Sermons
Reflect, Reclaim, & Renew
All of us have suffered some sort of loss in our lives. Whether it be the loss of a beloved friend or family member to death or betrayal, the loss of a dream, the loss of health, or anything else that was and is no more. Before we, as individuals, can continue effectively functioning in our life-after-loss, we need to pause and reflect.
After reflecting, how do we get back lost time? How can we rekindle relationships? How do we regain momentum? And what about those who were taken from us way too soon and without the opportunity to engage in a proper celebration of their lives? To reclaim these and the other losses doesn’t mean that we do not remember, recall, or recollect. Part of reclaiming is to do all these things. But it also means something even more challenging: to envision, imagine, and visualize the new thing that God is raising up in us and in our church body. We will bring with us, into this new thing, the lessons, memories, and some activities from the past, but the end result will be something new and exciting.
Every so often we must renew things in our life: subscriptions to magazines, gym memberships, or even our driver's license. If you are like me, I have most of these on auto-renewal. If we are not careful, the spiritual life we have subscribed to when we claimed Jesus as our Lord and Savior, can begin to feel like it is on auto-renewal as well. We don’t give much thought to the terms and conditions of the cost of our salvation, much less the fine print (my Bible has small letters) of the covenant, and perhaps we also need to re-examine the vows we took when we said, “I do, I will , or I believe.” A re-commitment doesn’t have to be a daunting task - renewal can be an exciting, life-giving opportunity!
Who Is Jesus?
Current Worship Series
Who is Jesus? Liar, Lunatic, or Lord.
In one of his greatest writings, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis writes this about who Jesus was: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
Walking with his disciples one day, Jesus asked the straightforward question, “Who do people say that I am?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” Then he asked a heart-stopping question. He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Who do you say that Jesus is? That question might very well determine how you express, live-out, and demonstrate your faith to an ever-watchful world. Over the next 8 weeks, we will explore this question in our new sermon series, Who is Jesus? Liar, Lunatic, or Lord.
Turning Points
How do you build a church? The Book of Acts explains to us the ups and downs of the very first church, the community of faith that Jesus set the disciples up to create in his name.
He didn’t give them a handbook for what was to come, but he did give them a few rules - love God and love others - and a purpose: “... you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” - Acts 1:8b
And they would do this by the power of the Holy Spirit, which would bind them together as a family in the name of God. Still, they would run into their issues as the church formed:
Who can join up? How do we deal with opposition? What do we do with our enemies? How do we do life together?
As we continue into a season of reclamation, as we lean into hope as Easter People, as the world returns to health, what can the formation of the first church tell us about what God wants to do with us today? How do the turning points of the first church’s story coincide with the issues we encounter in this place and time as we rebuild and encounter God moment by moment? Join us as we explore "Turning Points: Moments That Made the First Church."