Sermon Leftovers

Life-Change made simple requires two steps. 1) Get rid of the bad stuff in your life. 2) Replace it with good stuff. This seems ridiculously simple, but often the simplest things in life are the hardest to believe. However, this formula doesn’t originate with me, it was Paul’s idea about 2000 years ago. Read and contemplate Colossians 3:12-17. The part of Colossians 3 which you read was part two of our formula above. These were the things you are to bring into your life to facilitate spiritual Life-Change. Consider this. Paul says (v15) to let the peace of God reign in our hearts. Can you do that? If you can relax and be at peace, knowing that God is in control, you’ll have a much easier time loving those around you. Those who have peace can love others because they aren’t worried about taking care of themselves. As a result, they are able to “above all, put on love”. Paul’s point is that if you are a loving person; your heart will be compassionate, you will be

Read and Contemplate 1 Peter 2:11-12. In our efforts to be "in the world", we face a constant temptation to become indistinguishable from the world. One must be careful that in pursuit of being relevance, the true distinctness of faith is not lost. Because an externally-focused life requires loving the people in the world (particularly those who are "hard to love")  it can be easy to get so caught up in social causes that the gospel is lost. It is right, appropriate, and incumbent on the church to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoners, and comfort the oppressed. However, it would be better for those people to enter the kingdom hungry, naked, and captive than for them to be full, clothed, and free but miss the kingdom. The other side of this coin is that Christians can sometimes, in an effort to bring change to the world, become so politically entrenched that the lines between God's kingdom and the political parties become impossible t

Life is a series of endings... And new beginnings. The new beginnings are always great, but we often miss out on great beginnings because endings are often painful. Too often we choose to continue something we know should end, simply because we are afraid the ending might be too difficult . As a result, we often miss out on what could have been a fabulous beginning. STOP! You don't need to keep doing that For some people, endings are never an option. Rather than choosing to stop something that is no longer healthy, they will work themselves into exhaustion trying to solve an impossible problem. Sometimes the truth is uncomfortable, and for that reason people are often unwilling to face it. Almost always, this type of avoidance leads to an even more uncomfortable situation or truth. Richard Nixon learned this lesson the hard way. When the watergate scandal first broke, he could have stepped in, apologized, and ended the wrong behavior. This would have been painful. He wo