Tag: Investing in God’s Kingdom

Doubling Down

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We have talked about sacrifice. We have talked about surrender. We have talked about commitment. When we have pursued these three essential elements of seeing God’s kingdom advancing work increase and expand in our midst, there’s just one thing left to do: Celebrate. But how we celebrate matters. As we wrap up this teaching series and enter together into the glorious future to which God is leading us, let’s talk about the best way to celebrate kingdom successes. Spoiler alert: It is an entirely more active process than we might imagine.

Doubling Down

So, my baseball team is not playing in the World Series right now. We could have. Our pitching was certainly good enough. Our manager definitely deserves great credit for his part of the effort. The Royals are one of three teams in baseball history to have gone from losing more than 100 games in a season to making the Playoffs the next. That kind of a turnaround doesn’t happen on talent alone. And for most of the season, we hit the ball pretty well. We were way ahead in the runs scored versus runs allowed statistic. Almost 100 ahead in fact. That was a pretty dramatic change from last year all by itself. In fact, we scored more total runs this season than Cleveland who won the division. If we had won as many games as our runs scored versus runs allowed stat suggested, we would have won the division instead of them. But from the All-Star break forward, we gradually hit the ball less and less, and as a result, we scored fewer and fewer runs. We didn’t do the things that had propelled us to first place in the division more than once earlier in the season. As a result, our success waned. And our Cinderella run ended.

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Sticking with It

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Pursuing a path of sacrificial living and surrendering to God’s call on our lives are very good and important things to do if we are going to have any chance to experience the growth and expansion of His work in our midst. But as good and important as they are, they cannot be a one-off affair. They have to be something we do and then keep doing over and over again over the long haul of life. This doing and then doing again is the substance of a third thing that is necessary if we want to see God’s work in and through our lives become more than we ever imagined that it could. Let’s talk about this third thing as we continue our series, Together.

Sticking with It

I grew up listening to rock and roll music from the 60s and 70s. That was what my own dad had grown up with and he was either listening to it or singing it or whistling it almost all the time. I took to it about as naturally as walking. It doesn’t hurt that it’s mostly all really good music. One of the songs out of that era I remember listening to more than most is called Cats in the Cradle by Harry Chapin. I suspect many of you have heard the song. It’s about a man who is so busy with work all the years that his son is born and growing up that he misses all the key moments and milestones in the boy’s life. Then, when things have finally slowed down for him and he’s ready to start pursuing a relationship with his son, the son is so busy doing his own life that he doesn’t have time for his dad anymore. It’s really a depressing song to be one of Chapin’s most popular. 

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Letting Go

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If we want to grow God’s kingdom, walking a path of sacrificial living is going to be the key. But sacrifice by itself isn’t enough. There’s another step to take. In today’s continuation of our teaching series, Together, we are talking about what comes next once we have decided to walk this path. Helping us understand it will be two different stories, one of which ranks among the hardest in the Old Testament. Let’s dive in and see why letting go gives God a lot of room to accomplish His good work.

Letting Go

Some of the most incredible military victories over the course of human history have been won because one side simply refused to surrender and fought with courage and valor until their opposition was finally overcome. Even battles that have been lost have been turned into rallying cries for future soldiers to inspire them on to incredible feats of bravery. Consider the battle cry, “Remember the Alamo!” When the citizens of Texas were fighting Mexico for independence which ultimately resulted in their becoming a part of these United States, they were inspired by that cry to keep on pressing to defeat their foes until their threat was eliminated once and for all. But the fact is that Texas lost the battle for the Alamo that created that cry. It was their very refusal to surrender, though, that transformed them from being merely the losing side to immortalized heroes in the minds of their fellow soldiers and citizens. 

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