” He told me about a farmer who would wait until he came to a spot bare of grass to scrape the manure off his shoes: “That’s what I mean. You have to keep it in your mind.”
Wendell Berry The Art of Loading Brush
Each week I hope to share thoughts from sermons delivered at First Alliance Church where we attend.
This week Pastor Paul delivered the third lesson in his series on Colossians entitled “The Supremacy of Christ”. The BIG IDEA he builds upon In this series is : “The gospel is the supremacy of Christ which absolutely changes everything.”
This week’s lesson was entitled Jesus + Nothing= Everything. You can listen to the lesson HERE. In my previous Pew Note post I had alluded to Christ+Nothing as a concept that had challenged me earlier in my journey. I was grateful Paul put some flesh (pun intended) on the subject today.
The defining issue at Colossae was the assertion that Jesus alone was not sufficient. Teachers were insisting that the Christian life required more than Jesus. Pastor Paul identified categories of additions to Jesus as: Reason (2:18), Ritual (2:16) and Rules (2:20-21)
Apostle Paul was absolute regarding the supremacy of Christ. (1:18). We live our lives in him. Who I am as a Christian is rooted in who Jesus is. To the extent my life does not reflect the image of Jesus, I am deceiving myself, and as Pastor Paul illustrated, living by moonlight. Moonlight is only adequate for short-term survival. To experience life in all it fullness, we need sunlight. Exposed to sunlight we will flourish and live fully. The Message’s paraphrase of 2 Cor.3:16-18 provides beautiful imagery of being exposed to sunlight.
“Whenever … they turn to face God …, God removes the veil and there they are—face-to-face! They suddenly recognize that God is a living, personal presence, not a piece of chiseled stone. And when God is personally present, a living Spirit, … We’re free of it! All of us! Nothing between us and God, our faces shining with the brightness of his face. And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.”
??2 Corinthians? ?3:16-18? ?MSG??
Compelling questions I am left with are: First, to what extent am I living in moonlight? Secondly, where do I find sunlight , …becoming brighter and more beautiful… as I become like Him…?
The balance of Pastor Paul’s sermon provides direction to a sun-drenched existence.
Beginning with this post, I plan each week to share thoughts from sermons delivered at First Alliance Church where we attend.
This week Pastor Paul delivered the second lesson in his series on Colossians entitled “The Supremacy of Christ”. The BIG IDEA he builds upon is : “The gospel is the supremacy of Christ which absolutely changes everything.”
If you are interested you can listen at https://faclex.com/sermons/ . It is not my intention to critique or rehash his lessons (although I reserve that right) but to share thoughts and ideas that I found of interest as I listened and took notes.
This weeks lesson was “God’s Big Ideas for our lives” (Col 1: 9-14). As Pastor Paul emphasized the importance of keeping our eyes on Jesus, reminding us that the issue at Colossae was some were saying that Christ was not sufficient. That brought to mind an encounter many years ago with a publication whose tag line was “Christ + Nothing”. My first reaction was negative, largely due to the source of the publication and my biases and presuppositions. But when I began to ponder the idea, it became a significant turn in my spiritual journey. Wrestling with that idea is a worthy endeavor.
Pastor Paul later encouraged us to evaluate change in our lives as we move toward being more Christlike. He cautioned against expecting/demanding dramatic change but to think more in terms of improvement. That brought to mind the idea of approaching change as a 1 degree course change. If I can effect a permanent 1 degree change in my life, it will ultimately result in dramatic change. Ask any astronaut or ship’s captain what would happen if their calculations are wrong by 1 degree.
There was much valuable content in the lesson, but these are just two ideas that came to my mind.
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My favorite blogger Richard Beck wrote today on mystery in his faith journey. His words resonated deeply with my own experience and current understanding.
Mystery can be a ticklish business. I would say that, for most of my life, I always felt that an appeal to mystery was a cop-out, a way of ignoring the question and shutting down the conversation. The answer Quia–“Just because”–can be infuriating.
And yet, here on the other side of my middle age, I’m starting to appreciate mystery more and more. I think in my younger years I gave reason too much credit. There are things I know and believe about God that I simply cannot articulate. Words, literally, fail me. Poetry gets a little closer, but not much. My faith is growing more mystical as the years pass. And that has been a great grace.
In their book “Practical Wisdom,” Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe tell the story of a hospital janitor named Luke. In Luke’s hospital there was a young man who’d gotten into a fight and was now in a permanent coma. The young man’s father sat with him every day in silent vigil, and every day Luke cleaned the room. But one day the father was out for a smoke when Luke cleaned it.Later that afternoon, the father found Luke and snapped at him for not cleaning the room. The first-mountain response is to see your job as cleaning rooms. Luke could have snapped back: I did clean the room. You were out smoking. The second-mountain response is to see your job as serving patients and their families. In that case you’d go back in the room and clean it again, so that the father could have the comfort of seeing you do it. And that’s what Luke did.
The quote above is from a recent article by David Brooks entitled “The Moral Peril of Meritocracy” . Powerful and convicting, Brooks is a voice in the wilderness. Which mountain are we climbing?