living for eternity today
It’s pretty easy to give words to Jesus. It’s way to simple to twist the words of the Bible to make them say just about anything we want. Over the past few weeks we’ve touched on just a couple of these statements that Jesus never said but we kind of think he said. The goal of the series was to show that we should be glad Jesus never actually said them! This week we wrapped up the series with the realization that life isn’t fair and that’s probably a good thing!
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In my journey through my bookshelves to find something good to read, I tend to find an author and stick with them for a few weeks. Last week we took a look at Follow Me by David Platt and Francis Chan. This week we tackle another David Platt book titled Counter Culture. If I’m being honest, and why wouldn’t I because this is my website, this one was challenging. It was challenging because Platt is calling Christians, and me specifically, to the task of living the faith I claim to possess.
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Some of the very first words recorded in the Bible that Jesus said are Follow Me. Can you imagine hearing those words? Here he is, the man the world has been waiting for is standing right in front of you and he’s calling you to come and follow where he’s going. The excitement must have been riveting! People ended up coming from miles and miles away just to get a glimpse of this man that we’ve come to know as Jesus. And it happened simply because of a pointed phrase – Follow Me.
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Some days life is just flat hard. Things fill our minds that really have no place in us. We worry and grow anxious about some of the strangest things in life. We face health struggles, financial woes, relationship pains, and parenting trouble just to name a few. The more these things mount up in our lives, the less adequate we feel in life and the more we feel like failures. It’s far too easy to let the fear of these and many other things in life stop us from living the life we’ve been called to live. But we’ve been told to fear no more.
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This week is a pretty special week for those of us who are in the Lutheran Church world. This week, if you’re following a church calendar of any kind, you’ll notice was the week of the reformation. Now this isn’t something we go around talking about everyday so perhaps a quick history lesson is in order.
Continue readingFor some people serving is something they do. But for the Jesus follower it should just be part of who we are. That was this week’s focus in our Red Letter Challenge. Throughout the week we’ve been challenged to find creative ways to serve one another. Maybe it’s someone in your house or maybe it’s someone at work or even someone in your neighborhood – whoever it is find a way to touch their lives with an act of service.
Jesus was known for serving people. As a matter of fact, Jesus made it a practice to touch someone’s life before he taught someone a life principle. This week in our message we spent time seeing how Jesus has already touched our lives. Then we dug into the life lessons we’ve gleaned from this touch and the teaching that undoubtedly followed. If you have about 25 minutes, you should check out this week’s Red Letter Serving message.
It’s a simple fact that I can’t give away someone I haven’t first received. I have to have it in order to give it away. I know that sounds pretty simple but so often we fail at sharing something because we haven’t properly invested in it ourselves. This week at Living Word Galena, we talked about forgiveness. The idea was that I’m only going to forgive as much as I’ve been forgiven. If I don’t value my own forgiveness, then I’m not going to forgive others well.
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As a pastor, I kind of have a thing for worship. I believe it’s important to say the very least. As a matter of fact, I think we should all find a place to connect with God in worship with other people who believe what and how we believe! But that’s not all worship is. For so many Christians, worship is something that has to happen in a place at a certain time. It can only last a certain length of time and we have to act a certain way while we’re there. But what if worship was more than a 60 minute time slot on Sundays?
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This week we wrapped up our sermon series titled Jesus is Greater. In this series, we’ve discovered how Jesus is greater than everything! This week we take that truth and apply it to our problems and the giants we face. It’s easy to let our troubles and temptations and challenges seem so large that they’re all we see. But what would happen if we stopped looking at the giant problem and started looking at the giant God?
Continue readingWe live in a dog eat dog kind of world. Every moment is about trying to get ahead in life. We need to be better than everyone else in class or in the office. We need to be the best on the team and the number one in the league. We need to even be better than we were yesterday for crying out loud! Nothing is ever good enough. But ever happened to humility? This week we talked about humbling ourselves versus being humbled by someone else.
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