Becoming Who You Are

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I did not preach yesterday morning. I was celebrating the wedding of my college roommate this weekend. In Detroit. In March. Anyway, while I did not preach this weekend, I was given the opportunity to speak to our local association’s pastor’s gathering last week. Here’s the message I gave them. If you are a leader in your local church, and you feel like your church could be more than it is right now, this is a message you’re going to want to catch. What I shared with the pastors last week was the secret to setting your church on the track of becoming fully who God designed her to be. Thanks for reading and sharing.

Becoming Who You Are

Have you ever tried to go somewhere blindfolded? Maybe someone’s done that to you as a kind of team-building exercise or an object lesson of some sort. How’d you do? I suppose it depends on where we are. I mean, if I’m at home, I’m going to feel fairly confident. I know where all of our stuff is—you know, minus all the surprises the kids leave in the floor—and feel like I could probably navigate my way around it to reach some goal without the benefit of sight. If you were to take me out of that environment and put me somewhere unfamiliar, though, that confidence level is going to drop like a stone. Even if you were to just put me in my front yard, I’d be moving around pretty carefully, not to mention slowly. It’s hard to get somewhere when we can’t see where we’re going. 

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Morning Musing: John 12:24

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“Truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains by itself. But if it dies, it produces much fruit.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

How is it that we manage to figure out who we are? More than that, how do we manage to become that person? There’s something inside of all of us that longs to be fully ourselves. The trouble is, most of us don’t really know who that is or how to get there if we do. There are all kinds of obstacles in the way. These appear in our path both internally and externally. Externally, some of the people around us don’t want us to become fully who we were made to be because they want us to be conformed to their own image for us. Maybe this is a parent in your life, but it could also be a sibling or a friend or a boss or a coworker. Many of our obstacles, though, are internal. We are afraid of the journey to reach that point. We don’t want to give up all of the things that will have to go for us to get there. We want to have options and not be fully committed to any one thing. The result here is often a mess. Jesus gave us a way to get there though. It is a way that was accidentally captured in the final episode of Titans season three. I know I did a review of the series a few weeks ago, but having just finished it at last, there’s one more thing we need to talk about. Let’s get to it.

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Digging in Deeper: Proverbs 4:23

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“Guard your heart above all else, for it is the source of life.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of my favorite illustrations of something Jesus said involves a tube of toothpaste. I look at the congregation and tell them people are like a tube of toothpaste. Then I ask them a question: What comes out when you squeeze a tube of toothpaste? After laughing nervously for a minute because they figure it’s a trick question (it’s not), I tell them: toothpaste. The next question is why? At this point, they’re really worried I’m going to pull something on them. Toothpaste comes out of a tube of toothpaste because that’s what’s in it. Now, sure, I’ve occasionally seen a magician make something like ketchup come out of a tube of toothpaste, but we all know that’s just a trick. If you were to go to the store and open all the tubes of toothpaste right out of their boxes, you would find nothing but toothpaste in them over and over and over again. Then, just to illustrate the point, I squeeze a tube of toothpaste all over a plate in front of them. The illustration is fun, but it helps make a point that Solomon makes right here in Proverbs. Let’s talk about it.

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Morning Musing: Acts 1:14

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“They were all continually united in prayer, along with the women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

What do we do when we don’t know what do to? There are seasons in life when the path forward from where we are to where we want to be isn’t at all clear. The reasons for this are many, but the result is the same: we feel lost and alone and confused and anxious and we don’t know what to do about it. What we see here in the beginning of Acts offers us a good way forward for moments just like this. Let’s take a look at what these folks did when they didn’t know the way forward.

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Morning Musing: Acts 1:8

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“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come on you, and you will be my witness in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the big educational trends of the last generation is the great focus on all things STEM. STEM, of course, is an acronym for science, technology, engineering, and math. This comes out of a recognition that those particular disciplines are of an increasingly vital importance in the modern world, coupled with a desire to prepare students more thoroughly and effectively to gain meaningful careers in related fields. This STEM focus plays itself out in a variety of ways from schools offering more of the relevant courses in these areas, to the development of entire STEM schools – like my own boys attend – where STEM has become an entire educational philosophy where real world problem solving and interdisciplinary interactions are the foundation on which all learning is built. What this helps students see is that just because an idea is properly understood through a single set of lenses doesn’t meant there are not still more implications to the idea that can help us understand other ideas in new and important ways. What has me thinking about all of this today is a reflection I recently read on this well-known verse from Acts. What it means is clear. But there are some implications of those ideas that I hadn’t considered before. Let’s explore these together.

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