Tag: Sermons

Seeing Through the Fog

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Today we are continuing our new teaching series, All Signs Point to Jesus. Like we talked about last week, Jesus reveals His glory so we can see who He is. He does great and wonderful things in our lives and in the world around us in order to help us wrap our minds around the fact that He exists and what He is like. But if we’re not careful, we can focus our attention so much on the things that He does, that we can stop actually seeing Him. In the next sign John relates to us in his Gospel, Jesus invites a man to see through what He can do to who He really is. Through this story He makes the same invitation to us. Let’s look at this together.

Seeing Through the Fog

Do you remember the first time you realized your teachers were real people too? When you are young, teachers feel like these strange creatures who exist and inhabit the world of school, but don’t ever leave. After all, they’re there every time you are. They leave the world of their classroom behind every now and then, but only to accompany you to somewhere else in the maze that is the school building. Or maybe outside to recess. And if you’re young enough, your teacher is always old. She could be barely into her 20s, but she seems old all the same. But then it happens. You see your teacher somewhere other than school doing normal-people things rather than teacher-people things. And it completely blows your mind. It’s like your entire worldview framework gets shattered into a million pieces that will never be put back together again. 

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Helping Us See

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This week we are kicking off a brand-new teaching series that is going to take us from now to Easter. The question of who Jesus is, is the most important question anyone could ever ask or answer. Over the course of this series, we are going to be walking through the various signs Jesus produced which the apostle John noted in His Gospel were all pointers to His true identity. Each sign helps us to get a better sense of just who Jesus was. Let’s get this journey started with a trip to a wedding.

Helping Us See

Who is Jesus? That’s one of the most significant questions that anyone could ask or answer. The only one with potentially greater significance is the question of whether or not there is a God in the first place. Literally everything hinges on the answer to that question. And that may sound like somewhat of a grandiose claim, but think about it. Let’s say someone protests our claim here by pointing to science. “The question of the existence of God or the identity of Jesus is irrelevant,” they might argue, “because science does for us all the things our ignorant ancestors naively relied on some made up god to give them.” Okay, but why do you think science as you know it exists in the first place? Because of a belief in God on the part of some really smart men and women in the past. Actually, that’s not quite right. They didn’t merely believe in God, they believed in a specific and historically unique understanding of God that made their efforts to study and strive to understand how the world works in an organized fashion reasonable in a way that no other worldview had ever done. And, honestly, they only believed in God as they did because they and their forebears had a certain answer to the question of who Jesus is; an answer that was at least mostly consistent with the broadly orthodox position on it dating back to the very first believers. So, yes, the question of who Jesus is really is the most important question anyone could ever ask. 

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God Loved First

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For the last four weeks, we have been having a conversation about marriage. More specifically, we have been having a conversation about how to get back to the basics in order to fix the foundation of our marriage so that we can build properly and in a way that will lead to long term happiness and success. Most of this has been rooted in addressing our own relationship with God. Today, as we wrap up this series, we are talking about what most people understand to be the foundation of marriage: love. If we are going to get marriage right, we have to get love right. Let’s talk about what that means and how to do it.

God Loved First

Did you have a good Valentine’s Day? Guys, did you treat her right? Did you at least put a little bit of effort into doing something special? Do you know why we have a Valentine’s Day? It’s so Hallmark and Russel’s Stover can make obscene amounts of money selling cards and chocolate. It’s all a capitalist, corporatist plot to conform us to the social box they want us to fit into so they can keep making money off of us. It’s a scam! Or maybe it’s just a cynical effort to depress us for not doing enough to love our partners or to make us feel bad for not having a Valentine in the first place. Ever wallow in one of those particular puddles of self-pity? They can be a tempting line of thought this time of year, but, no, that’s not why we have Valentine’s Day. We have Valentine’s Day because hundreds of years ago, there was a pastor in Rome named Valentinus. 

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How to Talk Right

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A whole lot of our relationships are tied up in communication. This is especially true for our marriages. If we want to have the kind of marriage we desire, communicating well is going to be an essential part of the process of getting there. And, if we have put in place negative communication patterns along the way, getting this right is going to require us to get back to the basics in order to fix our foundation before building properly moving forward. In this next part of our teaching series, Back to the Basics, we are talking about how to communicate well in marriage. Let’s dive in.

How to Talk Right

The largest cruise ship in the world right now is the Icon of the Seas from Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines. It’s big on a scale that’s hard to imagine. For starters, it’s as long as four football fields back-to-back-to-back. It weighs approximately 250,000 tons. It’s 20 decks high—that is, it’s as tall as a 20-story building. It can hold up to more than 10,000 people between passengers and crew. You could take the entirety of Oakboro on a cruise…times three…and still have room to spare. It’s so big that if you were to completely hollow it out, you could fit the Titanic inside of it with enough room to still play a football game at one end. In short: It’s enormous. Exceedingly enormous. So big, that you really can’t grasp it until and unless you’re standing in front of it looking up. Even then, it’s still hard to grasp. By comparison, though, the mechanism for steering it—the rudder—is remarkably small. Sure, the rudders of ships scale up with the size of the ship, but by comparison to the whole thing, it seems incredible that such a small thing can successfully steer something so large. 

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Naked

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While playing hide-and-seek is a fun game for kids, in the context of our lives, we want to be found. This is especially true in marriage. We want our marriages to be loving and intimate. We want to know and be known by our spouses. Intimacy, though, is tough. In this second part of our teaching series, Back to the Basics, we are talking about some of the things that can interrupt intimacy in our relationships and what we can do to get it restored. Thanks for reading and sharing.

Naked

I love playing hide-and-seek. I think I always have. I don’t play it as much anymore as I used to—my kids have mostly grown out of it—but it’s still a lot of fun. I remember one time playing with the boys at my folks’ house years ago. They have a loft area overlooking the living room. There’s a linen closet up there that’s really big. I got in there behind the blankets that were on the bottom, and they couldn’t find me. I had to finally start texting clues as to my location to Lisa so she could give them some hints. It was an awesome hiding place. But, the best part of the experience was being found, and the laughter that echoed through the house in that moment. When playing hide-and-seek, it’s always fun to find a killer spot. But if you stay hidden forever, eventually it gets boring. The real excitement of hide-and-seek is in being found. Deep down, we all really want to be found. 

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