Sermon – Page 8 – The Nexus

In this final part of our series, Pursue: Chasing God in a Godless World, we talk about the one thing that has the greatest power to throw us off the path to life. Having this thing in our lives is like having mold in our houses. It can grow in ways we don’t notice or see until we’re sick from it. What is it and how do we deal with it? Keep reading to find out.

Resist Pride

We had a rainy November,didn’t we? As the rain was falling a couple of weeks ago, I looked out at our swamp and we had more water standing in our yard than we did during Hurricane Florence. And, given that we had almost as much rain over those few days as we did in the bigger storm, I shouldn’t have been surprised. It still wasn’t the catastrophic rain they had not all that far east of here. The real problem from that amount of flooding isn’t just the floodwaters themselves. It’s what comes next. The North Carolina Baptists have and will continue to have disaster relief crews busily at work for the next 2-3 years to get life restored to where it was before Florence rolled through. It’ll take that long because the clean-up is hard work. You’ve got to go into these homes and demo and replace everything from the ground up to above wherever the final water line was. And you have to do all of that because of the threat of mold.

Read THE REST

In part five of our series, Pursue: Chasing God in a Godless World, we pause to remember. Along the way of our journeys after Jesus, problems and challenges are going to arise. When these do, if we’re not careful, we can get so focused on dealing with them that we forget about the God who’s been helping us all along. Keep reading to see what impact this can have and how we can avoid it.

Avoid Spiritual Amnesia

When was the last time you forgot something? (And if you can’t remember, now counts.) Forgetting things is frustrating. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how some things stick, but others don’t. Usually, it too often seems like the inane, unimportant things stick, while the important ones don’t. That’s infuriating, isn’t it? It’s infuriating for us, sure, but it’s infuriating for the people around us who were perhaps counting on us remembering them. Guys—confession time—we do that more often than our wives do, don’t we? I know I need to work on that all the time and I’ll bet some of you do too.

Read the rest…