The Mystery of the Resurrection

Good Morning!  He is risen!

Indeed, He is risen!  Praise God for the joy of Easter morning.  This is the day of all days.  This day is the accomplishing of all God's plans for you and for me.  All our hopes and dreams are fulfilled in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  Let's take a moment and give thanks to Him who gives us life:

Lord Jesus, what can we say that has not already been said?  You took the cup of the wrath of God and drank damnation dry.  You took all the punishment including separation from Your Father so that we might become children of God.  Thank You that we will be raised to life and not left forgotten in the grave.  In the same way, You are not forgotten as You rose out of the grave.  Praise be to Your Name.  You are worthy.  Speak now truth by Your Word, by Your Spirit.  Amen.

Last week, Carl took us through story of the arrest of Jesus up until Jesus' death on the cross.  Following his death, his body was hurriedly removed and placed in a nearby tomb due to the oncoming Sabbath.  A special Sabbath.  Passover.  That Passover day, the tomb was sealed and the guards were placed in order to prevent someone from stealing the body of Jesus.  And so it continued until Sunday morning.

The Power of the Cross

Welcome! This week and next, in keeping with the Easter season, we are focusing on the cross and resurrection of Christ. In today’s message I want to remind you of the events leading up to and including the crucifixion, and then we will look into the title of this message, the power of the cross.

I will start by reading a fairly long set of verses from the book of John focusing on Jesus’ arrest, questioning, and the events that follow. We start in John 18. 

When He had finished praying, Jesus left with His disciples and crossed the Kidron Valley. On the other side there was an olive grove, and He and His disciples went into it. Now Judas, who betrayed Him, knew the place, because Jesus had often met there with His disciples. So Judas came to the grove, guiding a detachment of soldiers and some officials from the chief priests and Pharisees. They were carrying torches, lanterns and weapons. – John 18:1-3

The Greatest Rescue

 Psalm 27

Welcome! Today, in addition to a short teaching, we will spend time remembering the Lord with the bread and the cup, as He instructed His disciples to do, and we will also have a sharing time where everyone is invited to share what the Lord has been teaching them and working around and through them in the past month. First, as we have been doing this year on communion Sundays, we will go through a Psalm together. Today we will look at Psalm 27.

Psalm 27 was written by David. David most likely wrote it reflecting on recent experiences he had gone through or was going through, especially including dealing with enemies, and although you may not have any earthly enemies you are dealing with, one of the wonderful things about the Psalms is how they find express truths packed with emotion that can be expressed by anyone, no matter what they are or are not going through. The Psalms speak to our heads through our hearts, and since the Lord wants us to worship Him with our entire hearts, souls, minds, and strength, it is good for us to not only read the Psalms, but agree with them, to say, “Yes, Lord, me too!” And this is what I would like us to do with Psalm 27 this morning. You may find some verses resonate with you more than others. If so, that’s great! Just make a note of what verses do speak to you, and use these as a basis for how you pray before we take communion. Here is how the Psalm begins:

Love, Actually

Today, we reach the end of the relationship series we started back in February. It has been an encouragement to me, and I hope also to you. If you missed one of the messages, please go back and listen online. Right now, we will complete the series looking at Love Actually. Let’s pray:

Father God, you are love. We’re all seeking and searching for love. We all want to be filled. We don’t want loneliness. I pray that You would speak to us about love, real love. Show us actually what love is. May we not be tricked by counterfeits, may we not yield to deceitful things which may satisfy for a moment, but are burned up like chaff, making us feel even more empty and discouraged than before. We need you. Speak to us, fill us, and transform us, I pray. In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

Did you know there was a movie with this title, Love Actually? It was released back in 2003, and it was billed as “the ultimate romantic comedy.” It had about a dozen main characters. If you can imagine a 2 hour movie with a dozen main characters, well the story can’t help but come across as muddled and shallow. Worse than a shallow story though, the writer and director’s treatment of love itself is disappointingly shallow.

Love in Dating (and Waiting)

Welcome to part 6 in our 7-part relationship series. The entire series has been a great time of focusing on God’s love for us and our relationship to Him. We’ve also focused in depth on our relationships with others. So far, we’ve talked about love in marriage, love in family, and love in friendship. If you’re interested in those earlier topics, I encourage you to go back and listen at the message center on the church website. They all are good messages, but in particular if you have family relationship issues or friend relationship issues, I strongly recommend those two messages. (And for those who are wondering: no I did not happen to give either of those messages.)

Today’s title is “Love in Dating (and Waiting).” There are some parallels with the Love in Marriage message. If today’s message speaks to you, I also encourage you to go back and listen to that message as well.

If we let it, this dating and waiting period of our lives has the possibility to become a very anxious time. Doesn’t it? Before I was married, I remember a lot of anxiety in this area. Both before I became a Christian and after I became Christian.

Love In Friendship

Welcome! Today, as we continue our series on relationships, we will focus on friendship. As I was preparing this message, my thoughts turned to the old comic strips by Charles Schultz, Peanuts. Schultz was a Christian, and he had a wonderful way of poking into topics that nobody else would ever touch. Today, as you can see, we have about 35 college students joining us on their spring break to reach out on campus, and if you are one of these students, we just want you to know that we so appreciate you and that we will be praying for you this week. We know that you will be doing a lot of different evangelism techniques, including so-called “cold turkey” evangelism, and so we thought the following comic strip from Peanuts would help by giving you some pointers, some tips on things to say when you are knocking on doors.

Here is a summary of the comic. It features Sally; Charlie Brown’s little sister, and a red-haired boy that is not a regular to the Peanuts universe. The boy has just knocked on the front door of the Browns’ house, and Sally has answered the door.

Love and God

Welcome! This month we have been exploring some of what the Bible has to say about relationships, and so far we have talked about the nature of agape love, love in the context of the relationship between husband and wife, and love in the context of family. I wanted to start today with a video clip produced by the children of a pastor in one of our sister churches in Florida. This video was shown at one of the Faithwalkers conference teachings this past December. I think it is a great example of agape love in the context of the family.

The video can be found here.

For the sake of the recording, let me summarize what the video has shown. A family is sitting down to breakfast together, and they run out of orange juice right before a young boy can pour some for himself. His brother, also a young boy, offers to get him some, and goes to the refrigerator only to find that they don’t have any. He jumps up to grab a big hat, and then takes the hat and goes out the front door. The next thing you know, he is in some kind of shed up on a tractor and starts the tractor. He drives out to some orange trees, and pulls some oranges off of the tree, filling up his hat. He then restarts the tractor and goes back, brings the hat full of oranges into the house (losing a few along the way). Then he goes to his back porch and uses an electric juicer to juice the oranges until he has a cup of juice in a measuring cup. He takes the measuring cup to the kitchen and pours the juice into a cup, and then brings it cheerfully to his brother.

Love in Family

Welcome! Today we continue our series on relationships, on love, focusing on the family. As I prepared for this message, one of the things I did was to think about and review various well-known stories and events from the Old Testament from the direct perspective of family relationships. I had never done this before, and I found it fascinating.

For one thing, I was shocked at how many family relationships in the Bible were what today we would call dysfunctional. What exactly is a dysfunctional family relationship? I came across multiple definitions but was struck by one reference that characterized a dysfunctional family relationship by five symptoms: (1) estrangement (avoiding one another), (2) anger (expressed or hidden), (3) lack of trust (tied to unforgiveness), (4) deception (valuing your own desires over truth), and (5) secrecy (including an unwillingness to change or face reality).

Love in Marriage

When Carl and John asked me to talk on the subject of “Love in Marriage” I told Miriam that I need to be on my best behavior for the next two weeks. I kind-of cringed a little when I heard the topic. Usually, when I give a talk God works on me on that particular subject that week. I’m not standing up here sharing these things with you because I’m an expert at loving my wife. In the business world a person learns how to do something well and then people pay them to share their insights and secrets. They’ve become an “expert” on a particular subject. But the difference in the business world and the church world is that there really isn’t anybody who’s an “expert” on anything. They may be further along than many of us. But we’re all a work in progress. The reason why I’m sharing these things with you this morning is because I’m a work in progress. And Miriam is a work in progress. We have “The Expert” working on us, changing us so that our marriage will reflect the love that God has for the church that’s talked about in Ephesians 5.

Love, Simply

Welcome! Today I am excited to be starting a new series with you on Relationships. Today I want us to contemplate what love really is, according to the Bible. The world and the Bible have different definitions of love, and so it is critically important that we really understand what love really is, or we will have no way to properly understand countless passages in the Bible.

I want to start with an excerpt from a story. The story is The Road to Oz, one of the L. Frank Baum Oz books (no relation, by the way). In this particular story several characters are wandering through the wilder parts of the Oz world together: Dorothy, of course, and her little dog Toto, too; Button-Bright, a small boy who was not so bright and loved to say “Don’t know” to every question, the Polychrome, the Rainbow’s Daughter, a fairy whose natural home was in a rainbow, and the Shaggy Man, a man who loved to dress in rags and who was the proud possessor of a magic talisman known as the Love Magnet. The Love Magnet caused all who were close to its owner to love its owner.