God Is Generous – So We Don’t Have To Cling To What We Have

One of the Greatest aids to my spiritual growth over the last couple years are the 4 G’s, outlined in Tim Chester’s book, You Can Change.   Chester says that All Sin and Negative emotions are the result of not believing some truth about God.  Sin and Negative Emotions happen when we believe lies, and the lie of Satan, instead.  To combat sin and negative emotions we then need to hold up the freeing truth of God.  The four truths that Chester suggests are:

1. God is great – so we don’t have to be in control

2. God is glorious – so we don’t have to fear others

3. God is good – so we don’t have to look elsewhere

4. God is gracious – so we don’t have to prove ourselves

You can see how Chester links each truth to the freedom to us they give to follow God.  One area where I find the 4 Gs harder to apply is to Stewardship.  Yes, they do apply in part, God is Good so I don’t have to look for my good in what my money and time can give me.  God is Great so I don’t have to look to my money and time to give me the power to secure my life.  Yet I’ve been looking for another truth that could be memorized that specifically connected to us giving of what we are and have to God’s mission and glory. 

The 5th G I suggest is: God is Generous – so I don’t have to cling to what I have.  God promises to provide for us as we live for Him.    Look at Mark 10: 28-30 where Peter reminded Jesus of everything that he and the other disciples gave up to follow Him:

“I tell you the truth,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields–and with them, persecutions) and in the age to come, eternal life.

As we give God will keep giving to provide for our needs and ultimately our eternal need of life with him in a renewed creation. 

Paul says, “We are God’s Workmanship, Created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph 2:10). When God asks us to do something, He enables us to it. 

2 Corinthians 9:6,8-15  Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly and whoever sows generously will also reap generously….And God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that you may always have enough of everything and may provide in abundance for every good work…

10 He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your resources and increase the harvest of your righteousness. 11 You will be enriched in every way for great generosity, which through us will produce thanksgiving to God; 12 for the rendering of this service not only supplies the wants of the saints but also overflows in many thanksgivings to God.

God generously gives to us so that we might give to others.  He supplies all our needs and gives to us what we need to serve others.  Sometimes we’re moved by God and asked by God to give what we think we’re unable to give.  Yet even then, he provides for us.  The Widow at Zarephath gave more than she thought she was able to when she gave the last of her food to feed Elijah, yet God provided for her in greater ways than she could imagine.  In John 6:9 the disciples forgot the truth that God was Generous and they didn’t want to serve others because the cost seemed to much for them to bear.  Yet they forgot that God was Generous and would bear the cost themselves and supply what they needed to accomplish Jesus’ request to feed the 5000 people who had come to see him.  A little boy, with the faith of a child, remembered that God was Generous, so he didn’t have to cling to what he had. He gave up all the food that he had for that day trusting that God could use it to help feed the crowd.  The amazing part is that the boy probably ate more than what he had given and they had far more left over than what they started with. 

God is Generous – We don’t have to cling to what we have.  We don’t have to run after other things either.  We can serve others and give of our time, talents, and treasures because God will give us all we need for our well-being and all we need to accomplish his will. 

Questions:

• How often do you give of your time, talents, and treasures?  How often do you find yourself serving and sacrificing for others?  What positive and negative thoughts do you have when you give and serve others?
• How does remembering God’s generosity give you freedom to be generous?
• What truths do you have to remember about God to give you the freedom to follow him joyfully?

Images found here and here

There Is Surely A Future Hope For Me

Do not let your heart envy sinners, but always be zealous for the fear of the Lord.  There is surely a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off.  Pr 23:17-18 

I’ve been reading through Proverbs over the last week and this verse seems to sum up the theme of proverbs: to be wise is to see that God is better and the only lasting good.  How often I’ve envied sinners in my heart.  How often I’ve wanted what was forbidden me because I doubted that God had something better in store.  When I’m tempted to secure my own good and pleasure, when my heart starts to yearn for that which it wasn’t meant for, I need to remember that, “God is Good so I don’t have to look elsewhere.” 

The brokenness and emptiness that we often feel in this world will never be cured by attaining some other broken and empty thing.  This world is fading.  This world will one day end and my life here will end as well.  Yet while my life will end here, there is surely a hope for me.  God sent His Son, Jesus, into this broken world.  He repaired my broken relationship with God by paying the debt I owed Him because of my rebellion.  One day he’ll also repair this broken world, my broken body, and my broken soul.  I’ll experience the ultimate good when God restores all things and I’ll see him face-to-face and live with him forever. 

God is Good.  I don’t have to look elsewhere.  I don’t have to chase fleeting pleasure I can never keep.  Rather I can be zealous for God’s good, because his good will last.  My hope in His good will not be cut off.  There is surely a hope for me.  There is surely a hope for us. 

 

For more on how God is Good and other truths that free us, check out Missional Training #12 – The 4 Gs and Tim Chester’s Blog and Tim’s book, You Can Change.

picture found here

 

 

Sermon: How to Kill Sin

 A while back I gave a message,How to Kill Sin,based off of Tim Chester’s “The 4 G’s.”  Check it out if you’d like. please forgive the feedback the first few seconds of the audio.

Go here for more information on the 4G’s

Leading to the Launch of our first two Missional Communities

A passion of mine has always been how to reach the unreached, how to give a credible Gospel witness, how to share the Gospel in such a way that the current generation hears and understands it.  I’ve studied church planting for years and have studied Missional Communities for the last couple years.  Yet I’ve found that often times it’s difficult to put what you learn into practice.  I wish I could give 6 months of my life to join  a church that did MCs well and then come back and do what I’ve experienced.  However, we often don’t have the luxury of that.  We simply have to try what we’ve read about and adapt as we need to along the way. 

Over the last four months we’ve been involved in the business of planting a church.  In late September, our sending church approved of our mission plan and funding.  In October we gathered a core team.  We began this blog so that we could share many of the things that we’ve studies and discussed. 

Where We’ve Been

Here’s what our Core Team has been doing as we’ve gathered weekly:

1. In those meetings we discuss a chapter of the Gospel-Centred Life over  a meal.  This volume, written by Missional Community pioneer, Tim Chester, does a great job of sharing how the Gospel addresses everyday life and how we’re called to live in Gospel Communities on Mission.  Most of our MCs will use this material at some point.
2. After each meal, we’ve gone through The Story Formed Way, a ten week session of interactive dialogue and story telling through the key narratives of scripture.  The idea behind it is to give the participants a biblical and systematic theology yet be equally accessible to the novice and the mature Christian. 
3. Almost every week, I’ll also put up a blog post entitled Missional Training.  I ask that our core team review that video or post and we often discuss those posts in our meals as well.  I recognize that not all people have time to watch the videos, but it gives the self-learners some direction and also posts that our future leaders can point their MCs to for training. 

Where to begin with starting MCs?

We are near the conclusion of our training and are ready to plant our first two Missional Communities.  For the mean time, we’ve called these MC East and MC West.  As each MC gathers and discusses where meeting place and their mission, they will probably take on a more specific name for a neighborhood, development, or street they meet on.  We’ve divided the members of our Core Team into these groups based off of their proximity to one another and their affinity.  We have diverse ages in each group.  Yet we chose to keep our three guys in their early 20s together and our three families with young children together at this time. 

My wife and I will attend the group with young families since we have a 9 mo old daughter.  Since I’m the pastor, I plan to be at both MCs initially for the first 4-6 weeks to guide, mentor, coach the leaders and be present to answer (if I can) any questions that come up.  (I wont need to do this at the beginning of each MC, but my initial leaders felt like they needed me present since we’re really learning what it means to be a Gospel Community on Mission.  After that initial period, My wife and I will probably take a few people back to our neighborhood, or somewhere else, to help start another MC.

So, As we seek to launch these MCs, there’s a few things that will need to be done.

1. The leaders of each MC will pick a date for starting The Story Formed Way. They will consult their MC members and pick a date about 4-5 weeks out.  
2. In the mean time, the leaders will work with their team to make sure that there are social and/or service events planned for the weeks leading up to The Story.  They will invite their prospects to those events to introduce them to other members of their MC.
3. As well as big social events, they will make personal plans with those prospects as well.  We’ve been talking about this from the beginning.  Most members of our core have been trying to engage their unchurched friends and neighbors.  We’ve encouraged our members to  invite them into their live before inviting them into their MC. 
4. At some point in those 4-5 weeks, their to invite their prospects to come to The Story.  They’ll explain that it will include many of the people you’ve been hanging out with.  It’s low key, in a home, with no expectations of biblical knowledge.  Trust the spirit on when to invite them and how to invite them.  If they say, “No,” keep inviting them to social and service events.  You might have to build your relationship a little further before they trust you enough to open up. 
5. Who should you invite?  We’ve been talking about those people in our lives who need Jesus.  Each member should have been trying to build relationships with someone that is unchurched or dechurched.  Are they family, friends, acquaintances, coworkers?   Who can you engage?  Who have you engaged?  Who has asked you about the Church Plant?  Who has shown interest in joining us?  Are there members of St. Paul who have left the church in the last year or so for various reasons, but might be engaged in a Gospel Centered Community on Mission?   

 

Correcting Mistakes

In the mean time, my core group will continue to meet weekly.   After listening again to Jeff Vanderstelt’s Gospel Fluency, I realized that I had made a near fatal mistake in our core group training.  I hadn’t been asking my core to rehearse the Gospel.  I simply asked them a couple weeks back, “What is the Gospel?”  I received blank looks, the names of the Gospel books in the Bible, and “Jesus on the Cross.”    Now my team knew the Gospel.  Yet they weren’t prepared to share it. 

So in the following weeks, we will be asking “What is the Gospel?” and will look for an answer that speaks of the whole story of God: Creation –> Fall –> Redemption –> Restoration.  We will also bring up hypothetical situations and role play by asking, “How does the Gospel Address this.  We have been studying the 4 Gs since the beginning, but last week I made up cards with the 4 Gs and how to use them.  We’ll encourage each member to actually memorize them and use them in explaining how the Gospel addresses sins and anxieties in life. 

A second big mistake that we made was  that we’ve talked a lot about reaching out to our unchurced family, friends, neighbors and acquantainces, yet we were not intentional about keeping each other accountable.  Because of this, it was easy to think about making plans to grow in our relationships with these prospects, but not actually get around to doing it all that much.  In the future, we will share with one another who are prospects are, ask one another how we’ve engaged them in the previous week, and we can also pray for those people our fellow MC members are working to win over. 

Again, we are learning how to church plant and launch Missional Communities as we go along.  I hope what I’ve shared here might help some future church planter or MC leader.  If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment.