Category: Sermons

Stand Down

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In this third part of our teaching series, Stand Up: How to Fight Injustice, we finally start talking about action.  We’ve spent the previous two weeks establishing a baseline from which to begin our fight.  This week the fight begins…but not where we might expect it.  Our battles against injustice begin best not on our feet, but on our knees.  Keep reading to see how this plays out through the story of Esther.

 

Stand Down

One of our good friends in Virginia is a handyman who enjoys woodworking.  Prior to living there and getting to know Rod, the only time I had ever done any woodworking was my junior high shop classes—classes which I thoroughly enjoyed and was pretty good at.  I still have most of the things I made.  Rod and his wife, Pat, had the gift of loving us and they did it well and in a number of ways.  One of the ways Rod did this with me in particular was to let me come down and play in his shop and create.  I only got a few projects finished before our growing family reduced the time available for woodworking to nil, but I enjoyed every minute of it.  Some of my favorite projects are a spice rack/cookbook shelf that’s hanging in the dining room and a toy bulldozer that was intended to be for the boys to play with until I realized how quickly they were going to break it relative to the number of hours that went into making it at which point it became a display piece.  Well, Rod liked to collect t-shirts with inspirational or funny messages on them.  One of my favorites was one that was perfect for the novice woodworker.  It read: Measure twice, cut once, curse, go by more wood, repeat. Read the rest…

Stand with Conviction

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In part two of our new teaching series, Stand Up: How to Fight Injustice, we looked together at the next part of the story of Esther.  Mordecai stands up to do the right thing…and everything goes wrong.  Through this hard turn of events we are reminded that if we are going to stand against injustice, we are going to have to make a commitment to do the right thing regardless of the outcome.  Keep reading to see how this unfolds.

Stand with Conviction

We live in a day when businesses are finding themselves needing to take social and moral stands in order to attract new customers.  Have you noticed that?  Used to be, companies and businesses focused on business.  If they wanted to convince people to spend their money with them instead of with a competitor, they worked really hard to plant the idea in our minds that they were the very best at what they did.  Their product was better than anybody else’s.  They were going to take care of their customers better than anybody else would.  They were the best…at their business.  Today, though, as being socially conscious has gotten more and more popular, many businesses are worrying less about talking about how great their products are, and are instead spending more time telling us how socially conscious, or progressive, they are.  Commercials often double as political statements.  Some don’t talk about their products at all, they just take a stand on some social issue and assume that customers will be drawn to use their products on the basis of that social stance alone. Read the rest…

Be Ready to Stand

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This week we begin a brand new series called Stand Up: How to Fight Injustice.  For the next six weeks and with the story of Esther as our guide, we are going to look at how as followers of Jesus we can stand effectively against injustice in the world around us.  Sometimes we’ll be called to do that in big, bold ways, but more often than not, our best chances will be small and seemingly insignificant.  But, if we don’t make them, injustice is given that much more space to flourish, so make them we must.  Stay tuned in the weeks ahead for how to do it.

 

Be Ready to Stand

Have you ever heard the word “serendipity” before?  I’m sure you have.  Better question: Do you know what it means?  You might know it was the title of a romantic comedy starring John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale.  That doesn’t really answer the question, though.  Serendipity is a word used to describe a random, but fortunate turn of circumstances.  In other words, serendipity is when something good happens to you totally unexpectedly.  The idea is that the universe has contrived to bless you in some kind of a way without your realizing it.  Now, this is not a concept that connects with the Christian worldview at all.  As followers of Jesus, we believe that God is the giver of all good gifts, not some impersonal entity such as “the universe.”  But, many people don’t have a category for something like this happening because they don’t have the proper worldview framework and so they simply call it serendipity. Read the rest…

Get Moving

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In this second part of our conversation, What’s Next, we took a look at how the ideas of growing and reaching and help give us clarity in terms of our next steps now that we understand our identity a bit more fully.  Keep reading to see how these can guide us.

 

Get Moving

Well, last week, after spending the previous four talking about our God-given identity as a church, we began a new conversation seeking to answer the question, “What’s Next?”  So we know a little better than we did before who God made us to be.  What are we supposed to do with that?  What are some of the things we can be doing now to start moving us down the road in the direction of becoming fully that church?  Certainly we’re not going to get there all at once, but what are the steps we can take now no matter who we are and where we are in order to start the ball rolling in that direction?  Perhaps to ask that another way: How can we begin adjusting our behavior as a body in light of who God made us to be such that even if we’re not fully that church yet, we’re putting ourselves in a place to begin becoming that church? Read the rest…

Diving In

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After spending the past four weeks talking about who God made us to be as a church, this past Sunday morning we started a new conversation about what’s next.  Now that we know who we are, what are some of the specific things we can start doing now to make sure we are able to move all together in the direction He has designed us to go?  Keep reading to find out.

 

Diving In

Wasn’t last week fun?  If you were not here for whatever reason number one, we missed you.  Number two, you will want to get your hands on a video of the service so you can experience some of the Spirit moving as we did in the room.  After three weeks of unpacking the key pieces of the identity God has built into this church for the purpose of building up the larger body of Christ and expanding the kingdom starting in Oakboro and moving on outward from here, we finally put everything together as we celebrated the resurrection and found ourselves in the larger story God is writing across the ages.  I thought it was a really exciting morning and I hope you did too.  It was definitely a morning that I have been looking forward to for quite some time.  Several of you have told me how excited you are to race forward to see what God has in store for us in the days ahead as we become fully the body of Christ He made us to be—a place where people connect to grow in Christ and reach out for His kingdom.  And yet this week…everything looks about like it did last week.  So…what’s next? Read the rest…