Not only does Sin destroy our relationship with God, it also ruins our relationships with those around us. Instead of the beautiful partnerships we were designed for, Sin causes us to turn inward, to become selfish.
From Series: "Venom"
Everyone knows the world isn't as it should be. There's a sickness deep within us, a rot in the human heart. The Bible calls that rot Sin, and even though no one likes to talk about Sin, we can't escape its reality. A snake once whispered to us that we could be like God. We believed that lie, and the venom of Sin has been killing us ever since.
But God will not abandon us. Why do we talk about sin? Because then we get to talk about how God rescues us from Sin. After we tried to become like God, God became like us, to become our Sin, to save us. Join us the six Sundays of Lent (February 17-March 24) as we explore what Sin is and how God saves us!
In high school, I wasn’t very popular, and I wasn’t particularly good with the ladies. I was the nerdy kid who let popular girls copy my homework. Now, to say I wasn’t very popular didn’t mean I had no friends. In fact, I had a really good group of friends in high school. Friends who liked me a whole lot more than I liked myself. And we had this spot right in front of our lockers where we’d all hang out before school.
One morning we were all sitting there, laughing and joking like we always did, when one of the popular girls came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. I’d known her since elementary, and we were in biology together, but we didn’t run in the same circles. She said, “Hey JR., do you have that biology homework?”
Like a chump, I dug into my bag and snatched out the homework, gave it to her. She flashed her cheerleader smile at me and said, “Thanks buddy!”, then walked off.
My circle of friends had fallen silent as they watched the exchange. And I didn’t make eye-contact as I turned back to my actual buddies. I felt ashamed, ashamed that I’d allowed myself to be used, to be reduced to “Homework Kid”.
Isn’t that an experience most of us have had – where someone reduces us to a function, a role? Continue Reading…
We struggle to conquer Sin in our lives because we treat Sin as a list of dos and don'ts. But Sin is the bending of our hearts away from God. That changes how we approach Sin and how we find freedom.
From Series: "Venom"
Everyone knows the world isn't as it should be. There's a sickness deep within us, a rot in the human heart. The Bible calls that rot Sin, and even though no one likes to talk about Sin, we can't escape its reality. A snake once whispered to us that we could be like God. We believed that lie, and the venom of Sin has been killing us ever since.
But God will not abandon us. Why do we talk about sin? Because then we get to talk about how God rescues us from Sin. After we tried to become like God, God became like us, to become our Sin, to save us. Join us the six Sundays of Lent (February 17-March 24) as we explore what Sin is and how God saves us!
We know there’s something wrong with us, deep in our core.
We know that so well that we don’t need the Bible to tell us something’s wrong. Every human culture in history has recognized that truth. Nearly every religion has some sort of “Fall” story, an understanding that the way we see the world right now isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.
Sure, we all disagree about why. But we agree on the what. There’s a rot deep in the human heart. No wonder we don’t like to talk about it. That rot is obviously unpleasant.
But it gets even worse when we try to discuss that sickness in a religious context. Because the Scriptures call that Rot Sin. And when we think Sin, we imagine that God gave us this list of rules. We even have the story – when Moses, God’s prophet, climbed up Mt. Sinai and got the 10 Commandments, he brought them back down and now we know that if you want to be a good person, you have to follow those.
Because we have this list of what makes you a good person, the world gets divided into two kinds of people: the good and the bad.
You’re either a law-keeper or a law-breaker. You either measure up to the list or you fail. The good people keep the list. And they become the police – they make sure everyone else is keeping the list. They single out a few of the sins on the list as especially bad, and if you do those sins, well. You’re not welcomed. You stay out there in dark with the bad people, the lawbreakers. The sinners.
We good people, we law-keepers, we’ll stay in here where God’s approval is.
And if you’re one of those outsiders? Well. You can get your act together, start behaving, clean yourself up, and then you can come in with all the good people.
Sound familiar? When religious people start talking about Sin, it’s a short jaunt to judgment, condemnation, cliques and exclusiveness. Continue Reading…
Ash Wednesday is the beginning of Lent. We gather to mourn and confess our Sin, and to repent.
From Series: "Venom"
Everyone knows the world isn't as it should be. There's a sickness deep within us, a rot in the human heart. The Bible calls that rot Sin, and even though no one likes to talk about Sin, we can't escape its reality. A snake once whispered to us that we could be like God. We believed that lie, and the venom of Sin has been killing us ever since.
But God will not abandon us. Why do we talk about sin? Because then we get to talk about how God rescues us from Sin. After we tried to become like God, God became like us, to become our Sin, to save us. Join us the six Sundays of Lent (February 17-March 24) as we explore what Sin is and how God saves us!
Genesis 1-2 teach us what God originally intended for us and for our world. And we know when we look around today that things are not how God created them to be. We know that we are not how we were created to be. And we know that the Scriptures call the reason everything’s not the way it’s supposed to be Sin.
But there’s a disconnect between Sin on a grand scale and the level of our lives. We have no problem agreeing that the world is broken, that there’s something wrong out there. But when we get down to here (tap heart), it’s much harder to talk about Sin.
Mostly we want to say that we’re okay. Are we perfect? Eh… no. But we’re not that far from God’s Way. We’re doing our best and we don’t do bad stuff (okay, at least not too much bad stuff). And there’re plenty worse sinners out there.
So we don’t talk about our own Sin. It’s uncomfortable and awkward and no one likes to air their dirty laundry anyway. So we talk about Jesus and resurrection and salvation and love and life.
But we don’t talk about why we need to be saved. And that’s silly because how can salvation mean anything if you don’t need to be saved?
We buy into the myth of productivity, the story that says we are what we make. That we should always be 'on', always going, always working. But God tells us that to be fully human, to be everything we were created to be, we must rest. God calls us to Sabbath, to lay down the things we do so that we can be the people we were created to be.
From Series: "First Things First"
We ended 2012 in the Revelation, exploring how Jesus' coming into our lives is the End of the World as we know it. But if Jesus' coming is the End, it's also a new beginning. Jesus' death and resurrection reconnect us with God, open up a world that has been lost to us since Sin entered into the world. So to kick off 2013, we're going to dive into Genesis 1-2. We'll explore God's original intentions for the world, and the implications for our new life in Jesus. After all, in the new year, it's good to get the First Things First!
In The Shining, we meet Jack Torrence, a dad who’s failing as a father and as a man. He can’t overcome his own shortcomings to provide for his family. Jack escapes with his family to the Overlook Hotel to work on writing – hopefully he can produce a novel that will provide for his family.
But if you know the story, you know that things only get worse for Jack. He’s slowly driven insane by his inability to work, to provide, to achieve and succeed. And one classic scene is so creepy we almost overlook the truth its teaching. Jack’s wife, Wendy, finds his manuscript and begins to read it out of curiosity. To her – and our – horror, she finds that far from writing a novel, Jack has been typing one sentence over and over and over, for hundreds of pages.
All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. It’s an old proverb given terrifying new meaning by King’s insight. And it’s easy to write The Shining off as just a story (and one Jesus wouldn’t read!). But the reason good horror works is because it magnifies reality. It takes something in the ordinary world that ought to terrify us and blows it up big, makes us see how scary it should be.
It’s the myth of productivity.
It’s the American obsession with Work, our pathological need to produce, to do just a little bit more. The myth of productivity tells us that we’re just this far from having what we want or being who we want to be. That what it takes to succeed, to live a full, meaningful life, is hard work and all you need to get yours is just a little bit more.
Put in a few more hours. Go to a few more practices. Give a little bit more blood, sweat and tears. Because what’s admirable, what’s good and noble and true is work. We want to be valuable to society. We want to be the most productive, the craftiest, the hardest worker and have the house, the kids, the stuff to show it.
But the truth of that story is that it’s crazy.
It should horrify us, how the demands of our life steal away our humanity. How the way we live actually makes us less human.
Which of us hasn’t felt ourselves going a little bit crazy trying to keep up with the Joneses? No, we don’t go postal. We don’t turn into crazed ax murderers. But we lose ourselves. The busier we get, the less connected we feel to who we really are.
We feel ourselves being reduced just to a role, a function. We’re a driver. Or a bread-winner. Or a kid-deliverer. Or an employee, a task-doer. A house-cleaner. A food-cooker.
The more we work, the more we put in, the more we lose ourselves.
King was right: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
But he’s not telling us anything new. His warnings about the lure of productivity echo what the Scriptures told us way back in the beginning. A simple truth we find in the heart of the Creation Story: we weren’t made to work work work.
Let’s return one last time to Genesis 1-2, to listen to the vision of humanity we find there.
Join us Sunday as we take a hard look at why we need Sabbath.
When we start to live in real community, we often find frustration because we compare ourselves to those around us. We try to take their process of spiritual formation and apply it to our lives. But spirituality isn't one-size-fits-all. There's no formula for healthy spirituality. Rather, we are more like gardens. Each of us is a little bit different, and we should approach our spiritual growth with the freedom to experiment, to figure out what path God designed to lead to our flourishing.
From Series: "First Things First"
We ended 2012 in the Revelation, exploring how Jesus' coming into our lives is the End of the World as we know it. But if Jesus' coming is the End, it's also a new beginning. Jesus' death and resurrection reconnect us with God, open up a world that has been lost to us since Sin entered into the world. So to kick off 2013, we're going to dive into Genesis 1-2. We'll explore God's original intentions for the world, and the implications for our new life in Jesus. After all, in the new year, it's good to get the First Things First!
Something… unfortunate… often happens when we start to live in community.
The end result is comparison and defeatism. Particularly when we start to take community seriously, we end up in relationships with people who are better than we are. Maybe they know more scripture or don’t sound stupid when they pray out loud. Maybe they have really good insights into discussions or they say what you’re thinking better than you could. Maybe they’re really disciplined – they have a regular devotional time or keep Sabbath or have better kids. Maybe it’s not even anything spiritual. Maybe they’re funnier or in better shape or whatever.
Whatever the ‘thing’ is, I know how your story goes because it’s how my story goes: you hang out with that guy a couple of times and you wonder, How does he do it? And you find out – either because you ask or from conversation. They tell you, Oh I get up at 5 every day and spend two hours in prayer and reading the bible before I go run 10 miles then make breakfast for the family and drive the kids to school after I walk my dog.
And you think in your head, Oh, I can try that. I just need to ______. And then you fill in the blank with however your life doesn’t look like his. Maybe it’s getting up two hours earlier. Or exercise. Or whatever. You try to take his formula and fit your life inside it.
But you know what happens next: it doesn’t work. It might work for a week or two, but sooner or later, you just can’t keep doing it. You can’t keep up his routine. So you slide back into the life you were living, bringing with you a new sense of defeat and failure because you tried to be better and you didn’t make it.
Here’s something I’ve observed time and again: often the reason for our failure is that instead of trying to figure out how to be fully ourselves, fully the person God created us to be, we’re trying to be someone else.
And as long as you’re trying to become someone else, you’ll never succeed.
And yet, again and again, we compare ourselves to someone else. And again and again, we come up short. We turn Christianity into a formula we all have to follow, and then we wonder why we keep failing at it.
Our problem is that we don’t see a pretty insidious story at work beneath the bedrock of our culture. This false story is a lot like the individualism we talked about last week – we never think about it, and no one ever taught us this story explicitly. But it’s a deep part of our worldview, so much so that it colors even what we read in the scriptures…
Join us Sunday as we explore what God calls us to be.
Our culture prizes the individual, but the reality is we weren't created to succeed on our own. Genesis teaches us that part of God's order, God's Way for us is to be in community. I can't be the full image of God on my own, and neither can you. We need each other!
From Series: "First Things First"
We ended 2012 in the Revelation, exploring how Jesus' coming into our lives is the End of the World as we know it. But if Jesus' coming is the End, it's also a new beginning. Jesus' death and resurrection reconnect us with God, open up a world that has been lost to us since Sin entered into the world. So to kick off 2013, we're going to dive into Genesis 1-2. We'll explore God's original intentions for the world, and the implications for our new life in Jesus. After all, in the new year, it's good to get the First Things First!
One of the most pervasive American myths is the individual. Since our founding, we’ve idolized heroes like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. These days, it’s Jack Bauer or John McClain or even Batman and Superman.
Deep in the soul of our collective identity is a conviction that I should be able to make it on my own.
To ask for help is weak. Whether it’s bread-winning or child-raising or college-paying-for. Whether it’s American Idol or the MVP or Heisman trophy, we love to single out the best individual. The person who rises above the rest.
The same goes for failures, too. I grew up in Kansas City in the 90s, when the Chiefs were always almost good. They went to the playoffs every year and managed to lose every year. And every year, after they lost, the whole city would find one guy to blame for the team’s failure – one year it was Lynn Elliot, another Steve Bono and finally Marty Schottenheimer, the head coach.
Anytime a business fails, or a marriage or anything else, we find a single person to blame it on.
We know that’s not true. We know that one player can’t totally succeed without the rest of the team. Neither can they destroy a game for a whole team. We know that when a business succeeds or fails, it’s almost never because of a single person. We know that marriages are way too complex to reduce to one person’s great or poor decisions. We love to blame the president for the state of our country when we all know good and well that we have 538 grown adults in Congress who apparently missed that day in kindgergarten when we learned how to compromise.
And yet again and again we single out the one person. Again and again, we try to make it on our own, refuse help, run from any scenario in which we might have to rely on someone else.
All of this because deep down, we are convinced that the individual is the basic building block of a culture. That I ought to be good enough on my own, that I shouldn’t need anyone else to be me, to succeed as a person, to have a full, rich life.
That complicates discussions like we’ve been having in this series because when we talk about bearing the Image of God, for instance, like we did last week. Because we think, Okay, what do I need to do to bear the image of God?
We take that framework of individuality and put it on the Scriptures – because I think in terms of me, myself and I, that must be what the Scriptures are talking about. But the Scriptures don’t let us take that and run.
If we read carefully, we see that God actually never intended for us to function purely as individuals. We were actually created to need other people.
Genesis 1 teaches us that God created us in God's image. While other creation stories written around the same time teach that humans were created to be slaves to the gods, Genesis teaches us that we are God's children and partners in creation. Today we are constantly surrounded by stories, by companies and cultures telling us what to be and how to act. We must always listen to Jesus, who perfectly reveals God's way to us and reminds us that we are first and foremost friends and children of God.
From Series: "First Things First"
We ended 2012 in the Revelation, exploring how Jesus' coming into our lives is the End of the World as we know it. But if Jesus' coming is the End, it's also a new beginning. Jesus' death and resurrection reconnect us with God, open up a world that has been lost to us since Sin entered into the world. So to kick off 2013, we're going to dive into Genesis 1-2. We'll explore God's original intentions for the world, and the implications for our new life in Jesus. After all, in the new year, it's good to get the First Things First!
Everyone knows the story of the ugly duckling, right? [pic of the duckling] Somehow a baby swan gets raised with ducklings. Everyone makes fun of how ugly he is, and he feels all self-conscious. But in the end, he grows up to become a beautiful swan. [pic]
The moral of the story is supposed to help awkward kids be assured that one day things will get better, that one day they’ll be a beautiful swan. The thing about that story is “Hold on it’ll get better eventually” is a nice message, but it doesn’t actually make anything better in the here-and-now.
There’s nothing wrong with the baby swan. What’s wrong is the story he’s living.
He thinks he’s supposed to be a duck because that’s how he’s grown up. That’s the story he’s been living in, with his fake duck mom and adopted duckling siblings. Everything about his life and circumstances are telling him he’s a duck, but they’re wrong.
What would actually be better for the ugly duckling would be for him to realize right now that he’s not a duckling at all. It would’ve been better for him to start living as a swan now, not wait until some far off later date.
The reason the story of the ugly duckling connects with us is because we understand at a basic level that when we’re not who we were created to be, we suffer. A swan shouldn’t try to be a duck. It doesn’t go well for the swan.
The same is true for us. We are surrounded by cultures and companies that tell us who we are and what we should want. All sorts of stories that, deep down, we know don’t quite fit.
Just like that ugly duckling, we’d be better off if we realized that we’re not ducks at all. We’re swans.
So this morning, we’re going to ask of Genesis what we were created to be. How does this creation story illuminate God’s intention for humanity? What does that teach us about our purpose? And is it possible that as we learn Genesis’ story, we’ll find that we’re ugly ducklings, living the wrong stories, trying to be ducks when God created us as swans?
Join us Sunday as we explore what God’s story for our lives looks like.
We all want to know God's will. We get tripped up because we think God's will is a path to walk. The Scriptures teach us God's will is a person to follow.
From Series: "First Things First"
We ended 2012 in the Revelation, exploring how Jesus' coming into our lives is the End of the World as we know it. But if Jesus' coming is the End, it's also a new beginning. Jesus' death and resurrection reconnect us with God, open up a world that has been lost to us since Sin entered into the world. So to kick off 2013, we're going to dive into Genesis 1-2. We'll explore God's original intentions for the world, and the implications for our new life in Jesus. After all, in the new year, it's good to get the First Things First!
Last week, we saw in Genesis 1 that God has a Way, an order for the world. And if we want our lives to have meaning, if we want our families and friends and careers and hopes and dreams, even our mistakes and failures, to have a purpose, we must order our lives according to God’s will, God’s plan, God’s Way.
That’s right where many of us get tripped up. We want to know: what is God’s will?
How are we supposed to know God’s Way? We’ve all looked into the dark, unknown future, wondering which path we should take.
The good news is that God doesn’t want us to be confused. God wants us to see clearly how we are to live, how we are to walk in this world. We get tripped up because we misunderstand what God’s will is. We’re asking the wrong questions.
We want to know the path our lives are supposed to take. Where am I supposed to go to school? Who am I supposed to marry? What job should I take? Should I move there? Should I switch careers? When should I move?
And it’s not just the big stuff. We want to know the right path on the little stuff too. Our work, our relationships. All the rich details that make up our lives. We want to get that stuff right, for it all to matter, to have meaning.
But when we explore the Scriptures, we don’t find God answering those kinds of questions for us. We find that the light shines into our lives looks not like a path, but a person.
God’s Will for our lives is the person of Jesus, the light and word of God.
Talking about Jesus in today’s world can be confusing – everyone seems to have a different idea about who he is and what he did. On one end, you’ve got Christians, who say Jesus is God’s son. And on the other end, you’ve got people who say that Jesus was just a guy, a good teacher. Nice, probably a little hippy-ish, spiritual but got turned into a religion he never would’ve endorsed.
So when I say, “God’s will is for us to be like Jesus,” we’re all understandably confused and intimidated. How do I be like the son of God? Do I have to learn to fly? Throw lightning bolts? I’m already pretty good at judging and condemning, but maybe I need to damn people some more?
Or should I start wearing robes and walking everywhere? Take up carpentry? Start offering pithy religious statements to people around me?
Obviously not. So… “be like Jesus”. What does that mean?
Join us Sunday as we learn what God’s will looks like!
New Year's Resolutions are a ritual that seem to set us up for failure. We laugh at our inability to keep them, to actually improve our lives in significant, meaningful ways. Genesis 1 demonstrates that if we want our lives to have meaning, we must live according to the Order, the Way God set up for us. This order is available to us again in the wake of Jesus' death and resurrection!
From Series: "First Things First"
We ended 2012 in the Revelation, exploring how Jesus' coming into our lives is the End of the World as we know it. But if Jesus' coming is the End, it's also a new beginning. Jesus' death and resurrection reconnect us with God, open up a world that has been lost to us since Sin entered into the world. So to kick off 2013, we're going to dive into Genesis 1-2. We'll explore God's original intentions for the world, and the implications for our new life in Jesus. After all, in the new year, it's good to get the First Things First!
We’re six days into the New Year, which means that of those of us who’ve made New Year’s Resolutions, probably over half of us have already broken them. The Resolution ritual is a curious one: usually for the last couple of weeks of the year, lots of us decide to change our lives in fairly substantial ways. We decide we’re going to start eating right, get in shape, read our Bibles more, go to Church more, be better people – nicer, complain less, call our parents more, and so on. Maybe this will be the year we pick that hobby back up or start writing that novel or start our new career.
But woven into the fabric of the resolution ritual is the expectation that it’s not really going to happen. Continue Reading…
When I was in high school, I worked for a gas station called QuikTrip. It was pretty much the best high school job a guy could want. QuikTrip is open 24/7/365, which means it’s one of the only places open on Christmas Day. My family always got up really early to celebrate Christmas, and by 10 am, we were all just sort of sitting around for the day.
So the last couple of years I was at home, I volunteered to work on Christmas Day at a gas station. Continue Reading…
I'm a Teaching Pastor in Dayton, Ohio with my wife Amanda. I do the #StoryMen podcast with Matt Mikalatos and Clay Morgan. I love stories of all kinds. So what's yours?
