Brick Layer’s Accident Report

Does anyone here know Murphy? Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong will. Does anyone know Murphy? Does anyone here ever have bad things happen to them like this Brick Layer? Has anyone here ever been in an argument with your best friend, with your spouse, with your X? Has anyone here ever been in a car crash, been cut from a team, failed a test, gotten a bad review, been fired, downsized, etc, etc, etc. We could go on and on and most of these things have happened to us if we’ve lived very long.

Last week we talked about our vision of Heaven on Earth. We talked about the importance of keeping our eyes on God and who he created us to be, because we need vision in order to keep our eyes on what’s important in life.

Heaven on Earth is a great concept, but what about reality? What about all the bad stuff that we encounter every day of our lives? How are we to understand this, and how are we to navigate through it in a healthy, productive manner that moves us towards God’s vision of Heaven on Earth. How are we to understand and deal with all the bad stuff that happens in life? Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Big Idea: Prayer is more than a business deal with God; it is fundamentally about a love encounter with God that changes us and then the world.

 This sermon is fourth in a series of worship messages. Last week we asked the question, “Where is the best place to live?” The idea was inspired by the United Nation’s practice of annually releasing a list of the best countries to live in. Likewise, Money Magazine annually determines the top ten places to live in the US. This inspired the question, “Where is the best place to live?” not according to the U.N. or Money Magazine, but according to God.

Where is the place where you and I come most fully alive? Where is the place where you and I become most fully who God created us to be? Where is the place where true riches reside?

Last week we said worship is a great place to live. We said that worship is not something we do for an hour or so on Sunday, but rather, a place where we give our heart to God and center our lives around his will and his love.

Today, we are continuing to ask “Where are the best places in the world, not according to Money Magazine, Forges, or the U. N. but according to God. One of the greatest places where we truly come alive is when we live in the house of prayer. To live in the place of prayer, as opposed to making a visit there now and then, means we learn to pay attention to God, not just when we need him, but in the crazy, normalness that marks our lives. We learn the secret of praying without ceasing, so that always, in all our comings and goings, there is a communing with the God who is near.

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 Where is the best place to live? Every year, the United Nations ask this question about countries.  Every year, Money Magazine asks the same question about cities and towns in the US. Forbes Magazine does a similar assessment on a world scale.

The UN uses only three basic criteria to determine the world’s most hospitable and

inhabitable countries: life expectancy, educational level, and annual income. Countries

whose inhabitants live the longest, know the most, and earn the most, win. Underneath the

simplicity of those measuring sticks is a complex evaluative grid that touches on issues of

politics, economics, cultural institutions, and the like. Money Magazine‘s touchstones

include leisure activities and cultural opportunities, access to health care, number of golf

courses, air and water quality, and traffic density. Where is the greatest place to live?

This idea got me thinking: What are the Bible’s best places to live? What are God’s criteria for determining that? We’re going to look at the best place to live this morning, not according to the UN or Money Magazine or Forbes Magazine, but according to God.

The criteria are these: Where do we become most fully alive, most fully ourselves? Where do we

find our greatest joy and peace and wisdom? Where do we experience the deepest sense of

belonging? Where is it that, and then at the same time, where it is safe and yet abounds with adventure? Where do true riches reside?

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 Opening: They don’t understand by Sawyer Brown

 Have you ever felt judged . . . put down . . . or shamed by someone? Have you ever felt like someone was trying to control you or manipulate you or shame you to get you to do something that they wanted you to do? Do you ever worry? Do you ever worry about someone? About their life? About the choices they’re making? Have you ever had some Bible thumper beat you up with their convictions, or maybe you’ve watched them beat someone else up with their convictions? Maybe you’ve beat someone up with your religious convictions? Have you ever thought that all those things could ever be part of the same problem?

This morning we’re continuing on the series entitled, “Who am I?” and we’ve been asking the question of what defines us. Where do we get our sense of worth and value, and our sense of identity or belonging from? In the first week we said that many of us base our identity on how others perceive us. If people that we love are mad at us or call us names, or ignore us, then we often times have a very low sense of self at those times. When people are happy with us and we’re all having fun together, then we have a higher sense of value and worth. We said that God did not create us to have a foundational identity based on something that is constantly moving. We were created to have our identity based on something that is stable and firm, much like the house that we live in was built upon a firm foundation in order to whether all the storms that mother nature can throw at it, so we were created to have our identity based on a firm foundation. A firm foundation is not based on whether or not others are happy with us. A frim foundation, we said, is based on our Creator, who is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. Our identity is based on how valuable we are in God’s eyes, Our value is  not based on our value in someone else’s eyes

In the second week, We said in the first week that nobody should ever define us. We said that our sense of value and worth should never come from what people say or do to us. We were not created to for our identity to be based on something that is constanly moving like, how other people perceive usThe second week we said that nothing, especially money should define us. We said that only Christ, who thought we were invaluable, who was willing to die for us, should define us.

Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow and as long as we are defined by things that move, we will be filled with anxiety and fear. the only way that Jesus can become your Prince of Peace is when your identity is based on him, on what he says about you, because he created you. When you base your identity, your foundation on anything other than Jesus, then your house, your idenity will always be shifting as the storms of this world beat against you.

 That’s where we’ce come from, this is where we’re going. Jesus said,

Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces. Matthew 7:1-6 (NIV) Read the rest of this entry »

Leading Christian psychologist Larry Craab wrote in his book Connecting the following:

We’ve been asking the question, “Who am I?” What identifies who I am? Am I identified by what others say about me? Do I find my value and my worth my purpose or my identity, my sense of belonging from others, by what they say or do to me. Am I emotionally healthy when people are patting me on the back and saying, “Atta boy” and does my world fall apart when I mess up or somehow don’t live up to somebody’s will for me? Do I take my report card to my husband or my wife and receive my value and my sense of self worth from them or do I get it from somewhere else. Do I go to my husband or my wife, my parents or my friends and at some basic level ask the question, “Am I worthwhile? Am I valuable? Do I belong?” Or do I go to my husband or my wife, my parents or my friend knowing who I am, knowing that I’m worthwhile, knowing that I’m valuable, knowing who I am when I go to them? Depending on which way you approach people in your life, it makes a huge difference on the level of confidence and maturity that you display. The former will always lead to times of deep anxiety, the later towards much peace.

We said that just as a building inspector requires a firm foundation for your house, so that your house will weather all the storms Mother Nature throws at it, so it is that your Creator created you to have a firm foundation, which is Christ. As long as you and I build our identity on anything that moves, on anything that can be taken away, on anything that is dependent upon sinful people, your foundation, and therefore your value and worth will always be unstable and you will always have a shifting foundation, which will cause anxiety, fear, and stress at the very core of your being. God created you to know who you are and you can only know who you are when you understand at the heart level whose you are. We can only answer the question “Who am I?” when we come to know the Great I AM.

We said that we cannot find our identity from anything on the outside. We cannot allow anything or anyone else to define us. We cannot be defined, we cannot find our value, we cannot know our worth apart from our Creator and our Lord Jesus Christ. You are so valuable to him that he was willing to die in order that you might have life, life abundant. We must find our value and our worth in him, because in him our world no longer shakes, but becomes firm. The storms in life the value and worth and sense of belonging that he gives us, but our house, our identity stands firm.

This morning I’d like to continue probing the question, “Who am I?”

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