that came to Joel, the son of Pethual, hear this, you elders, give ear all inhabitants of the land. Has such a thing happened in your days or in the days of your fathers? Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children and their children to another generation. What the cutting locusts left, the swarming locusts is eating, what the swarming locusts left, the hopping locust is eating, and what the hopping locusts left, the destroying locusts is eating. Awake you drunkards, and weep and wail, all you drinkers of wine, because this of the sweet wine, for it is cut off from your mouth. For a nation has come up against my land, powerful and beyond number, its teeth are lion's teeth, and its fangs of a lioness. Now we go to chapter two, verse one and two. Blow a trumpet in Zion, sound an alarm on my holy mountain. Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near. A day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness. Like blackness there is spread upon the mountains a great and powerful people. Their like has never been before, nor will be again after them through the years of all generations. Now we're going to skip down to verse twelve in chapter two. Yet even now declares the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning, and rend your hearts, not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he's gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He relents over disaster. In our last power part of the passage, verses 24 through 32. The threshing floors shall be full of grain, the vats shall overflow with wine and oil. I will restore to you the years that the swarming locusts has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army which I sent among you. You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God, who has dealt wondrously with you. And my people shall never be put to shame. You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and I am the Lord your God, and there is none else, and my people shall never again be put to shame. And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions, even on the male and female servants in those days, I will pour out my spirit, and I will show wonders in the heavens and on earth. Blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. For in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those who escape, as the Lord has said, and among the survivors shall be those whom the Lord calls. This is the word of God, and we received God's word this morning at Family Church. Let me help you understand some context to what's going on as we're reading and studying the book of Joel. So we have God's people in the nation of Israel, but right now in the timeline in the Old Testament history, the people of God have actually been split into two kingdoms, and we have a timeline that will help you understand that. We have the northern kingdom, which has ten tribes. And last week we got to hear about one of the minor prophets talking to them, but now we're in the southern kingdom of Judah. And Joel's the first prophet that is encouraging them to turn away from their evil ways and to turn back towards the Lord. And you can see this is happening between the 7th and 9th century BC. And this is all before the exile that is to come. And Joel is letting them know hey, the day of the Lord is coming. The day of the Lord is near. And he's pointing out all these warnings that the kingdom of Judah is receiving from God so that they would turn away from their unrepentant sin before the day of the Lord comes. And we get a couple of those warnings in chapter one. So the first warning we get in verse four is of the locusts. That these locusts have come through the kingdom of Judah and they have devoured everything. I don't know if you've ever seen a swarm of locusts. They look like just a massive cloud, and they destroy everything that is in sight. And it actually says here, hey, there's been multiple locusts that have come in verse four. The cutting locusts, the swarming one, the hopping locusts, the destroying locusts. They have come through the land and destroyed everything. That's warning number one. And then warning number two is a warning for something that is about to come. In verse 6, we hear that there is this army, this nation rising, who is powerful and beyond number. Here's what Joel means by that. What he's saying is, hey, if you thought the locusts were bad, this foreign army that's about to come, there's so many of them you won't even be able to count them. This is a warning for what's about to happen. And then in chapter two, we get this general warning that, hey, the day of the Lord is coming. It is near. That's warning number three. We have to ask ourselves, so what exactly is the day of the Lord? When we study the Bible, the day of the Lord, it can mean a couple of different things. But I think a great ideal definition for us is that the day of the Lord is where God confronts evil. And we have previous days of the Lord. So in that chapter one, the locusts have already come through the land, and they've already had to experience that God confronted their evil with the locusts. And he's done that in other times in the Bible. In the story of Exodus, he does that in Egypt with the Pharaoh as well. We have an upcoming day of the Lord. This army, this foreign nation that's rising up that God is sending to confront Judah for their evil ways. If you read the rest of the Bible, there's another future day of the Lord. It's a day where God is going to confront evil by sending his one and only Son to die on the cross. And then we also know that there's a final day of the Lord. That there will be a day where God confronts evil for the last time and he separates evil for the rest of eternity. This is the day of the Lord that Joel is talking about. And he's saying, Hey, God's sending you warnings, people of Judah. The locusts have already come, the army's about to come. Are you going to listen to the warnings or is Judah going to ignore them? And I think today there are four things from this text and from the book of Joel that we can actually learn about God and things that we should apply to our lives. So as you walked in today, you should have received the listening guide. It has a place for you to take notes on the back. And I'd love for you to get that listening guide out because we think taking notes will actually help you remember things. It's something I tell my students in our middle school and high school ministry every single week. So, number one, I want you to write this down. It's that God takes sin seriously. That's the first thing that we learn in this passage. That sin is actually a really big deal. Sin actually separates us from God. First time we see sin is in Genesis 3. It separated Adam and Eve from God when they chose something over their relationship with God. You see it with the people of Judah and all through the Bible, and you and I, we still deal with sin today. It separates us from God. Sin looks like a lot of different things. Sometimes we choose money or influence or relationship over God and we turn our backs towards God. And the Bible says that God does take sin seriously. But then we also often hear that, well, hey, but we have an all-powerful and an all-good God. So a lot of people ask the question doesn't that mean we can just ask him to forgive our sins? And will he'll just forgive and forget? That's actually not the case. That God takes sin seriously. And there's a pastor that I really enjoy learning from. His name is Pastor Tim Keller. And this is what he says. He says, forgiveness is not God pretending that sin didn't happen. Forgiveness is God dealing with sin at an infinite cost to himself. And when you read and study the Bible, you learn that God did take care of sin. That's the gospel. That he sent his one and only Son down to this earth, and Jesus lived the perfect life that you and I can't live. He lived it entirely perfect, and then he died on the cross, and the cross is where God handled sin. There's another pastor named David Platt that he says this the cross was not a display of how little God, of how little God thinks of sin, but how seriously he takes it. So seriously that he'd sacrifice his one and only Son. Sin is bad and God is good. And part of God's character is that is He He is a holy and righteous God who will judge sin. He brings judgment upon sin because he takes it seriously. And you and I should learn from this that we need to take sin seriously too. We often say at family church that sin leads us to brokenness. And that sin has a big effect on us. Point number two in your notes today, what we can learn from this text is that sin makes everything suffer. Sin makes everything suffer. Let me remind you, chapter one, what the locust did. And let me point out some verses to you that we didn't read through. Verse 10. The locusts came through and the fields are all destroyed, the grounds mourned, the grain is destroyed, the wine is dried up. And then it even says that the beasts of the field have no pasture for them. Even the flocks of sheep suffer. Whenever I hear, read, or think of the word suffering, I think back to the year 2010. It's a rough year for me. I was on the JV football team as a ninth grade boy. Wasn't very good at football. But when I was on that football team from the summertime until the late fall, our coach made us suffer. We had to run laps anytime that we did something wrong. Anyone else here ever play on a sports team where you had to run laps for doing something wrong? Okay, the few, the proud. Alright. So whenever there was a mistake, the whole team paid for it. So if we lost the game on Thursday, we were running laps on Friday. If the star linebacker messed up on a play really bad, we were all running for it. If somebody was acting up in class and the coach got an email from our teacher, we were running extra laps that day. But the worst form of this was when coach called you over to him and you had to stand next to him on the sideline as everybody else ran laps for your mistake. And that was the worst feeling in the world. And I'll never forget what I learned from that coach, my ninth grade year of high school. Ninth grade in college, in high school. I learned from that coach that mistakes don't just affect you. That mistakes affect everyone around you. It's the same with sin. Sin will never just affect you. Sin will affect the people around you. When there's sin in your life, you will suffer, and the people around you will suffer. I'm learning in this stage of life that in my marriage, when there's sin in my life that affects my marriage, I'm not the one that always runs the laps for it. My wife runs the laps. I'm learning that the sin in my life now and in the future, that one day my son is gonna have to run some of the laps for that. Let me ask you this. That addiction that you have in your life right now, are you running laps for it? And maybe you're okay with suffering for that, but how is that affecting your family? Are they running laps for you? The lies that you keep telling, who's running laps for that? The thoughts that are going through your head every single day, the sinful thoughts, who's running laps for that? If we're being honest, maybe you've been running laps for quite some time now. You've been going through some suffering because of your sin, and you've been asking yourself, why does all this have to happen? What we're seeing from the text is that there are consequences for our sin. The people of Judah face consequences like the locusts and the foreign armies for their sin. So when you and I sin, we have to understand that there's consequences. There's no avoiding that. But I do love that Joel points something out to Judah, and I believe it's something that God wants you to hear today. It's verse 12 in chapter 2. Yet even now, declares the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, with mourning, and rend your hearts, not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful. He's slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love. He relents over disaster. If you brought your Bible with you and you feel comfortable underlining, I would underline, highlight, star those first three words. Yet even now. Yet even now means that even right now, as you're in the middle of facing the consequences of your sin. Even right now, as you are sinning, God wants you to return to him with your whole heart. And yes, he's sending you warning signals, he's sending you warning consequences, but at the same time, he's giving you an opportunity to do something. Don't ignore him. Don't ignore him. Because it doesn't matter what you've done, it doesn't matter what you've said, it doesn't matter who you are. God is saying that. Yet even now, you can return to him. You can repent. Number three, what we learn from this text today is that God wants us to repent because God restores us when we repent. And repenting, repentance literally means to turn away from. So when we're living a sinful life, we're walking towards sin and turning away from God. Repentance is to turn the other way, to turn towards God. And we often have this misconception that in order for us to repent, to go before God, we have to put ourselves all together and be perfect. No, that's not what Joel's telling us to do. The only stipulation here when it comes to repentance to the Lord is that we're supposed to do it with a genuine heart. That verse 13 is really important. Rend your hearts, not your garments. What he means by that is hey, come to me with your whole heart of repentance, a true desire on the inside. Don't just repent for show. Don't just put it on the outside. Say a prayer so that God would fix the problem that we have. No. He wants true and genuine repentance from you. Enemy. And I love that Joel follows us up with he's saying, Hey, return to the to the Lord your God, and then he reminds us of something. He reminds us of who God is. Reminds us that if we return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and He's merciful. He's slow to anger. He is abounding in steadfast love and he relents over disaster. So, yes, recognize we have a holy and righteous God who judges sin, but we also have a merciful father. We have a God who takes sin seriously, but we also have a God who has a serious love for the sinner. And if you skip down to verse 25, you get to read something that's truly incredible. That we don't just have a God who is merciful and chooses to forgive us for our sin. No, we have a good God who goes one step further. I will restore to you the years that the swarming locusts has eaten. The hopper, the destroyer, the cutter, my army which I sent among you. And you shall eat in plenty and be satisfied and praise the name of the Lord your God who has dealt wondrously with you, and my people shall never be put to shame. You know, in this season of life as a new dad, turning 30 this year, there's a lot of things that I'm learning. To be honest, most of the things that I learn, I actually get to learn from my church family from just doing life alongside all of you. One of the things that I'm learning is that when you live long enough, you have to live with those locust years. Some of you, you're in the middle of those years right now, and you are suffering. That God has sent you warnings, but you haven't repented, and you're in a season of suffering because of that right now. And for some of you, you've repented and you're running towards God, but you still have to deal with the years that the swarming locusts have eaten and taken away from you. And you're suffering as you're running towards God, but you're still dealing with those years that the locusts have stolen from you. Do you believe that God can restore those years? Because that's what it's saying in the text. He's saying, I will restore to you those years. And what that restoration looks like doesn't mean that he erases them. Doesn't mean he just makes them go away. No, but we have a God that's big enough that he can make those years good. He can make good come out of those years that we did wrong. So I'm here to tell you, and I believe God wants you to hear that you need to repent so that he can restore you. And you have to believe that he's a big enough God and a powerful enough God that if you repent, he can restore those years of your marriage that the locusts took away. You have to believe that God is big enough to restore the relationship you have with your parents or with your child. You have to believe that God's big enough that if you repent, he can restore the years of all those bad financial decisions you made out of sinful desires. And he can restore to you the years that the locusts took away that didn't even have to do with your own sin. That someone else's sin had an effect on you and that you've been running laps for it. Repent and be restored by this good, gracious God, because he is a good and loving father. So repent so that your life can be restored. Repent so that your family can be restored. You know, we do a lot for the sake of our families. I want to show another picture of my son, Santiago Santi, because again, he's just adorable. He's so cute that people who don't like babies often come up to me and they like whisper a secret, like, hey, not really into the babies thing. Yours is cute. You should keep him. And I'm like, oh, thank you. My wife grew him, so she did a great job. But I love my son. I love Sati. He's my best friend. I love talking to him. And there's nothing that I wouldn't do for that little boy. Doesn't matter if it's a 50 if diaper change and the diapers are getting stinkier because now he's on like real solid foods. Dirty, all right? Doesn't matter if he wakes up at 3 a.m. because he's teething and he's he screams in the middle of the night and he he needs medicine, he needs a bottle, and he just needs to be held. So I don't even hesitate. I'll get up and hold him. Well, even right now, he's so hungry all the time. I try to cook eggs for him and he loves eggs, but he doesn't like when I cook eggs. I gotta drive to Chick-fil-A on 10th Avenue North because he loves the holy eggs from Chick-fil-A. But I'll do it every time. And I know he's not gonna be this little forever. And I know things are going to change, but I hope that there's one thing that never changes. I hope that my little boy knows that he can call out to me and that I'll be there. One of these days he's finally gonna know my name. And I'm gonna remind him every single night, Santiago, your dad loves you. There's nothing you can do that'll make me love you any more or any less. And if you are ever in trouble, Santi, you can call on your dad's name and I'll be there for you. It doesn't matter where you are, it doesn't matter what you've done, doesn't matter what you've said, none of it matters. If you call on my name, I'll be there to save you. Do everything I can. If that's the love that I have for my little boy, how much more love does your heavenly father have for you? He's saying, Return to me with your whole heart, come back to me, is what God's saying. And I love verse 32, it's a really important verse. And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. Point number four today, call on the name of the Lord and be saved. You can call on his name today. If you haven't done it before, you should call on the name of the Lord. You should repent, tell God, I need you to save me, and that way he'll restore those years to you. And at the end of this service, we'll have a team right here in the front, our next steps team, that they would love to help you call on the name of the Lord for the first time today. And this verse is so important that Paul actually quotes it in the book of Romans in Romans 10 13. He says the same thing everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. And right before that, he actually says a really important verse, one of my favorite verses in the Bible, Romans 10 9. That if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, then you will be saved. Because we know the gospel, and the gospel changes everything. Jesus' death on the cross made a way for you not just to call on the name of the Lord so you can be saved right now, but so that you can be saved for the rest of eternity. That's why every week here at Family Church, we take the Lord's Supper to remind us of that truth. So as you walked in today, you should have gotten your Lord's Supper materials. Family Church, we take it every single week, and we believe the Lord's Supper is for those who have already repented and believed in the gospel, in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And we believe it's for those who have been baptized, who've made a public declaration of their inward faith, that they've rendered their hearts and not their garments. So if you haven't been baptized as a believer, then I'd ask you to not take the Lord's Supper today. That's something you'd want to do in the future. Come and talk to us. We'd love to help you take that next step. Maybe you're from out of town and you're visiting us today. You normally take the Lord's Supper at your home church. Take it with us today as our guests. But right now, as we have this song sung over us, let's take some time to render our hearts. Let's confess to the Lord of our sins and prepare our hearts as we get ready to take the Lord's Supper.