living for eternity today

Tag: confession

Couch Cushion Confessions

Have you ever done the terrifying task of moving furniture in your home? Ok so it’s not all that terrifying but it could be! Let me explain.

In our home, we most of the time eat in the kitchen but sometimes we’ll overflow into the living room. When we have more guests into our home than can fit around the table, we’ll generally spill over into the living room and use the couch. Or at night when we’re sitting down to watch tv sometimes we’ll grab a bowl of popcorn or other snack. And this very fact is what makes moving furniture a potentially dangerous, or at minimum humbling and embarrassing task.

The food that somehow miraculously misses our mouth hole tends to make its way into the crevasses in the couch. It lodges between the cushions and sometimes even bounces (or I’m convinced crawls) under the couch into the back most corner where it’s virtually unreachable.

We can vacuum the floors and even the couch but unless we remove the cushions and use the special tools on the vacuum, we’ll leave a lot of dirt and dust and food lodged under the cushions.

This is kind of like life in this world. As followers of Jesus, we have this thing called confession. And at its core, confession is like peeling back the couch cushions and revealing what’s underneath that we refused to deal with. Confession is coming to the harsh reality that something is a miss in our life and we need to have some help dealing with it.

Look I get it. No one likes to deal with the junk under the cushions. And if we’re being honest, most of the time no one can see what’s lurking in the hidden crevasses of our lives. But not dealing with these matters, doesn’t make them go away. It’s like Jesus’ words to the church leaders of his day that they were clean on the outside and dead on the inside. He called them whitewashed tombs. Nothing living exists in a tomb. It needs to be brought into the light to find life.

God loves you for who you are but loves you too much to leave you where you are. Click To Tweet

Confession is coming to Jesus in the mess of our lives and letting him have his way with us. Here’s the deal you don’t need to have it all together to come to Jesus but when you do come to Jesus you better expect to end up being changed.

What The World Needs Now

This world is a hot mess! I don’t really know how else to say it. People are fighting. Accusations are flying all over the place. Everyone things that their way the is the best way. We want things to get better and honestly many think that better is tied to a policy or person. But that’s not what’s going to make things better.

This week we baled on a message series to address the matters in our world. But not quite how you might think. While the issues in our nation are very much politically driven and we’re trying to find the right person to offer the right policy to fix what we feel is wrong, we have a short sighted view of the real problem.

The more time and effort we spend on short term, quick fixes the more short duration fixes we’ll discover – if we discover a fix at all. Specific people and policies are not what this world needs.

This world needs those who call themselves believers in Jesus to actually live like believers in Jesus. The world needs the church to be the church and or Christians to start living what they are claiming to be true. The world doesn’t need more love or acceptance or tolerance. The world needs forgiveness, healing and some hard truths spoken.

Some won’t like the message. Some will. The point is not to please everyone. The point is what’s needed isn’t always the thing that’s wanted. Sometimes the most needed thing is the least desired thing.

You get what you deserve!

It’s pretty easy to give words to Jesus. It’s way to simple to twist the words of the Bible to make them say just about anything we want. Over the past few weeks we’ve touched on just a couple of these statements that Jesus never said but we kind of think he said. The goal of the series was to show that we should be glad Jesus never actually said them! This week we wrapped up the series with the realization that life isn’t fair and that’s probably a good thing!

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Seven Words

Over the past several weeks in our midweek services at church we’ve been wrestling with the gospel, the good news of Jesus. Our task has been to take what we know of this good news message and summarize it in about seven words. There’s nothing magical about seven words. There’s nothing all that special about this number necessarily. The number seven is a simple number that is small enough to remember and long enough to pack a meaning. So what are your seven words? Continue reading

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