Tag: Sermons

A Proper Patriotism

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We are in the midst of another intensely partisan election season where one side regularly derides the other as hating America while the other side accuses the one of being a threat to our democracy. Both sides claim to love the country while insisting the other obviously does not. This raises an interesting question for us to consider as followers of Jesus: What does it look like to properly love our country? What does it look like for a follower of Jesus to properly love whatever country he happens to call home? As we continue in our series, Who Do You Want to Be, this week, examining what it looks like for believers to live like Jesus is coming back someday, let’s take a look at this question through the lens of the Gospel.

A Proper Patriotism

What does it look like to properly love your country? That’s a trickier question to answer than it might appear at first glance. I suspect most of you immediately called to mind all kinds of patriotic images. We’re not quite a month past the Fourth of July. Gathering as families and communities while we eat good food and watch other people blow stuff up seems to be a pretty good way to love our country. But can you love your country too much? Is that a thing? Can you make an idol out of it? What if you love it to the point that you are willing to overlook or otherwise justify obvious and real faults? No country has a history that is totally spotless from any sort of failing of morality. Does a proper love of country allow for honest conversations about those? At the same time, though, can you give those kinds of things too much attention? I mean, no country is perfect, sure, but none of them are all bad either. Every country has noble and redeeming qualities if you are willing to search for them. Yeah, maybe you have to search a little harder in some places than others, but they’re there. It seems that a proper love of country is going to avoid both of these extremes and fall in this messy middle ground of loving without idolizing, and being honest without becoming cynical. What has me thinking about all of this today is that as we continue in our teaching series, Who Do You Want to Be, we are going to be taking a look at our duty to be good citizens wherever we happen to live. 

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Making Things Better

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What does it look like to live with the end in mind? Perhaps a number of different things come to mind for us, but the list Jesus and the apostles created for us doesn’t always overlap with the things we might imagine first. As we continue in our series, Who Do You Want to Be, we are starting to get specific about some of the things we are called to do, some of the ways we are called to live as followers of Jesus, if He really is coming back one day. This first one is something God’s people have always been called to do wherever they happen to be: make our communities better places for everyone living in them. Let’s explore this together.

Making Things Better

Let’s start with what is going to sound like a strange question today. Have you ever been kidnapped and dropped off in a country that was totally different from your own? I can’t say that I have experienced anything quite that traumatic, but I can imagine it would be pretty terrifying and disorienting. Actually, check that. I probably can’t imagine how horrifying that would be. It would be even worse, though, if there weren’t any meaningful prospects of getting back home anytime soon. What can you do in that kind of a situation? There are basically two options before you. One is to do whatever you can to get out of the situation, whatever it takes. That’s certainly where our mind might go first. After all, who would want to remain in a horrible situation for even a second longer than is absolutely necessary? The other option is to stay put and make the best of your new situation whatever it happens to be. Now, to a certain extent, factors beyond your control will impact which option is meaningfully available to you. It may be that you want to remove yourself from the situation, but you simply cannot. 

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The End Is Near

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This week we are kicking off a new teaching series. Next week we’ll be off again. After that, though, we’ll finish the last four weeks of this series. In the apostle Peter’s final letter, he asks a question that is critical for followers of Jesus to answer. In light of Jesus’ forthcoming return and the end of the world it will bring with it, who do we want to be? If Jesus really is coming back, what kind of lives should we be living? In our new series, Who Do You Want to Be, we are going to explore some of the ways we should be living as followers of Jesus in a world that won’t last forever. We’ll start today by taking a look at Peter’s question and why it matters so much.

The End Is Near

Have you ever met someone who was so convinced of some future event that they were willing to make dramatic adjustments to their life and the lives of their family members in light of it? One such group of folks are colloquially called “Preppers.” That’s short for Doomsday Preppers. These folks may look normal—or maybe not—but they hide a secret. Everything they do, they do with the idea in mind that the world is going to end sometime soon, and they’re going to be ready for it. And if you choose not to get ready yourself, don’t come crawling to them when you’re out of food and water and the zombie hordes are threatening to bust down your doors and you don’t have sufficient firepower to hold them off. That’s your fault, not theirs. 

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Giving An Answer

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Imagine you’re in a conversation and somebody asks you why you are a follower of Jesus. What would you say? For most of us, the very prospect of that situation unfolding is enough to make us break out in a cold sweat. The last thing in the world we want to do is to be asked a question about our faith that we potentially can’t answer. And yet, we are called to be able to give a response. Let’s talk today about the apostle Peter’s counsel on giving an answer and some practical steps we can take to be able to do just that.

Giving An Answer

We are a people given to fear. We fear all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons. Go look up a list of phobias sometime. You won’t be able to pronounce most of them, but the definitions will at least amuse you. Some of them seem like they have at least some sort of a rational justification for them like a fear of snakes (herpetophobia) or heights (acrophobia). Others seem just silly like a fear of the number 4 (tetraphobia) or the color yellow (xanthophobia). Then there are some that seem like someone just made them up entirely so they could create a long, impossible to pronounce word like hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia which, of course, is the fear of the number 666 (which, in case you were interested, my spell checker actually caught and flagged as being misspelled; not because it is a random jumble of letters, but because I swapped and “e” for an “a”). Most of those fears, though, are pretty niche. I don’t know of many people who suffer from arachibutyrophobia, the fear of peanut butter getting stuck to the roof of your mouth. But there are some fears that are common and which have plagued humanity from time immemorial like death. 

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Giving It Our All

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God created the church to be the place where His presence dwells on earth so that people who don’t know Him can experience Him and come to be in a relationship with Him. Nothing short of that is our goal. But this isn’t a goal to which we can give merely a half-hearted effort. It requires entirely more of us than that. As we wrap up our series, Building the Kingdom, today, we’re talking about Paul’s passion to see the Gospel advance, what that means for us generally, and what that means very specifically for this church. Let’s see what Paul has to say and what we need to do.

Giving It Our All

I still remember watching the original Mission Impossible movie with Tom Cruise as superspy, Ethan Hunt, when I was growing up. It hit theaters the summer before I started eighth grade. I remember its being terrifically fun. The plot mostly kept you guessing until the very end. The twists and turns left you never quite sure who was playing for which side. I remember over the next several years watching the second and third installments in the series, but neither one in theaters. And they were just okay. They were fun, but never quite up to the focused, spy-thriller par of the original. After that, I fairly well lost interest. Life got busy. Marvel’s MCU got up and running. Streaming services were still in their infancy. And, I wasn’t willing to spend money to buy the subsequent entries on DVD. They looked pretty fun, but seeing them just wasn’t on the agenda. 

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