You know what nobody prepares you for as a parent? If you have kids, you've experienced this.

Maybe you were this kid growing up, but you spend so much energy thinking about the gifts that you

want to get your kids. And it's a privilege to get them a birthday gift or a Christmas gift or

whatever, whatever moment calls for a gift. And sometimes younger. And you're just, I mean, I was so excited about, you know, man, I'm going to, I'm going to be the best gift giver my kids have ever seen. I'm going to, I'm going to spend big. I'm going to spend more than I can afford. I'm going to go into debt. I'm kidding. But, you know, you want to get these awesome gifts. You need your research and Amazon and everything looks awesome and they're, you know,

there's special toys, whatever.

And then your kids are more interested in the box the toy came in.

You know what I mean?

Or you have all these incredible toys for them and then they just want to rearrange your

Tupperware drawer.

Or you have all these awesome things and they want to play with the pots and the pans. Or if you're like my kids, you know, I try to be healthy and so I've got this little like vitamin organizer thing with like different vitamins and stuff in it that are kind of broken up by each day. They prefer to rearrange that for me than to play with the toys that they have. And I'm just

thinking, okay, this is really cute, but I'm like, man, I've got something better for you. It's

like I want to look at them. I'm like, hey, you're settling. It's not that deep, by the way,

but it certainly feels that way. And I could not help but think about that as I prepared for this sermon today

because I think in a lot of ways we don't get away from that as adults, especially spiritually.

And I think for a lot of us, temptation is to settle for far less than what Jesus came to offer

us. And I want you to hold on to that thought and the Tupperware

lid for just a moment. Last week, we kicked off a brand new series called questioning Jesus,

conversations with Pharisees, seekers, and disciples. And the idea behind this series is that

throughout the Gospels, Jesus was very often

questioned. However, he was also often doing the questioning. To all of his contemporaries,

to anybody that followed him, to anybody that heard Jesus in the first century, he would have been

known as a rabbi.

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