This morning’s message is about . . . um, just a minute, let me check my notes . . . oh yes, this morning’s message is about vision. . . . At least, I think this is the week where I’m supposed to talk about vision. Maybe it’s next week, I don’t know. Oh, that reminds me, I have to go in and get my eyes checked, oh, and while I’m over there I have some stuff I should drop off over at Good Will. . . .Oh, ah, where was I . . . oh yes, vision.

How many minutes have I been talking now? Just two minutes, is that all, well, only 28 minutes to go. Speaking of “to go”, I should have went (fidgeting). So what do I want to say about vision? I sure hope you like this message. I’m a little bit nervous that you won’t like my message (nervously click my pen).

Hold ON! Come Back! I was doing a little play acting with that, and those of you who are new here this morning, were going, “Oh my, my, my, what have we gotten ourselves into?” I started that way because I wanted to communicate that without vision, even simple things like communicating get all messed up and goes nowhere.

How many of you thought that I was clearly sharing my thoughts, that my thoughts had focus and were good and helpful? None of you? That’s right, because without vision, without focus, nothing turns out good.

This morning I’m going to be using the words “vision” and “focus” interchangeably, because in order to see anything clearly, we have to be able to focus well. If your eyes don’t focus, then you don’t see well. The two go hand in hand. In church or in life, we need to know where we are going, otherwise we just wonder around going in circles like a dog chasing his tail.

Focus is what our eyes do in order to see, in order to have vision. When the lens on our camera gets out of focus, the picture is blurry. When your eyesight or vision is bad, things are blurry and it’s hard to see. If it gets bad enough, it gets hard to know where you’re going. As a church, as a group of people moving toward becoming like Christ, we have to see clearly how we’re going to get there. To illustrate this I got in the car this week and while going 55 miles an hour, I closed my eyes and determined it’s not a good idea to drive with your eyes closed. What we’re going to talk about this morning is how important vision is in your life and mine. Many of us live our lives randomly, without any focus on where we’re going or on where we’re headed in life. It’s as though we have our eyes closed driving down the road.  Vision is a sense of knowing where you want to go and then focusing on doing whatever it takes in order to go there.

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Time . . . Time . . . It’s an interesting word. It’s an interesting concept. Does anyone here want to try and define it? Nobody?

Here’s the Definition (project): The continuum of experience in which events pass from the future through the present to the past.

It’s ordinary, it’s common, and yet, it’s really difficult to put it to words. It’s actually quite mysterious. We understand time and yet we don’t. It’s illusive. It’s hard to nail down a definition and yet we all live within its grasp.

There is another word that is equally illusive, and though well known in the church, is not used in secular society outside of swear words. It is one of the most distinguished words in the Bible. It’s a Hebrew word “qadosh”, which means Holy; a word, which more than any other is representative of the mystery and majesty of God.

The word Holy is like the word time. It has a certain mysteriousness to it. When you put the two words “Holy Time” together, it’s very mysterious.

What do you think was the first holy object in the history of the world? Was it a mountain? Was it an alter? Was it a temple? Was it a people? What do you think? It was none of these things. The first holy object was time. Time is the first to be called Holy. We are told that “God blessed the seventh day and made it Holy.” There is no other object in the creation story that is called holy. No thing is identified at the time of creation as Holy. Only time is created as Holy. The difficult thing is that both time and holiness are difficult to define in any real sense, and so when you put the two words together it creates lots of confusion.

Now, this is a radical departure from traditional religious thinking. Most would think that after God created heaven and earth that he would then create a holy place. But it seems that to God a holiness in time was of greatest importance in the creation story. Later a place would become holy – the tabernacle and the temple, but in Jesus’ day, even that would be destroyed to the point where only time remained holy.

There are six days in which time is identified as creative time, time to create, Then there is another type of time called Holy time. It is a different kind of time.

I have in my closet two types of cloths. I have good cloths and I have work cloths. My good cloths are wor Read the rest of this entry »

1-16-11Time: Holiday

Does anyone here feel like they need a holiday? Some time off? Do any of you feel like you’ve worked too hard this week? Imagine for a minute if you had a holiday every week. Wouldn’t that be great! You’d have a day off every week where you didn’t have to work, you didn’t have to worry about all the stuff on your to-do list, or all the household chores that daily fill your itinerary.  Wouldn’t it be great to have a holiday every week where you didn’t have to work and do all the things that keep you and I running every day?  What if we had a day to spend with our family and friends, or out in nature, or doing something nice for someone else? Does that sound like a luxury? Does it sound like a pipe dream? It’s not; in fact, God designed your world and mine, at the beginning of time to have such a day. He created you and I for a weekly holiday and built it into our very nature when he created the world.

In Genesis 2 we’re told that “By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done. Genesis 2:2-3 (NIV)

 God thought it was good to work for six days and then to rest from his work on the seventh day, he designated it a holy day to be remembered for all time. Holy means to set apart. It means to keep it pure. It means to not corrupt it. To be holy means that this day is to be different from all other days, but the question is, “Why did he make it different and how did he make it differnt?” God thought so highly of the Sabbath Day that it made the top ten list of the things that God feel most strongly about. In the countdown of commandments, the Sabbath is number four. He says in the fourth commandment. “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God” (Exodus 20:8-10).

It’s interesting that we typically don’t discredit the other nine commandments. We all believe that it’s not good for people to commit murder or adultery or to dishonor your father or your mother, but many of us don’t really take the Sabbath all that seriously, and I think one of the reasons is that we don’t fully understand what’s going on with it, and why it’s so important to God and to us.

Now, traditionally the Sabbath day has been understood as a day of rest, but I have a number of questions I want to pursue this morning. What if I’m not tired? What constitutes rest? What if I have things to do? Is this a day for God or for me? Did God set this day apart for my welfare or some hoop that he wanted me to jump through? And then this question, “God had just created all the heavens and the earth, the sun, the moon and the stars, all the fish, the birds, and the animals – and us, and never once did he declare any of those really good things “holy”, but then he gets to the last day and he declares that this day, thought it seems much like the other six, he declares this day to be holy. Why is there nothing else in creation that God called holy, but a day? What’s going on here and what’s at stake? Read the rest of this entry »

Info to keep the characters straight:

King David                           Different mother                 Same Mother          

Father                                     Amnon – Raped Tamar        Tamar – Half brother to Amnon

Do you live with any regrets? Researchers have found the single most often expressed emotion in daily conversation, as you might expect, is love…a child to a parent, a friend to a friend, a wife to her husband . . . Expressions of caring and affection are more common than anything else that we say. That’s a really good thing. However, the second most commonly expressed emotion on a daily basis kind of surprised me. It’s regret. “Wish I had shown up on time. Wish I’d spoken up. Wish I hadn’t eaten that.” Anybody feel that over the holiday season? “Wish I’d been saving my money. Wish I’d asked her out. Wish I hadn’t asked her out.”

Regret is as common as love. It has a unique sting to it. All pain stings, but regret has a unique sting because it’s not just “I wish things had turned out differently,” it’s oftentimes “I know things could have turned out differently if I would have acted other than the way that I did.” That is why regret is harder to bear than other forms of disappointment. I might be disappointed that the Lions didn’t win the their division, much less the Super Bowl, but I

don’t regret it. Regret keeps me awake at night because it’s not just that I’m in pain; it’s that I know it was in my power to have been a better self, and I didn’t do it. I had the power and the opportunity to for things to turn out differently, but I did the wrong thing. I chose wrong and now I have regret for my choice or choices.

Everybody here knows about regret. Regret is a woman dying of emphysema, who looks back on her first cigarette and thinks to herself, “Man, if only I had known then what I know now.” When a man who has lost his family because of alcoholism looks back on his first drink, “Why did I go down that road?” When a couple in a divorce court thinks back to their wedding vows and wonder, “How did we end up here?”

The Bible, like our world, is full of stories of regret. There is the regret of Adam and Eve when they ate the fruit. There is the regret of Esau when he sold his birthright for a bowl of food. There is the regret of Samson when he betrayed his heritage, told his secret to Delilah, and lost his strength. There is the regret of Peter when he denied Jesus even though Jesus had warned him about it ahead of time. This is all over the place in the Bible just as it is for you and me.

But maybe the hottest regret in the Bible is lodged in the heart of a man named David. His regret, in this case, is not so much for what he did as what he didn’t do. And it’s summed up in a single word. We sometimes have a word that all of our regret could get poured into. And for David, it’s a single word we’ll come to eventually…a word that is desperately needed to be said by him, but he didn’t say it until it was too late. Everybody has a word. I wonder what your word is?

I know we don’t like looking at the subject of “regrets” because they’re painful, but here is why we’re doing this: the capacity for regret is itself a gift from God because it means we can learn. We can ask, “If I keep living the way I’m living today, what would my biggest regret be when I get to the end of my life? And how might God call me to change the way I’m living so that I don’t end up there, so that I can live with more hope and less regret?” We alone of all creatures on earth have this God-given power.

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 When you got up this morning, and you opened up the newspaper or you looked at the calendar or you took a look at your cell phone, you might have seen the date that was there. What you saw was December 24, 2010. We don’t think about this very often…the year 2010…but 2010 years from what? From the birth of this little baby named Jesus. You can’t open a newspaper, you can’t look at a cell phone, you can’t look at a calendar, without being reminded of Jesus the Christ, the one whom Christmas was named after more than two millennium ago.

Every year, this week, Time magazine names the person of the year…that one individual who had the biggest impact, who touched the most lives, who affected the world most deeply. And every year, everybody has nominations, and everybody guesses, and everybody argues.

Does anyone remember who Time’s person of the year was last year? Ten years ago, when it was the year 2000, Time named the person of the century. That was a wider swath of time. Because there were so many candidates it was way, way harder to try to name one person out of a century. Does anyone remember who the person of the Century was? Albert Einstein, right!

Here’s what’s ironic…it is kind of hard to name a person of the year, really tough to name thr person of the century. Here is irony…if you had to choose the name of the single person who has had the biggest impact on the world, on the world’s history since the beginning of recorded time, that one life that has touched every continent, every nation, every culture, and every language, there is just one name…just one name that stands head and shoulders above the rest.. Read the rest of this entry »