All of us have been in relationships where trust has been broken. It is devastating. It brings everything you have believed into question and makes it hard to trust future actions. Trust is huge. You could say that trust is to relationships as bones are to a human body. You can not have one without the other. Conflict can be a cancer that ravages a relationship, but trust is the backbone.

So two questions; how do we build trust and where do we find what trust is? Continue reading…

Relationships, to use an old saying, “we canʼt live with them we canʼt live without them.”

When we have fulfilling and functional relationships, our hearts and souls are overflowing with life. But relationships that are dysfunctional can wound the heart and blight the soul. Continue reading…

Every conspiracy has weapons. The French resistance during World War II used Molotov cocktails (bottles filled with gasoline to be lit on fire and thrown at the enemy), guns, propaganda…in reality, anything they could lay their hands on to fight the Germans.

So what are the weapons of Jesus’ advent conspiracy? I would submit that there are a number of weapons. The gospel, or good news, is the ultimate weapon, the nuclear bomb of all bombs. You also have the weapons of prayer, justice, righteousness, giving and many, many others. So I want us to focus on three that I believe are especially counter-cultural here in the U.S. Continue reading…

Conspiracy. Not a word you typically associate with Christmas and the advent of Jesus. Nonetheless a conspiracy is exactly what began with a baby in a manger. God had come in the flesh to set the world right. To deal with indifference, cruelty, injustice, broken relationships; in summary, sin – all that we do to dishonor God, hurt others and destroy ourselves. Much about the world system, or governing principles, is opposed to this sort of transformation, this type of change. So Jesus begins a conspiracy to overthrow the world by 1st overthrowing the power of sin, 2nd by overthrowing our hearts, 3rd by us joining the conspiracy as co-conspirators so that we might be agents of the overthrow. Continue reading…

In John chapter 4, Jesus strikes up a conversation with a Samaritan woman. In the course of the conversation, which took place next to a well, the woman discovers that Jesus is the “Messiah” or the savior that she has been told about and that she is waiting for. Jesus made an interesting assertion during the discourse, that He was the source of living water saying “but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:14) By this Jesus means the Holy Spirit and in verse 24 Jesus says “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.” So then the Spirit and living waters go together, the Spirit brings a reality to our lives that is described as “living waters” i.e. a constant flow of life. Continue reading…

In Luke 15 Jesus tells three parables in response to the religious elite’s complaints that He was spending time and eating with tax-collectors and sinners. I don’t know how you feel about the IRS, but in Jesus’ day tax-collectors were considered traitors to Israel; people who had sold out to the Roman oppressors by extorting taxes from fellow Jews. They were despised above all others.

Reality is, sinners  are just people like me and you who make mistakes and have failings. Perhaps we don’t take religion seriously, but do consider ourselves spiritual. Again the religious elite look down upon people like us. In their minds prophets (a.k.a. “religious” people…they considered Jesus one) should not spend time with such people and most certainly didn’t eat with them. So they grumbled about Jesus’ actions which prompted His three parable response. Continue reading…

Yesterday we continued our Purge series by talking about STUFF. At the heart of our series is Hebrews 12:1-2 where we see the prize for running this life race. That prize is joy. If we are running a race, we want to do so free of any hindrances. This is where Purge comes in, getting rid of everything that would hinder or keep us from not only running, but also winning the race.

STUFF can hinder us. I defined STUFF in 4 ways: as a noun; 1. property, as personal belongings or equipment; things, 2. inward character, qualities, or capabilities, 3. action or talk of a particular kind, and as a verb, 1. to fill (a receptacle), esp. by packing the contents closely together; cram full. So you see STUFF can mean a lot of different things; physical objects, talents, particular actions, and to cram “stuff” into some type of receptacle (which by the way can include ourselves at an emotional, intellectual and spiritual level). Continue reading…

With the revelation that Jesus time is more about “being” than “doing” (that right “being” creates right “doing”) comes a question, “what do I need to Purge in mySELF so that I can BE what God intends me to BE?” You see, after examining how we spend our time and after carving out time to be (having the state, quality, identity, nature, role, etc.), we have to understand both what we need to be and what hinders us from becoming so.

So what is our BE? The three aspects of Jesus joy that we have been talking about. This was the prize that Jesus ran for, lived for, endured for. So then our being should be that of expressing and experiencing that joy (see week one). So what keeps us from it? What hinders us from “being” within the time we have purged in our lives so that the outcome is right actions? Continue reading…

Last Sunday we continued our Purge series which is all about getting rid of the stuff and sin that weighs us down and tangles our lives. The point is that we are intended to live a life of purpose not a rat race.

Our two greatest commodities are ourselves and our time. The two are impossible to separate. We produce desired outcomes via ourselves (thoughts, energy, emotion, etc.) in the context of time. In fact we need to use our time better and take care of ourselves so that we can continue to be productive. So this raises two questions: How do/should we spend our time? and What do we need to Purge so that we can spend our time as we should? Continue reading…

Why would we do a blog about our current series called Purge? Well there are two reasons: 1. Preaching is not speaching, a talking head with no input from anyone else, a giving of information not an exchange of information, 2. If Preaching is not the aforementioned then it is an exchange of information, a conversation in community. Our desire is that this blog will be one way we facilitate this dialog.

PURGE – Sunday the 11th we kicked off a new series looking at the business, fullness and preoccupation of our lives. How often do you hear someone say, or perhaps you say it yourself, that there isn’t enough time, or we have too many things to do, or that life just seems like running around. Well my friends, I would like to say that this is not what life is supposed to be like. Our lives are meant to have meaning and purpose, to be fulfilling. Continue reading…