Tag: Sermon

Uncomplicated Relationships

Leave a comment

In this final part of our series, Simplicity: Finding Contentment in a Busy Life, we tackle one last area where we all struggle with finding contentment: Our relationships. Relationships can be hard. They can be so complicated. What causes that and how can we fix it? With some wise words from Paul as our guide, we wrap up our journey by answering those very two questions. Thanks for reading.

Uncomplicated Relationships

Around about the time that I was coming through my early teenage years, schools were just beginning to transition from having junior high schools to having middle schools.  My own school district followed the trend pretty closely.  When I was a freshman in high school, they passed a huge bond issue to fund some badly needed new school buildings.  The initial plan was to build three single-grade schools for all the students in the district.  So, they opened Pioneer Ridge Sixth Grade Center, George Caleb Bingham Seventh Grade Center, and they converted my junior high building into the James Bridger Eighth Grade Center.  The first class of those students came in as freshmen during my senior year of high school.  Imagine that—an entire grade who had been entirely on their own for three years.  And the year before that, they were all the last class of fifth graders at their various elementary schools.  Forget about not knowing how the standard school pecking order worked; they didn’t even remember what a pecking order was! 

Read the rest…

Use It Well

Leave a comment

In this fourth part of our series, Simplicity: Finding Contentment in a Busy Life, we get practical. What does it actually look like to live with the simplicity and contentment found only in Christ in some specific situations that everyone faces? We start this week with a situation that is powerful tempting for just about everyone to seek their contentment somewhere other than Jesus. Keep reading to find out where.

Use It Well

By a show of hands, how many of you have heard of Benny Hinn? The televangelist is a longtime peddler of the Prosperity Gospel. The Prosperity Gospel is a uniquely American heresy (that we have unfortunately exported around the world) which holds that God rewards faithfulness with material blessings, that worldly success is an obvious sign of God’s favor. It holds that the contrary is true as well: Poor health and financial loss and the like are signs of faithlessness on our part. If we aren’t seeing the life outcomes we want to see, it is because we don’t believe strongly enough. Hinn’s specialty is healing. His services are filled with him waving a hand in someone’s direction and that person falling over backwards as she is “slain by the Spirit.” In practice it’s pretty wild stuff.

Read the rest…

A Centered Life

Leave a comment

This past Sunday morning, we kicked off a brand new teaching series called Simplicity: Finding Contentment in a Busy Life. The fact is: We all have lives that are busier than we’d like them to be at times. We all have times when we are just discontent with the state of our situations. Trying to navigate out of and around those kinds of seasons can be tough. This series is all about how to avoid them in the first place. Don’t miss a single part of this journey as we talk about how to focus in, slow down, and live the kind of life we’ve always wanted to have.

A Centered Life

Do you ever want more?  That’s kind of a broad question.  More of what?  Well, anything.  If we’re going to stay that broad, then of course you do.  I do too.  Now, not of everything.  But sometimes we want more, right?  Maybe you want more to drink at dinner.  Perhaps you want more dinner.  Kids often want more attention.  If you’re reading or watching a great story, you may want more when it ends; you may want to find out what happens next.  There are all kinds of situations in which we want more. 

Read the rest…

Love Like Jesus

Leave a comment

This week we finally wrapped up our series, Being Useful. In the final analysis, how can we be the most useful to Jesus? The answer is found in getting ourselves on board with His most central mission: To love one another into the kingdom of God. To find out more about this incredibly freeing truth, keep reading.

Love Like Jesus

By the time I reached my senior year of college, I was so deep into my chemistry major there was no turning back from that.  I say that, because by that time I had already agreed to pursue God’s call to ministry and realized that most of what I had spent the previous three years learning was going to gradually leak out of the back of my head from disuse.  Always a fun realization when you still have the four hardest courses of your major yet ahead of you.  Speaking of that, one of those courses was Descriptive Inorganic Chemistry, or DINC for short.  The professor for the class was Dr. John O’Brien. 

Read the rest…

Irreducible Complexity

Leave a comment

With one more week to go in our series, Being Useful, we are starting to get a lot more clarity on what the picture of a life that is useful to Jesus looks like. And what does it look like? Love. This week and next we are going to wrap up this powerful series by talking about the role love plays in the church and in the life of a follower of Jesus. Don’t miss a single part of it.

Irreducible Complexity

Some of the fiercest and most significant debates happen in places where nobody sees them.  These are often inner-disciplinary debates among scholars on a single topic.  And the stakes for these are a lot higher than it would seem.  For instance, a debate among mathematicians about the best way to solve certain kinds of math problems may look from the outside like a bunch of geeks arguing about esoteric philosophies that have nothing to do with the daily lives of normal people.  But, the winning side may very well have their ideas appear in textbooks—do they even use textbooks anymore?—and curricula for elementary students and, all of a sudden, a whole new way of thinking about math will be planted in the culture.  All of a sudden, what was once abstract academic jargon begins to have a profound impact on the lives of regular people who are far removed from the ivy-covered campus buildings of elite universities.  Hello: Have you tried helping your kids with their math homework lately?  Case in point. 

Read the rest…