Pastor Fred continued the What’s Next Series by preaching out of Acts 14. There were quite a few nuggets that I picked up on and here are a few of them. The first one is that one of the underlying themes of the sermon is, What is Truth? This has been a long debated subject etc and one of the more famous examples is in the Gospel of John when Pontius Pilate asked that exact question to Jesus. The subject of truuth can be put two ways. There is Truth with a capital T that is absolute and no way we can get around it no matter how hard we try. It’s like gravity, eventually airplanes are going to land because they can’t fly forever, or when a person jumps up, they will come back down to the ground, no matter how much they want to fly. Then there is truth with a little T. This is like Duluth being 55 degrees and foggy while people in Moose Lake or Barnum have it sunny and 75 degrees. Both are true and this form of truth is based on location and even experience, whereas Truth with a capital T is universal and applies to everyone and we can not avoid it.
My second nugget is that most of us struggle with contentment. Is we “need” or we really want something because it will make something better. So we get on our favorite app or website and have it shipped within two days in a lot of cases. Amazon makes over one billion deliveries a year and now imagine what the numbers are with places like Wal Mart doing the same thing.To put it another way, Americans has over 1.25 Trillion dollars in credit card debt alone. This does not include student loans, mortgages, medical bills or any other debt. Then we have to find places to keep the stuff that makes us content, we fill up garages, attics and even renting out storage units for all of our treasures that makes us content us happy. The sad thing is, we often forget about those things and move on to another project, or trip over them looking for something else. Just remember what Jesus said during the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. We shouldn’t find our contentment or treasure in things that collect dust, rust, break or magically disappear, but in things that are eternal.
My third nugget is how often do we get distracted. I know I am not the only person who sits down to check something on their phone and twenty minutes later I completely forgot what I was looking up. When I go hiking with two people, and when we are traveling to our destination, random thoughts pop into their head and they share them. It’s often not what we were talking about and the goal is to push my buttons. It’s worth it because there is often chocolate or ice cream involved. So here is my question, do we allow ourselves to get distracted because something is to hard or we don’t want to put on the big kid pants and not deal with it, and hope it goes away. It’s like not paying a speeding ticket and then a bench warrant comes in the mail from the county court and mom happens to pick up the mai when everyone is coming home from school. When we get distracted, bad things happen and it usually makes ir worse.
My final nugget is discipleship and this is where we intentionally become more like Jesus. 18th century theologian John Wesley was a big advocate of discipleship. He created something called band and societies and they make the current view of small groups look like child’s play. There was a list of five questions that was asked of every person during these groups and that 5th question was “do you desire to keep anything secret?” How well do things go when we keep the important things from the significant people in our lives? Most of the time it doesn’t go well, and we are more likely to do it again with bigger things. Discipleship comes in where a person ask God and a few trusted people to not only keep them accountable but also to be an example and to carry each others burdens. Discipleship is point people to Jesus and encouraging them to take that next step. Also, there are even times for correction when something goes wrong. The biggest part of discipleship is that you can’t not expect others to what you are not willing to do yourself.
I will close with this, the main point of Pastor Fred’s sermon was that how are much are we willing to hive. With the pig and chicken wanting to start an all day breakfast joint, are we going to be like the chicken who gives a little each day for the cause in the form of eggs. Or are we going to be like the pig and give everything it had so there could be bacon and sausage. My guess is that most of us want to be the chicken, and give a little daily, but God is calling us to bid that pig and give till we are uncomfortable and then give a little more. We all have that one area where God is calling us to give more to the point where we are out of our comfort zone. Could it be tithing more, participating in a ministry of some kind to having a difficult conversation. I will close with this illustration. When I was in seminary, there were a number of people who fought God about going into full time ministry. Some of them had that fight for several years and even a decade in some cases, but eventually said yes. For some it was harder because not only were they a full time student, but they had a family to provide for. So our we going to keep fighting God or are we going to submit to God and give it our all.
Grace and Peace
Tom Boustead
No comments:
Post a Comment