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Shaping Us Toward Monday

Useless. No doubt you understand your limitations and run up against a task for which you feel useless. Other times you find yourself deep into a project and discover that a very important tool or part is broken and as such is useless impeding completion of your work.

The Songwriter starts us off with a reflection on his own formation. What was surely improbable at one point has become valuable as it is brought to life. That is the nature of human beings. From improbable origins we are brought into being. Scientifically we may be bi-pedal carbon-based life forms. At the same time we are creative, industrious, caring, empathic, collaborative and relational. Failing to live into those features of humanity we can be destructive, lazy, insensitive, uncaring, aloof and selfish. 

Jeremiah demonstrates the usefulness and uselessness of the varied paths we choose. Employing the imagery of potter and clay he reminds that God's grand design is that we live into what is useful in carrying on His love and mercy in the world. Turning ever inward we find it hard to live into an appreciation for the other - person or group.

Shaping Us Toward Monday

If you were unable to be with us this past Sunday, you may want to request the CD of Allan Karr's message. While we present the texts for the upcoming Sunday in our right sidebar, we may mistakenly communicate that what we are about is getting ready for Sunday. So, in light of that very real likelihood, we will change our posts about the texts for the coming Sunday to, "Shaping Us Toward Monday."

We hope this shift is a regular reminder we hope to be shaped by the Spirit of God through our interactions with the Scripture to live out our lives in Way of Jesus. For instance, it would be very easy for us to think a ritual is more important than a person. Jesus faced just such an instance yet again in the Luke passage for this week. He healed on the Sabbath and the boundary keepers could not tolerate their "day" being denigrated in that way.

Jesus' retort was to suggest the in-congruency that a day set aside for honoring God would mean the neglect of people in need. He then follows with a parable that gets at the heart of our natural tendency to think only of our own advancement.

Draw in the Jeremiah passage and you get the idea the pattern is oft repeated. God's people refused the provision of God and instead dug cisterns of their own, those that would not hold water. They both shunned the living water of God and failed to provide for their own needs. Relaying the words of God, the prophet suggests these actions represented two evils.

How would you draw in the passage from Hebrews? The Psalms?

As you are reading the texts for the coming Sunday, keep Monday in view. for it is Monday that tells what influence the Way of Jesus has really had and is having on us.

Sunday at Snow Hill

A Special Guest - Allan Karr

 

More than ten years ago we responded to a request to help plant a church in Douglass County, Colorado. Allan Karr contacted me and asked if we would consider helping financially with the dream of a new church.

We took the matter under prayerful consideration and agree to a three year commitment to help start Castle Valley Community Church. Allan was recently profiled by Oklahoma Baptist University where we met as Freshmen. Here is a clip from that profile, 

"I got a call from Golden Gate Seminary about joining The Nehemiah Project," he said. "The North American Mission Board and Golden Gate have a partnership with the project, and they both asked me to join."

At the time, Karr did not feel led to leave Colorado, so the seminary offered for him to stay in the area. Karr signed on to become a professor of church planting for the seminary and he also was designated as a national missionary by the North American Mission Board, serving as a director for The Nehemiah Project, helping to better equip church planters.

Karr quickly found that he received more than just a teaching position. He also had the opportunity to work with a multitude of diverse cultures, backgrounds and languages.

"I really get to be like a foreign missionary," he said. "Ninety percent of my time I spend with international people, especially with my students. It is very diverse, which I like. It's my passion."

 

What Is God to do?

From Pastor Todd's weekly email,

Finally, the Hosea passage gives us a glimpse of a conversation God has with himself. You may take this as odd, but if you have been a parent or responsible for younger siblings at any point in your life then you know why you may be found talking to yourself.  Despite your best attempts to tend and care for those children it seems they are always looking for a way out from under that influence. Even more they tend to walk away from rather than be drawn by our cords of love. What is a parent to do? What is a God to do?  Show mercy. Gather the people together again. In our lives may we exhibit that same trait. Ready to show mercy when the impulse is anger and wrath. If God who is often right to be angry over our dismissal of his love shows mercy, how important would it be for people who claim his name and live in a relationship of love with him to follow that example?

You may listen to more thoughts on the texts for this coming Sunday by clicking here.

Looking forward to sharing life and faith with you this Sunday. See you on The Hill!

Vacation Bible School - Sharing Jesus by Sharing the Story of God

We are having a great week with young people in our community. A number of people are taking photos. We will post some here soon.

Toni sent us a great video of Casa de los Angelito and the very young children living there at Casa Bernabe. We hope the young people attending here will make the connection that all people are special and we may show them God's care by helping care for them.

Thanks Toni for your commitment to our Triune God in the Name of Jesus as you help us connect what we believe with what we do.

Pastor Todd began his weekly email about the texts for the coming week this way,

Chuck Berryhill and me traded emails earlier this week. We acknowledged both the reality of busy schedules and evidence that despite busy schedules people will do what they want to do. The email conversation reminded me of something I recently read.

 

It seems that the seventeenth century French mathematician turned philosopher/theologian, Blaise Paschal, had some thoughts about why people fill their lives with busyness. He wrote in his famous work, Pensees,

 

I have often said that the sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

Paschal has much to say about this thought. At its core, he suggests people live into, even create, distractions so as to avoid the hole in our lives that may only be filled by God. It terrifies us to think of our own mortality, limitations, and failures. He continues, 

Despite [his] afflictions man wants to be happy, only wants to be happy, and cannot help wanting to be happy. But how shall he go about it? The best thing would be to make himself immortal, but as he cannot do that, he has decided to stop thinking about it.

The way to avoid thinking about it is to fill our lives with distractions intended to make us happy. We spend a great deal of time before we learn these externals really do not make us happy. But, we tend to continue to fill our time with whatever distractions may keep us from thinking about what it means to be a human being.

 You may read the entire piece here. If you would like to receive this email weekly, you may sign-up in the right sidebar.

And, Pastor Todd posted some audio reflections centered around the Scriptures for this coming Sunday here.

Shaping Us Toward Sunday ... Texts for the Week

From Pastor Todd's Weekly Email ...

I was sharing a conversation recently where it was remarked, "Can you believe how fast the year is going by?" We all agreed that at some point our parents or grandparents often made this remark while we felt like life dragged on slowly. Then we all acknowledged just how fast time does go by. Sometimes it goes by so fast we forget just how we are to make use of our time. Jesus remarked about time and the need to make the most of the "day" and the Apostle Paul notes that we must "redeem the time." If we are not about things that give preference to the mission of God in the world we are forgetting the "day" Jesus described and we fail to bring to bear any kind of "redeeming" of the time in which we live.

 

Our texts for this week challenge us in a variety of ways. Last year I had the privilege of sharing a small collection of pastor's talking about preaching with musical artist Michael Card. At the time Card was working on a book on the Gospel of Luke. One theme he replayed over and over was, "the people who should 'get' Jesus don't and the people who shouldn't get Jesus do.' That could easily describe some of the setting for the Old Testament text for this week. You would think the King of Israel would get it when an opportunity to point to the work of Israel's God comes along he would seize it. Instead he responds out of feat, if not mis-perceiving the ways of God.

Scriptures for the Week - Living In Ordinary Time in Jesus' Way

Freedom. We mistakenly identify this notion with unlimited license. The sad reality is that the discovery of freedom may also become the very entrance into a new kind of slavery. The Apostle Paul pleads with the Christians in Galatia not to find a new yoke of slavery on their way to understanding their new place "in Christ."

James McClendon suggests laws are both written and unwritten. In his book Ethics, McClendon notes that whatever a community agrees to becomes the "law" of that group. Even before laws are written, they are practiced. The Apostle Paul will urge the Jesus people in Galatia to practice love against which there is no law. He writes, in fact, that the entire law - Old Testament - may be summed up in love for neighbor. Love becomes the rule of life for people in the Jesus Way.

Evidence of love is in relationship(s). The Apostle Paul described the activity of the Spirit which promotes love as evidenced love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. These sound strikingly similar to Paul's description of love in relationship found in 1 Corinthians 13.

The Gospel text of Sunday reflects an understanding of a commitment to the way of Jesus that trumps all else. Putting a hand to the plow and not looking back is to assume the posture of committed gardening in the soil of life the kind of commitment needed to experience the kind of heart renovation for the follower of Jesus.

What are your thoughts about the texts for the coming week? You may find them listed in the right sidebar.

You may find this video a bit challenging.

Scriptures for the Week

Naboth, Simon, and Paul. Three personalities different stories. Intrigue. Treachery. Abuse of Power. Failure to recognize the need for forgiveness. The Faith of Christ. The Faith in Christ. Crucified selves.

Take some time to read the texts for Sunday. What strikes you about the lead characters? What kinds of damage is done by power?

Leave your thoughts in the comments.