Announcements
Wednesday
Fun—The
next Wednesday is
a chance for your kids to come and play on our playground! They'll
be supervised by several church members from 12-2. If you have
questions, please speak with Lynne Brock.
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 in the grocery cart.
8 oz. Styrofoam bowls
Dry Milk
Styrofoam Plates
Plastic Forks/Spoons
Pasta
New
Hope News
Sunday
School—This Sunday, the adult class will study 1
John.
Session—Meets
Wednesday, June 26 @ 6:30
$.02/meal—Next
collection will be July 21. Be sure to save your pennies!
VBS—Will
be the week of July 15-18. Make your plans accordingly!
Pray
For:
Russell
Mabry
John
L. Wright
Links
Keith's
Random Thoughts
Sometimes, life brings the opportunity to be thankful for things you
never thought thought about. For example, Monday evening I was quite
grateful I don't park my car over white carpet. Why? Because I also
learned that it's a bad idea to put the jar of pasta sauce quite
close to the door when you're on the way home from the grocery store.
Sometimes, the load shifts while the vehicle is in motion.
So there I was, staring at a mess of tomato sauce and broken glass
all over the garage floor. If you've ever broken a glass jar, you
know how little shards go everywhere. Your first reaction is
frustration, and then you blame the pasta sauce makers for not using
a plastic jar. It's always nice to have someone to blame.
I cleaned up the mess, but I knew there would be little pieces of
glass everywhere. So I swept the floor. Twice. (I often go without
shoes at home.) Then, after pulling the car out of the garage, I
swept it again, noticing that I had already run over one piece I had
missed. There were still more little pieces. I think I got them
all, but I'm not entirely sure.
When I think about sin and the brokenness of humanity, it's not that
different. Some of the problems are easy to see—war in
Afghanistan, horrific poverty in much of the world, exploitation of
the poor, slavery. It's easy to see and label these as brokenness
that demands our attention.
But we can keep going. The next level of examples might be a bit
harder to spot, but they're present. This might include constructs
that are a part of society that promote injustice. It might include
the back-breaking debt that many poor nations owe to rich nations.
It might not be outright oppression, but perhaps inward attitudes of
nations or cultures that look down on others. It might be our
consumer mentality that forgets about our connections to our brothers
and sisters, either the ones who cannot afford the same goods or the
ones who are making these goods in sub-standard factories in distant
countries.
We can go deeper still, finding shards of brokenness that escape our
notice at first. It might be our own personal sin, even those we
hide within our hearts, like envy or lust or greed. It might be the
lie that no one notices, or subtle cheating that doesn't get caught.
Sin burrows its way into the world, infecting us all, playing our at
national and personal levels.
It's easy to get discouraged, to think that there is no hope, that
humanity is doomed.
But God pulls our heads up from the darkness to notice the light, to
notice his ongoing work of renewal and redemption. God doesn't
ignore the sin that infects, but rather promises to banish it and
demonstrates his power over it. God doesn't promise to fix
everything according to our timetable, but he does promise that there
will come a day when sin exists no more, and he invites us to spend
our lives participating in his ongoing work of redemption. We can be
agents of life and hope, the hands and feet of Jesus Christ,
spreading light in a world that can often seem overwhelmed with
darkness. We can join the winning side and let hope conquer our
fears. One day, all will be made right.
Sin infects us all, but the power of the grace of God is an
astounding thing. May we never forget that is is God that wins, and
it is God who invites us to be on the winning side.
Text
for this Sunday
Daniel 2 is a pretty long chapter. I'm not going to be reading the
entire chapter, just bits and pieces, but the sermon is based on the
entire arc of the chapter. If you'd like to read it, click
the link above, or click here.
New
Hope on iTunes
Keith's
Blog
& Devotionals
for your Kindle
No comments:
Post a Comment