Good Morning!Ladies, please join us tonight at 6:30pm for a salad dinner and an evening of worship/fellowship. Bring a salad to share and we’ll see you tonight!Thank you!
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This blog was posted on buzzardblog.com and we thought it would be worth sharing. Click here to view original blog post.
This is a guest blog post from my good friend, Toby Kurth. Last year Toby planted ChristChurch in San Francisco. Toby is a great pastor, writer, and thinker. Enjoy his post.
“Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean, but abundant crops come by the strength of the ox.” Proverbs 14:14
We are about a year into our church plant and have become increasingly convinced that a healthy church should be messy. If we really believe what the Bible teaches us about ourselves and others, how can it be any other way? Church is not just a meeting or an event; church is real people. Real people that have been saved by Christ and that are being transformed into his image. We all know that we have sin and struggles, but so many of us have gotten really good at hiding it.
The reality is that life comes with mess, mess that is produced by the work that God is doing in our lives. Work that can be painful and hard, but it is good. I think we are more or less resolved to accept that mess comes with our physical life, but what about spiritual life? Are you as quick to accept that? Do you believe that spiritual life is supposed to be messy?
God wants us to embrace the mess and work that comes with spiritual life because He wants to do real work in our lives. God calls us to acknowledge the mess of our own lives and the lives of those around us. He meets us in the mess. We grow in the mess. Christ redeems the mess.
We all face the temptation to present ourselves better than we are, to deny our sin and failure. We are often driven more by what people might think of us than reality. We slant stories to make ourselves look better. We hide our weaknesses from our friends and spend a lot of time reinforcing pretense. The more we do that, the more we drift from an active awareness of our dependence on Christ.
That is why we need the gospel. The gospel tells us the truth about ourselves and gives us the grace to embrace reality. The gospel tells us that left to ourselves we rebel against a good God and His ways, but that despite our rebellion God pursues us through Christ. The gospel is not a sales pitch. It is not a promise that everything will be neat and clean, that you can have your best life now. The gospel is grounded in reality. We all struggle to varying degrees and we are all desperately dependent upon the grace of Christ every moment of every day. God gives grace to us as we humble ourselves before Him and each other.
Living honestly is also a far better representation of the gospel to an unbelieving world. When we pretend that we are entirely with it and have no struggles, we make the gospel appear inaccessible to those that are not. When we live honestly we demonstrate that the gospel provides real hope for real people. If you are a follower of Christ you are not the way you are merely because you try to be a good person. It is because the Almighty Creator of the Universe is at work in your life to help you grow in the midst of the mess that is your life. A life without mess is a life without work. God is more interested in the fruit of your life than your comfort and reputation.
In this week’s message, entitled “Old and New”, we examined Colossians 3:1-17. We heard that God’s call for us, as Christians, is to become who we already are in Christ. To better understand this call upon our lives, let us consider these questions:
- How strongly do you see theology or doctrine as being connected with life? How does this tend to affect the way that you read your Bible?
- How did you connect with the description of how we can read the Bible with a “that’s God - that’s me” filter mechanism? How did the message help you with this?
- Have you ever thought of the Christian life as mainly believing the right things and doing the right things? In what ways does this understanding of the Christian life differ from the one presented from Colossians 3:1-17?
- Have you ever struggled to understand what it means to be united with Christ? How was Sunday’s explanation a help to you?
- How is putting to death what is earthly and putting on what is holy connected with God’s work of grace in your life?
- How does the understanding that God has given you a new nature affect the way that you embrace God’s ongoing work in you and through you?
Let’s pray this week that God will give us a greater understanding of all that is found in our union with Christ.
The week before last, we sang an Isaac Watt’s hymn, “How Sweet and Aweful”. The first lines read, “How sweet and aweful is the place, with Christ within the doors.” Watts is speaking of the spiritual nourishment and divine glory present when the church gathers. Aweful here simply meaning “full of awe”. However, given most of us think of alternate meanings when we hear the word “aweful” (awfully close to awful), we changed the wording to awe-filled.
That’s just a small tidbit to get you interested. The larger song is actually a celebration of electing grace and a plea for God to continue opening more hearts to the gospel. Verse 2 provides a helpful perspective for my soul anytime I’m enjoying worshiping the Savior.
While all our hearts and all our songs
Join to admire the feast
Each of us cry with thankful tongues,
“Lord, why was I a guest?”
Every time I sing or hear those lines, my heart is humbled because I’m reminded that I have no hope apart from my Father’s saving intervention. What do I have that I have not received? May they remind us this week to never take a moment of corporate worship for granted.
I was able to share this with the singles at Resolved Saturday evening and the rest of the church family Sunday morning, but for anyone who may have missed those meetings I also wanted to share an update here.
Since Jen and I moved to Richmond with our family 3½ years ago, it has been a distinct joy to serve as part of the pastoral team with a particular emphasis on evangelism and singles. It’s been a privilege to labor with the other pastors to serve you, but over the past 6 months, I’ve been sensing a redirection in God’s call to the marketplace where I would have contact with a wide variety of people, especially those that don’t know Jesus.
In this new season, going forward, God has made it clear that He is calling me to be a pillar and a light in this church. A pillar in the sense of being a strong support and encouragement through involvement in a Community Group, serving, and sharing the Gospel as part of the wonderful normal life of this church. God is calling me to be a light in the business world, pursuing excellence for his glory and sharing the Gospel. So, these two things excite me and we have faith for this new journey.
God is helping us to trust Him in this transition. We are experiencing the care and support of the pastors and their wives, whose friendship means so much to us. I want you to know that your pastors have been such a wonderful support in this process. I’ve never felt pressure to do anything but they’ve wanted us to follow God’s clear call of us for our family and so that you are best served.
I want to say thanks to you for bringing us so much joy over the past 3½ years. I have been the recipient of much encouragement and have loved seeing God working in you. Thank you for your love, your care and for making this past season in pastoral ministry for us, a joy.
None of this transition changes our hearts of love for you, the people of KingsWay. We are planning to stay in Richmond to continue to be an active part of KingsWay and pursue God’s plan for us in new endeavors. We look forward to continuing to walk this road together with you.
Just a quick reminder that Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University starts tomorrow evening. The class will run in our auditorium for 14 Wednesdays at 7:30 pm. For more info click on the logo above…
