The Power of Lent
Reflecting on these past three weeks of Lent I am amazed at how powerfully God has been at work here at DCC.
We are seeing answers to prayer that we have been waiting on for years. There are families spending time seeking God together. There are men rededicating themselves to the pursuit of God and to being better dads and husbands. There are wounds being healed. There are new leaders emerging. There are people in biker bars excitedly talking about the ministry of our church. God is at work and there is so much to be thankful for.
How has God been at work in your life? Have you heard the voice of God in any new ways? Have you experienced a fresh touch of his Spirit? If so we would love to hear your stories to celebrate with you and to rejoice in the good things God is doing.
Psalm 108 says…
My heart is steadfast, O God;
I will sing and make music with all my soul.
Awake, harp and lyre!
I will awaken the dawn.
I will praise you, O LORD, among the nations;
I will sing of you among the peoples.
For great is your love, higher than the heavens;
your faithfulness reaches to the skies.
Be exalted, O God, above the heavens,
and let your glory be over all the earth.
Let God’s glory reign over your life today.
Blessings-
Pastor Greg
Being Tested in the Wilderness
The text I am wrestling with this week is the story from Matthew 4 of Jesus going into the wilderness to be tested. The first thought I am wrestling with is whether God sent Jesus there to be tested or tempted. The Greek word used in this text can mean either. Tempted sounds far more pejorative than tested and places the emphasis on the role of the Devil during his encounter with Jesus. Tested points back to a purpose with God in this encounter.
I don’t think that God wants to lead us into temptation, that is after all why we pray to avoid this very situation in the Lord’s Prayer. But I do think God intentionally tests us to demonstrate his faithfulness to us and to develop our faith. As we walk through this time in the wilderness God will surely test our faith, because without testing there is no growth. The question is for all of us is will we pass the test?
Into the Wilderness
Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday and the beginning of the season of Lent. We are DCC are having a churchwide Lenten emphasis called Into the Wilderness. Just as Jesus went into the wilderness for 40 days to prepare for his ministry, we want to spend 40 days in the wilderness of spiritual formation and allow God to do something powerful in our lives.
In our men’s group we have each committed to seeking God in a specific way for this season of Lent. Some have pledged more time in scripture, others have pledged family devotional time, some are giving up beloved beverages like coffee and a couple of our men are being baptized. It is really exciting!
So won’t you come into the wilderness with us and seek God in a new way these 40 days?
If you aren’t sure where to start I have written a 40 day devotional guide for Lent. You can download it here.
Be Blessed and Seek Christ-
Pastor Greg
Reading the Bible in 60 Days
If Mardi Gras can start early then so can Lent.
Big love to the city of New Orleans who are having the biggest and longest Mardi Gras ever after the Saints Super Bowl victory. Sometimes the part just needs to start early and go late.
I have the same feeling about Lent this year. I can’t wait for Lent to begin and I haven’t. In spending a lot of time preparing my worship services and sermons for Lent I realized how much I have craved a sense of renewed spiritual discipline and intimacy. No matter how hard I try throughout Advent I always seem to find the by the end of January I am so spiritually thirsty.
That being said, I have specifically felt compelled by the Spirit that during Lent I need to read the entire Bible as an act of submission, discipline, and full immersion into God. Reading the entire Bible is pretty ambitious in 46 days so I decided to extend my Lenten discipline to entire month of February and to give myself about 60 days to read all of scripture. It has equaled out, in my Bible, to around 30 pages of scripture a day. That is no small amount of scripture. Carving out time to read that much scripture has required less TV, less blogging, less reading other blogs, time at work, time at home, and a tremendous amount of intentionality, and it has only been one week! Of course that is a major of point of this exercise anyways, to reorient my life in a more Godly fashion, so it has been successful thus far.
I am finishing up Deuteronomy today, and I wanted to offer some random notes and thoughts from my reading of the Books of Law.
Random Reflections from the Genesis-Deuteronomy Read more…
Welcoming All With Grace
As part of our visioning process, our church has worked on naming our core values. There are lots of values any church can name about what they believe to be important, but the point of the process is to find the values that best define the reality and the aspirations of our particular church. And so through months of tough work we came up with five values that define us here at Duneland Community Church.
The value I preached on this past week is: Welcoming All With Grace
DCC has always been a welcoming church. You can sit down and hear the stories of our people and you will hear about people who had never stepped foot in a church before and yet found a home here. You will hear about people rescued from addiction and from heartbreak and from divorce. You will see that we are a congregation that has a diverse socio-economic range. You will see that we are a congregation that is ready to welcome all who walk through our doors. You will also find that we really enjoy our hospitality. People come to our church and they will always be well fed, especially on potluck Sunday!
But welcoming all isn’t the end of the story. We believe that our embracing of all who we encounter, inside our church or outside in everyday living, involves transforming grace. We don’t simply embrace people and call it a day, we embrace all people with God’s grace and the hope that they too with experience the transformation that comes from being embraced by grace and mercy. It is the embrace of someone who accepts you just as you are and dreams and hopes for you to be all that you can be. That is our value as a church and we aspire to make it a reality not just inside the four walls of our building, but in the everyday reality in which we live.
Values
I have written a couple of times about being in the part of our Visioning Process where we are talking about our values as a church. This week I challenged the board to do some homework around our values and I want to invite you to add your input as well.
As we listed our values out there were four major values that we found are especially important to us. Roughly stated they are as follows:
Investing in Our Community
Come As You Are
Intentional Transformation
Communicating Hope with Relevance
All of those statements are big statements with a lot of meaning behind them, and none of them are complete, but we feel like the capture well what is important to us as a church. We want to invest in our community by engaging the marginalized, and ministering to youth, children and families. We invite people to “Come as you are” because we want all people to be welcomed and embraced by our church. We are about intentional transformation because we don’t think that God simply wants us to get together and love each other, he has a purpose of changing us and reshaping us into his image through these relationships. Finally we want to make sure that everyone we encounter clearly understands that the Gospel message of Jesus Christ is relevant to all people in all places at all times. Nothing could be more relevant.
So now as a church we are working to reshape these values into language that is clear, concise, compact, concrete, and challenging. Can you help us? Tell us what these values mean to you and how you think we should live them out. How have you experienced these values and how much further do we have to go to make these true of us as a church? What scripture comes to mind to support or inform these values?
We value your input in this Visioning Process and would love to hear from you. We need your input.
Advent Thoughts for Week 1
Sunday marked the beginning of the season of Advent. Often we can get distracted from Advent but just talking about the Christmas season, but Advent is something a little different. Advent is a time of preparation for Christmas. It is a time of solitude, waiting, remembering, and looking forward. It is supposed to be a time of reflection and celebration as we prepare for the celebration of Christmas.
It is hard to have Advent when Christmas decorations show up in stores in October and it seems like Christmas lights replace Halloween pumpkins. That is why Advent is more important than ever for us as a church. We must intentionally live out this season before Christmas differently than the world. It is a time when we can show that our faith helps us see the world differently. It is a time when we can show our neighbors, coworkers, and families that our priority is in celebrating Christ, not buying Christmas gifts.
So I encourage you to take time this Advent season to slow down, to sit and pray, to read scripture, and to wait for the joy of a true Christmas celebration.
Will we be left behind?
As a kid I was terrified of the rapture. There was an awful movie I saw as a kid called A Thief in the Night and it scared me that at any moment God was going to come back and take all the true Christians away and somehow I was going to be left behind.
Do you believe in the rapture? Have you read any of the unbelievably popular Left Behind books? Have you been watching Kirk Cameron movies lately?
So what do you think about the return of Christ? Do you think it is close? Do you think we will have any idea it is coming before it happens? What do you think about prophesies about the coming of Christ?
Heaven and Hell
It has been fun and really interesting to walk through the afterlife these past two weeks. I don’t know if you have enjoyed our different format as much as I have, but I have really enjoyed teaching the last couple of weeks. This week will prove to be the most challenging week yet in our series. This week we are looking at the realities of the New Heaven, New Earth and Hell.
The purpose for this Sunday is two fold. First, I want us to have a clear picture of the eternity that God promises us in our resurrected life. I think the picture scripture gives to us might surprise us. Secondly, I want to present as accurate a picture as possible of the eternity that awaits those who are not followers of Christ. This is easier said than done, but we will do the best that we can.
So what kind of questions do you have about heaven and hell? We talked a lot last week about what life may be like for us in the intermediate state after we die and before we are resurrected. Now we are going to look at Revelation 21 and when heaven meets earth. What do you picture heaven to be? What about hell? How many of your thoughts about heaven and hell are formed by movies, paintings, and mythology? How much is rooted in scripture? My challenge this week is for you to look for all the relevant passages about heaven and hell that you can find and add your thoughts to this post.
Thanks-
Greg
From Here to Eternity, week one recap, week two questions
Sorry about no blog last week, our internet connection wasn’t working at all last week, but now I am back.
If you missed it, yesterday we began a new series called From Here to Eternity. Over the month of November we are looking at what life after death is really about and what we need to understand about it.
If you missed yesterday you should be able to download the sermon on our podcast in a day or two. The focus yesterday was on the resurrection of Jesus and how revolutionary the idea of resurrection is in the history of the world. Before Jesus actually did it, no one believed that people really came back from the dead. Most cultures believed that there was life after death, but not life after life after death when the person would be physically resurrected in bodily form.
Jesus changed all that, and with his resurrection we now can experience a part of the resurrected life ourselves, through our salvation and faith in Christ.
This Sunday we are continuing in 1 Corinthians 15 and even into part of chapter 16. If you want to get a great summary of the importance of resurrection, and what resurrection means for us, this is the passage to go to.
So this week we are shifting from Christ’s resurrection to our own. We are looking at what happens in the in-between state between death and resurrection and what our resurrected life will be like. Next week we will look at the meeting of Heaven and Earth in Revelation 21.
So what are your thoughts about the in-between state of life after death but before resurrection?
Where do you think we will be? What will we be doing?
Will it be different for believers and non-believers?