Announcements
Confirmation!--
The
session approved Jade, Chase, Ashley and Jackson to be confirmed on
May 18!
This
is great news for the kids, for this congregation and for the Kingdom
of God! Please join us on the 18th to celebrate what God is doing in
their lives.
Purpose-Driven
Life!--
This Monday is Day 8!
We
have a few books left in the office if you're interested in joining
in and catching up!
Community
Kitchen Spot
There
are a lot of hungry and homeless children of God and the community
needs some help feeding them. If you would like to help out, please
bring the following items to church this Sunday & put them on the
bookshelf.
Plastic
Forks, Knives, Spoons
Dinner
Napkins
Heavy
Duty Sectional Dinner Plates
Dessert
Plates
Pray
For:
Norma
Capone
Those
kidnapped girls, their families, their captors, the country of
Nigeria, and the human brokenness that allows such travesties to
occur
For
Steve
Hayner, the president of Columbia Seminary and one of the best
men I know.
Links
How
Heaven
is for Real
portrays American religion
Keith's
Random Thoughts
I am not a farmer. I
have never lived on a farm, though we did have a garden growing up.
(Technically, the garden is still there. If you want anything other
than poison ivy, however, I'd recommend gleaning elsewhere.) I
suspect that most of America shares this in common with me, although
I know many folks who have grown up on farms.
The point is this—many
of Jesus' agrarian metaphors are lost on us. I was thinking about
this yesterday while listening to Albert Mohler's interview with Stan
Hauerwas. (You
can listen to it here)
Jesus constantly talked
in agrarian language, and partly this was because he was in the midst
of an agrarian world. If he walked and talked among us today, I
imagine many of his parables would be different. (I'm not entirely
sure that the 'pearl of great value' would be replaced by 'an
expensive smartphone')
But maybe they wouldn't
be.
See, farming is hard
work. It's also slow, patient work. It's work that doesn't pay a
lot of immediate dividends. No one plants a seed and then plans a
harvest party for the next day. Well, no smart person does that.
Instead, the diligent farmer plants a seed and then spends months
weeding, pruning, watering, watching and waiting. It's a long, slow
process that depends on a lot of things beyond our control. Farming
requires faith that a seed will germinate, burst forth from its tomb.
It requires rain and sunshine. It requires a miracle to transform a
seed into eventual bounty. It takes time. While there are many
small celebrations throughout the season, when it rains or when a
plant flowers, the truest and best celebration is reserved for the
final harvest.
In the same way, the
faithful life isn't necessarily a triumphant one of continual
celebration. It's a lot of hard work, a lot of unglamorous labor, a
lot of non-triumphant work. It's a lot of weedy and watering,
neither of which are particularly sexy. But they are necessary, and
they pay enormous dividends at the end of the season, when the God of
the universe invites us in to an enormous harvest party, thrown by
him.
So discipleship is a way
of life, one that calls for patient endurance and small acts of
selfless love. It's not necessarily triumphant. It's not always
glamorous.
But it's faithful, day
in and day out, to the call, and it's trusting in the God who will
one day throw a party larger and more generous than we can imagine.
So let's keep working,
day after day, and trust in the God who calls you deeper into life.
Text
for this Sunday
(Click on Link below to read)
New
Hope on iTunes
Keith's
Blog
& Devotionals
for your Kindle
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