the journey

A sermon where none is needed

Here's the 1st place winner of Geez Magazine's writing contest.

Wow. Powerful stuff.

Technorati Tags: Geez Magazine, writing, sermons

One Prayer

Here's something new from LifeChurch.tv.

It's a series of services designed to:

• Promote unity in the body of Christ.
• Expose churches to other great teachers and ministries.
• Empower churches to experiment with video teaching.
• Infuse spiritual passion into a typically challenging month (June).
• Give the senior pastor a three-week break from teaching.
• Raise money for a mission project.
• Teach our people to fast, pray, and seek God in concert with thousands of other believers.
• Participate in the larger work of God in His church.

Here's the promo video at YouTube:

To participate or for more information, click here.

Tags: LifeChurch.tv, One Prayer

What is the power of prayer?

I stumbled upon several good thoughts on prayer while preparing for Sunday.  If any of you struggle with prayer, have given up on prayer or have serious reservations about prayer, let me encourage you to examine the essays posted here. 

Here's an excerpt:

To me, the power of prayer depends on the sort of prayer that you are praying. Oftentimes people become disappointed and disillusioned when they pray to God to grant a specific outcome or desire and their "prayer" is not answered. Many people think a miracle has happened when just such a prayer results in God's bringing about the desired outcome.

I once prayed that a close friend who was sick be made well. His subsequent death seemed to me not only a failure on God's part to grant my prayer, but an affront to my sense of right results and even justice. In reflecting on this event over the last several years, I've come to realize that a miracle occurs as we learn to perceive the purpose of prayer as something different, something that changes us and gives meaning to our understanding of the words "thy will be done"; that is, we understand an outcome as part of living fully and the total package of the human experience, both the joyous and the tragic, instead of perceiving it as upsetting our apple cart. This is not to say that tragedy is not tragic, but tragedy is not something caused by God for the purpose of making us suffer or to deny our wish. While we may not want our friends to die young, death happens to us all, and it is not God's failure on our behalf when it does.

Living fully is so hard to do. In order to achieve it, we have to accept many conditions, outcomes and events that we wouldn't have chosen and don't agree with, and even embrace them as a part of life - our lives - because they are a part of life (and death). Learning to pray with that more mature understanding helps me experience God as not so much a parental figure with the power to give me what I want, but as a potent and ever- present source of connectedness and strength that helps me to understand those events life inevitably throws my way.

Source: ExploreFaith

Tags: pray, prayer, power of prayer

This weekend: Lust

This weekend we'll be taking a look at the deadly sin known as Lust.  Here are a few tidbits to get you thinking:

The scripture passage:

You have heard that it was said, “You shall not commit adultery.” But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.  Matthew 5:27-28 NRSV

A definition:

"Uncontrolled or illicit sexual desire."  It gives no thought to consequences; it's all about the euphoric thrill of the moment.

A word about Lust:

Frederick Buecher defined lust as "the craving for salt of a [person] who is dying of thirst." (Wishful Thinking, p. 54).

Tags: lust, 7 deadly sins

The subject of lust

This weekend we'll be dealing with the deadly sin known as lust.  Here's a good quotation on this topic:

"Lust is the ape that gibbers in our loins. Tame him as we will by day, he rages all the wilder in our dreams by night. Just when we think we're safe from him, he raises up his ugly head and smirks, and there's no river in the world flows cold and strong enough to strike him down. Almighty God, why dost thou deck men out with such a loathsome toy?"  Frederick Buechner

HT: Leadership Journal

Tags: lust, 7 deadly sins

A word about greed

Tomorrow morning I'll be preaching on the subject of Greed.  I thought you might be interested in seeing an excerpt:

• Greed drives our consumerist, capitalist society.  Everything is a commodity to be consumed for your own personal pleasure, including Jesus. Therefore, it becomes all about marketing the church to meet the demands of a picky consumer & selling Jesus as cheaply as possible.  I would imagine that great men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer are rolling over in their graves because of this. 
• Greed will never make us rich toward God. Somewhere along the line we've gotten the mistaken notion that an abundance of possessions is the same as abundant living. 
• Greed never knows how much is enough.  The thin line between our "wants" and "needs" becomes blurred.  Is it possible that we mostly desire the wrong things to fill our restless hearts?
• Greed can make you coldhearted.  Is it possible that greed, a perverted form of self-love, prevents us from any concern for others?
• Greed diverts our reliance on God--in essence it's a form of idolatry.  Is it possible that our well-meaning quest for financial security lessens (or replaces) our need to trust in God?

Technorati Tags: greed, 7 deadly sins

Greed is good!

Here's someting I ran across while preparing for a sermon on greed.

Who could forget this classic movie clip that typified a generation known for greed?

Tags: greed, Michael Douglas, Wall Street, decade of greed

This weekend: Envy

If Pride is all about me,
then Envy is all about you-- you have what I want!

There appear to be some common symptoms of envy that might help us identify it's disruptive presence:

• Envy can involve malice:  It's chipping away at someone's reputation by innuendo and half-truths.  One moment you're praising them, another time you're questioning their integrity.  It's really messy.
• Envy can involve jealousy:  If you want to observe Pride and Envy in full swing, just attend a preacher's meeting.  Wow. The green eye of envy is alive and well there.
• Envy can involve dejection: It's focusing on someone else's blessings and feeling short-changed. 
• Envy can involve hypocrisy:  We pretend happiness when someone else is blessed, but it's merely pretense. 
• Envy can involve lovelessness: It's love of your friend's possessions, but not love for your friend.  If anything, it's contempt for your friend's successes.   

Source: The Workbook on the 7 Deadly Sins

Tags: 7 deadly sins, envy

A fresh look at the 7 deadly sins

Here's the skinny on a new sermon series:

A FRESH LOOK AT THE 7 DEADLY SINS
A seven-part sermon series (duh)

Have you ever wondered why talk shows like Dr. Phil are so successful?

Why would a middle-aged man with a Texas-direct, blunt-to-the-point-of- cruel approach garner such a faithful audience? One psychotherapist explained it this way: "People are ready to be told the truth about themselves, even when it hurts, because they know that, without getting the truth, they won't get life."

With that in mind, we'll be pulling out all of the stops in our upcoming reexamination of the seven deadly sins. No holds barred. No punches pulled. Why? Because twenty-first century followers of Jesus need to hear the absolute truth about sinning.

Join us this weekend as we examine the mother of all sins: Pride.

Further reading:
Wikipedia article
Sinning like a Christian by William Willimon
The Workbook on the 7 Deadly Sins by Maxie Dunnam & Kimberly Dunnam Reisman

Tags: 7 deadly sins, William Willimon, sermon series

God's sharecroppers

I've decided to provide a note-taking guide for the next few Sundays to see how they go.  Here's what everyone will be receiving this weekend:

God’ Sharecroppers
Sunday, July 9, 2007
Prepared by Mark Bushor, Ph.D.

Passage: Matthew 21:34-37 NRSV

Today’s scripture passage reminds us that we are God’s sharecroppers. We tend the earth and its riches on someone else’s behalf. And we’re expected to represent God’s interests, being as generous with each other as God is with us. We're not owners. We were never meant to be.

Sharecropping: Background information
Types of sharecropping arrangements

1. Workers can rent plots of land from the owner for a certain sum and keep the whole crop.
2. Workers work on the land and earn a fixed wage from the land owner but keep none of the crop.
3. Workers can neither work for nor get paid from the land owner, so the work and land owner each keep a share of the crop.

Inherent problems with the system:

• The typical form of sharecropping was _____________.
• The landowner controlled the extension of ________ & the plantation ______________.
• The landowner controlled the ____________ and ______________.
• ____________ for the sharecroppers was sub-standard (e.g., no plumbing)
• Sharecroppers found themselves tied to land in a perpetual _________ of debt.

Life application points:

1. Ownership is a game we play. We own ___________. Period.
2. Being guests (instead of owners) ____________ us of certain responsibilities we are not equipped to handle.
3. Being guests places us in relationship with the ____________ who places us in relationship with each ___________.
4. Being a guest shifts the emphasis from competition to _____________.

Family study guide:

• How does this affect your perception of possessions?
• How can it change the way you use (or accumulate) possessions?
• What does it mean to be God’s sharecroppers? Is that a bad thing?
• How do you regularly put your gratitude into action? How are you holding back?

Suggested reading: The Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall and Denver Moore

“They needed to give in order to remember who they were: grateful guests, who took their lives into their hands like wrapped and ribboned gifts and who returned the favor by giving themselves to others.”

 

If you'd like a copy of the study guide with answers, just leave a comment below.

Technorati Tags: sharecroppers, sharecropping