Pastor's Posting

I thought the in-val-id/in-valid insight was really strong. It's something we need to watch out for as we encounter people as a mission outpost.

What a challenging question by Jesus... "Do you want to get well?" It's easier just to stay with what we've always known than to change our thinking and think about changing.

In the last part of the message you talked about conversations in community. We want to move people further along the path to not just meet at church but to share meals, share the Lord's Supper, share life and share leadership in this movement to transform lives in Plano and our surrounding cities. We're on the path... We just need to model this to everyone we know. I'm about to read "Making Room for Life" and it will probably be among our LifeGroup curriculum suggestions for the Desparate Households series. I suspect this book can help us.

I like this Monday notes blog idea! Maybe it'll take off among the staff and then catch on with others too.

Allen,

The more I read the NT, the more I see the essence of the ekklesia (the gathering of Christ followers). The three core aspects of that community was gathering in someone's home, sharing a meal (during which someone reminded the others what Jesus did for them through taking bread and wine), and conversations about how following Jesus affects their daily lives. That was pretty much it. We have stacked on a lot more since then, but that is still the core.

Thanks for helping us capture that essence again.

i was moved by the same thing as you in vs. 6-8. Many of the battles we lose are because we don't engage in the fight. we want that 'magic pool' to take care of things for us. this is a challenge at which i fail more often than i like to admit....

I'm sorry to say, I can't yet be in two places at one time. :-) Since Chris was out of town, I spent the worship time with my lifegroup at Elevate. But the scripture passage that was used was the same, as you know.

The thing that caught my attention was two fold: First the answer the lame man gave Jesus was not "I believe thou are the Christ..." It was nothing insightful, or large. He was stating the obvious, but Jesus saw his heart. Jesus credited the lame man an affirmative answer not because of the words he used, but because of the lame man's intention of the heart and His desire to see fulfill the man's need for God's glory. I can just see Jesus today bending his ear to our spiritual voice. Can you see Him excited at the first word of a sinner's prayer. Do you think he waits patiently for the prayer to finish before He answers our call? I think Jesus already knew the man's heart, and the words were really for the man and those around him.

The second thing is the results of the lame man's response -- Jesus telling him to do something he knew by all logic could not be done -- take up you bed and walk. How like Jesus to take the desires of our hearts and require the application of action - an action we know we can't do in ourselves. He not only is the one to trust upon, but also does all the work (in this case healing) for us to simply put to action his direction. It excites me to see this as a picutre of salvation and spiritual maturity. He requires the impossible, and then fulfills that requirement personally so that we must only BEGIN to "will" our muscles and find we have been given the empowerment for obedience.

Thanks for encouraging us to reflect! Jacky

Kris, I like your "magic pool" metaphor...I'll keep looking for mine.

Jacky, you're right about Jesus not wanting our formulaic confessions, but our hearts. Tough to get away from when you have been told those were all Jesus wants to hear...

Enjoying the dialogue

I was amazed at the way God has woven together the messages of Recovery (especially this one) and the work we are doing in our new life group. We are trying to take a look back at how our life stories have unfolded and how God is preparing us to help Him finish our stories, all for His glory. This past Sunday evening we talked about how our stories include myths that over time we have come to accept as truth; about how they hinder our calling to love God and others, and how they hinder our ability to reflect the glory of God to the world. Examples, among many, included: "I must have a good (wife or husband) to be satisfied", or "I need for others to like me and approve of me to be satisfied", or "I must be visibly successful in the eyes of others to be satisfied", etc. And, we talked about how these myths are often unwitting (or occasionally witting) agreements with Satan to believe the foolish lies rather than the truth of God just as Eve did when she was deceived. It was so good for us to have heard Sunday morning that Jesus is in the business of using Himself (the Truth) to break our fragile hold on our cherished myths and heal our hearts and set us free.

Mike,

It is cool how God has connected Sunday morning and your discussion in LifeGroup. What is the name and author of the book that started you on this journey?

Before I forget, I LOVE this idea! I’ve often wished to sit with everyone over lunch or coffee and share the ways God spoke to each of us through Gene and the worship because I learn so much from each of you.

Like Allen, the invalid/invalid was huge for me, and the string of words that popped into my head made me ask myself several questions: 1) Do I validate or invalidate others based on my perceptions of their situations? 2) Do I honestly attempt to value the opinion of others when it differs from my own? 3) How often to I look past the physically healthy appearance to see the hurts of the invalid inside? 4) With whom do I share my own hurts? Am I afraid to share them because I feel like they will invalidate me or because I don’t want to burden them? 5) What areas of my heart seem healthy but are really not? 6) Where have I kept myself an invalid even though Christ has already healed me?

I also like Kris’s magic pool idea. It is so easy to put our trust in the wrong thing or to blame others (“no one to help me get into the water”).

As Jacky said, Jesus looks past our stuff to see our hearts. I’m always amazed that he longs to forgive me and heal me. Guess that’s why it’s called amazing grace…

I love Mike’s phrase “how God is preparing us to help Him finish our stories, all for His glory.” One of the things I look forward to in heaven is finding people like this man and learning what happened to him after he was healed. After his encounter with Jesus, what did he do with the rest of his life on earth?

What am I doing with the rest of my life?

Thanks for the conversations. I look forward to more!