Some Thoughts On Parenting
The commandment we are diving into this week is the fifth commandment Honor your father and your mother. That is a big command. And it carries with is so much responsibility. As the parent of young children this is a command that I read and think about teaching my children to obey me. But this is really not the main thrust of the command. This is a command that talks so much about the nature of relationship between parents and children.
This command has as much to say about our responsibility as parents as it does our responsibility as children. Part of the reason parents are expected to be honored by their children, is that parents bear the responsibility of giving their children an identity rooted in their faith. God expected parents to be the primary shapers of their children’s spiritual lives.
This is a very different idea of spiritual development than we have in the church. Often we think it is primarily the role of the pastor or Sunday school teacher or youth worker to shape our children’s faith. But that is not how God intended it. God expects parents to be the primary shapers of faith for our children.
So what does this mean for our parenting? Well first and foremost it means that your own spirituality with greatly affect your children’s. What they see in you will be modeled. This is true for mom and dad alike. If one parent is engaged spiritually but the other isn’t there can be far reaching consequences for your children. It also means that when you make decisions about your family life, God needs to be a priority in those decisions. If Jesus isn’t a priority in your home, he will most likely never be a priority for your children.
That is a huge responsibility to bear and that is why God says parents should be honored. Carrying that burden alone is reason enough to give honor to our parents, even if we as parents don’t always fulfill this responsibility.
Blessings,
Pastor Greg
Strategery (Yes that is spelled correctly)
Right now we are preaching through a four week series on our strategies as a church. We know what we are trying to do, our mission is Cultivating God’s Wholeness in a Broken World. But now we are talking about the how.
The last couple of Sundays we have heard some awesome stories from Bryan and Leslie about how God has used this church to help them find wholeness. This week Doug will be sharing some great stories from his own life as well.
So what about you? What are your stories? What happened when you Discovered there was more life through Christ? How did your life change when you accept an invitation to become a Disciple? Well join us this week as we find out what happens when we Develop a passion to serve.
Share your stories with others so we can all be blessed by God’s work in your life.
It is Finished!
Wow, that was an amazing Lenten season. What a wonderful day of celebrating we had on Sunday as we sang our praises to Jesus our risen Lord. This Lent was such a unique one for me as I worked to read the entire Bible in 60 days. Several times before I have tried to read the Bible in a year, but I never had the discipline to see it through.
That is why I am glad I took on the challenge of reading it in 60 days. I have the discipline to do in two months what I couldn’t do in a year. The entire thing was such a blessing. Do you even realize how little of the Bible most of us know or ever read? After six weeks of reading and over 1400 pages I still wasn’t on the New Testament. I only read the NT for 13 out of the 60 days.
There is so much scripture to explore and all of it reveals a piece of God to us.
As a pastor I think I would be satisfied if my people even just knew the red letters, the words of Jesus. But sadly many of us are pretty unsure about those too.
If you want to spend more time in scripture I would suggest starting with the red letters. Begin with the Gospels and read the story of Jesus multiple times. Start with Mark the shortest of the Gospels then go to Matthew and then Luke. Finally go to John and hear his voice that was looking back after decades of processing what Jesus had taught him. Live in the gospels and allow them to be a gateway to the rest of scripture.
So I am challenging you to rediscover or discover for the first time the joys of scripture. The story of God and his people is one that challenges, encourages, and transforms us as followers of Christ. Don’t live in ignorance any longer! Discover more of scripture for yourself.
Baptisms and New Members
What an amazing day this past Sunday was! We welcomed 16 new members into our church, baptized two adults and confirmed the baptism of two more. This was an unbelievable day for our church. Here are some photos from the day. God is good!
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.