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Most of us will go through seasons of overwhelming busyness. Some of us are on a trajectory to burnout and you don’t even know it. The Bible gives us guidance for stressful seasons.
Our Bible story today is about a time when Moses had such an overwhelming amount of responsibility, that he was failing everyone too! God gave him a way out of that kind of trouble, and God wants to help us in a way that’s not too different.
Think about the ideas that we buy into; not just believe but actually live by:
“Retail therapy”
“If it feels good, it can’t be wrong.”
“Prove them wrong with your success”
“Work smarter, not harder as an excuse to never work hard.”
Victim mindsets and blame shifting. There’s something attractive about these things. They are ways of maximizing pleasure and comfort and minimizing pain and discomfort. While these ideas don’t seem harmful at first… They slowly make Christians ineffective and eventually useless for God’s kingdom.
The late philosopher Dallas Willard once observed, “The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who are identified as ‘Christians’ will become disciples – students, apprentices, practitioners – of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.” The quote is saying that, a lot of people call themselves Christians, but a lot of those people do not follow Jesus and live by his way. If they did, the impact on the world and its issues would be revolutionary. Heaven on earth.
So today, we are going to explore what’s making so many Christians ineffective for God’s mission and his kingdom.
We live in a world in which many people are rewarded for being unkind and unfair. This is called injustice. Injustice is all over the place – in governments, schools, workplaces and homes.
It is everywhere, where many people are using their power to exploit other people to gain an unfair advantage. So, my big question today is how do we respond to injustice? Do we just whine about it? Do we give up? Do we respond with violence?
Our Bible story passage today, shows us the best way to thrive amid an unjust environment. Today we’re starting a new series in the life of Moses. We find that his story starts with his mom and his sister who found a way to deal with injustice.
Today we’ll be learning from one of the greatest Christians in history. His name was Paul. And we’ll learn two things from a prayer that he prayed.
We’ll learn that:
More specifically, we should pray for power to be what God wants us to be. And we should pray for glory – to God – because as that turns out, that’s the greatest thing for us.
This sermon is about sex. I think it’s a really interesting topic, but it’s can also be awkward because it comes with quite a bit of baggage.
Looking back, I’ve always wondered why they only used fear-based tactics to teach about sex? Sex is supposed to be a great gift from God. It’s not something to be afraid of or ashamed of. We just need a better theology of sex, even kids these days need to know what the Bible says on the topic.
We can’t avoid the topic, because some research suggests the average age of a person first viewing pornography is 12 years old. For many, the sexual part of our life can be a huge source of guilt and shame. I’ve counselled people who are still affected by sexual encounters from a decade ago. I’ve had conversations with many people whose marriages have ended because of affairs. They’ve told me how it has broken their families.
So, my big question today, what is the best way to handle the sexual dimension of our life? I want to explore the Christian view of sex and why it’s not just “Don’t do it”.
And as it turns out, there is a way to be victorious in this part of our life. No matter how tempted we are, and how much we have failed in the past, we can still please God. That’s what we learn from our Bible passage.
A lot of us, if we are honest, feel this kind of skepticism towards ALL prayers.
But no matter how you try to avoid it, prayer seems to be a huge theme throughout the Bible and therefore, a part of our Christian faith. We’re encouraged and even commanded to pray. Jesus, the one we’re following and imitating, has prayer as a core rhythm of his life and he even teaches us HOW to pray.
The reality, however, is if you ask any Christian about their prayer life, we kinda just look down, twiddle our fingers and say, “Oh yeah… I know I should pray more… but I don’t.”
What if prayer isn’t this dreadful chore but a way to access the source of life and joy, connecting with the one we’re made for. How can we approach prayer in a way that is life-giving instead of life-draining? Because for Jesus, as well as the New Testament writers, prayer was a source of joy! What do they know that we don’t? Let’s explore that today.
We’re halfway through our series on the Thessalonian letters, and Enoch has given me a special task to look through Thessalonians to see what we can learn about prayer because prayer is weaved throughout the entire letter. In the letter, Paul prays for them. Paul brings up the fact, he prays for them. Paul commands them to pray. Paul even asks them for their prayer. So a lot about prayer here. What does it have to do with anything?
Our question is simply: Why pray?
And our answer today is because:
We are expected to put in the energy and time to mentor people- raise disciples strong in the faith. However, this is often neglected and ignored. Maybe because just like parenting; it’s so much work to raise the next generation of disciples. It can be tedious, but we have to understand it’s worth doing/role to play.
So, my big question today, what is the joy of discipleship?
1. There is joy in knowing we will share eternity with our friends
2. There is joy in seeing people grow in faith
We begin a new series on the books of 1st and 2nd Thessalonians in the New Testament.
My big question today is: How can we know that we are on the right track spiritually?
The good news is, we can know. I’ll tell you my answer, and after that, I’ll spend the rest of my time showing you the answer from the Bible, because it’s important that you see it from the Bible. Pastors will fail you, but God’s words will not fail you. So it’s important for you to base your life on the Bible and not what pastors say.
That said, here’s my answer. If we want to know that we’re on the right track, we need to look in three places. We need to look INSIDE, we need to look BEHIND, and we need to look AROUND. I’ll explain what I mean.
We need to look INSIDE of us to see if we have courage to live out what we believe.
We need to look BEHIND to the past for evidence that supports what we believe.
And we need to look AROUND us for the approval of mature Christians.
That’s my answer and I’ll spend the rest of my time up here showing you my answer from the Bible.
Many Christians feel lost spiritually. They look at their relationship with God and it’s become stagnant. They don’t feel like they’re growing, and it feels like they’re just drifting with no direction.
On the other hand, there are other Christians who stay on track with God, and God is taking them places! They feel joy! They feel God’s overwhelming presence in their friendships, in their family and in their career. I believe all of us can experience God like that!
So, my big question today is: how can a Christian stay on track? That’s what our Bible passage is about today.
Our passage today tells us that if we want to stay on track spiritually, we need to make every effort to build character. It’s what matters the most! We should build character when we are alone, and we should build character with others.
Let’s be honest. We all know Christians who are the least loving, or most judgmental, or even the ones making the most harmful decisions in life. We look at them asking, why isn’t it working? Or maybe for yourself even, you’ve been going to church for years, serving, reading your bible, part of a small group, baptized, all of that and you still find that you’re perpetually unsatisfied in your everyday life. Stuck in the same cycle of brokenness. You don’t look any more like Jesus than you did on the first day of following him. You don’t have a sense of the abundant life Jesus promises.
It’s easy to start thinking, “is this all a hoax? Is it even real?” Across the Western World, people are leaving the Christian faith because they’ve tried it and it doesn’t deliver the way they expect it to. One stat shows that the western churches decline by 10-15% every year. Another stat reveals that Post covid, the average church only has 85% of their original attendance. What’s going on? I think these people leaving have come to the conclusion… this whole Christian thing doesn’t work.
And so that is what I want to focus on today.
“Why isn’t it working?”
Now this is a huge question with probably hundreds of different angles and factors to consider but we’re going to look at it through our bible passage today.
Now because this is such a deep and rich passage, we’re actually going to split this into two weeks. This week, I get to privilege of doing the theoretical big picture stuff and then next week, Pastor David will dive into the details of the practical stuff and the list of virtues.
Through our passage, we get a glimpse, a diagnosis of why this whole Christian thing isn’t working for so many people.
Why isn’t it working? Because: