Today at Living Waters our Lead Pastor Bob preached out of Exodus 3 on Moses and “The Burning Bush Mystery” (subtitled “The Making Of A Servant”). It was a sermon for the whole church body, but especially for his up-and-coming Associate Pastors. It was Good News and good advice for the future of my ministry.
Check out my church’s new Twitter feed @LivingWatersHFL.
Every Friday night I post the Top 5 of one of my classic hit music charts based on personal preference from either 10, 20, or 30 years ago (rotating each week). Here it is – for the week ending Sunday September 14TH 2008:
On this day 10 years ago it was a Sunday, and I wrote right here on this blog about the kickoff of our church’s 3-service schedule at 8:30, 9:45, and 11:00. “As it turns out all three services were solid as a rock and rather evenly distributed in attendance. Flagship Cinemas dreams of the number of people that we had in their building this morning during the regular work and school week.” (Our church met in our town’s movie theatre at the time, and I made light of the fact that our movie theatre was struggling. It still is, but it’s still in business showing first-run movies.)
Look what else this Christian of 2 years at the time wrote on his blog 10 years ago:
“God sees the whole picture. He is the only one who does. That is why He does things His way for His reasons in His own time. It is fine to question God at any time. In fact it is beneficial to do so. That is what a deeply-committed believer in Him does. It’s one who expresses questions for God and faith in Him simultaneously.”
That’s some Good News right there.
This weekend I’ll be mostly Bible-studying and sermon-writing. I’m writing two sermons simultaneously – one on James 4 and one on Genesis 4 – and I’m building a foundation for a 3RD sermon. May you have a weekend of fun, good times, and Good News. I’ll be back on Sunday with Scripture.
This morning I preached a sermon titled “Humble & Gentle”. Here are 15 highlights:
Read James 3:7-18.
I’ve begun writing my 22ND sermon – the 19TH of which will be preached to my church family sometime soon. (I’ve actually written 3 sermons that I’ve determined aren’t ready to be preached – for various reasons.)
My new sermon that I started writing yesterday is titled “War & Peace”, and it’ll likely be based on James 4:1-10. It continues my message series on the Book of James which I started in February. (This will be my 9TH sermon in this series.)
Here are 3 working paragraphs that I’ve written thus far based on James 4:1:
… Fast forward not quite 2,000 years into the future. It’s 2018. What do we have in the world today ? We have Christians inside God’s Kingdom who look and act no different than non-Christians of the world. We have churches squabbling internally about silly things. We have megachurches looking down on small churches as irrelevant. We have small churches chastising megachurches as secular or worldly. We have churches competing with each other instead of uniting with one another. We have religions and denominations – and their respective rules – working against each other. We have church leaders preaching on how much we sin – and how much the world sins – as they get caught in years of sin.
No wonder non-believers and non-followers of Christ walk away from us instead of towards us. The hard truth is that many of our neighbors out there love God, but they don’t care too much for His followers – because of what they hear and see from us. I speak from personal experience here. I felt that way up until 12 years ago. I’ve always believed in God’s existence. Even when I didn’t follow Him – I’ve always believed that He existed. But I didn’t care so much for His people and for His churches. That is – until I became His follower – and then 5 months later – became part of His church family.
In my first year on this fantastic journey I fell in love with God – first – before family – before friends – before the workplace. Once I joined a church family I discovered that God commanded me to love everyone – genuinely – believers and non-believers alike. I don’t think that a lot of our neighbors out there know that we love them – and that God loves them – unconditionally – eternally …
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