Tag: redemption

Published November 12, 2019

The Great Drama of God

About six weeks ago we began our visual theology message series – based on the book by Tim Challies and Josh Byers. And as you can see on the title page, there are four main components that make up this series. These are like the four reasons why we want to study Theology (or why we want to study God)… These are four things that every Christian should want to do.

#1. We want to grow close to Christ,

#2. we want to understand the work of Christ,

#3. we want to become like Christ, and

#4. we want to live for Christ.

Those are the four main reasons why we are studying theology – and these four components form the basic outline for these messages.

In the first component, which Greg just finished for us last week, we talked all about how to grow close to Christ. In that section, we talked about everything from how the Gospel connects us to Christ to our new identity in Christ. We looked at how God speaks to us through the Bible, and how we speak to God through prayer. These are the basics of growing close to Christ.

The second component of this series (that we’re going to start looking at today) is designed to help us understand the work of Christ. In other words, not only do we want to have a personal relationship with Christ, but be also want to understand what He is doing in the world. This is a key element of the Christian faith – we need to understand what God has done, what He is doing right now, and what He’s going to do in the future.

You see, the Bible tells us that we are living smack-dab in the middle of an incredible story! We are all part of God’s unfolding drama. Our life on this planet is just one scene in an eternal, cosmic story that’s been playing out since time began. It’s like God is the ultimate writer and director and the world is the stage for his drama to unfold.

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Published May 28, 2018

Doing God’s Work

There’s a short film called “Godspeed” that I watched recently and it’s all about this Pastor, Matt, who ended up moving to and pastoring in a tiny community in rural Scotland. And while he is there, to make a long story short, he learns the value of slowing down, learning to really know and be known by the people around him, and he learns to participate with God in the slow work of changing lives through relationships. And I watched this film back in January and I am still processing the implications for my life. It’s had a significant impact on me and I’ve debated showing you the whole film in place of a sermon, but I’ve opted not to do that today – perhaps that’ll be part of a Bible study in the fall or something.

But at the end of the film, there’s a short epilogue. After spending 13 years in Scotland, learning to operate at Godspeed, Matt moved back to America and began pastoring a church in small city in central Washington. And the film closes with how Matt is now, along with his new congregation, trying to figure out how to live the slower, more relational “Godspeed” life in the midst of the fast paced, non-stop culture of America. Life in urban America is very different from life in rural Scotland, so how do these principles translate and apply in this culture?

And that actually sounds a bit like what we’ve been doing here for the past several weeks. About a month ago we began going through this series called “Kingdom Living” and we’ve been trying to figure out how do we live differently in the Kingdom of God while still living in this world. What does it look like for citizens of the Kingdom of God to live right here here in Alberta, Canada in 2018 in the midst of a very worldly culture & society? Because just like how rural Scotland is very different from urban America – the Bible describes life in the Kingdom of God as being very different from life in the kingdom of this world.

So far, we’ve looked at two major contrasts between these two kingdoms. The first contrast was how our western culture today is increasingly individualistic and me-centered. Selfies are our main way of expressing ourselves. The question everyone asks is “What’s best for me? – Not, “What’s best for us?” But in the kingdom of God, we are called to put others first and to sacrifice for the good of one another.

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Published May 22, 2018

An Economy of Abundance

This week, for the first time since living in Penhold, we planted a garden. I mean, last year we did plant a little flowerbed with a few veggies in it, but we’ve never had a real garden space at this house until this year. Which has been has been bit disappointing to us – previously we’ve always had large gardens and we love fresh peas and corn and carrots and beans and all that. But landscaping is always a multi-year process (for us anyway) – everything takes time and we just hadn’t gotten to the point where we were ready for the garden. But finally, this year, having dug up our entire backyard anyway, we were finally ready to plant a garden.

So that’s what we did on Saturday and now we’re all pretty excited to watch those tiny little seeds sprout and grow and then ultimately produce a whole bunch of really good things to eat!

And it’s always amazing to me how one little seed produces so much! For example, if you plant just one little bean seed, that little bean seed will grow and produce a plant with about 20 bean pods – and each of those pods hold about 6 beans – so that’s roughly 120 beans produced by planting one little bean seed. That’s a pretty good return on investment! You plant 1 and get 120 back!

Corn is even better. You plan one little kernel of corn and you get a plant with at least one (maybe even 2 or 3) corn cobs with each having between 500-1200 kernels each! That’s a really impressive return!

Tomatoes are even more amazing. In each average-sized tomato, there are between 150-300 seeds. That’s per tomato – and each tomato plant grows a lot of tomatoes! Now we probably wouldn’t get this with our short growing season, but in the commercial greenhouses, one tomato vine will grow about 200 tomatoes in a season. So even at 150 seeds per tomato, that’s 30,000 seeds all produced from one little tomato seed. Incredible.

And then, just as one final example, consider an apple seed. If you plant one single apple seed, you can grow a beautiful apple tree. That apple tree, once’s it’s fully mature, will produce on average (depending on the variety) about 500 apples each year. Each of those 500 apples will hold about 10 seeds – so that 5,000 seeds per year. Now perhaps that’s not as impressive as the 30,000 tomato seeds, but this apple tree will continue producing these apples year after year for at least 20 years or more. That means, that over the lifetime of that apple tree – from one little apple seed – will grow over 100,000 other apple seeds.

And I bring all this up because I think it’s a wonderful illustration of how the economy of God is an economy of abundance. And I’ll explain what I mean by that in just a minute, but first, let me back up and remind us all of what we’ve been talking about for the past several weeks.

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Published December 28, 2011

A Future of Hope

Over the last three weeks we’ve been looking at background of the Christmas story. And we’ve discovered that this history of hope goes all the way back to the beginning of time when God created the heavens and the earth.

You see, God had set up the perfect system for the perfect life – He would be the source of everything mankind would ever need. He would give them life, food, meaningful relationships, purpose in their work – everything they needed, He would provide. But He would also be their authority. Of course, He certainly gave them responsibilities and authority as well, but He was to be the ultimate authority. That was God’s setup for the perfect life. As long as mankind looked to God as their source and as their authority, life would be amazing.

And it worked great! With this setup, Adam & Eve enjoyed life to the fullest as God intended it – and it was sweet. They had everything they wanted. Their relationship with God and with each was perfect and beautiful – Never any conflict or never any strife – it was what you might describe as heaven.

But something happened. Sin happened. Adam & Eve rejected God as their source and as their authority and they took that role for themselves and as a result – everything fell apart. Their relationships with God and with each other was broken. The sweetness of life became bitterness and life on earth has been a struggle ever since.

But God had a plan. God knew this would happen even before He created the world, so all along, He had a plan. And this is what we’ve been looking at for the past three weeks – God’s plan to put things back to the way they were when He first created them.

And in case you missed those first three Sundays, let me give you just a quick summary.

On week one, we learned how God promised Adam & Eve that one day, one of Eve’s descendants would crush Satan’s head and defeat sin for all time.

On week two, we learned how God promised Abraham that one day, one of his descendants would be a blessing to every family on earth.

On week three, we learned that God promised King David that one day, one of his descendants would be King for all time.

And as we looked at some of the old testament prophecies and as we looked at the Christmas story as recorded in Luke, we came to realize that all these promises were fulfilled in the birth of Jesus Christ. He was the one that God had been promising for some 4000 years.

And that’s what makes Christmas such a big deal – its because finally, after years of hoping and waiting for God to fulfill his promises, finally, God’s own Son, Jesus Christ was born as a man and He would make things right again.

But here’s the problem. If you look around at the world today – it doesn’t really seem like everything right again – does it? There’s still pain. There’s still suffering. Satan seems as active as ever. Sin is still around in bountiful supply. Our relationships with God and with each are far from perfect. So… what happened? Was it all a joke? Did God’s plan fail? Or is it just that the story isn’t over yet? Well, that’s what we’re going to look at today.

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Published December 5, 2011

The Beginning of Hope

We are now in December. We’ve got snow on the ground, people have their Christmas lights up, there’s eggnog in the grocery stores, so it must be time for some Christmas related sermons.

Quite often I shy away from a lot of seasonal messages – just because we hear the same things year after year after year. But this Christmas, I want to take the whole month of December to tell you the Christmas story – the whole Christmas story. I think sometimes we get gypped and we only hear part of the story. We hear about the angels, about the shepherds, about having no room at the inn, about the wisemen, but we miss out on all the stuff that happens before that.

So I want to start us off today, not with the wisemen, not with the shepherds, not with Mary & Joseph – not even with the prophets that foretold the birth of Jesus. Instead, I want us to start in the beginning. Literally. In the beginning – Genesis 1:1

That’s truly the beginning of the Christmas story. Because really, the entire Bible is the Christmas story. Everything that happens in the Old Testament is a lead up to the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Everything that happens in the New Testament is the result of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

So this December I want us to take a look at the big picture. I want us to try to see what God was doing right from day one. You see, Jesus’ birth didn’t just happen. In fact, all of history didn’t just happen. God wasn’t just making stuff up as He went along. Before He even created the world, God had a plan. And that plan involved all the stuff that we read about in the Bible – everything from Adam & Eve in Genesis all the way to the end of time in Revelation. God had and still has a plan.

You may have heard the saying that history is HIS STORY. That’s absolutely true – History is God’s story. And believe it or not, you and I are a part of that story.

So over the next few weeks as we try to look at the Bible as one big Christmas story, hopefully we’ll be able to see where we fit into the picture. Hopefully we’ll be able to see how the whole Bible – how all of history – is a History of Hope – a grand story that each one of us is very much a part of.

I don’t know if you’re as excited about this as I am, but I trust that by the end of December, you will be.

Our story begins as I said before, In the beginning.

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