 Good morning everybody. Can we welcome those who are watching online as well as those over our Portage Campus? We love you guys, welcome. We're so glad to be with you. Radiant tribe, one house, many rooms. And I'm fired up. You guys got your Bibles? If you got your Bible, lift it up wherever you are. Raise it high, raise it proud. Some of you are lifting up phones. Sure, okay. Yeah, if the power all goes out, hopefully your battery's charged. But I don't care whether it's on your phones or iPads or Bible's term with me to the Gospel of Luke chapter 10. And we're in a summer series entitled Heroes. And we're talking about heroes of the faith. Last year we talked about Old Testament heroes and there are so many of them. This year we're talking about New Testament heroes. And here's what I want us to get. We're not just looking at their lives from the perspective of a biographical sketch. We're actually desiring to dig down deeper below the surface of their story to find some of the DNA. Find some of the qualities that made them heroes of the faith that we can adopt and that we can learn from and that we can grow from. Because let me tell you something. The same Holy Spirit that dwell on the inside of Peter, John the Baptist and all the other heroes is the same Holy Spirit that lives on the inside of you if you're a follower of Jesus. The same word of God that they had is the same word of God we have. We don't have junior varsity Jesus and junior varsity Bibles. We got the real thing and if God can do it in them how many know by his grace he can do it in us. We just need to be inspired. The Bible says that he's given us these stories as examples to encourage and inspire our faith. And this morning we're gonna look at a woman who's in the Bible who is a massive hero of the faith. Her name is Mary of Bethany. Now there are a lot of different women named Mary in the Bible. There's Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene. And this one in particular is Mary of Bethany or Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus. And we're not gonna read all the particular stories connected with her but I wanna draw our attention to one very significant encounter that Jesus had with Mary of Bethany that I think epitomizes who she was as a hero of the faith. Luke chapter 10 beginning in verse number 38. And it says now as they went on their way Jesus entered a village and a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving and she went up to him and said Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me. But the Lord answered her Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things but one thing is necessary. And Mary has chosen the good portion which will not be taken away from her. So here's Mary and Martha living in the same village at least that we know of a little town called Bethany that's on the eastern side of the Mount of Olives. It's the last stop for Jesus before he enters into Jerusalem. The way that a Jew would travel in Israel if you're from Galilee, the northern district of Israel you would travel on the east side or along the coast of the Jordan River to avoid going through Samaria. And then once you got to Jericho you would make a sharp directional change to go west uphill 14 miles from Jericho to Jerusalem but before you would enter into Jerusalem you had to cross over the Mount of Olives and the little village on this side of the Mount of Olives was called Bethany. And that's where Martha and Mary and their brother Lazarus lived. And Jesus often would stay in Bethany. The reason why he'd stay there is because they were his friends. How many know? Nothing like crashing a friend's house when you're in town. I've got friends in different cities and sometimes when I travel to cities I stay in hotels. Hotels are, sometimes they're great but there's nothing better than staying if you can with somebody, a friend. That's how Jesus traveled before he would go into Jerusalem, the hub of the city he'd like to stay with his friends. Now in this particular occasion Jesus comes into Bethany and he runs into Mary and Martha and Martha invites him to come into the house along with his disciples. I mean he's got his little entourage of his 12 and who knows who else is following along and Martha says, no, come to my house. Come to my house. I wanna prepare a meal. I wanna host you. Hospitality's huge in Middle Eastern culture and so come please, come. Honor me. Honor my house by coming into my house and so Jesus says yes. And as we just read in the middle of the party while Martha's doing everything we see her sister and the only thing that tells us about her sister Mary is that Mary is parked at the feet of Jesus hanging on every word that he's speaking and it causes conflict with Martha and ultimately Jesus has this conversation with Martha about priorities and I think when you look at the story of Mary of Bethany there's a couple of different stories and we'll touch on each of the different stories that kind of tie back into this one central issue. We just know certain things about Mary and this will help you biographical material. Number one, obviously she lives in Bethany. She's probably the younger sister of Martha. And the reason why we know that is it was the prerogative and the privilege of the oldest to actually host people in your homes. It was kind of like, if you're the oldest this is your responsibility but it's also your privilege. So Mary's probably the younger sister in the birth order. Her name is Mary but her Hebrew name is actually Miriam. Mary is just kind of an anglicized name that comes from Miriam which has a long history all the way back to Aaron's and Moses' sister name Miriam and her name actually in the Hebrew means bitter or rebellious. And what we know is that when you look at her life both here and in a couple of the other stories that reflect her life though even though her name is Miriam, bitter and rebellious that's the polar opposite of how she lived her life. She was not bitter in spite of some circumstances that she faced. And she was not rebellious, she was devoted. And I think when we look at Mary of Bethany's life this story and some of the other stories and we begin to create a composite what we begin to realize is that Mary of Bethany is a massive example to us about what it means to be undistracted in our devotion to God. Undistracted. In our devotion to God. That's how Mary lived her life. She was undistracted. In this story we see her at the feet of Jesus which by the way is a posture of a disciple. When a rabbi would call somebody to become one of their students or disciple like when Jesus called Peter and he called Andrew and John and James or when Paul was called to be a student and a disciple of a man named Gamaliel who was the greatest scholar, greatest theologian of his day it says that he sat at the feet of Gamaliel. That's what that means is he signed up to be a disciple and here when it comes to Mary of Bethany it says that she sat at the feet of Jesus and listened to his teaching as a student. Why is that unusual? Because to the best of my knowledge both in history and in the Bible there's no other rabbi who called not just men but also women to be his disciples. Do you know that the first proclaimers of the gospel after Jesus' resurrection were not men, they were women? Do you know that some of the disciples that traveled with Jesus were women? Mary the mother of Jesus but then Mary Magdalene and Mary and there's a whole list you can actually go through the gospels and compile a list of about 11 different women that followed Jesus. So Jesus had 12 that were the apostles but he had at least 11 other women that traveled with him and were part of his ministry team. So if you ever hear in our culture that Christianity is anti-women that may be true of some movements within the church but it's not true of Jesus. Jesus is an equal opportunity savior and he also calls women to be his disciples because he created you with some gifts that us guys don't even necessarily get and I'll tell you one of them it's the ability to focus in the face of distracting environments. When we were raising our kids and they were little and I would come home from work I was basically an only child. When I came home as a kid I was the only one my house was quiet. Jane grew up in a house with siblings and so when I came home and our kids were screaming and toys were flying Jane was able to like focus in a conversation I could not. I'm like can we silence the children? Is there a mute button for these kids? She's able to like cook dinner, vacuum with her leg, change a diaper, watch TV, listen to Spotify and talk to me about life and I'm like Mary Bethany was a disciple of Jesus who knew what was important in her life and had a massive capability of living out her priorities of being undistracted especially when it came to devotion to Jesus. Her relationship with God was undistracted and when I say distraction let me give you a working definition of what it means to be distracted. A thing that prevents someone from giving their full attention to the important thing. Anything that will keep you from giving your full attention to the things that are most important. Anybody ever found yourself in a situation, a conversation that you knew was important or you needed to get some information that was vital but you found yourself distracted and then you had to ask what was that? Anybody ever done that before? In class I was terrible in school because I was always distracted. I was thinking about all kinds of other things. Teacher would go, Mr. Cummings are you paying attention? Oh yeah, totally. Listening everywhere that you say. What did I just say? I don't know, can't remember. Pay attention, pay attention. You're gonna need to know this. Listen, when it comes to life, distractions in our generation are more than, I think at any other time in human history, we have more distractions now than any other generation before us. Doesn't mean that they were better than us, it just means we're more distracted than they are. But in the middle of a distracted generation with all kinds of voices, all kinds of options, choices, things to think about it, we have the same 24 hours in a day, same basic life expectancy that generations before us had. But yet, we try to cram more things into the same box of time that our parents and our grandparents and those before them did. And yet, we don't have any more time. We don't get any more life. You know, the one thing that unifies and does not separate the wealthy from the poor is you can't buy time. You can buy everything else, you can't buy time. What does that require? Focus, requires focus. And I think that in our generation, our greatest enemy for disciples of Jesus, those who really wanna serve God, fulfill your purpose, know God intimately, find joy and peace in your relationship with God, it's distraction, it's distraction. Think about it, when I was a kid, and by the way, whenever you say when I was growing up or when I was a kid, that means you're old, so just face it. But when I was a kid, we had three channels on television. And one of them, maybe a fourth that you could barely get if you moved the rabbit ears around a little. My cousin Kimmy in the 80s had a huge bangs. Remember those aquanet bangs? Spray, it looked like a satellite dish. We could get channel 17 if she would hold the rabbit ears. And if you wanted to change the channel on the TV, you had to get up, walk to the television set, click, click, click, click, click, click, move the rabbit ears. And you had three channels and it went off at like midnight. Now we have 400 stations, 24 seven. And if that's not enough, you got Hulu, you got Netflix, you got Amazon Prime, you've got all kinds of options. I mean, you can spend your entire life engulfed in an iPad, on your phone, scrolling through Instagram, Facebook, social media. There was a time when we hung phones on the walls. And when you answered the phone, you said, hello. It's because you did not know who it was. You were asking a question. I saw somebody the other day, they like, I was in the airport terminal, this probably 18, 19 year old kid, he looks at his phone and he answers and he goes, hello. And I realized he's asking a question that he already knows the answer to. He knows who it is. But we're so trained to say hello, like it's a surprise. There really was a day when it was a surprise. And it really was a day when you could just let it ring. Now if you let it ring, the person on the other side of it knows, they have their phone with them all the time, they see my name and they're sending me to voicemail. And I'm upset about it. How many get upset about that? It's like, with your kids especially, it's like, how come your phone never leaves your hand? But when your dad calls, you never answer. Don't you dare send me to voicemail. I'm paying the bills. We're distracted. Think about this, there was a time 120 plus years ago. When the sun went down, you went to bed. And you woke up when the sun came up. There was no such thing as a third shift job. There was no such thing as artificial light. Maybe a couple of gas lamps in her fireplace. How many grew up watching Little House on the Prairie? Anybody grew up like, come on, can you really be saved and not have watched Little House on the Prairie? Wa, wa, wa, wa, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. So I did, I grew up watching her. And what did they do at night? Paul sat down with his fiddle. Wa, wa, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Or you know, Mr. Edwards is playing the spoons on his knees. It's terrible, but they didn't have iTunes. You watched the fire and you went to bed. Today we've got options. We could spend every moment of our lives, listen, distracted. From what's really, really important. Think about the things that are important in your life. Family, career, goals, health, finances, your future. How about this one? Your relationship with the God that you will spend eternity with. What about that? And let me ask this question. If you were to audit your life today, really honestly audit your life and determine, and we agreed upon, we're going to determine the things that are most valuable to you, most important to you by the amount of time you spend to them and the order in which you give your attention to them. Would the priorities that you think or want to be important in your life, would they actually register that way? Or would it be one of those situations where it's like, well, you know, that's really important to me, but I just can't find time, I'm too busy. Because here's what I want to tell you that, that if the things that you're spending the majority of your time and your energy and your prioritizing in your life don't match up with the things that you would list as the most important. What that means is you're looking at life through lenses and prescriptions that were never supposed to be given to you. And in a distracted life, we'll create a blurry life where nothing is clear. And nothing is seen the way that you're supposed to see it. We don't want God to be in our peripheral vision. We want God to be front and center. Hebrews chapter 12 says, looking unto Jesus, who's the author and the finisher of our faith, which means God is the God who starts our story and is finishing on the story. But the way that we start and finish strong is by keeping our eyes on Jesus. The priority of our life. And Mary of Bethany did that very same thing. She did that, she lived undistracted. While her sister is busy doing things, she is sitting at the feet of Jesus. And so if Mary truly is a model of undistracted devotion, what does that make Martha? Martha is a image or an example to us of our worst self. Because Jesus, I'm gonna know whenever Jesus says your name twice, pay attention. Martha, Martha. Notice he didn't say, Mary, Mary, why you bugging? He said, Martha, Martha. He said, you are troubled and anxious. Think about our culture. Trouble, which is stress and anxiety, which is worry. About many things. But one thing is needful. In Mary, she chose that, the better part. The part that will not be taken away from her. So here's what I want you to get this morning. Inside of each of us, there is a Mary and a Martha that are battling for dominance. Part of your personality is gonna swing towards Martha. Some more than others. And some of us are gonna swing towards Mary. There is a war between the Mary and the Martha in us. And if we're going to live undistracted within our devotion to Jesus, we've gotta let Mary win the battle. We've got to let the Mary in us. That part of us that sits at the feet of Jesus and prioritizes our relationship with God and sees everything else through that lens first because that gives us focus from an eternal perspective. And then we do the, I'm not talking about living in a monastery where all we do all day long is pray and read our Bibles. And I quit my job so that I can be undistracted. Well, guess what? We're gonna be really hungry. We need to go to Little League and we need to take our kids on vacations and we need to have jobs and we need to work hard and we need to have dreams and we need to have goals and we need to go to the gym and we've gotta have date nights and we've gotta watch comedies and laugh and you've gotta binge on Netflix because Stranger Things is coming out in a couple weeks and you've gotta do all those things. There's nothing wrong with those things. They just cannot become the substitute for the one thing, the prioritized thing in our life that is the most necessary, which is sitting at the feet of Jesus and from the position of sitting at the feet of Jesus, we gauge the importance of everything else. That's the difference. So I wanna show you from the life of Mary that it wasn't that she lived a perfect life without any challenges. No, she faced the same challenges you and I face every single day, but yet she chose the better part and that's what enabled her to be undistracted. So let's take a look at this. Mary of Bethany is a model of undistracted devotion to God. Number one, she did it by keeping her focus in the midst of offendable circumstances. Affendable circumstances. Anybody ever been offended in this room? Somebody just offended. Raise your hand if you've ever been offended. Okay. Some of you are offended, I just ask that question. And so now you're offended. And when you're offended, rarely do you know you're offended because it's justified. Do you know the worst kind of offense is when we're offended at God. I'm talking about when you're facing some things in life that do not seem to jive with what you think God should do or where God disappointed you or you're facing some very hard, difficult circumstances and it seems at times as if God does not care and does not hear you and is not responding to your need. That's our greatest opportunity to be offended and all of us face it. Disappointment is the result of unmet expectations and when we come to God, we have some expectations. Sometimes God answers our prayers really quick. Sometimes we see him answer other people's prayers and we're just like, wow, that's awesome. And then there's times where it's like, hey, I've done everything I'm supposed to do. I've prayed the prayer, I've stood on the scripture, I've asked you God, God, I know you're good, but yet where are you? If you've ever been through something like that, take comfort in the fact that so did Mary. Because there was a day where even though Jesus would call her and Martha and their brother Lazarus, his friend, there came a day in John 11 where Jesus is ministering in Jerusalem when Lazarus, the one who is Jesus' friend, imagine being Jesus' friend, not just a disciple, but somebody that Jesus, the son of the living God in human flesh, looked at and said, I really like you. I want you to be my friend. He gets sick to the point of death. So Mary, the older sister, the caretaker, she sends a messenger over the mountain into Jerusalem and says, go find Jesus and tell Jesus that Lazarus, the one that you love, he's sick and I need you to come and heal him. I mean, she thought, hey, I've got an in, right? I mean, Jesus is God in the flesh, he's Messiah, he heals the sick, my brother is his friend, he needs a miracle, the doctors say that there's no helping him, so just go get him. And when you read the story, she sends the messenger and when the messenger shows up and Jesus hears about it, it says in John 11, verse five, now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, so he loved them, right? Jesus is love, God is love, he loved them. And then it says, so because he loved them, so when he heard that Lazarus was ill, how did he respond? He stayed two more days. How does that make sense? Wait a second, what was Martha's expectation? Well, you obviously love Lazarus, you're gonna drop everything, like an ambulance. It's gonna woo, Jesus is gonna get a police escort and get to Bethany so that he can heal Lazarus. It says he loved them, but then he waited two more days. The disciples questioned him, hey, shouldn't we be going? He's like, oh, don't worry about it. God's got this, you see, Jesus knew the end from the beginning, Martha and Mary didn't. Jesus knew he was gonna show up and it's fine. I'm gonna go there and heal him. But there was a reason why he was waiting, because he knew this was gonna be his greatest miracles, greatest sign. It was gonna testify to the entire nation of Israel, ultimately his messianic authority, because in Jewish culture, they had a belief that within two to three days, a person could be resuscitated and they were not considered dead. Jesus had to wait long enough to where everybody knew Lazarus was dead, buried, stones rolled in front of his tomb, so that when he resurrected him, there would be an indisputable evidence that this was a death and a resurrection. But he waited two days. Martha didn't care about that. Martha carried about getting what she wanted done right now. So when Jesus finally, after four days, comes strolling into town, you can go and read it later. Martha leaves the house, here's Jesus and his disciples are coming up the driveway. Martha comes out and she's fiery, baby. She comes out looking for Jesus. Where have you been? How many of you got somebody in your family like that? It's like, where have you been? If you would have been here, Jesus, he would not have died. Lazarus would still be alive. Jesus, where have you been? But even now, I know Jesus, that if you'll pray for him, a miracle could still happen. But what she was saying is, I prayed, I asked, I knew, I believed you were good, I believed you were a friend, but you disappointed me, Jesus. That's what she was really saying. But while Martha is confronting Jesus on the driveway, it says that Mary remained in the house seated. Why is that significant? Because seated is a position of rest. It's a position of waiting. She was grieving. She didn't understand, but she wasn't offended. Jesus walks up to the tomb and I want you to think about this. Jesus standing before Lazarus says to him, he cries, shortest verse in the Bible says, Jesus wept, two words. But it says so much. He knew he was about ready to raise him from the dead. He knew his intentions, but still saddened him. And then Jesus said, roll the stone away. He said, he's dead, he's been in there four days, Jesus, it's too late. Huh, it might seem too late to you, but it's never too late for God. Roll the stone away, Lazarus, come out. You know, some scholars believe that if Jesus had not specified who he was calling out of the grave, he would have emptied out that cemetery. There's coming a day when Jesus comes back and he's gonna call all the saints out of the tomb. And what you saw him do to Lazarus is gonna be done on a massive scale. But on this particular day, restrained, he said, Lazarus, my friend, come out. Lazarus comes waddling out. He's raised from the dead. I am the resurrection and I am the life. Offendable circumstances. You can look at it and you can judge, Martha, but we've all been there. It's like, God, I thought I was your friend. I thought you loved me. I read your promises. I've read things that you've said. I've prayed for healing. I've asked for a job. I've believed for you to restore my relationship with my spouse. I'm believing for my kids and I'm in the middle of a situation where I've been faithful and tied in, but yet I can't pay my bills. God, what's going on? Offendable circumstances. Let me ask you, in the middle of offendable circumstances, do you run out and accuse God for not meeting your needs or are you in a place of rest and waiting because you are so convinced by the character of God? You just know that even though you don't understand why you're in what you're in, that God sees the beginning from the end and he works all things for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purposes. Where's your devotion line? Easier said than done, Pastor Lee. Oh, I know. Can't tell you how many times I've been disappointed. Let me tell you why I've been disappointed because God didn't take my advice. Little old lady in the first service told me, she goes, my, she was the first time guest. She goes, my, you sure have a lot to say. She's right. I tell God all the time. God, this would be great if you'd do this. You know, we do that sometimes with the Lord. Offendable circumstances, can you be undistracted even when you go through offendable circumstances? Number two, she was undistracted by the urgency of the mundane. Details of life. The urgency of the mundane. While Martha was focused on all the details of doing many things, that's what Jesus said. You're troubled and anxious about many things that were urgent because obviously you've got a dinner party over, right? This is that Mary saw the priority of the most important thing. The ability to prioritize beyond the urgent to the important. So think about this. You know, whenever we have people over at our home for dinner, it's the most stressful day that we ever have because what we call clean in our day to day, like what we're comfortable in, is not up to par when you have people over. How many of you know what I'm talking about? Like, Jane is super stressed when people are coming over. It's like, I just, I put my thick skin on because she's walking around and I'm stressed all day long. It's like, people are coming. How many, are you gonna Swiffer get the vacuum? Once again, I mean, we have a golden retriever. I mean, most incredible dog, but he sheds like a, like sheep. I mean, so there's tumbleweeds all over our wood floors. I'm swiffering. We could knit sweaters for the poor with the hair that we get off of the floor. And so we're doing that. We're dusting everything. It's music playing. Do we got candles burning? Did you clean the windows? It's like, whoa, details. That's what Martha's going through. She's got all these people coming over and here she is. She got Jesus. God is in your house for dinner and his disciples. And so she's bringing out, here's the bread and here's the hummus and oh, let me go back. I gotta get some glasses here and then fill up everybody's water and she's multi-testing. She's doing everything and she's irritated because she looks over at her sister and her sister's just listening to Jesus. And so Martha comes, hey, Jesus, aren't you gonna say something to Mary? Tell her to help me. I mean, slave it away in here. I kind of have a picture of my mom's and wives specifically. Have you ever found yourself trying to clean up after dinner or clean the kitchen and you're putting dishes away and everybody else is 20 feet away watching television and nobody moves? And so what do you do? You start throwing stuff. It's like silverware. Put that silverware away. Dishes aren't going gently into the car. Slamming them in there. Drawers are slamming. Ugh! Throwing stuff away. Carpages are gonna throw stuff away here. Hey, somebody feel like giving me a hand here. It's like, huh? I can see Martha doing that. And it makes sense. It's like, I can just see Mary going, Jesus, can you just speak a little louder? I can't hear you over Martha's clanging of the dishes. If you just speak a little, she's so focused. Martha's like, come on, Jesus. Martha, Martha, one thing is necessary. Do we get wrapped up in the details of what we do, that we miss out on the one thing that's most needful, which is we constantly come back to our devotion to God and to our relationship with Jesus as being the significant, most important thing of our life, the priority of our heart and that from there, when we're healthy in that environment, everything else is fueled with peace. I mean, we can work hard. It's one of the reasons why I believe that spending the first part of your day is so significant with the Lord. Read my Bible and I pray and it's not because I like mornings. I would rather get up and go do something else. I just know that if I get caught up in the rat race of everyday living, I'm not gonna do it later on. And so I get distracted because we're task oriented, a lot of us are task oriented people. Here's what I know. I know that Martha is probably on the Enneagram, a three with a two-wing. Anybody know what an Enneagram personality test is? So if you've ever taken, it's like all those other personality tests in Enneagram, a three is the achiever and a two is a helper. So I can relate to Martha because I am on the Enneagram, I'm a three. And when I first took it, I was mad that I was a three because I wanted to be another number on there which only reinforced the fact that I'm a three because I was trying to achieve a different number and a two is the helper. I can just see Mary, Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus, she's like a four which is the creative and they just don't care about anything. They wake up at 11, 13 in the morning and wear the same clothes they wore for the last 14 days but whoa, I'm creative. It's like, whoa, the three of us is looking at the foregone. Would you do something with your life? Come on, get up out of bed, wash your hair for once, please, that fried chicken on the floor is nasty. Get rid of it. Your artsy, that's wonderful, but here's a list. Any list people in the room? Me too. Have you ever done this? At the end of the day, after you've accomplished everything you knew you had to accomplish, you write a list so that you can check off all the things that you did so that you feel better. Anybody? Martha, Martha, Martha, I wanna kill the Mary. But at the end of the day, guess, here's what happens every day. Tomorrow there's a new list. You don't remember the list from 50 days ago. It's because it renews every day. But your relationship with God, it's the most important thing, your priority, your devotion, keeping your focus. Why? Because that doesn't go away. You don't lose that. Jesus said she's chosen the better part because it won't be taken away from her. You see what you do in your relationship with God today builds layer upon layer and goes with you into your future. You never lose it. But the things that you spend so much time and energy in today are just gonna end with today. Let me give you the last thing. It's Mary was not distracted by the cost of extravagance of her worship. There's a story in John chapter 12. It's another dinner party and it's Mary, Martha Lazarus is sitting at the table post-resurrection. And it says in the middle of this dinner in verse number three, it says, Mary took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus. Wiped his feet with her hair. The house was filled with fragrance of perfume. But Judas Iscariot, who was one of his disciples in would betray him, said, why was this ointment not sold for 300 denarii and given to the poor? But in verse eight, Jesus said this, the poor you have with you always, me, you do not always have. Mark's gospel. When he tells this story, he says that Jesus responds to Judas and says, she's done a beautiful thing. And wherever the gospel is preached from this day forward, what she has done will be told as a memorial. But you have to think about that. A bottle of ointment of made from nard. Nard is from a plant in Northern India. It's very costly, very expensive. And the reason why Mary of Bethany would have had this for one or two or maybe both reasons. One is it was an heirloom gift that had been passed down from generation to generation. The value of it, 300 denarii, a denarii in the Bible is one day's wages. 300 days wages do the math is a year's salary. It's about $70,000 in modern terms. So you would give this as a gift to your children, especially your daughters. And one of the reasons why you would give it, it was part of her dowry. So when she would get married, this came with her. And what a lot of times they would do is they would either keep it because of its value or on your wedding night, you would break it and you would pour it out on the bed as a celebration of the new union. So the best of our knowledge, Mary wasn't married. But all she had was Jesus. And so in the middle of this party, a party that was held for Jesus two days before he was about to go up, be arrested and crucified. Mary interrupts the party where everybody's talking and focused on other things and details. I'm sure Martha was slinging cups and throwing dishes. Who knows? Mary finds Jesus. She saw something that nobody else caught. She knew the moment, but this was significant. And she came to Jesus and she took the most expensive thing that she had, the most costly. She broke it. She poured it out on Jesus, on his feet. And then she let down her hair. In Jewish culture, a woman would never let down her hair for the whole world to see except her husband. She let down her hair and with her tears and her hair, she began to dry Jesus' feet. And Jesus says what she's doing is a beautiful thing. You know what she was saying? She was saying to Jesus, my future, my dreams, and my dignity belong to you. I will not offer to you average worship, Jesus. I will not give you what's comfortable. I will not measure the level of my devotion by what everybody else is doing. I wanna give you something more costly. I wanna give you a sacrifice. I wanna give you inside as well as the outside. I wanna humble myself before you. She was not distracted by the cost associated with passionately and fervently worshiping Jesus. In all three of these stories, Lazarus' resurrection, the party in Martha's home, and this story with the perfume. Do you know where you find Mary at the feet of Jesus? In a seated position, waiting at the feet of Jesus. It says that the perfume filled the entire room. Do you know what I believe with all of my heart? Is that if you and I can live undistracted in our total devotion to Jesus, not distracted by what people think of us, not distracted by what is going on in social media, not letting the news capture our attention and shape our viewpoints, not distracted by our fears. We don't allow the details to run our life, but if we can keep our eyes undistracted on Jesus, and we keep coming back to it saying, God, I wanna give you everything. I wanna give you the best of me. My future is in you. My dignity is in you. My hopes are in you. I trust you even when it doesn't make sense. I wanna work from a place of a relationship, not work from a place of trying to perform my way into pleasing you or finding fulfillment in life. My fulfillment is found at your feet. Jesus, here's what I believe. We live like that. Every room, every circumstance, every environment you and I walk into and the fragrance of the goodness of God will fill the room everywhere we go. And others will see the goodness of our God. Do you stand up with me wherever you're at? Charles Spurgeon, great preacher from London, lived about 150 years ago, one of my heroes, wrote this, permit not your minds to be easily distracted. Or you will often have your devotion destroyed. Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full in this marvelous face. And the things of earth will grow strangely dim. And the light of his glory is grace. Let's pray. Jesus, our Lord, we confess that we're easily distracted. We confess that our attention is so easily averted. But Lord, today we also confess that there's nothing worthy of comparison with who you are. And there's nothing as worthy of our full attention and all of our lives, our dignity, our worship, our sacrifice, our time, there's nothing as worthy as you. Lord, you're not just a God who stays at a distance. You're a God who draws close to us. You're a father who invites us into the secret place to be with you. Lord, I pray that even in the middle of summer, no matter who we are, where we're at in our faith journey, Lord, we would not allow our hearts to become distracted. But we would keep the main thing, the eternal thing, the most prized and valued thing, our devotion to you. We would keep it front and center. Lord, forgive us for the times when we haven't and give us grace to change and to repent and to have a new way of thinking. Lord, we wanna live in relationship with you. We wanna live from the perspective of who you are and let everything else flow from that. Help us to be like Mary and we pour out our worship. We pour out our devotion at your feet, Jesus. How beautiful are the feet of our Savior. I wanna invite our prayer team to make their way down front this morning. And before we dismiss three people quickly that I wanna highlight. Number one is you're here and you, you may believe in God, you might have gone to church all of your life, but honestly, you've never had a defining moment where you have recognized that you need a Savior, a personal Savior. You need your sins to be washed so that you can be made right with God. Today, believe the spirit of the living God is maybe grabbing hold of some of our hearts and he's calling you repent. Repent is not a bad word, repent means change your mind. Stop thinking that you've got it all together and repent and acknowledge Jesus as the Lord of your life. Today, you can be made a child of God if you'll repent and believe. That's first group. Number two, you're here and you're facing some offendable circumstances. Some hard stuff and it seems as if Jesus is waiting two days and you can't figure it out. Your heart has been disappointed with God. Today I'm gonna challenge you. Don't allow your hearts to become hardened. Keep them soft. You may not know what God is going to do, but you can know the God who is going to move. You can trust him. You can stay seated and rest and in peace knowing God's at work. And in a moment, those of you who are struggling with offense, I want you to come and receive prayer to break that so that you can walk free. And then the third group is this. You've got some baggage, some stuff that's distracting you. And today you know you need to let some of that go and start with a new perspective today at the feet of Jesus. I'm gonna pray and then when I dismiss, if any three of those are you, I'm just gonna invite you to come and receive prayer up front. God meets us when we pray together. Lord today, thank you for the invitation to draw near to you. Meet us in this place as we pray in Jesus' name. Amen.