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Giving Up On Perfect

December 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment

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Christmas Is Not Your Birthday – Giving Up on Perfect *
Sycamore Creek Church
December 15/16, 2013
Tom Arthur
Luke 1:26-38

Merry Christmas Friends!  Let’s dive into the Christmas story today…

Luke 1:26-38 NLT
In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a village in Galilee, to a virgin named Mary. She was engaged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of King David. Gabriel appeared to her and said, “Greetings, favored woman! The Lord is with you!”

Confused and disturbed, Mary tried to think what the angel could mean. “Don’t be afraid, Mary,” the angel told her, “for you have found favor with God! You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus.He will be very great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David. And he will reign over Israelforever; his Kingdom will never end!”

Mary asked the angel, “But how can this happen? I am a virgin.”

The angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the baby to be born will be holy, and he will be called the Son of God. What’s more, your relative Elizabeth has become pregnant in her old age! People used to say she was barren, but she has conceived a son and is now in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible with God.”

Mary responded, “I am the Lord’s servant. May everything you have said about me come true.”

And then the angel left her.

We’re into the second week of a series called Christmas Is Not Your Birthday.  Whose birthday is it?  We all know the answer, but how many presents under the Christmas tree will have Jesus’ name on it?  Instead of focusing on the birthday boy himself, what we end up trying to do is have some kind of perfect traditional Christmas.  Our search looks something like this:

In the movie, Christmas Vacation, Clark Griswold is searching for the perfect traditional Christmas.  He’s got an image in his mind that is similar to the image almost all of us have in our mind too.  There’s a problem with our quest to attain this image of Christmas.

Mike Slaughter says, “In our attempts to create the magical Christmas experience we run ourselves into the ground emotionally, physically, financially, and relationally.”

Last year around this time someone turned in an anonymous prayer request that was so beautifully written that I saved it.  It describes well the situation that many find themselves in while searching for the perfect traditional Christmas:

Please remember all those for whom the holidays are a difficult time. Perhaps they have lost loved ones whom they miss; especially when family gather at the holidays. There are those who have little or no family, or do not feel part of the family they do have. They may have major financial challenges that make it difficult to go see loved ones or to buy food for a nice dinner or gifts for their children. They may have both sad and happy memories of holidays past, but this year, they are sad and depressed and just getting through another day is a challenge. May our Lord be a strength and comfort to them!  May we remember to extend a hand of hospitality and friendship, not knowing how much it may mean to those around us.

Speaking of the pain that many feel around this time of the year, how are your listening skills?  Listening is probably one of the most powerful tools in your toolbox.  If you could use some improvement on your listening and caring skills, make sure you check out the training we have coming up in February with John Savage.  We’ll spend  Thursday and Friday evening as well as all day Saturday learning how to listen and care for one another in more effective ways.  John Savage has worked with our church in the past and is a retired United Methodist pastor, psychologist, corporate pain specialist, life coach, author of several books, and musician.  Among all those things he is really just a very wise man.  This is a can’t miss opportunity to improve your listening skills in your marriage, in your job, with your friends, and in your church.  If you want more info, email Pat Brown (pat.orme@yahoo.com).

And yet amidst the chaos that is Christmas, Mike Slaughter reminds us that when we focus on the birthday boy himself, “Christmas is God’s vivid reminder that amid the uncertainty, God shows up to bring you peace, purpose, joy, hope, and wholeness.”

Unsanitary NOT PERFECT
So, friends, let’s give up on perfect.  There was very little that was perfect about Jesus’ birth.  The nativity was unsanitized, NOT PERFECT.  Think about this for a second.  Have you ever been in a delivery room?  The two times I’ve spent significant time in a delivery room at the hospital, everything was squeaky clean.  All the instruments used were wrapped in plastic and opened just for us.  All the bedding was fresh and washed (at least to begin with!).  The floor was spick and span.  But this was not the setting that Jesus was born into.  He was born in a barn.  Have you been in a barn lately?  It’s filled with flies and dung.  And those flies had most likely been on that dung.  Jesus was born in a very unsanitary situation.  The public health officials would have had a heyday!

But our lives are not sanitary either, are they?  Life is messy.  The more we follow Jesus the messier it gets.    Mike Slaughter says:

In turn, the Gospel of Luke makes it indelibly clear that walking in the way of Jesus is neither safe nor predictable.  Sometimes we have the idea that when we do right, wrong is not supposed to show up.  And if we are faithfully following Jesus, then life isn’t supposed to get messy, but it does.

Don’t for a moment think that just because you follow Jesus that life will get easier.  It is likely to get harder!

Favored NOT Perfect
When the angel Gabriel appears to Mary he says, “Greetings, favored woman! The Lord is with you!” (Luke 1:28 NLT).  Slaughter reminds us that:

God’s favor cannot be earned.  God comes when we are doing everything wrong.  God comes when we are doing nothing.  God comes whether we are being naughty or nice.  Why?  Because God loves us and we are highly favored!

This announcement by Gabriel was not what Mary was expecting.  She responds, “But how can this happen? I am a virgin” (Luke 1:34 NLT).  Mary wants to know how she’ll be pregnant if she’s a virgin.  She had done everything right so far.  She had saved herself for her future husband, and then she ends up pregnant?   We too do everything we know to be faithful to God and then you lose your job, your spouse tells you they want a divorce, your four-year-old is diagnosed with leukemia, your kid’s high school counselor calls to tell you they think your teenager is using drugs, and you ask, “How can this be, God, when I have tried so hard to do what is right?”

Imagine Mary’s conversation with Joseph.  Imagine Joseph’s response, “God did it?”  Joseph doesn’t believer her.  He plans to quietly divorce her.  She might be stoned to death for adultery.  Slaughter reminds us that, “Nowhere does the Bible promise that a life of faith will always make sense or follow a predictable path.”  Mary is favored even though her situation seems far from perfect.

NOT Perfect but NOT Alone
Gabriel goes on to tell Mary, “What’s more, your relative Elizabeth has become pregnant in her old age! People used to say she was barren, but she has conceived a son and is now in her sixth month” (Luke 1:36 NLT).  She will not be alone in this because she has community.

My son, Samuel Lewis, was born on July 5th.  I posted this on Facebook and noticed that immediately below that posting was my good friend Jon Van Dop’s posting that their son, Nic, was also born on July 5!  We were not doing this alone.  I was, however, one kid ahead of him, and he had sat through several meals listening to me go a little crazy about learning to live with a baby in the house.  Next time we met, he said to me, “You know when I used to listen to you talk about how you were frustrated and angry and going a little crazy when your first son was born, and I would look at you like I understood?  I didn’t understand but now I do!”  God used that difficult experience I had of getting used to having a baby in the house (after thirteen years of being married with no children!) to be a help to Jon with his first baby.  Jon didn’t have to do this alone.  None of us do.  We have a community called SycamoreCreekChurch.

We not only have the community of the church around us, but we also have the Holy Spirit.  Gabriel continues, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the baby to be born will be holy, and he will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35 NLT).  The Holy Spirit is God’s presence with us.  Mary is told her child shall be called “Immanuel” which means “God is with us.”  Even if the community is not immediately available, God is with you.  The Holy Spirit is God’s comforter, God’s advocate, God’s love and mercy and grace with you.

NOT Perfect but Faithful
Mary surely was not perfect as a human being.  There was only one perfect person, her son, Jesus.  But she was faithful.  Mary responded, “‘I am the Lord’s servant. May everything you have said about me come true.’ And then the angel left her” (Luke 1:38 NLT).  This is the “divine consent.”  Mary was willing to allow this to happen to her.  She responded with faith even though the whole thing must have seemed a bit preposterous.  And Mary continued to be faithful.  Mary was faithful in bringing up Jesus by bringing him to the temple for the temple sacrifices, temple visits, and to study the scriptures.  Mary was faithful when the religious leaders accused Jesus of heresy.  Mary was faithful when Jesus was found guilty in a rigged trial.  Mary was faithful when the appeal to Roman politicians failed.  Mary was faithful while her son was flogged.  Mary was faithful while her son was executed on a cross.  Mary was faithful when her son breathed his last breath.  Mary was faithful when Jesus was laid in the grave.  Mary’s life was not perfect, but she was faithful to what God had called her to do: to be a loving mother.

Friends, we need to give up on the perfect Christmas.  There is no perfect Christmas and the first Christmas was no image of perfection either.  Slaughter reminds us:

So when Christmas comes around during an imperfect season of life, and you just don’t feel like celebrating, remember: it’s not your birthday; it’s Jesus’ birthday, and by celebrating Christmas, we are celebrating someone else who suffered too.

Instead of seeking the perfect Christmas, let’s seek to make Christmas about Jesus’ birthday and celebrate it accordingly.  One way you can do this is to take our Christmas challenge: give away as much as you spend on yourself this Christmas.  Some of you can do this by just being more generous.  Others will need to cut your spending on yourself, your kids, your grandkids, and your boss or secretary in half so that you can give half away.  Then bring that second half in on Christmas Eve and give it in the Christmas Eve offering.  100% of the Christmas Eve offering is given away.  This year we’re giving it to our medical missions in Nicaragua, the second poorest country in this hemisphere.  Twice a year we send medical teams down to do medical clinics.  They bring life-giving and life-sustaining medicine and medical expertise to bring both physical and spiritual hope.  Over the years on Christmas Eve we’ve given away over $31,000.  Last year we gave away $3800.  2011 was our record year when we gave away $5800.  Can we make 2013 a record year?  Can we give away $6000?  Can we make it a miracle year?  Can we give away $10,000?  If we can, it will be because you gave up on perfect and decided to celebrate Christmas like it’s Jesus’ birthday.

Jeremy Kratky, our worship leader, is gearing his family up to celebrate Christmas with some different traditions this year.  He told me about a question his sister emailed him and how he responded. I asked him if I could share it with you.  Here it is:

Tom,

My older sister asked me this question in an email earlier today: What does the Christmas season look like in your home?  

Below is my response. Thank you God and Sycamore Creek Church for helping me see Christmas in a different light! 

Christmas in my home is what you might imagine. It’s focused on relationships with some gift giving. Kristin and I have been convicted (in a good way) on how we spend our money around Christmas. Our church is currently in a series called, “Christmas Is Not Your Birthday.”  We’ve all been challenged to give away as much as we spend on Christmas to people who actually have needs. Or, to spend half as much on Christmas and give the other half away. It’s a huge challenge and we’re not there yet. We did incorporate, however, a baby step this year. Rather than spend money on a gift for each other this Christmas (approximately $50 each), Kristin and I elected to give that money to a medical missions team our church supports which provides life giving, life sustaining, and life altering medicines, education, and hope to people in Nicaragua. So our gift to each other this year is a date night, which is already built into our monthly budget (so we’re actually not spending any additional money). Rather than it being just another date night, our gift to one another is this make a craft or riddle that represents a date night surprise. For example, Kristin loves musical theater. So I’m thinking about buying tickets to a show at the Wharton Center. The craft or riddle I create would work in the theme or the title of the show we’re going to see. The beauty of it is that we’d be going on a date night anyway, but this adds a celebratory component to it that makes it a wonderful gift. Thus, the $100 we would’ve spent on each other is now available to bless others. Each year on Christmas Eve, Sycamore Creek receives an offering that goes to this Medical Missions Team. 100% of it!  If all of us do even one little change this year on how we spend money, we anticipate a HUGE offering that will bless others. We’re dreaming the offering might be over $10,000!  For a church our size?  That’d be a miracle! We still bought our kids their presents. We read the Christmas story as recorded in Scripture and we’ll sing Happy Birthday Jesus. We have a beautifully decorated tree and poinsettias strewn about the house. We have our mantle dressed with Christmas-y stuff. It’s rather cozy. Outdoor Christmas lights. We’re letting go of some old traditions (Kristin and I buying each other a gift) and making some new ones with our children. Jonah, Nora, and I made Christmas cookies the other night at a cookie decorating party I attended with a Dads group I’m a part of.  We dropped them off to firefighters on the way home. I want Jonah and Nora to really understand that Christmas is about giving, not necessarily getting. Giving cookies to those firefighters the other night was something that Jonah and I suspected was on Jesus’ wish list; for it’s His birthday, right?  As you can tell, this message series has been very helpful to me and my family. I’m thankful you asked what Christmas looks like, for it is different this year, and hopefully for years to come. 

We just ended a three year capital campaign here at Sycamore Creek for building/space needs. We’re tithing off the top 10% to local and foreign missions. So this Christmas our small groups (growth groups), who each have committed to service in mission to our local community, are having fun giving away $1000 checks to their respective mission that particular group supports. We feel it’s on Jesus’ wish list. 

Love you,
Jeremy

This year we’re also giving away $1000/week to the local missions that our small groups support.  This week we gave away $1000 to Open Door Ministry.  Here’s that giveaway:

Will you give up on the perfect Christmas this year and instead seek to make it about celebrating Jesus’ birthday?  May God work a miracle in and through Sycamore Creek Church this Christmas.  Amen!

 

*This sermon series is based on the book, Christmas Is Not Your Birthday by Mike Slaughter.

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Expect a Miracle

December 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

bday

Christmas Is Not Your Birthday – Expect a Miracle *
Sycamore Creek Church
December 8/9, 2013
Tom Arthur 

Merry Christmas Friends!

Is it too early to say that?  No way.  Stores started decorating for Christmas weeks ago.  We put our Christmas decorations up the week before Thanksgiving so they’d be up to enjoy over Thanksgiving weekend.  So, Merry Christmas!  It’s never too early to say it.

But what are we saying when we say Merry Christmas?  What we’re really doing is saying, “Be merry because a birthday is coming!”  But whose birthday?  Your birthday?  Your kids birthday?  Your grandkids birthday?  No, Christmas is not your birthday.

That’s the series we’re beginning today: Christmas Is Not Your Birthday. Over the next several weeks we’re going to look at how to celebrate Christmas as Jesus’ birthday rather than our own.

Here’s the problem we run into every year with Christmas: Christmas has become too predictable.  What we need this year is a miracle!  Christmas is the perfect place for a miracle:

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.
~The Prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 9:6 KJV)

Hundreds of years before Jesus’ birth the prophet Isaiah predicted a miraculous birth, the birth of a baby who would be God and who would bring peace.  That’s quite a birth, quite a miracle!  But how did we get from that, Jesus’ birthday, to this?

The traditional “perfect” Christmas today includes: chaotic consumerism, stressed shopping, a terrible to-do list, disastrous date books, awful agendas, and deep deep debt (a pledge of allegiance to an economic Christmas orgy of overspending and debt).  Jesus was to be called the Counselor.  Maybe we should call him the Financial Counselor?  The traditional Christmas isn’t traditional at all.  It’s a “mixture of…a little biblical truth…some eighteenth-century Victorian practices, and…a double shot of Santa theology” (Thank you Mike Slaughter) on steroids provided by Madison Avenue with a shot of eggnog to make it all go down.

We’re left with the question: What exactly does God look like if this is how we celebrate the birth of the one called The Mighty God?  God ends up looking like Santa Claus?  God becomes a genie in a bottle with three wishes (if you’re good enough).

My own Christmas growing up was like this.  I remember when my grandma would hand me the J.C. Penny Catalogue and tell me to circle the things I wanted from it.  Now that I look back on this, it seems absurd to me.  My grandma lived so simply that when she died all my mom had to do to clean out her possessions was to empty one drawer at the nursing home!  And yet she bought into the whole traditional Christmas when it came to her own grandkids.  Another aspect of the traditional Christmas with my family was that kids of divorced parents cashed in big at Christmas.  Here’s how my Christmas schedule went:

Christmas Eve: Gifts with my dad’s parents
Christmas 6AM: Gifts with my dad and step-mom
Christmas 8AM: Gifts with my step-mom’s family
Christmas Noon: Gifts with my mom’s family
Christmas Afternoon: Gifts with my mom and step-dad.

Boom baby!  It’s one of the few times that being a kid in a divorced family pays off.  And of course, all these family members are doing their best to make sure that the other side of the family doesn’t one-up them!

So if this is how we celebrate the birth of the one called Mighty God, what does that God look like?  Something is really jacked up, isn’t it?  It’s jacked up because this baby wasn’t called Santa.  This baby was called Jesus, the Prince of Peace.  God doesn’t look like Santa, God looks like Jesus:

Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.
~St. Paul (Colossians 3:15 NLT)

In Jesus we see God and also humanity, at its fullest.  Sometimes it’s hard to wrap your mind around God, but Jesus is easier.  Jesus is a God I can believe in.  And that’s a miracle.

The miracle of Jesus is that he was ordinary and yet extraordinary.  He was ordinary in that he was born in an empire-occupied territory to an unwed mother.  His parents were poor and lived as refugees in Africa amidst genocide back home.  He grew up in Nazareth, a small town in the middle of the U.P. (OK, just kidding about the U.P. thing).  He was a basic laborer.  He worked with his hands as a carpenter.  Jesus’ background was not extraordinary.  It was about as average or below average as they come.

And yet Jesus’ birth was also extraordinary and miraculous.

All right then, the Lord himself will give you the sign. Look! The virgin will conceive a child! She will give birth to a son and will call him Immanuel (which means ‘God is with us’).
~The Prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 7:14 NLT)

Jesus is God with us and he was extraordinary in so many ways.  His message was a message of healing.  Jesus’ first sermon was also from the prophet Isaiah.  He stood up in the synagogue and read:

God’s Spirit is on me;
he’s chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor,
Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and
recovery of sight to the blind,
To set the burdened and battered free,
to announce, “This is God’s year to act!”
(Luke 4:18-19 The Message)

He was the son of God full of power and yet he reached out to those who were powerless.  He was ultimately executed on a cross and resurrected three days later.  He was ordinary but extraordinary.  If God can work an extraordinary miracle through an ordinary Jesus, then he can work a miracle through any ordinary person, including you and me this Christmas.  In fact, you are God’s miracle worker!

This miracle is going to take some preparing for.  Christmas is Jesus’ birth and that means there is going to be a labor.  Preparing for the miracle this Christmas requires the cost of labor pains.  This birth was no “silent night.”  In fact, that song is really just about as silly as they come.  Sentimental, yes.  Realistic, no.  The birth probably looked more like this:

 

Jesus’ life cost him something.  He lives.  He taught and was persecuted by the religious establishment.  He was executed on a cross.  He raised from the dead.  All of those who closely followed him were persecuted and executed as well, except one who was sent into exile.  Those are some serious labor pains, not sentimental silent nights.  As Mike Slaughter says, “The real Christmas was a snapshot of poverty and anxiety, not feel-good warm fuzzies.”

So this Christmas we need another miracle.  We need the miracle of giving up on the “traditional Christmas” and building new traditions that put the celebration back on Jesus’ birthday, and this miracle is going to take some birth pains.  It’s going to require you to give up some stuff that makes Christmas look more like your birthday or your kids birthday.  It’s going to require you instituting some new traditions that look more like celebrating Jesus and what Jesus’ life was all about, his purpose.

What’s the goal or purpose of your life?  Is it “the good life”?  Retirement?  Golf every day?  Walking on the beach and collecting shells?  Sitting in your man cave watching ESPN1, 2, & 3 on your 80 inch HD TV?  Shopping till you drop?  Lying around in a hammock?  Those all might be OK for a season, but if that’s the ultimate goal of your life, then you’re life is going to get pretty boring pretty quickly.  My step-dad just retired.  He’s done good as a small business owner.  He sold his business to one of his most faithful employees.  He’s got a good life with my mom.  They have a house in Indianapolis and two in Florida.  They’re pretty set for the rest of their lives.  But about two weeks into retirement he got pretty bored sitting in his living room with his iphone watching sports on his super huge TV.  He told me that he was trying to figure out what to do with his life now that he’s retired.  He went to his pastors and asked if they could use him volunteering fifteen or twenty hours a week.  He wants his retirement to make a difference in somebody’s life.  He wants to serve others.  He wants his life to be like Jesus’ life.

As Mike Slaughter says, the new meaning and purpose of our lives at Christmas is that “We find meaning when we give sacrificially to those in need, because by doing so, we are giving to Jesus himself.  It is his birthday after all!”

So take up a new tradition this Christmas: celebrate Christmas as Jesus’ Birthday!  One way we’re doing this is by changing how we spend our money at Christmas.  Most of us spend way more than we even have to spend.  We go into debt to have the “traditional” Christmas.  New rule: don’t go into debt to celebrate Jesus’ birthday!  Rather, make this commitment: give away as much as you spend on Christmas.  For some of you that means simply being more generous at Christmas.  For others it means cutting your spending in half.

We’re going to give you an opportunity on Christmas Eve to give away as much as you spend on yourself.  Usually our offerings all year long go to supporting the immediate mission and ministry of SCC, but at Christmas Eve we receive an offering and give it all away.  This year we’re giving it all away to our medical missions in Nicaragua.  Twice a year we send teams to Nicaragua to bring life-giving and life-changing medicine, medical expertise, and hope to individuals all across the second poorest country in the Americas.

Over the life of our church we’ve been able to give away over $31,000 in our Christmas Eve offerings.  Last year we gave away $3800.  Our record is $5800 in 2011.  I’d love to see us smash that record this year.  Can we do $6000?  No, that’s too low.  Let’s shoot for $10,000.  Come on, if we give away as much as we spend at Christmas, we can easily do $10,000.  Get your family and friends in on it.  Give them an invite card to join you for Christmas Eve (one service at 5PM at Lansing Christian School and one service at 7PM at Jackie’s dinner with a $10 Christmas dinner), and tell them not to spend any money on you but to give it to our Christmas Eve offering.  Now that’s a miracle!

During Christmas we’re not only focusing on giving overseas, but we’re also giving away lots of money locally.  This is the last year in a three-year capital campaign at SCC to save money for a building.  When we began the campaign we decided to tithe on what we received for the capital campaign, so we’ve been setting aside 10% for missions.  We’ve received about $330,000 so we’ve set aside $33,000 for missions.  Half of that is going to our medical missions in Nicaragua and half of it is staying here locally.  Part of the local money is going to the ministries and missions that our church’s small groups have committed to.  So over the course of December, each of our small groups is getting a $1000 check to give to their local charity.  We’re going to show you a video each week of that miraculous moment when someone from our church gets to give $1000 to a ministry they’ve been volunteering at for a long time.  You’re not going to want to miss that!  That’s what your giving does.  It changes lives both here in SCC, in our community, and our world.  Here’s a miracle for Holt Senior Care:

 

*This series and sermon are inspired by Mike Slaughter’s book, Christmas Is Not Your Birthday.

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Act Your Wage

November 19, 2013 by Leave a Comment

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Strapped – Act Your Wage*
Sycamore Creek Church
November 17/18, 2013
Tom Arthur

Peace friends!

Anyone feeling strapped these days?  Too little money?  Too much debt?  The proverbs say:

Just as the rich rule the poor,
so the borrower is servant to the lender.
~Proverbs 22:7 NLT

The word “servant” is really too weak of a translation here.  It’s more like “slave” or “in bondage” or “strapped.”  Jesus says that you can’t serve both God and money.  What we found out last week is that we don’t serve money.  We serve God.  Money serves us as we serve God.

Here’s an Old School Rule: If you didn’t have the money to buy something you wanted, you weren’t allowed to buy it.  Before the great depression, 2% of houses had a mortgage on them.  Forty years later only 2% don’t have a mortgage.  Then in the last decade we’ve had quite a ride when it comes to houses and mortgages, haven’t we?  According to the New York Times, “More than a third of homeowners who received loan modifications under TARP’s mortgage modification program have since stopped paying” (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/business/new-defaults-trouble-a-mortgage-program.html).  Defaulting on your mortgage is becoming more and more common.

There’s a certain mindset of entitlement in our culture.  We expect that when we graduate college at 22, we deserve the same lifestyle of our parents.  So we keep driving cars like our parents.  We keep eating out like our parents.  We try to live in houses like our parents.  We expect instant middle class status without the hard work of getting there.

We are a generation of pretenders and posers.  There’s a scene in the movie Cinderella Man where Mae Braddock, the wife of James Braddock, the Cinderella Man boxer, goes to see his manager, Joe Gould, who lives in a fancy expensive apartment building.  When she first knocks on the door, he’s home but doesn’t answer it.  She keeps knocking. She yells at him from outside his door, “Don’t hide in your fancy apartment, I want to talk to you.” He ignores her for a while but then finally lets her in. When she comes in, she sees that the apartment is almost empty. There’s a card table and some chairs. She says, “I didn’t know, I mean I thought that…” He says, “That’s the idea. Always keep your hands up.”  That’s how many of us are posing for the rest of the world, with our hands up hiding our real financial situation.  Unfortunately, many of us are using debt and credit cards to pose.

The proverbs say:

One man pretends to be rich, yet has nothing
~Proverbs 13:7 NIV

There are three kinds of people:

  1. The Haves
  2. The Have-Nots
  3. The Have-Not-Paid-for-What-They’ve-Got

Today I want to look at three values essential to becoming unstrapped.  I want to give you some really practical advice for getting your financial house in order.

1. Embrace the Value of Self-control

How’s your self control these days?  How’s your self control when it comes to money?  The proverbs say:

Like a city breached, without walls,
is one who lacks self-control.
~Proverbs 25:28 NRSV

Without self control we’re like an ancient city without a wall, defenseless to attacks.  We’re vulnerable to debt and exorbitant interest of credit cards and pay day loans and pawn shops.  We’re like the little kid in the grocery line screaming, “I want it now!”  Except instead of getting the candy bar or the match box car, the financial stakes are bigger!

This is a generalization, and while it is not always true, I think it has some truth in it.  Women tend to nickel and dime and quarter their way into debt.  They buy shoes and belts to match the shoes and pay hundreds of dollars on hair cuts and dying (one survey found that money spent on hair added up to $50,000 over a lifetime! http://main.stylelist.com/2010/03/29/the-price-of-pretty-women-spend-50-000-on-hair-over-lifetime/).  Then there’s the nails to match it all.  Nickle.  Dime.  Quarter.  Dollar.  Five Dollars.  Ten Dollars.

Men on the other hand do the debt thing in one big purchase.  A new car.  $20,000.  A time share.  $10,000.   A boat.  $30,000.  An ATV.  $10,000.  A new flat screen TV, Blue-ray DVD player, surround sound, leather couch, wall mount, and upgrade of all old DVDs to Blue-ray.  $15,000.  Boom goes the dynamite!  And friends, you’re in debt.

What we need to do is show a little self control.  We need to practice saying, “No.”  Say it with me now:

Ladies – Do you really need to get your nails done twice a month? NO!
Men – Do you really need to play golf twice a month?  NO!
Do you really need a $4 cup of coffee each day? NO!
Do you really need your kid to have an iPhone 5abc-xyz?  NO!
Do you really need a brand new car?  NO!

Say NO! for a little while so we can say YES for the rest of our lives!

2. Embrace the Value of Sacrifice

Are you willing to make a sacrifice to attain something better?  The author of Hebrews says:

Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross…
Hebrews 12:2 NIV

So we’re to focus on Jesus who was willing to sacrifice his own life for something bigger.  Sacrifice means giving up something you love for something you love even more.  Give it up to gain.  Give up the belts to gain.  Give up the shoes to gain.  Give up the fancy hair and nails to gain.  Give up the new car to gain.  Give up the boat to gain.  Give up the fancy house in the fancy neighborhood to gain.  Give it up, sacrifice, to gain.

Let me give you just one example.  The average person eats out a lot!  If you brought your own lunch every day to work, brown-bagging it daily saves you $100,000 over a life time!  $100,000!

The other night a Kirby salesman came by the door around 8PM.  It was a college student.  He used a nice line on me to pull at my heart strings.  He said, “I just need one more demonstration to go home tonight.  You don’t have to buy anything.  Just let me show you it for about ten or fifteen minutes.”  The poor guy was obviously tired, and I let him in.  Then after way more than ten or fifteen minutes, some other guy came to the door and did the sales job.  I was getting really annoyed at this point.  I told him he had two minutes to make his pitch.  He gave me the price: $1600.  $1600 for a vacuum cleaner!  Now it was a nice machine.  It really was.  It was the Porsche of vacuum cleaners, and I have no doubt that you get what you pay for.  But I don’t have $1600 for a vacuum cleaner.  He said to me, “What’s keeping you from buying it today?  The down payment?  The monthly payment?  What?’’  I said, “The cost.  I’ll give you $100.”  That was the end of the conversation.  The salesman left my house while the poor college student was there another twenty minutes packing back up the Porsche of vacuum cleaners.

We’re all asking the wrong question.  We’re asking:   How much down?  Or how much each month?  What we really need to ask is what’s the real cost?

Let’s go back to our credit cards.  The average credit card balance is $14,517.  You wracked up that 18% debt on your credit card with a trip to Disney World, the surround sound system, the flat screen TV, video games, new clothes, shoes, etc.  Now you’ve got to pay back $14,517, assuming you don’t add any more debt to it!  If you pay $291 per month (the minimum payment) on $14,517 at 18% it will take 52 years to pay off the debt and you will have paid a total interest of $41,414 (http://www.federalreserve.gov/creditcardcalculator/Default.aspx)!  You’re paying almost three times what it cost you to buy that stuff just in interest alone!  But that’s not all its costing you.

Let’s say that instead of buying all that stuff you saved the money and invested it.  Many say that historically the stock market makes 10%.  I found data that showed a 50 year average stock market return at 9.2% (http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/perfi/columnist/krantz/story/2011-10-17/rate-of-return-for-stocks/50807868/1).  But let’s use some real investment numbers.  When Sarah had a best seller and she made more than I did that year, we invested the maximum we could that year in a Roth IRA in a socially screen mutual fund called Pax World Growth.  We like the socially screened aspect of the fund because it means we’re not making money off of companies that pollute or discriminate or make money off of weapons, etc.  You get the point.  This year that fund is making 17%.  It’s a good year.  Since inception in the 1970s, Pax World Growth has made 8.46%.  We also opened a 529 college savings plan for Micah.  We decided to go again with a socially screened fund through the DC College Savings Plan.  Year to date that fund is making 22.44%.  Since inception in the 80s it’s making 7.45%.

Back to the credit card debt of $14,517.  If you didn’t spend that money and instead saved it.  What would happen?  Let’s take the lower of our investment returns and assume a 7% return on your investment.  If you saved $14,517 at 7% for 52 years (the same time it would take you to pay it off with minimum payments), you’d end up making $489,590.  But let’s take this a step further.  Let’s add the minimum payment of $291/month to your investment.  So every month you’re also putting $291 into that same investment account.  At the end of 52 years, you’d have $2,236,395 in the bank!

(These calculations come from Dave Ramsey’s website: (http://www.daveramsey.com/article/investing-calculator/lifeandmoney_investing/#/entry_form)

So what’s the real cost of going into debt on your credit card for $14,517?  The real cost is over $2,000,000!  How much of a difference could you make in this world if you had money like that?

3. Embrace the Value of Planning

Most of us fly by the seat of our pants when it comes to money.  Going back to the wisdom of the Proverbs:

The plans of the diligent lead to profit as surely as haste leads to poverty.
~Proverbs 21:5 NIV

You can wander into debt but you can’t wander out.  There are three basic planning tools you need to get unstrapped.

  1. A Budget: Budgeting is fairly simple.  It just takes some time and effort and focus.  If you don’t know how to budget, sign up for a FinancialPeaceUniversity class in the area.  There are eleven Churches in the Lansing Region that are hosting them right now.  I also want to take budgeting a step further.  In our culture, finances are taboo.  What you make and how you spend it are “private.”  That may be our culture’s value, but it’s not a Jesus value.  Share your budget with someone else outside of your family.  Ask them for input on what you make and what you spend.  Ask someone who manages their money better than you manage yours.
  2. An emergency fund:  Save $1000 for emergencies.  You’ll never get ahead if you are always in crisis mode.  You’ve got to have a cushion so that when you hit a crisis, it doesn’t sink you.  To build this emergency fund you may need to sell stuff, go heavy on the coupons, or even get an extra job.  Many of you know that over the last two and a half years Tabitha Martin has been living with us getting back on her feet after being at Maplewood.  She’s just moved out into her own place this past week.  I asked her if I could share what’s happened to her recently.  Over the two and a half years she’s lived with us she’s saved $3000.  About two weeks ago she was in a car accident and totaled her car.  Because she had $3000 on hand, she was able to buy a car with cash.  But she didn’t spend it all because she also needed money for a down payment on her apartment and a future emergency fund.  So in the last week she bought a new car, made a down payment on her apartment, and retained an emergency fund for the future all because she had a big emergency fund to begin with.  If she hadn’t had it, she’d be back to square one.  But because she had the emergency fund, she was able to continue moving forward with her life.  Thank you God!
  3. The debt snowball: The basic idea here is to pay off your smallest debt first.  Then take the payment of that debt and add it to your payment on your second smallest debt.  Once you’ve got those two debts paid off, then add those two payments to your third smallest debt.  And on and on until you’ve snowballed your way out of debt.  To get a really great picture of what this can look like on the ground, check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyF4mZFtfZs.

So why are you talking about this in church?  Because nobody teaches you this in school.  And unfortunately, most of our parents don’t talk about it.  Maybe they don’t talk about it because they’re so deep in debt and strapped that they don’t have any wisdom to share with their kids except, “Don’t do as I do.”  So we talk about money in the church because money is spiritual.  Money and things are the number one competitor with God for our hearts.  The Bible says more about money than just about anything else.

What do you think you do for the glory of God if you had no school loans?  If you had no car loans?  If you had no credit card debt?  If you had no home equity loans?  If you had no mortgage?  What kind of impact could make on this world?  How could you help bring the kingdom of God here on earth as it is in heaven?

God, help us have some self-control. Help us sacrifice something good for something better.  Help us live by a plan with our money so that our money can bring you glory and honor.  In Jesus’ name and by the power of your Spirit, amen!

*This sermon was adapted from a sermon by Craig Groeschel

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The Buck Starts Here – A Godly Perspective on Money

November 11, 2013 by 1 Comment

strapped

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Buck Starts Here – A Godly Perspective on Money*
Sycamore Creek Church
November 10/11, 2013
Tom Arthur

Peace friends!

A little more money would make life a little better?  Right?  Dave Ramsey says, “Money is fun. If you’ve got some.”   The problem is that most of us are strapped for cash.  And the hard reality is that we’re strapped largely because we’ve done something stupid with money.

I’ve had my share of stupid purchases.  There was the time I spent $18 on a Rainbow Brite Doll for my fourth-grade girlfriend, who then broke up with me.  Afterwards I realized that a Rainbow Brite Doll was for a four-year-old, not a fourth grader.  Then there was my job during college at The Gap.  I spent all my paycheck on clothes while accumulating student loan debt.  Shortly after I was married I spent $200 on Gore-tex waterproof boots that ended up being a little too small.  I didn’t realize they were too small until after half a day on the trail through the dirt, water, and mud and aching feet!

I asked my friends on Facebook what stupid or unwise purchases they’ve made.  Here’s the stories they shared:

  • Going to the casino and losing it all and not being able to get anything from the ATM on weekend.
  • Bought a house right before the housing market crashed.
  • Went to Costa Rica when I *really* didn’t have money to be doing that sort of thing.
  • Grad school?
  • Went to Divinity School.
  • Bought a new house before old house was sold. Two house payments. Not good.
  • There was the time the sales woman was hot at the Buckle in the mall.  She was flirting really bad.  I spent $300 of my graduation money. I went back the next day and asked her out. I thought she was interested, but she was with someone else!!  Lol

We’ve all made stupid and unwise purchases.  Check out this poem by George Bilgere called Unwise Purchases.

So we’ve all done it, but this is not a guilt series.  We’re not here to shame you.  Shake off the guilt. Shake it off.  This is a practical series about how to manage and handle your money in a god-honoring way.  It’s a series about:

  1. The heart and money
  2. Disciplines to help us to climb out of debt
  3. Saving and what to do with it

The wisdom of the Proverbs says:

The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is servant [servant/slave/in bondage] to the lender.
Proverbs 22:7 NIV

“We’d love to [you fill in the blank]…but we don’t because we don’t have money.”  That’s bondage.  That’s being strapped.
We’d love to stay at home with the kids, but we don’t because we don’t have money.
We’d love to adopt an orphan, but we don’t because we don’t have money.
We’d love to buy a little bigger house for our family, but we don’t because we don’t have money.
We’d love to go on a mission trip, but we don’t because we don’t have money.
We’d love to give a little more away, but we don’t because we don’t have money.

The average household debt is $136% of household income.  The only institution that does this and gets away with it is the US government!  The average credit card debt is $14,517.  That’s a lot of ear rings, belts, shoes (to match the ear rings and belt), golf clubs, DVDs, and more.  The average 21 year old is $12,000 in debt!  $12,000!  It gets worse.  The average 28 year old is $78,000!  $78,000!  $78,000!  The number of US households living paycheck to paycheck is over half at 55%.

If money is one of the best outward measurements of your inward spiritual condition (and I believe it is), then we’re in really bad shape spiritually.  I was meeting with someone the other day who is reading through the Bible for the first time.  He said to me, “There’s a lot in here about money!”  He’s right!  2/3 of the parables deal with money and possessions.  1 in 10 verses in the gospels deal with money and things.  2300 verses in the Bible are about money.  That’s five times the amount on prayer or faith!  Money is an indicator of our spiritual condition, and there are two temptations we face when it comes to money.

Two Temptations of Money

1. We’re tempted to serve money.  Jesus says:

No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
Matthew 6:24 NLT

Money and things are the #1 competitors for our heart.  If you bought something you didn’t need with money you didn’t have to impress people you didn’t like, you’ve served money.  If you’ve ever hoarded money, you’ve served money.  If I want to give my kids the life I never had, when all they ever wanted was your presence, you’ve served money.

2. We’re tempted to love money.  Paul, the first missionary of the church, was a mentor to Timothy when he said:

For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. And some people, craving money, have wandered from the true faith and pierced themselves with many sorrows.
1 Timothy 6:10 NLT

Money isn’t good or bad.  It’s neutral.  It’s the love of money that is wrong.  There are a lot of poor people who love money.  If you’re rich, it doesn’t mean you love money. You may just be good at what you do.  If you have debt with low money, you will have more debt with more money.  More money makes you more of what you already are.  King Solomon who was known for his wisdom said:

Whoever loves money never has enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income.
Ecclesiastes 5:10 NIV

We’re under the power and influence of money and we don’t even know it.  Most of us don’t have an income problem.  Most of us have spending problems.  Which indicates a spiritual problem.  We don’t need more money.  We need more Jesus.

Things have got to change.  Are you sick of it?  Get sick of it so that you do something about it!

The Point
Here’s the whole point of the message today: If you’re a Christian, we don’t serve money, we serve God.  Money serves us as we serve God.  So how does money serve us?  Four ways:

  1. Money buys basic needs like food, shelter, and clothing.  These are basic NEEDS (not wants) that we must have in order to live life.
  2. Money buys time.  If you’re spending all your time focusing on food, shelter, and clothing, then you don’t have time to focus on “higher” needs like loving your family with your presence.  Micah has recently begun saying to me, “Daddy, do you have time to play with me?”  Time to play with Micah isn’t as basic a need as making sure he’s got food, clothing, and shelter, but it is a very important need.
  3. Money buys options.  Do you own a clunker car that you’re always afraid is going to give out on you, or do you own a dependable car that gets you to work and back each day?  Dependable doesn’t mean BMW.  It means just what it says, a dependable basic car.  But if you don’t have the money to buy a dependable car, then you’re ending up with all kinds of other problems like not being a dependable worker and not having dependable income from that job to meet the basic needs of life.
  4. Money buys blessings to others.  When you’ve got your basic needs met and you’ve got more income, it is fun, yes FUN!, to bless others with what you’ve got extra.  For example, check out this video about tipping:

Christmas

We picked this series to happen in November to help you prepare for Christmas.  Christmas is one of those times when we throw out all financial wisdom and go big into debt and spend several months if not years trying to dig ourselves out of the hole we dug ourselves in.  This Christmas I want to challenge you to do Christmas differently.  We’ll be doing a series called Christmas is Not Your Birthday.  You know that Christmas is not about you.  It’s not even about your family.  It’s about Jesus.  Christmas is Jesus’ birthday.  And Jesus’ birthday wish list has on it blessing others with your resources rather than buying into the greed, consumerism, and materialism of our culture.  This Christmas we’re encouraging you to spend less so that you can give more away.  If you usually spend $1000 on Christmas, give $1000 away.  Or if you usually spend $1000 on Christmas, then cut it in half and give $500 away.  We’ll be receiving a special offering on Christmas Eve that will go entirely to our medical missions in Nicaragua.  Twice a year we bring life-saving and life-giving medicine and medical expertise to Nicaragua, the second poorest nation in the Americas after Haiti.  Use your money to bless others this Christmas rather than give more gifts to people who already have too much.

Paul, the first missionary of the church, said to the church in Rome:

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another.
Romans 13:8

Do you want to better honor God with what God has given you?  Then take today’s message as a foundation to your life, and come back in coming weeks to learn basic practical steps for how to handle your money wisely.  Today, set your will, set your mind, set your heart on getting your financial house in order so that you owe no one any debt except the debt to keep loving as many people as you can.  And remember, this is first and foremost a spiritual problem.  It’s a spiritual problem because our hearts are in the debt of sin, and Jesus must first free us from that debt so that we can get our financial debts in order.  Have you asked Jesus to free you from the debt of sin?  If not, do so today, and trust that with time and perseverance, and wise financial decisions, you can get to a place where you are blessing others financially because God has blessed you.

* This message is adapted and based on a sermon by Craig Groeschel.

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Dance with Abandon

October 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

DancingWithGod

 

 

 

 

Dancing with God – Dance with Abandon
Sycamore Creek Church
October 20/21, 2013
Tom Arthur
2 Samuel 6:14-16 

Friends, let’s dance!

Growing up I hated being on the dance floor.  I hated going to school dances.  They never turned out well.  A friend of mine held a dance at his house.  He paired me up with a girl, and I didn’t know what I was doing.  She put her arms around my waist, and I put my arms around her shoulders.  Then I noticed that all the guys had their arms around the waist and the girls had their arms around the shoulders.  Embarrassing!  At another dance my date danced with a bunch of other guys who all seemed to dance better than I did, and then she took off my wrist corsage.  I conferred with my friends, and they told me to give her a quarter to call home and get a ride.  This was before cell phones.  So that’s what I did!  Even though I’ve been swing dancing for about fifteen years now, I still always feel a little embarrassed dancing with someone besides Sarah.  I don’t want to be seen as a “bad dancer.”  The dance floor is full of potentially embarrassing moments.

Today we’re continuing a series called Dancing with God, and we’re looking at the parallels between learning to dance and the spiritual life.  Today I want to explore that sense of embarrassment we often have when it comes to dancing and the embarrassment we often feel in our culture being a follower of Jesus.

The Problem
Here’s the problem I want to deal with today when it comes to these moments of embarrassment: We are more interested in saving face than living faith.  We play it safe when it comes to God.  We’re reserved.  We don’t want to be fanatical.  We don’t want to be seen as a weirdo.  We’re concerned about what others think.  We’re more interested in saving face than sharing faith.

I struggle with this myself.  I’m never quite sure how people will respond when I answer their question, “What do you do?”  I have a pastor friend who responds saying: “I’d be embarrassed to tell you.”  I often meet with people in coffee houses.  When we spend time in prayer, I pray quietly.  I don’t pray quietly so that only God can hear me.  I pray quietly because I’m a little embarrassed about what others will think.  There are in our cultural context some “rough” or “hard to swallow” beliefs of Christianity, and I tend to downplay those rough spots with my non-Christian friends.  In the end, I want to be seen as smart, educated, together, emotionally stable, a successful leader, creative, entrepreneurial, and on and on.  And I often want these rather than to fully live out my faith.

When was a time you were more interested in saving face than living faith?

Dance with Abandon
So today I want to look at a moment when someone danced with abandon before God even though it was embarrassing to some of those around him.  The story is told of the time King David, one of the greatest kings of ancient Israel, came back from a particularly successful battle.  Here’s what happened:

David danced before the LORD with all his might; David was girded with a linen ephod.  So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the LORD with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet.  As the ark of the LORD came into the city of David, Michal daughter of Saul looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the LORD; and she despised him in her heart.
2 Samuel 6:14-16

And you thought there was no dancing in the Bible!  King David danced with abandon ignoring what others might think of him.  Now Michal and David have some baggage together.  Michal and David were married.  Michal was the daughter of Saul, the first kind of Israel who David overcame with God’s anointing to become king.  While David and Saul were fighting for the kingdom, Saul married Michal off to someone else.  When David eventually won the power struggle, Michal was taken from that husband and given back to David.  So their relationship at this point isn’t a blank slate.  And it may be because of this baggage that she despised him.  But there are several other possible reasons too.

We read that David was wearing an ephod.  An ephod is a priestly gown.  Was David wearing sacred clothes reserved for priests?  Maybe by doing so he was demoting himself from King to priest and Michal thought this was below David.

An ephod by itself is also a rather revealing garment.  Consider it the ancient hospital gown.  It certainly didn’t cover up everything as David danced with abandon into the city.  Perhaps Michael thought that David was being immodest as a king.

The ephod was white, and white is a symbol of purity.  Was David pure?  From Michal’s perspective, David had led a “coup” of her father.  Later David would see another woman he wanted, Bathsheba, and would have sex with her even though she was married.  He was the king after all.  When she became pregnant, David had her husband killed on the battlefield.  David was not the most pure guy around.

Or we read that David was leaping and dancing.  Leaping and dancing are not respectable decorum for a king.  A king is supposed to carry himself with dignity and restraint.  He’s not supposed to let his emotions show.  Maybe Michal despised him because he wasn’t acting his part.

So here’s the point of today’s message: Dance with abandon before God.   Live in the rhythm of the Holy Spirit, the beat of God’s heart for the world.  Ignore what others might think of you and dance with an audience of one: God!

Now when I say dance with abandon I don’t mean do any little whim that comes into your mind.  I said I wanted you to listen to the rhythm of the Spirit.  The rhythm of  God’s Spirit is always an improvisation rooted in tradition.  I don’t mean tradition in a negative sense.  I mean it in the most positive sense.  For example, Jarsolav Pelikan, a Yale church historian said, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead.  Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”  He also liked to quote Goethe, a German writer of the 18th and 19th centuries, who said, “Take what you have inherited from your fathers and work to make it your own.”  You have to remain rooted in the tradition while at the same time dancing with abandon into the future.  The reason you have to remain rooted in tradition is because if you don’t learn the tradition, you may mistake your own whims for the rhythm of the Holy Spirit.  David was dancing within a tradition in the story we just read.  The Ark of the LORD was going along with them.  He wasn’t just doing whatever he wanted.  The tradition of Israel was present with him.

The same thing is true on the dance floor.  Dancing with abandon is always rooted in a tradition of dance.  To be the most creative, you have to learn the basic steps of dance and then the advanced steps and then the creativity and abandonment comes when you add your own little twist.  To get a sense of that, let’s look at a dance form that is perhaps one of the most clear forms of dance where you dance with abandon: Breakin.

The Tradition of Breakin
Breakin, sometimes called break dancing, at first glance looks like it has no order to it.  It looks like it is complete and total dancing with abandon.  But breakin has a deep tradition.  Those who dance this dance are called b-boys or b-girls or breakers.  The “b” comes from the word “break” which is a “break” from the main parts of the song or piece.  To get a sense of what a break is, watch the first couple minutes of this video.  It’s about the “Amen Break”, perhaps the most famous six seconds of any song of all time.  The Amen Break was recorded in 1969 by The Winstons for the song “Amen Brother.”  It was on the B-side, the back side, of their album Color Him Father, and it won them a Grammy Award.

The break is the short part of the song that everyone waited for to really let it all go on the dance floor.  In the early 1970s DJ Kool Herc, a Jamaican, was the first to realize that he could extend the short break by buying two copies of one record and have them side by side so as to be able to mix the two records back and forth between the same break.  This extended the break so that you could keep dancing to it.  So what before was a dance-with-abandon-to-six-seconds-of-music became a dance with abandon for as long as the DJ kept the records spinning.  Thus was born b-boys/girls or break-boys/girls.

B-boying consists of four kinds of movement: toprock, downrock, power moves, and freezes. Toprock is anything in a standing position.  Downrock is when the arms and legs are both supporting the body down on the ground.  Powermoves are the amazing acrobatics of b-boying.  And freezes are suspensions of the body in the air.

Breakin, which at first glance doesn’t look like it has any tradition, actually has quite a deep tradition.  It’s from that tradition that you end up with amazing dancers who add their own little touch, style, and improvisation, and dance with abandon.  There are hundreds if not thousands of videos displaying the amazing dancing of b-boys and b-girls, but here’s one of my favorites:

It’s within the tradition of breakin that a b-boy or b-girl is able to dance with abandon.  The same is true of the spiritual life.

The Tradition of the Church
It probably goes without being said, but the church has a tradition.  We’ve been exploring the pieces of it through this series.

First, get in the dance.  Show up on the dance floor.  You can’t learn to dance if you don’t join a community of dance.  In the same way, it’s pretty hard to learn the dance of faith without a community of faith.  So regularly join the community of faith and its “dance”, that is worship & small groups.

Second, there’s only one leader on the dance floor.  God leads and you follow.  God is in an eternal dance.  The Father and Son dance in the Spirit, and the Spirit is continually inviting you to join that dance of love, mercy, and grace.  To do so, you’ve got to let God lead, and you have to follow.

Third, to let God lead you’ve got to learn a couple of basic steps.  A woman can follow a man on the dance floor if she knows a basic step, and that leader can make her do all kinds of things she’s never done before, but it is all dependent on learning the basic step.  The basic steps of the life of faith are prayer and scripture reading.

Fourth, once you’ve got the basic steps down, then you can go on to the advanced steps.  In swing dancing, the basic step is the triple step.  More advanced steps are the Charleston or aerials.  In the life of faith, the advanced steps are things like fasting, meditation, simplicity, solitude, and service.

Once you’re showing up regularly on the dance floor; once you’re letting God lead while you follow; once you’ve learned the basic steps of prayer and scripture; once you’ve begun to learn the advanced steps of the spiritual disciplines, then you’re ready to dance with abandon by improvising and being creative; then you’re ready to listen to really listen to the beat of God’s heart of the world and step out unconcerned about what others will think of you.  That’s when some pretty amazing things begin to happen in your life:

Worship and work weave together.
Church and community converge.
Recreation and redemption reconnect.
Evangelism and entertainment equate.
Discipline and devotion don’t divorce.
Faith and fun fuse.

All of the Above
There’s a hip hop group in Lansing called All of the Above.  Many involved in it are Christians who are dancing with abandon in the streets of Lansing.  If you want to know what it looks like when you improvise on a tradition and dance with abandon before God, here’s what it looks like:

That’s no stuffy faith.  That’s no spirituality stuck in the 16th century.  That’s a vibrant and living tradition of those who came before us dancing with abandon in the present and future.  That’s the kind of church I want to be: a b-boy and b-girl church breakin into our community with the love of God.  I want us to dance with abandon before God without regard for what others might think, and I want us to be surprised when people see us dancing with abandon and say, “I don’t know that I could ever do that, but boy is that beautiful.  Boy is that what our world needs.  I’m not sure I could ever abandon myself like that, but boy am I glad that they are.  I’m going to have to send my kids over there to learn to dance the way that church dances.”  Friends, let’s dance with abandon.

O heavenly Father, in whom we live and move and have our being: We humbly pray thee so to guide and govern us by thy Holy Spirit, that in all the cares and occupations of our life we may not forget thee, but may remember that we are ever walking in thy sight; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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Come to the Dance

October 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

DancingWithGod

 

 

 

 

Dancing with God: Come to the Dance
Sycamore Creek Church
Tom Arthur
October 13/14, 2013
Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 

Let’s dance, friends!

What?  Isn’t dancing of the devil?  Doesn’t dancing lead to sex, drugs, and rock and roll?  Why are we talking about dancing in church?

Well, dancing is actually often an act of praise in the Bible.  Take Psalm 30 for example: 

You have turned my mourning into dancing;
you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.
(Psalm 30:11 NRSV)

Apparently the person who wrote this psalm in the Bible thinks that dancing just might be something that helps you celebrate when life is good.

Recently I came across a lost book of the Bible. It’s called, Dancing with Jesus: Featuring a Host of Miraculous Moves!  There’s the Carpenters Clog, the Temptation Tango, the Apostolic Conga, and more!  Seriously.  And you thought Jesus didn’t dance.

Ok.  Now that I’ve offended someone…What I’m trying to do in this series is explore parallels between learning to dancing and the spiritual life of following Jesus.  Last week we looked at one basic idea: Only one person can lead.  God leads and you follow.  Today I want to look at something a little more, well, messy: the dance floor itself.  I’m talking about the church.

Why Church?
I get to see the good, bad, and ugly of church life, and I often have to answer a question not only for those around me but also for myself: what good is the church?  Let’s dwell in how messy it is for a while.  I deal with a lot of people’s junk and baggage.  In fact, people bring all kinds of junk and baggage with them to church.  I essentially lead a volunteer organization (a herd of cats?) that has a serious branding issue in our culture.  Church is just about as popular these days as Congress.  I have “cousins in the faith” that make me embarrassed to call myself a Christian.  So why bother?  Sometimes I’d rather just dance my own dance to my own music and ignore everyone else around me.  Like this young woman who likes to Dance Like Nobody’s Watching:

Admit it.  Even if you love the church, sometimes you just want to ignore it all and dance all by yourself.  Looking at some of the particulars of why people don’t like the church, we find these reasons:

66% – Religion is too focused on money
66% – Religious people are too judgmental
60% – Don’t trust religious leaders
51% – Strict/inflexible beliefs
47% – Wasn’t relevant to my life
42% – Church is boring or uninteresting

In the midst of all this negativity about the church, there’s a deep spiritual current that runs through our culture:

45% “consider myself a spiritual person.”

And yet amidst this spiritual tendency only 17.2% consider it “important to attend religious services.”

So what does all this have to do with dancing?  Our culture is asking, “Why do I need a community of faith?  I can dance alone.”  Here’s the problem we immediately run into: It’s hard to learn to dance alone.

Why Community Matters
When we turn to ancient wisdom in the Bible we read this powerful explanation of why community matters:

It’s better to have a partner than go it alone.
Share the work, share the wealth.
And if one falls down, the other helps,
But if there’s no one to help, tough!

Two in a bed warm each other.
Alone, you shiver all night.

By yourself you’re unprotected.
With a friend you can face the worst.
Can you round up a third?
A three-stranded rope isn’t easily snapped.
~Solomon (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12, The Message)

So if the problem is that it’s hard to learn to dance alone, here’s the point of today’s message: We learn best to dance in a community of dance.  Likewise, we learn to love best in an admittedly messy community of faith.  In fact, it is sometimes the messiness that gives us the opportunity to learn better how to love.  It’s the messiness of the dance floor that inspires improvisation and creativity.  Creativity and improvisation are best formed in a community rooted within a tradition.  Learning to love is best formed in a community rooted within a tradition.  I might even go so far as to say that all creativity ultimately comes from a particular tradition.  John Calvin, one of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, understood the church in this way.  He called the church “the church reformed, always reforming.”  In other words, it is always reforming its dance move. It’s always staying rooted in the past but improvising into the future.  Dance is just like this.  Dance is always rooted in a past tradition.  Take swing dance for example.  To give you a feel of the history of how swing dancing has changed over time, and yet remained true to a basic simple step, check out this history of swing dance:

Join the Dance
So if you want to go deeper and be more creative with this whole spirituality thing, you’re going to have to show up on the dance floor of a community of dance.  You’re going to have to go to the lessons.   You’re going to have to have a community of dance that teaches you the tradition of the dance you’re trying to learn and you’re going to have to master some basic steps.  It’s hard to learn to dance alone.  You need community.  It’s hard to learn the life of faith alone.  You need a community of faith.  So join a community of dance & regularly show up on the dance floor.

Sarah and I grew the fastest in our dancing when we participated in dance communities.  We took classes, went to weekend workshops, paid instructors, hung out with friends in basement jam sessions, went to monthly big band dances, watched DVDs, and on and on and on.  We learned to dance better in a community of dance.

The church is at its best when it is a dancing community learning from the past the dance of loving God with everything you’ve got and learning to love your neighbor as you love yourself.  The church is at its best when you learn from people who are better dancers than you are, people who are further along the faith journey than you are, people who have followed Jesus longer than you have.  The church is at its best when you bring your own unique style to the steps.  The church is at its best when you learn from the past so you’re ready for the present and the future, when you learn the tradition and improvise and be creative for the present and future.

I recently had the chance to talk to someone who is new to our church and didn’t attend church before coming to our Monday night Church in a Diner.  Her name is Joanna.  She’s an art history PhD student.  Here’s how the church was giving her a community that is helping her grow in her spiritual life:

Imagine a Dance Floor
So what would it look like if the church was like a dance floor where people were regularly showing up to learn to dance better?  It would have a whole range of skills and abilities.  It would have people sitting on the sidelines just watching.  It would look like a celebration where people who were watching wanted to join in.  It would have people just starting out.  It would have some really great dancers mixed in with some people just learning the basic steps.  It would have people learning from one another.  Off in one corner someone would be learning the Charleston.  Another corner would have someone learning the Jitterbug.  Another corner someone would be doing the West Coast Swing.  But they’d all be dancing to the same rhythm going deeper and getting better.  And now we’re back to the point: Why be part of a faith community, a church?  Because we learn best to dance when we show up on the dance floor.

Filed Under: Manuscripts, Sermons Tagged With: , ,

Only One Lead

October 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment

DancingWithGod

 

 

 

 

Dancing with God: One Lead
Sycamore Creek Church
Tom Arthur
October 6/7, 2013
Exodus 20:3


 

Let’s dance, Friends!

So Christians aren’t supposed to dance.  Right?  Well, we’re going to be breaking all kinds of taboos in this series.  Because we’re going to not only dance, we’re going to dance in worship!

But isn’t dancing of the devil?  I guess it depends on which Bible you read.  The one I read talks about dancing as praise to God or even just as celebration in our lives.  Consider one of the most famous passages in the Bible on dance:

For everything there is a season,
a time for every activity under heaven.
A time to cry and a time to laugh.
A time to grieve and a time to dance.
~Solomon (Ecclesiastes 3:1 & 4 NLT)

The Bible isn’t the only place where Christians are talking about dancing.  Theologians, those who study God, talk about God dancing!  You heard me right.  God dances!  There’s a big fancy theological word that theologians use to describe the dance of God: perichoresis.  It is a word that refers to the way that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit interact with one another.  Peri means “around” as in “perimeter.”  Ch?rein means to “go forward” or “dance” as in “choreography.”  Thus, theologians tell us that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are in an eternal dance with one another!

Dance seems hotter than ever these days.  There’s Dancing with the Stars, So You Think You Can Dance, and big hit movies like Step Up that dominate the popular imagination.  Even if you don’t like to dance or don’t know how, you probably enjoy watching other people dance.

I’ve had this sermon series in my mind for over fifteen years now.  I first got the idea when Sarah and I took a ballroom dance class and got hooked on swing dancing.  As I slowly and clumsily learned to swing dance, I began to notice many parallels between dancing and the spiritual life.  I want to explore those parallels in this series.  The first parallel I want to explore begins with a problem that every beginning dancer faces:

The Problem
Only one person can lead.  And we all want to lead!

In traditional dancing, the man leads and the woman follows.  In modern dancing, the man or woman can both lead or can even change who is leading at what time in the dance, but they can’t both lead at the same time.  Only one person can lead.  And that leads (no pun intended) to the point of this whole message:

The Point
God leads, you follow.

You can’t have anything in your life more important than God.  You can’t be following anyone else besides God, especially yourself.  The first of the Big Ten Commandments:

No other gods, only me.
~God (Exodus 20:3 The Message)

So don’t even try to lead.  Follow.  Let God lead.

I remember when Sarah and I began to learn to dance.  We would fight back and forth about who was leading.  I was supposed to lead, but she didn’t like how I led, so she would often tell me what to do.  I wasn’t always the greatest leader either, so I can’t blame her.  One weekend we took a weekend workshop to improve our dancing.  After learning a new basic step called The Hustle (a basic four-count swing), we went over to ask the instructor for some further clarification.  The instructor took Sarah and said, “Let me show you.”  Remember, Sarah had already learned the basic Hustle four-count step.  As she did her basic step, that instructor led her around the dance floor and made her look fabulous.  I mean really fabulous!  Like she had been doing this all her life.  But really all she was doing was the basic step and following his lead.  It both humbled and impressed me.

And herein lies the secret of following God’s lead: you follow by learning the basic steps.  There are several basic steps but perhaps one of the most fundamental steps is learning to pray.  It is nearly impossible to follow God’s lead if you haven’t learned the basic step of prayer.  So I want to teach you today the basic step of prayer, and I want to do that by looking at the master dancer himself, Jesus, and his prayer life.  Let’s see where Jesus leads us around the dance floor of life as we learn the basic step of prayer.

WHEN does Jesus Pray?
First, Jesus prays consistently.  We read about the time he took his disciples to pray just before he was executed:

Then, accompanied by the disciples, Jesus left the upstairs room and went as usual to the Mount of Olives. There he told them, “Pray that you will not give in to temptation.”
~Jesus (Luke 22:39-40 NLT)

“As usual” is the key phrase here.  Other translations say “as was his custom.”  Jesus had a regular and consistent prayer life.  I believe he did this because he never knew when temptation would come his way.  Temptation is always present, so you better be praying consistently so that you consistently resist temptation.

How consistent is your prayer life?  Some of you try to be consistently spontaneous, and some of you pull it off, but most of you don’t.  Most of us need a set time each day when we pray.  A good way to think about this is morning, noon, evening, and bedtime.  Come to God at least a little bit each of those times, and pick one to really spend unhurried time with God.

Second, Jesus prays before big decisions.  Luke, a physician and one of the biographers of Jesus tells us:

At about that same time he climbed a mountain to pray. He was there all night in prayer before God. The next day he summoned his disciples; from them he selected twelve he designated as apostles.
~Jesus (Luke 6:12-13 The Message)

This is probably one of the biggest decisions Jesus would make.  Who would he pour his time and energy into?  Who would be those closest disciples who would get most of his attention?  He prayed before he chose.

What big decision do you need to take to God in prayer today?  What big decision do you need to get away for a day-long spiritual retreat to seek God’s will?  When was the last time you prayed before making a choice that would change your life?

WHAT does Jesus Pray?
When it comes to what Jesus prays, he prays short & simple prayers.  He teaches his followers:

When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words.
~Jesus (Matthew 6:7 NRSV)

All of us have heard those long-winded Christians praying forever.  The longest prayers always seem to come just before you eat and you’re STARVING!  Some of those long-winded Christians seem to like to hear the fancy phrases they come up with when they pray.  But Jesus tells us to make it short and simple.  This teaching comes right before he gives us the pattern of the Lord’s Prayer:

Our Father, in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For yours is the kingdom and power and glory forever.
Amen.

Make your prayers short and sweet and to the point, like a basic dance step that effortlessly moves you across the dance floor.

Second,Jesus prays scripture.  When Jesus is being executed on a cross he prays to God:

At about three o’clock, Jesus called out with a loud voice,…“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
~Jesus (Matthew 27:46 NLT)

Many are unaware that Jesus is quoting a Psalm here, Psalm 22.  That means that he spent enough time in the Psalms, the prayer book of the Bible, that he could use the words of one in a moment of suffering to express his own feelings.  He didn’t have a cell phone that he could do a quick search for psalms to pray when you’re being crucified.  He had to know it and have it memorized.

How is your knowledge of the prayer book of the Bible?  When was the last time you turned to the Psalms for prayers when you didn’t have your own words to express the condition of your soul?

HOW does Jesus Pray?
Jesus prays with a private humility.  He teaches:

When you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites who love to pray publicly on street corners and in the synagogues where everyone can see them. I tell you the truth, that is all the reward they will ever get. But when you pray, go away by yourself, shut the door behind you, and pray to your Father in private. Then your Father, who sees everything, will reward you.
~Jesus (Matthew 6:5 NLT)

Insert here Christians who like to be heard praying.  Jesus isn’t teaching that you should never pray in public, but rather he’s asking the question: why do you pray?  To be heard by others or to be heard by God?

Many people find it helpful to have a special prayer chair or corner in their house.  It is in a private place that they share with God.  Do you have a special place in your home where you can privately pour out your heart to God?

HOW does Jesus Pray?
Second, Jesus trusts the answer he gets:

“You parents—if your children ask for a loaf of bread, do you give them a stone instead? Or if they ask for a fish, do you give them a snake? Of course not! So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good gifts to those who ask him.
~Jesus (Matthew 7:9-11 NLT)

Sometimes God answers with a Yes.  Sometimes God answers with a No.  Sometimes God answers with a Not Yet.  Sometimes God doesn’t answer at all.  Jesus follows God’s lead so closely because he trusts that the one who is leading him across the dance floor is good.  That means that whatever answer he gets is the right answer.

HOW does Jesus Pray?
Lastly, Jesus prays with bold submission.  Before he is crucified, an excruciating execution that causes one to die by slow suffocation, he prays to God saying:

Father, if you are willing, please take this cup of suffering away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine.
~Jesus (Luke 22:42 NLT)

Jesus is bold.  He doesn’t want to die in this way.  He asks for the suffering to be taken from him.  He has no problem telling God exactly what he wants.  But in the end he submits to God’s will.  There is something of a tension here.  Ask God for exactly what you want.  Don’t be timid.  You don’t have to worry about whether it’s the right thing or not, because God is good and won’t give you a snake if you ask for bread.  But in the end, submit to God’s will.  And that brings us back full circle to where we began: God leads and you follow.

Over time as you learn this basic step, your dance, the way you live your life, will become more and more beautiful.  You’ll be able to more effortlessly sense God’s leading.  You’ll be able to distinguish between the gentle nudges that tell you to spin this way or step that way.  Your life will be beautiful in a way that others will notice and be curious about.  They will want to learn to dance life like you dance life.  And it will all be because you let God lead by learning the basic step of prayer.

God, help us to follow your lead by learning the basic step of prayer.  Help us to dance with you the way that Jesus danced with you when he prayed.  Do it in our lives by the power of your Holy Spirit inviting us into the dance of God.  Amen!

Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With:

Accountable Friendship

September 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment

timothy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Timothy – Letters to a Young Man: Accountable Friendship
Sycamore Creek Church
September 29 & 30
Tom Arthur
2 Timothy 4:3-4

Peace friends!

The other day I was working out in the yard edging the driveway.  If you know me at all, you’ll know that I really don’t like doing yard work.  I live on a corner lot so there is at least twice the amount of sidewalk to edge than the average house in my neighborhood.  I’m not really having a very good time.  Tabitha, who lives with us, walks out to her car at just about the time that I’m fed up with the whole process.  If you know Tabitha, you know that she’s super bubbly.  She is an encourager at heart.  She looks at what I’ve done and says, “Looks great!”  I respond, “Another hour of my life wasted.”  She catches the attitude and says back to me, “You could always use that hour to pray.  That’s what I do in my cleaning job when I’m cleaning toilets and don’t like it.”  Ouch.  At first my defenses went up.  I thought, “Who are you to tell me when to pray?”  Slowly but surely God’s Holy Spirit worked conviction on my defensiveness, and I realized that the pastor had just been held accountable.  I also realized I had an opening illustration for this message!

The Problem
Here’s the problem I want to deal with today: We don’t give or receive correction well.  I’m no better than anyone else when it comes to this.  I get defensive even if there is truth in it.

When was the last time you received correction or guidance from someone and actually accepted it well?  When was the last time you gave correction or guidance to someone (especially in a touchy situation) and they received it well?

The Point
Today we’re wrapping up a series on Paul’s letters to Timothy.  Paul is the first Christian missionary and Timothy is a young church leader that Paul is mentoring.  They are spiritual friends.  With an eye toward eternity and the things of God, Paul is helping Timothy to live and lead well right now.  Today we’re going to see how Paul holds Timothy accountable and guides him and how he instructs Timothy to do the same with others.  What we’ll find is this: True spiritual friends do more than just listen, they also guide.

The “books” of 1 & 2 Timothy are actually not books.  They’re letters that Paul wrote Timothy.  Here’s one section where Paul guides Timothy about his own leadership of guiding others:

2 Timothy 4:3-4
For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.

Paul is essentially saying: It’s hard to receive guidance and correction.  When push comes to shove, we tend to seek out people who agree with us rather than seeking out people who will challenge us.  This comes in every facet of life.  Throughout the two letters, Paul speaks to Timothy about the content of the teaching he is teaching others:  “Pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching” (1 Timothy 4:16).  He talks to Timothy about money: “Love of money is the root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10).  He guides Timothy about sin: “People will be lovers of themselves” (2 Timothy 3:2).  In each case, Timothy is to teach and guide in the way that Paul has instructed him, in the way that Paul has received guidance and correction from Jesus.

Guiding and Correcting
Or course, saying you should guide and correct is much easier than the real thing.  I asked some friends for examples of when they had received or given guidance or correction.  I ended up getting two stories about eating disorders.

Alice McKinstry was at one time an Aversion Therapy therapist.  She helped people get over bad habits like smoking or overeating.  She actually met Mark, her husband, when he came in seeking help to quit smoking.  Her job was to give him an electric shock as he picked up a cigarette!  I guess it worked.  And she got a husband in the process!  One day she had a Jewish woman come to see her who had been in a concentration camp.  This woman had an eating disorder.  When Alice found out her background, she told her something that she wasn’t supposed to say in her job: she didn’t need Aversion Therapy; she needed to focus on the trauma of being in a concentration camp.  I was intrigued to find out that the woman ended up agreeing and sought out another kind of therapy.  It was a risk that Alice took on several levels to guide this woman to find healing.

I also heard back from Krissy Brokenshire about people holding her accountable through guidance and correction.  Krissy is a young mom of two kids in our church.  She wrote to me:

I have a long history of eating disorders that started when I was eleven years old. For the most part I have not had a major relapse for at least the past ten years, but a lot of that had to do with the people I love watching out for me. It was the worst in high school and between my parents and several close friends, they kept me honest about what I was eating and that I was making good life choices. Without nearly 24-7 accountability on the body-problems I would not have had the strong foundation needed to develop new habits and work on the head-problems.

I’m struck by the courage of both Krissy and Alice to receive and give guidance in a culture that is more interested in keeping everybody’s business private.

Give Correction or Guidance
Of course all of us have stories of giving correction or guidance and it not working out quite so well.  And it never will work out well all the time because no matter how well you do it, the person has to receive it well too.  So how do you do you give guidance in a way that will create the fewest obstacles possible?

Giving guidance is an art more than a science, but let me offer a bit of science to help you.  It comes from the science of marriage.  Julie Gottman and her husband John have been studying couples over several decades.  They video tape them arguing about something and then follow up every couple of years to see how their relationship is progressing or digressing.  Here’s a brief video of Julie Gottman talking about what the healthy couples do when they give one another guidance or correction:

Even though this is about marriage, I think it can be instructive to any situation where you’re attempting to hold a spiritual friend accountable.  I’d sum it up in these ways:

  1. Complain, don’t criticize.
  2. Start your sentences with “I” instead of “you.”
  3. Talk clearly about what you need.
  4. Be polite.
  5. Express appreciation.

Don’t forget to spend some time in prayer before you bring it up.  This might be a brief “breath prayer” in the moment or it might be a more extended time of prayer before the moment.

Receive Correction or Guidance
So what about being on the receiving end of correction or guidance?  What should you do if someone attempts to hold you accountable?

One thing the Gottmans focus on in their research is helping couples accept influence from one another.  I think this is a helpful emphasis for everyone.  Most of us have a gut reaction against accepting another person’s influence.  Most of us get defensive the moment someone attempts to correct us.  If that’s your default, then seek God’s power to change your default so that your default becomes: maybe there’s something I can learn from this person’s guidance or correction.  Maybe God can teach me something here.  Maybe there’s not and their guidance or correction is completely frivolous, but if you don’t begin with the default that there might be something of worth here, you’ll never really know.  You’ll only get defensive.

I’d suggest that your next step should be to be curious and ask questions about what the person is seeing or noticing.  Instead of defending yourself, get to see yourself from that person’s perspective.  This past week I had a meeting with a colleague who didn’t like something I did.  This person sent me an email about it, and I suggested we meet to talk about it face to face.  When I got the email, I was at first defensive.  But I held back the defensiveness when we met, and I spent the first twenty minutes just asking questions.  Then I summarized what this colleague felt.  I learned something new about myself in this process.  I also won over this colleague.  At the end of the twenty minutes of me just listening and asking questions and summarizing how they felt, this person apologized to me for sending the email!  I didn’t see that coming.  I think the door opened for reconciliation in part because I was willing to accept influence and ask questions.

A third step I’d suggest you go through is seek other input.  Does more than one person notice this about you?  Someone recently told me that the messages each Sunday were getting too long.  Then someone else told me the same thing.  Then I went to a conference where they essentially said the same thing.  Then I went to another church where the pastor’s message was just as long as mine.  It was too long.  Ouch.  So I’ve been working on getting them tighter.  Hearing the same thing from many people suggested to me that there was some real truth I had to grapple with here.

Lastly, make sure you pray about it.  Give God’s Holy Spirit an invitation to seek your heart and mind and show you your own brokenness.  Allow God to convict you and hold you accountable too.  Psalm 139 says:

Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts.
See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

A Community of Spiritual Friends Guiding and Correcting
What might a whole community of spiritual friends look like who were open to holding one another accountable through giving and receiving guidance and correction?  How would it not devolve into just being a big group of very judgmental and defensive people?  Well, I received a glimpse of what it might look like in an unlikely place: a karate black belt test.  Recently I went to see Justin Kring, a newly baptized member of our church, test for his second degree black belt.  His sensei is Mark McCloud, who is also a member of our church and owns the Karate Dojo in Holt.  I was deeply moved watching the panel of senseis preside over the tests.  The spirit in the room was not a spirit of being judgmental, but it was a spirit of accountability.  You had either mastered the kata techniques or you had not.  Mark doesn’t actually let anyone test who he knows won’t pass.  There are clear standards that one is held accountable to, but the community is one of support and encouragement and love.

That’s what I’d like to see happen here at SCC.  I’d like to see us be a community where spiritual friendships thrive and part of that thriving is that spiritual friends are holding one another accountable to truly following Jesus by giving and receiving guidance and correction.  If a karate dojo can pull it off, I think we can too.

Prayer
God, help us to be a community that creates environments where spiritual friendships can thrive.  Give those spiritual friends the courage to give and receive guidance and correction so that we more faithfully follow Jesus.  May we have these things by the power your Holy Spirit working in us.  Amen.

Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: , ,

Remember Who You Are

September 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment

timothy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Timothy – Letters to a Young Man: Remember Who You Are
Sycamore Creek Church
September 15/16, 2013
Tom Arthur
1 Timothy 4:14 & 2 Timothy 1:5-7

Peace friends!

Do you ever forget who you are?  You get so caught up in the problems surrounding you that pretty soon you feel like the problems are your whole identity?  Sometimes all the small problems in my life begin to add up and overwhelm my sense of who I am and who I’m called to become.  Sometimes my body distracts me with pain or anxiety.  Sometimes conflict with those around me crowds out who I am.  Or stress on time crowds out time with God where I remember who I am.  Sometimes I forget who I am, and then I realize that I’ve been playing to all my weaknesses rather than my strengths.  Other times sin bogs me down, and when I’m no longer living at the center of God’s will, I forget who I am.

When people talk to me about who they are and what they’re called to I often hear some pretty regular themes pop up.  Someone gets bogged down in a job that sucks the soul out of their life.  Or they begin to set their hearts on the accumulation of money, security & stability, respectability, and fame and pretty soon forget who they are.  Or others dig themselves so deep in a hole with bad choices and it is going to take so long to get out of that deep hole that they begin to forget who they are, even if they’re taking positive steps to get out of the hole.  I see people who are stressed on more than one front.  They’re fighting battles at home and at work at the same time.  Or home and school.  It’s exhausting, and pretty soon they forget who they are.  Sin gets in the way too.  Someone once told me, “I know it’s a sin and I’m going to do it anyway.”  The lure of the sin was blinding them to who they are.

Today we’re continuing in a series called Timothy – Letters to a Young Man.  It’s a Bible series where we’re exploring the two letters we have that Paul, the first missionary of the church, wrote to Timothy, a young church leader.  If you read between the lines there’s an impressive list of things that Timothy was struggling with and all of them threatened to make Timothy forget who he was.  Timothy was facing:

  1. Competing truth claims & “false teachers”
  2. People jumping ship
  3. Questions about how to organize the church
  4. Fanatics
  5. Theological and Biblical nitpickers (“Stupid and senseless controversies”)
  6. Hypocrites (“Holding to the outward form of godliness but denying its power”)
  7. Challenges to his young age
  8. Needy widows (Some who were freeloaders!)
  9. Questions about money and getting paid
  10. Physical ailments (Drink wine!)
  11. Social upheaval (converted slaves and slave holders)
  12. Expectation of persecution.

It’s enough to make one quit.  Timothy isn’t sure he’s up to the task.  He’s kind of like Steve Rogers before he become Captain America.

Dr. Abraham Erskine reminds Rogers of who he is.  What we’ll find as we read through the letters that Paul wrote to Timothy is that Paul is a spiritual friend and mentor who reminds Timothy who he is.  That’s the whole point of the message today: Spiritual friends remind us who we are.

Remember Your Calling
In the face of all these obstacles that Timothy is facing, Paul regularly reminds Timothy of who he is and his calling in life.  Here are two key places where Paul does that: 

1 Timothy 4:14 – Do not neglect the gift that is in you [talents], which was given to you through prophecy with the laying on of hands [confirmation] by the council of elders. 

2 Timothy 1:5-7 – I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice [history] and now, I am sure, lives in you [passion].  For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God [talents] that is within you through the laying on of my hands [confirmation]; for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.

Notice that Paul points to several things that point to who Timothy is: his talents or the God-given gifts that are in him, the confirmation of the church through the laying on of hands (twice Paul reminds him of this!), his history or circumstances, and his passion or you might say the fire in his belly.

Who Are You or What’s Your Calling?
What’s your calling?  Who you are is wrapped up a lot in the sense you have about your calling, your vocation.  “Vocation” is Latin for “to call.”  If you want some clues to what you’re called to do find a spiritual friend who will help you sort through your history, passion, talent, and confirmation.  What if it’s not clear after that?  It rarely is crystal clear, and in some ways I think our calling is a moving target.  But sometimes I get people talking to me who are looking for big stupendous things to be called to when our calling may be much more simple than that: to be a loving member of our family, church, community, and world.  Here’s one calling that all of you have.  If you ever wonder what God wants of you, here’s the answer: to be holy, to be set apart to love more perfectly.  If you seek holiness, a more perfect love, then you can say with Paul: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness…” (2 Timothy 4:7-8).

Who Reminds You Who You Are?
I have several people in my life who are spiritual friends who remind me who I am both past and present.  In there are two key groups of people who reminded me who I am.  First was a thirty-four week Bible study group called Disciple Bible Study.  Week thirty-three is a day-long retreat.  During that retreat you spend time going around sharing with one another what you see in each other in terms of your gifts and calling.  I did not yet have a sense that I was called to be a pastor, but all twelve people in that group told me that day that they thought I was.  Whoa!  Here is the confirmation of the church, the “laying on of hands.”

Eventually I went to seminary, and I was appointed to an internship at a church in Richmond, VA called Reveille.  While I was in seminary studying to be a pastor, I had never really had a whole community treat me like a pastor until that summer.  As far as they were concerned, I wasn’t just a student studying to be a pastor, I was their pastor!  That summer I became a pastor because the church treated me like one.  They reminded me who I am.

Most of you know Barb Flory, the founding pastor of this church.  I remember our first meeting together.  I cried.  That’s not really what you’re supposed to do when you’re exploring being a leader of a community.  Leaders don’t cry.  But Barb saw something in me that told her that I was the right person for this church.  She regularly reminds me of that.  It always seems to come when I’m feeling overwhelmed with the responsibilities of leading the church.

Then there’s my friend, Jon Van Dop, another pastor.  Jon and I meet regularly to discuss what we’re celebrating and what obstacles we’re facing as a pastor.  As I think back on these meetings, it’s somewhat humorous.  First he goes and dumps on me.  I tell him how awesome he is and what a good job he’s doing.  Then I dump on him, and he tells me how awesome I am and what a good job I’m doing.  We remind each other of who we are and what God has called us to.

Who is reminding you of who you are?  What spiritual friends do you have in your life who are being a Paul to you?

Who Do You Remind Who They Are?
So if each of us needs a Paul in our lives, we also each need a Timothy in our lives, someone we’re reminding regularly who they are.  For all of this is first our family.  Every night when Micah goes to bed, I tell him, “You are a gift from God to me and your mom.”  I remind him who he is.  I hope that when he’s sixteen I’m still reminding him that he is a gift from God, even if it doesn’t feel like it.

Of course, don’t just stick with your family.  Who outside your family are you reminding who they are?  When I lived in Petoskey I gathered together a group of high school guys for a weekly small group.  We began by reading the book, How To Find the Love of Your Life by Neill Clark Warren.  This was before Warren had founded e-harmony.  Then we moved on to the book of Romans in the Bible.  This wasn’t a huge group.  Three or four, sometimes five, guys.  Their assignment each week was to read a chapter and bring something to the group that they found interesting.  We were planning to end the year with a backpacking trip where we finished out the book of Romans.

Most of the guys in this group were seniors and were graduating at the end of the year.  One morning I woke up and went out to get the paper.  I read the paper and was surprised to read a headline: “Petoskey senior trip canceled after stampede.”  Whoa!  Apparently the seniors went on a wild rampage the last day of school running around the halls tipping over trash cans and pushing a teacher over.  Their annual trip to Cedar Point was canceled by the school board.  As I read the article, I saw the names of three of the guys in my small group as the three “ring leaders.”  The most interesting thing about it was that all three of the guys listed were quoted as taking responsibility and apologizing for what had happened.  It may sound strange, but I was particularly proud of those three guys.  I was proud to say that they were in a small group with me.  We all forget who we are and do stupid stuff, but I believe that it was at least in part because of that small group that they had not forgotten long.  They were the only ones named as having publicly apologized.  The next small group meeting was quite a time of discussion.  I didn’t cancel the backpacking trip to finish out the book of Romans.

One of the guys in that group was Charlie Matz.  I asked Charlie to make a video introducing himself and telling you a bit about what effect that backpacking trip and studying the book of Romans had on him.  Meet Charlie:

 

 

Charlie began a video production company called The Veracity Project.  Veracity means “truth.” They have made dozens of videos that seek to remind others who they are and have sold over 30,000 downloads and reached millions all over the world.  One of those videos stars his co-founded Bub.  It’s called “Big But.”

 

Big But – The Veracity Project from Do Something Church on Vimeo.

So who do you remind them of who they are?  Who is your Timothy?

Where To Find Your Spiritual Friend
So you’re convinced you need a spiritual friend to remind you of your big buts, and you need to be a spiritual friend to someone to remind them who they are.  But where do you find that spiritual friend?  We can’t make spiritual friendship just happen at SCC, but we can create environments where spiritual friendships can be made.  The place where that happens most is in small groups.  Throughout the month of September we’re publishing a list of all the small groups that are happening during the fall semester.  Small groups aren’t a magic wand to spiritual friendships, but they are the best thing we’ve got.  Because you’re not going to build these kind of spiritual friendships in a worship service.  It’s just too big of an environment.   You need something smaller.  Insert: small groups.  There’s a lot of buts about why you can’t get into a small group.  One of them has been: But when does it end?  You mean I’m supposed to sign up to meet with a bunch of people I don’t know for the rest of my life?  Well, no.  We’re switching this fall to a semester based small group system.  You sign up for a semester.  That’s it.  If you like the small group, great.  If you don’t like, well, it’s only three months.  At the end of the semester, the sign-ups begin again.

Spiritual Friends Change the World
What would it look like if we all had a spiritual friend who was reminding us who were and if we were regularly being that kind of spiritual friend to someone else?  I think we’d change the world.  Consider this fact for one moment: Jesus reminded twelve disciples of who they were – now there’s over two billion!  Who is your Paul?  Who is your Timothy?  Who is your spiritual friend that is reminding you who you are?  Who is your spiritual friend who you are reminding them of who they are?

God, help us find the spiritual friends we need.  Amen.

Timothy Reading Plan

Throughout this series I’m recommending that you read a chapter of 1 & 2 Timothy each day.  Someone who is doing this found this suggestion organizing your reading.  I thought it might be helpful so I pass it on to you.  It is from the great Bible App, You Version (download it and check it out):

First Reading: Enter
As you read this passage of scripture for the first time, you are simply “entering in” or familiarizing yourself with what God is saying here.  Notice the circumstances, people, places, etc.

Second Reading:  Impress
As you read the same passage of scripture for the second time, notice what word, phrase, sentence or verse makes an “impression” on you.

Third Reading:  Pray
As you read this passage of scripture for the third time, begin by spending a few moments in prayer thanking and praising God for his Holy Word.  As you read, be prayerfully interacting with God about the text.

Fourth Reading:  Live
In this final reading of the passage, ask God to show you how He wants you to live based on this scripture.  Is there something He would have you start doing, stop doing or continue doing?

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Spiritual Friendships

September 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

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Timothy: Letters to a Young Man
Spiritual Friendships
Sycamore Creek Church
September 8/9, 2013
Tom Arthur
1 Timothy 1:1-5

Peace Friends!

The other day Sarah, my wife, sent me to the grocery store to pick up some diapers for Sam, our newborn son.  I walked into the store confident that I could get the job done.  Then I got to the diaper section.  Have you ever looked at how many kinds of diapers there are in the diaper section?  I couldn’t figure it out.  I spent several minutes trying to master the various ways that they categorize diapers. Then after about five minutes I looked up and realized I was in the adult incontinence section.  I wasn’t even looking at children’s diapers!

The Problem
Here’s the problem I want to wrestle with today: life is made up of hundreds if not thousands of choices each day.  We feel paralyzed not knowing how to navigate all these choices.

I also experience this problem as a pastor.  How do I spend my day?  Which way do I lead the church?  What area should I focus on first?  Of the hundreds and thousands of things I could be doing as a pastor, which ones should I really make sure are getting done?  Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the choices.

I know I’m not alone.  I asked my friends on Facebook, When was a time you felt overwhelmed by choices?  Here is a sample of the answers I got:

  • Most of the time. I haven’t been diagnosed with anything, but I’m fairly easily confused, and need to take in my info in small increments at a time.
  • College. You’re expected to make choices about the rest of your life before you really even know who you are as a person. It can be very very stressful being constantly worried that you’re making the wrong decisions and that you’ll be unhappy the rest of your life.
  • Parenting – there are so many theories/methods/beliefs about how to feed, sleep, discipline, etc, and you have to deal with it the midst of being tired and while trying to balance the rest of life.
  • After the death of a loved one…life must go on. Sometimes it’s hard to get motivated and focus on accomplishing anything.
  • I second the comment on parenting. You have infinite choices on how to handle any given situation or decision, and often have mere seconds to decide how to respond.
  • Trying to decide what direction to go after downsizing? After a divorce?
  • Always!
  • When making ‘big’ life changes, like where to live after graduation, what degree to follow in college
  • Standing in front of the donut case at QD. Just kidding…Sort of.

Spiritual Friends
So what direction does God give us about all these choices?  What guidance does the Bible offer for how we navigate the hundreds and thousands if not millions of choices we have to make over a lifetime?

Today we begin a new series.  It’s called Timothy: Letters to a Young Man.  It’s a Bible series where we’ll take the next four weeks and dive into the two books of 1 & 2 Timothy in the New Testament.  They are written by Paul, the first missionary of the church, to Timothy, a young man and leader of the church.  I’d like to encourage you over the next four weeks to read these two letters.  There are only ten chapters between the two letters, so if you read one chapter a day over the next four weeks, you’ll read them at least two times.

What you’ll find in these two books is the point of this message: spiritual friends (those interested in your wellbeing from the perspective of Eternity) help us make wise decisions to live well.  Paul and Timothy are spiritual friends.  Let’s dive into the first letter and see what we find about the landscape of their spiritual friendship.

1 Timothy 1:1-5
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope, To Timothy, my loyal child in the faith: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.  I urge you, as I did when I was on my way to Macedonia, to remain in Ephesus so that you may instruct certain people not to teach any different doctrine, and not to occupy themselves with myths and endless genealogies that promote speculations rather than the divine training that is known by faith. But the aim of such instruction is love [action] that comes from a pure heart [motivation], a good conscience [Holy Spirit], and sincere faith [Ultimate ends: Eternity].

There are three things I see going on here.  First, Paul invests in Timothy.  Paul considers Timothy a “loyal child in the faith.”  Paul is like a spiritual father to Timothy.  He is investing significant time and attention into Timothy.

Second, Timothy invests in others.  Timothy is expected to be “instructing certain people.”  Paul is investing in Timothy in part to model for Timothy how Timothy might invest in others.  So Paul’s investment in Timothy has an impact beyond Timothy as Timothy invests in others.

Third, the goal of all this “divine training” is “love that comes from a pure heart.”  In other words, Paul is training Timothy in both his actions, love, and his motivations, a pure heart.  He wants Timothy to do the right thing but also for the right reasons and motivations.

Paul sums up the purpose of this divine training elsewhere when he says: Train yourself in godliness, for, while physical training is of some value, godliness is valuable in every way, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come (1 Timothy 4:7-8)

Perhaps we can describe what we’ve been talking about so far as the Why of spiritual friendships.  I’d like to give you some very practical advice on the Who, What, and How of spiritual friendships.

The Who of Spiritual Friendships
Find a Paul, a spiritual friend, who mentors you, who invests in your life not just from the perspective of here and now but from the perspective of Eternity, from the perspective of what God desires of your actions and motivations.  This person should not be me.  Not your pastor?!  Yes.  Not your pastor.  Why?  Because there’s no way I can invest in two-hundred plus people that call Sycamore Creek Church their home.  That’s not to say you can’t come to me from time to time, but I’m talking about someone who invests in you on a weekly if not daily basis.

One of the best ways to find a spiritual friend like this is in small groups.  Small groups are environments that build friendships.  But short of finding that person in your small group, look around your life and ask yourself, “Who do I look up to as a Christian?  Who is further along their spiritual journey in a way that I want to be like?”  Then go ask them to invest in you.  Start small.  Ask for one meeting.  Tell them you’re impressed with how they live their life and would like to know more about how they think about life and what they do to live their life the way that they do.  If after that first meeting you still like what you see in that person, ask for a second meeting.  At that second meeting propose a three to six month commitment where you meet weekly or every other week.  Then suggest a format for those meetings, which we’ll talk more about in a moment.  Who is your Paul?

When it comes to Who, I want you to not only look for who is investing in you, but I want you to look for a spiritual friend that you invest in, a Timothy.  This of course might be your immediate family, but it also might be your extended family: your nieces and nephews, your grandkids, or your godchildren.  Maybe it is someone who isn’t even a Christian but could really use someone to invest in them like a co-worker, neighbor, friend, etc.  I’ve begun investing some time in a young man in my neighborhood who mows my yard.  His family is not actively involved in a church and his grandfather just died this past week. His dad asked me to look for an opportunity to talk to him about death.  Or maybe the Who is a “younger” Christian.  I don’t mean younger in terms of age but younger in terms of not as far along the Christian journey as you are.  This might be someone who is a member of our church, or someone in your small group, or a kid in Kids Creek or a student in StuREV.

When I was a teenager I became aware of a friend of mine, Tiffany, in my radio class (yes, my high school had a radio station) that had just become a Christian.  She was brand new to her walk.  I had been trying to do this whole following Jesus thing for many years at that point.  So I began to invest in her.  I asked her to make a video to share what that meant to her.

I know what you’re thinking.  You weren’t interested in investing her spiritually.  You were trying to catch an attractive girlfriend!  I can’t say that wasn’t part of what influenced me, but she did have a boyfriend at the time, and we never dated or even talked about it.  I came to realize that sometimes there are more important things than potential romantic attractions.  God calls us to invest spiritually in those around us, to be spiritual friends.  Who is your Timothy?

The What of Spiritual Friendships
When we read Paul’s letters to Timothy, we see that there are two things that keep popping up over and over again: prayer and scripture.  He says: I remember you constantly in my prayers night and day (2 Timothy 1:3), and elsewhere he tells Timothy to be praying for those around him.  Prayer should be some part of what you do with your spiritual friend.

Paul also instructs Timothy a lot about scripture.  He says: All scripture is inspired-by-God and useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16-17).  Scripture should also be a big part of your spiritual friendship.  Are you reading it together?  Are you studying it together?  Are you sharing how it works in your life or asking questions about it together?

While we’re talking about the What of spiritual friendships, let’s digress slightly for a moment to talk about what happens when you disagree with your mentor or spiritual friend.  This is an important topic because it is likely that as you read through Paul’s letters to Timothy, there will be some things there that he says that you don’t agree with.  In particular, there might be some things he says about women and slaves that you have a hard time swallowing.  For example:

Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no womanto teach or to have authority over a man;she is to keep silent (1 Timothy 2:11-12).

Let all who are under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honor, so that the name of God and the teaching may not be blasphemed (1 Timothy 6:1).

I don’t want to dig into the details of these two verses and others like them right now. What I want to explore is what happens when you disagree with your mentor or spiritual friend, especially when your mentor is scripture.

A mentor of mine is Richard Hays. He is currently the dean of Duke Divinity school, but when I was there studying to be a pastor, he was the chair of the Bible department.  I had him for several classes including introduction to New Testament.  In his last lecture of the class he likened scripture to a mentor and said this:

When this mentor reproves us, we take it to heart. When this mentor offers encouragement and hope, we take heart. When this mentor says something baffling or offensive, we weigh it long and seriously. On those rare occasions when finally we feel compelled to disagree, we do so with fear and trembling, as well as with undiminished love and respect. And if we disagree, we do so on the basis of what the mentor has taught us.

I offer that to you as guidance for how to disagree with your mentor, spiritual friend, or even scripture.

The How of Spiritual Friendships
So let me boil all this down into a relatively simple package of how you invest in your spiritual friend.  I like to use very intentional questions.  I have a set of them in my back pocket that I pull out when I’m meeting with someone who I am investing in.  Many of them will not be new to you.  You’ve heard me preach about them, but let me share them with you again.

How are your RPMs (Relational, Physical, Mental, Spiritual Wellbeing)?  Take time to explore what scripture says about all these things and to pray about them.

How are you doing with the Three Simple Rules (Do no harm, Do good, Stay in love with God)?

What has been your spiritual high and spiritual low since we last met?

How are your H.A.B.I.T.S.?  (Hanging out with God and Hospitality, Accountability, Bible reading and memorization, Involvement with the Church and inviting to Church, Tithing, and Serving the church/community/world).

 Lastly: the “Six Questions”:

    1. How are you?
    2. What are you celebrating?
    3. What obstacles are you facing?
    4. What are you doing to overcome those obstacles?
    5. What can I do to help?
    6. How can I pray for you?

If you use one set of those questions each time you meet, you won’t go wrong.

The Church = Spiritual Friendships
Imagine a community that is creating environments where these kinds of spiritual friendships thrive.  Imagine a community where people are investing in one another in significant ways.  Imagine a community that helps you build friendships that are giving you guidance for how to navigate the hundreds and thousands if not millions of decisions you will have to make in your life.  If you can imagine that, then you have imagined the church that I want Sycamore Creek Church to be.  People are not just looking for a friendly church, but a church where people can make spiritual friends that help them make decisions with an eye toward eternity.

Fast forward in my friendship with Tiffany many years.  Tiffany is now working at the Gospel Music Channel:

Who knew that this young Christian that another young Christian was investing in would have such an impact today?  Who knows what impact you will have when you find your Paul and your Timothy?  We were made for spiritual friendships.  Don’t do life alone.

Small Groups – GroupLINK
Sycamore Creek Church offers several small groups every semester to create environments where spiritual friendships can thrive.  You may think you can follow Jesus alone or by simply coming to worship regularly, but I think you are mistaken.  You can only study and train hard for following Jesus by building deep spiritual friendships with other people in some kind of small group setting.  Worship just isn’t a setting that facilitates those kind of friendships.  Small groups do.

During the month of September you’ll have the opportunity to sign up for one of several small groups this fall.  Small groups change lives.  Small groups build deep friendships.  Small groups introduce people to Jesus Christ.  Small groups help people follow Jesus more faithfully.  Small groups support one another.  Small groups pray for one another.  Small groups are an environment for encountering God.  And more and more and more…

We’re beginning a semester-based small group system this fall.  That means you’ll be signing up for a small group that only lasts from October to December.  During January we’ll take the month off, and you’ll have the opportunity to sign up for the next semester that runs from February to April.  That means you’re signing up for a time-bound small group.  It has a start and end date to fit the rhythm of your life.  During the next three weeks, you’ll have the opportunity to sign up for one of these small groups.  So go ahead, sign up for a fall semester small group and build some spiritual friendships!

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