Tag: Sermon

When Life Feels Empty

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This past Sunday we kicked off a brand new teaching series called Finding Meaning. For the next few weeks we are going to walk through some highlights of the collection of wisdom in the Hebrew Bible we call Ecclesiastes. In Ecclesiastes, the wisest man who ever lived records some personal thoughts on his own efforts to find meaning in life. Through his reflections we can learn a great deal about where to find it in our own. First, though, we need a foundation from which to build this structure of ideas. That’s what we did yesterday. If we are going to find real meaning in our lives, where do we start building? Keep reading to find out.

When Life Feels Empty

So…the Patriots won the Super Bowl.  Again.  I’ll just say: They’re really good.  More specifically, Tom Brady is really good.  Bill Belichik is really good.  They managed to bring just what they needed to beat every opponent they faced in the playoffs.  Every time.  Now, the result was the most boring Super Bowl game ever, but I’ll bet you didn’t hear any complaints to that effect in the locker room after the game.  A Super Bowl win is a Super Bowl win even if it’s boring.  The thing that drives so many folks crazy about the Patriots isn’t just that they are really good.  The Los Angeles Rams and even my Kansas City Chiefs were really good this season and they didn’t drive anybody crazy.  The same goes with the New Orleans Saints.  No, the thing that gets under the skin of so many folks is that they’ve been good for so long.  This was the sixth win for Patriots and their ninth Super Bowl appearance just in the last 19 years.  In other words, they’ve been to the Super Bowl basically every other season for the whole of this millennium. 

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Planting Seeds

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God designed you to grow. And, when you’re growing like you should, you’ll be producing seeds that can be planted in other people that will affect the way they see and interact with and think about the world around them. The question is: Are these Gospel seeds, or are they seeds for something less savory. As a community, God designed us to be a place where people grow in Christ. Read on to see what this means for us, what it can mean for you, and what we should to about it.

Planting Seeds

I don’t have any corn growing in my front yard.  You can drive by my house any day of the week, any time of the day, and you won’t ever see any there.  It’s the weirdest thing.  It just isn’t there.  I like corn.  I love eating it.  I love it when we buy a whole bunch at the store, strip it off the cob, freeze it, and pull it out months later to enjoy.  Lisa is a wizard with those goodie freezer bags.  But there just isn’t any in my front yard.  There aren’t any green beans either.  That’s really too bad too, because it’s the one vegetable we’ve managed to be able to get all three boys to eat without much in the way of complaint.  I can’t tell you how convenient it would be to simply go out the front door and pick what we need rather than having to go to the store all the time for them.  Alas, though, the yard is bereft of beans.  And greens.  Now, I’m not much of one for greens myself, but Lisa likes cabbage.  You won’t find the first leaf of it in my front yard. 

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Resist Pride

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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. 

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Avoid Spiritual Amnesia

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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.

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