Category: Sermons

Naked

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While playing hide-and-seek is a fun game for kids, in the context of our lives, we want to be found. This is especially true in marriage. We want our marriages to be loving and intimate. We want to know and be known by our spouses. Intimacy, though, is tough. In this second part of our teaching series, Back to the Basics, we are talking about some of the things that can interrupt intimacy in our relationships and what we can do to get it restored. Thanks for reading and sharing.

Naked

I love playing hide-and-seek. I think I always have. I don’t play it as much anymore as I used to—my kids have mostly grown out of it—but it’s still a lot of fun. I remember one time playing with the boys at my folks’ house years ago. They have a loft area overlooking the living room. There’s a linen closet up there that’s really big. I got in there behind the blankets that were on the bottom, and they couldn’t find me. I had to finally start texting clues as to my location to Lisa so she could give them some hints. It was an awesome hiding place. But, the best part of the experience was being found, and the laughter that echoed through the house in that moment. When playing hide-and-seek, it’s always fun to find a killer spot. But if you stay hidden forever, eventually it gets boring. The real excitement of hide-and-seek is in being found. Deep down, we all really want to be found. 

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Love God First

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Marriage is something that affects all of our lives in one way or another. Most people are going to be married at some point in their lives. And, the various authors of the Scriptures have some things to say about marriage. This all means that as a church, it’s something we need to talk about from time to time. For the next four weeks, that’s exactly what we are going to do in a brand-new series called Back to the Basics. We are going to talk about four adjustments we can make in our marriages at a very fundamental level that will help put us on a track toward the relationships we want most. Let’s get start with today with a conversation about getting our priorities right.

Love God First

We do a lot of building in my house. The exact thing being built varies, but the building itself is consistent. Perhaps the most common building that happens is with Legos. Now, of course, you can build anything you want with Legos if you have the right bricks. The sky really is the limit in terms of the creative potential of that particular medium. Most of the Lego building that goes on in my house, though, is with pre-designed sets. These sets come with all the pieces you need to build whatever it is, packaged neatly in numbered bags, and with a set of instructions that walks you step-by-step through the process of building. Pro-tip, though: Don’t open all the bags at once. That makes the building a lot more tedious. Depending on the complexity of the build, the instructions range from fairly short to book length. But however long they happen to be, the most important thing is that you follow them carefully. If you use the wrong piece or put the right piece in the wrong place, that’s going to cause trouble later on in your building process. I can remember some sets I got mostly built only to discover that I had placed a piece incorrectly dozens of pages before. I had to go back and systematically take things apart in order to get it straightened out the right way. It was not very much fun. 

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A Relational Pathway

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Last week, we started a brief conversation about doubt. Today, we’re going to finish it. Last week we established the fact that the source of our doubts matters. It matters whether they come from a place of faith or a place of skepticism. But knowing where our doubts come from isn’t the same as knowing what doubt is in the first place. In this second part of our journey, we are going to clarify that, and with the direction of the teachings of Jesus, talk about how to get from doubt to faith. Read on to find out how.

A Relational Pathway

Several years ago, I went through a season in which I did a fair amount of woodworking. Now, I’ve long enjoyed woodworking ever since I took a woodworking class in junior high. I don’t know that it’s the woodworking itself so much as doing projects that have very clear instructions and which I can follow carefully to reproduce the results of the model. I enjoy it for the same reason I enjoy making the metal models that are all over my office. The difference between building metal models and woodworking, though, is that anybody can build those models. Woodworking is a developed skill. Having the right tools, but not knowing how to use them well will result in a lot of really bad woodworking. 

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Important Origins

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The beginning of the new year is often a time for messages of challenge and encouragement. In putting on a good face for a fresh start, though, it is easy to overlook or ignore problems and challenges that still exist. Doubt is one of those. And so, as we get started on this new year, we are taking a couple of weeks to talk about doubt, where it comes from, why that matters, and how God helps us deal with them. Thanks for joining me on this first sermon journey of the new year.

Important Origins

I have an important question for you as we get started this morning: Have you taken down your Christmas lights yet? Our tree was down on the 26th, mostly because we wanted full access to our living room again. The outside lights, though, we usually leave up at least a few days longer. We actually just got them all down in the last couple of days. We always put a line of lights across the front of our house, but it can’t be one continuous line because we have this weird extra roofline that breaks right at the front door. We’ve tried taking a string of lights across the gap, but they always look weird hanging loosely in this sort of no man’s land. So, we just break the strands of lights up and run cords to two different places. 

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Looking Out

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In the world of church life, this is the one Sunday that often gets forgotten about. It’s like a throwaway Sunday. I know of some churches that don’t even meet this week. Sitting between Christmas and New Year’s, most people are ready to just lie low, resting from the year past and preparing for the one that lies ahead. Yet rather than wasting such a time like this, it seems like a wiser play to redeem it. So, let’s look back and look forward at the same time; reflecting with gratitude on what has been, while anticipating with joyfulness what still lies ahead. Let’s talk about how we can be the kind of church God has made us to be.

Looking Out

So, I’m going to run out on a limb and be honest with you about something this morning. I went back and forth on this because of how it would be received, but decided that transparency is the best option. Before your minds race too far ahead of me with a list of all the things I could follow that opener with, I’ll just tell you: The idea for this message came to me in a dream. If you had a copy of the message and already read ahead, you were spared a bit of suspense there. I’m honestly not sure what it means that the idea came to me in a dream. I’m not sure how much weight to put on that. I am certain that it doesn’t mean anything significant about me. I normally have sermon subjects and passages planned out months ahead of time. But I had recently shifted some things around, and had been praying through what the message for this morning was going to be. For some reason, God seems to have chosen this way to communicate it. Prayerfully I’m getting it right. Again, I don’t know why. I don’t honestly remember any of the rest of the dream. I just remember the one idea that gave birth to what we’re going to be talking about today. I am pretty sure it is from God’s Spirit, though, because I hadn’t been thinking in this direction at all before, and the message is consistent with the Scriptures as we are going to see. All of that is to say this: I think what we are going to talk about this morning together is something God wanted to set before us as we wrap up this year and get ready for the new one arriving on Wednesday. 

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