Can anything good come from...

    I filled in for a pastor friend of mine awhile ago and here is the sermon in its essence.  I am going to take each of the points and epand them out here in the near future, but I wanted to give people a taste of what is to come.

One of my favorite statements to come from the Bible comes from the John 1.  In this verse, Nathaniel makes the sarcastic statement of “can anything good come from Nazareth?”  Phillips response is “lets go find out.”  In the following verses, Nathaniel has an encounters Jesus and becomes one of the twelve disciples.  How we respond to Jesus and who He says He is should impact our lives greatly.  It can be everything from Jesus is nothing more than a lying lunatic, to He is the Lord of my life and everything in between.  If we make Jesus the Lord of our life, which I hope we are on a path too, here are three ideas on how this Lordship affects our lives. 

            The first one is the idea of maturity.  Maturity is more than just knowing more facts about Jesus and knowing the books of the Bible forward and backward.  How does knowing that Jesus died for us make us change how we live our lives?  It is more than just doing things and not doing things.  Rules are important, but what are our intentions for doing or not doing something.  It has to be more than fire insurance, because this is really self centered Christianity and it makes my relationship with Jesus all about me.  It is moving from being self centered to fulfilling the great commandment, which is loving God with everything we have and loving our neighbor as ourselves.  When we put our relationship with God first, things tend to fall into place.  I can rattle off facts about the athletes in this years Super Bowl, but it doesn’t mean I know them.  It is shifting from knowing facts to knowing the person. 

           

The second idea is that the Lordship of Christ should change is the idea of community.  This idea of community doesn’t necessarily mean that we all get along all the time.  I would argue that if a church or any other organization is always arguing or always getting along, there is something wrong.  I think that the beginning of this idea of community is are we willing enough to share.  I see this a lot when people give prayer request, we can share just about anything as along as it is some one else.  For some reason, people don’t want to share their deep soul, and probably because we want to keep feeling the warm fuzzes.  Community is not only care to share, but are we sharing to do something about it.  Are we willing to come along side people no matter how dirty and messy it gets or how much they get on our nerves.  There are healthy boundaries that we need to follow, but are we willing to put them into place and use them. 

           

The third idea is evangelism.  Are we willing to break out of our country club mentality and share the gospel.  I will keep this short, but are we willing to let our friends and family not spend eternity in heaven.  There is this idea of personal evangelism and corporate evangelism. The former is what are you doing on a personal basis to reach others for God, and the latter is what is our churching doing to reach our community.  A person I know favorite statement about my home church is that if it were to fall of the end of the earth, would the community miss us?  This is true on a cooperate level, but also on a personal level.  If you personally ceased to exist would your circle of influence miss God’s presence that you provided?  If you received good news about being cancer free, wouldn’t you want to share it with the whole world?  The news we have on eternal life is much greater than becoming cancer free (becoming cancer free is a great thing).  So If we make Jesus the Lord of our Life, it means that we mature, live in healthy community, and tell others what Jesus has done for us

Hope and Faith

Recently I started reading the children’s book A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle.  The book is about a family who is missing their father and know one knows exactly where is or what he is doing, but they have hope that he is coming home soon.  The family encounters three mythical creatures and they take the two oldest siblings along with a friend to go save their father.  The mythical creatures are often quoting different proverbs in the original language.  One of the proverbs is about hope and how we all need it and have it get through life.  In essence, we all need something to believe in. 

            Not only does Hebrews 11 talk about hope, but it talks about faith, and in all reality faith is the mature aspect of hope.  Let me break it down, in my book there are two kinds of hope, the first kind of hope where we believe in something, but it doesn’t lead to action.  To put it in simple terms, this form of hope is thinking that your team is going to go out and win it all.  There are plenty of people who think that the Vikings are going to win the Super Bowl every year, but how many of them go out and buy the Super Bowl tickets or make plans to attend the victory parade at the beginning of the year.  My guess is that there are more people who don’t do that than who do.  Or to put it in more practical terms.  How many of us went out and bought supplies before our last major snow this month.  I would venture to guess most of us went out and got the milk, bread and snow melt before the snow got here.  With working at Wal Mart, we were busy they two days before we got hit with the snow, and our shelves were bare.  Now I am sure some of it was the chicken little the sky is falling, but people wanted to make sure they had food and other things before the snow got here.  If we do this, why don’t we do it with the Creator of the Universe who sits on the throne eternally.   

            As Hebrews 11:1 puts it, now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.  The author of Hebrews goes on and shares Bible hall of fame, or the hall of faith, of how different people through out the Bible had the faith and they put into practice what they knew.  Mature faith is knowing that we are not saved by our works, but we live out our lives as a response to what God has done for us and what He has promised us.  Through out the Bible there are references to God being there for us and guiding us through life.  To sum it up, God is reaching down willing and wanting to interact with us and through us, are we willing to reach out and do those things out of not only obedience, but having faith and hope that God will be there for us and will work through us.