JR. Forasteros - January 13, 2019
The Good News for You
Evangelism often relies on guilt, shame or fear to motivate people. But those aren't good news, and they're not where God's posture towards us begins. Jesus' baptism is an invitation for all of us to remember the heart of the good news: that we are God's beloved children, and God delights in us.
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I want to tell you about one of the worst times in my life – it was spring of 2009. I had just lost my first church job (I was a youth pastor). I’ve shared about that experience before, but suffice to say it was a surprising, very painful process. And what made it even worse was that Amanda and I had set our wedding date for July 25 – just a few months from that day.
So yeah, it’s pretty scary to be on the cusp of marriage and suddenly be unemployed (and I know it’s not like this for every career, but in pastoring, it also put my whole vocation into question. Was I really supposed to be a pastor? Where would I go? What kind of pastoring job would I seek out?
There was a solid month, maybe more, where almost everything in my life was in flux, where all I had were questions (and again, not just me, but Amanda too).
It’s awful, in those times. Losing sleep, constant anxiety, questions about an uncertain future. I know I’m far from the only one to experience these times in life. A loss of a job. The end of a relationship. A plan that didn’t pan out.
I want to ask today what it means to confess God as our creator in these times. Because it’s easy to have faith when things are good. But when life gets hard, when the things that made us feel stable and secure are stripped away, it’s much harder to be faithful.
We’ll see today, however, that when we say God is our creator, it’s not a past-tense confession. We’re not only talking about the origins of our life. We’re not even mainly talking about past-tense. To say God is our creator is to insist God is continuing to create. God isn’t interested in returning to the past. God isn’t interested in maintaining the status quo. God is ahead of us, working all around us, continuing to create new goodness in the world and invite us into it.
What does that look like? Well, that’s what we’re going to explore today. But let’s begin by celebrating this God who is with us, even in the darkest times!
