a drop of water

A neuro surgeon gave a brief testimony about compassion this week before Pastor Jamie gave the sermon Part One: Loving Our Neighbors in the series, Building a Community of that Loves the World.  He talked about how God was encouraging him to pray with his patients.  He explained how he was worried about being misunderstood.  If he prayed with his patients, would they think he doesn’t know what he is doing or didn’t study hard enough in his classes?  If he prayed with his patients, would they feel like he is trying to convert them?  If he prayed with his patients, would his reputation be muddled by people labeling him as one of those “weird” people who talk to God?  If he prayed with his patients, and the procedure was not successful, would he have done more spiritual damage than good?

But now he prays for his patients, “Dear Heavenly Father, Thank you for always being with this person their whole life.  Please give me the wisdom and the success to repair their blood vessels.  In Jesus name, amen.”  He shared how he realized that Jesus said we will be misunderstood, because he [Jesus] was misunderstood.  The fear of being misunderstood is not a reason not to love.  By overcoming this fear of being misunderstood, he realized that the greatest form of authentic love for someone is to pray for them.  As his patients look to him to work miracles in the blood vessels of their brain, he is able to acknowledge the one true God and his power to heal.

I fear being misunderstood.  I think the root of that is the misconception that I “understand so much” that others will have a hard time understanding what I’m saying.  Or maybe that what I am trying to do is so complicated that others won’t have the background to understand what I am trying to say or do. But when did God’s love and a relationship with God get so difficult to understand?  Neither should be difficult to understand.  They may be difficult to receive, but that is not a sufficient reason to not love. Kingdom style loving is like sowing seeds on the rocks, the path, the shallow soil and the good soil.

A Community that Loves God – A Message from Mark 12:28-31
Sermon by Jamie Wilson @ Coast Vineyard on October 5th, 2008

Jamie’s sermon was focused on Mark 12:30, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” and challenged us to assess our spiritual condition against this passage.  The four questions he posed were:

1. What do I want the most in life?
2. Are there emotions that I hide from God?
3. Are my thoughts obedient to Christ?
4. Do I ever get exhausted serving God?

He explained the aim of each of these questions alongside the four aspects of loving God with your heart, soul, mind and strength.  What we love with our heart is what we want most in life; it is what drives us and what we hope for.  For me I know I hope for success.  Wresting with identifying and expressing our emotions to God is very much apart of loving God with all of our soul.  For me I know I hide my impatience and frustration from God.  Cleaning up our intentions and trying not to focus solely on how “we” performed in life is important in loving God with all our mind.  For me critiquing how well I do takes center stage too often.  The last connection was that we must be pouring and spending all our strength (our life) to pursue God.  This is not an argument for burnout, but an encouragement to love God with all of your strength.  For me, I err towards the side of burnout a little too easily. Jamie closed up the message with Matthew 13:44 in an encouragement to recover our passion for God by discovering our need for God, surrendering before God, and committing to God.

Sermon @ Coast Vineyard by Michelle Wilson on September 21st, 2008

Let Me In! Learning to Cry Out to God When We Need Help — A message from Revelation 3:14-22

Laodicea was famous for its wealth (banks with great capital and the ability to lend and be generously charitable with neighboring cities.)  When the city was completely leveled by an earthquake, they refused the Roman government’s aid because they didn’t need outside help to rebuild.  They were famous for fashion, specifically a finely woven black wool that was desired across the ancient world.  They were also famous for medicine, specifically their eye doctors and their medical school.  It seems apparent, that most Laodiceans had very few felt needs, were completely self sufficient and relatively lukewarm as far as Christianity goes.  They had so much that they were out of touch with what they truly needed.

These three aspects of the city of Laodicea plays into human condition where we are poor (ultimately material wealth is worthless), we are blind (we can have the best optometrists in the world but still not see God), and we can be in fashion but still covered in sin).  The three aspects were further lined up with what God offers us through Jesus death on the cross, namely spiritual wealth as heirs to God, cleansing from sin and new sinless coverings, and restored relationship with the triune God.

Michelle ended the sermon with the phrase “I stand at the door and knock…”, positioning Jesus outside our heart’s door willing to step into our messyness and transform our lives, redeeming and healing along the way.  She suggested that we’ve found a place to hide from God despite his knocking and that God’s provision and presence comes with us opening the door in admission that we need help.

Sermon @ Coast Vineyard by Jamie Wilson on September 28th, 2008

Building a Community of Love (a message from Acts 2:42-47)

A Dream for Our Church…We aim to build a community of love…

• A community that loves God. (Passionately)
• A community that loves each other. (Most effective method of communication and apologetics)
• A community that loves the world. (With the same sacrificial love that God loved us first with)

The Building Blocks for a Community of Love…We are suppose to be a sign to the present and coming Kingdom of God

• A commitment to the Bible. (God’s word.  Often times we don’t know when to say what, or what even to say.)
• A commitment to sharing life together. (Christ’s disciples were known by their love for each other, committed to the relationships and the pain and joys of lif are the things that matter.)
• A commitment to worship. (“We become what we worship.” -NT Wright.  The body of Jesus, broken for us is our unity.)
• A commitment to prayer. (Intentionality, sticking with it, and pressing into situations with prayer is where we catch glimpses God’s heart.)
• The power of the Holy Spirit. (Tension and messiness are a given when the Holy Spirit starts acting).
• The practice of generosity. (open and generous, our God is fundamentally giving).
• A community that is really love will grow as the result of new faith.  (If the first six are present, it will be hard for keep this seventh aspect from being evident.  Likewise, if any of the first six are absent, the seventh will likely be impossible.

This was a good reminder to me about the importance of love in our everyday lives.  Each of the commitments that are building blocks for a community of love are an expression of love.  A commitment to the Bible is a love for God’s word to influence and transform our minds and hearts.  A commitment to sharing life together is a love for the social structure that God has designed for us.  A commitment to worship is a love for God in who he is to us, the world, and what he has done for us and the world.  A commitment to prayer is a love for our relationship of dependence on God and his provision for us.  A commitment to the power of the Holy Spirit is a love to see God supernaturally guide and counsel us.  A commitment to generosity is a love for the people around us who God has created and their physical, emotional and spiritual well being.  And lastly, a commitment to a growing community of faith is a love for God’s creation in light of his plan to save it from sin.

Many of our actions are motivated by our need to be loved.  We work to be loved in forms like acceptance, admiration, respect, and devotion from various sources, mostly in our relationships with ourselves, strangers, co-workers, friends family and God.  We have a self-image that we work tirelessly to perfect, because we think it will earn the love of the people we are in relationship with.

These actions span all walks of life as we buy the latest fashions, make resolutions to frequent the gym, work long hours in our careers, make sacrifices and decisions that we normally wouldn’t, give gifts, and try to meet expectations all in the name of prerequisting love.  I believe that our identity is deeply influenced in how we receive love, namely the unconditional love that can not be earned and is given freely by our close friends, family and God.

One response to unconditional love is to completely reject it as a debt of responsibility and an infringement on our individuality.  When our parents have high expectations for us that chafe with our personal goals, or when our relationship with God is perceived as just a list of do’s and dont’s, we disappear in the opposite direction.

A second response to unconditional love is to leave it like an unopened Christmas gift under the tree.  We refuse to accept our parents helping hand in the face of failure (that they warned us about) or the forgiveness that God has extended to us through Jesus’ death on the cross because our pride and self-dependency has moved it just beyond reach.

A third and optimal response to unconditional love is realizing that what we have been trying to earn in all the wrong places is already available and unconditional.  Accepting it wholeheartedly provides a basis for us to redirect it outwards to those around us, and frees us (in success and failure) to explore our individual response  to that initial gift.

This is the kind of love that satisfies our need.  Granted we can not force people to accept our unconditional love for them, I believe we can do a lot of good in tailoring the expression of our unconditional love for them to ease its acceptance.  On that same note, I believe it can do a lot of good in realizing how we accept unconditional love from our close friends, our family and God.  Even though everyone has a different shape void, the unconditional love that fills it starts with what God has already freely give us.