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OneLife West Sermon on Ephesians 6 and Parenting

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Bret Nicholson preached today on Ephesians 6 and parenting. It was a good day to do it, because it was also the first day that 6th graders are now in the main service with us. We have done the family pew thing for a long time, taking all of our kids in with us, but recently we realized our kids will get more out of their own classes and they go and enjoy them.

One thing not in these notes is where they described the Orange philosophy. My teens heard that and later in the day said it was cool how they do that. The red represents your home – where you live your life, and the yellow represents the church – the light of the world, and when they work together you get orange.

Jesus Manifesto: Works & Fruit vs. Jesus Christ

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So why do we preach rules, regulations, and laws instead of Christ? And why such an emphasis on “works”? Good works are simply fruit falling off a tree. If you will sink your roots deep in Christ, who is your life, you will not be able to stop the fruit from coming forth.

Sweet, Leonard; Viola, Frank (2010-06-01). Jesus Manifesto (p. 58). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

 

 

 

 

Abundant Life, Rule Free, from Jesus the Shepherd

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[I am sick as a dog today. stopped up, cold, runny nose, some stomach pains and nausea earlier. I’ve just been still in the chair surfing the internet for a while. It’s hard to think.]

v.8 Jesus isn’t talking about the prophets, but about false prophets and false teachers. The wild thing is, the converse of His statement is “if you listened to them, you are not my sheep”

Jesus contrasts Himself to the previous anti-shepherds by saying that He came for the sheep to have life abundantly. It seems like it would be easy to see from the previous chapter that the Pharisees are not on the side of having abundant life, but on the side of having abundant requirements, regulations, and judgments. I talked to a guy recently that is struggling to do the things “Jesus expects” and to do the things his pastor tells him to do. He is weighed down with burdens like the Pharisees would assign. ‘Do this activity this way. Don’t do this. This is wrong. This is good.’

Jesus was alive, and lived a lot talking about what the Kingdom of God was and what the Father is like. If I teach my son how to ride a bike by telling him all of the places he shouldn’t ride his bike and all of the ways he should not sit on his bike and all of the improper ways of holding the handle bars, he will never learn how to ride a bike. He will certainly be an expert on how to not ride a bike incorrectly! But he won’t be able to ride it 4 feet! When I taught my oldest son how to ride a bike, I assured him of this: “You will fall and it will hurt, but you can’t give up. I will take care of you and your booboos will get better, and you will become a better bike rider.” It was all true, and now he rides like the wind (and sometimes I wish I could get a little fear back into him!)

That’s how I think of Jesus giving us abundant life. He doesn’t train the sheep in how to avoid the wolf, or carry on telling the sheep how evil and hungry the wolf is. He just takes care of them and has them follow Him. How much of life is taken care of in that one little lesson?!

Follow the voice of the shepherd.

Here is to living life free in the Son, and trusting that the sheep of Christ will hear is voice and not be distracted by the sound of the [zealboy phrase edited out]

From Field Goals to Neighbors

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“Yet, because Moses gave you circumcision (though actually it did not come from Moses, but from the patriarchs), you circumcise a child on the Sabbath. Now if a child can be circumcised on the Sabbath so that the law of Moses may not be broken, why are you angry with me for healing the whole man on the Sabbath?”
(John 7:22-23 NIV)

I was just thinking about this and how God cared so much more about people being in a relationship with Him and having faith in Him than doing all of this stuff just right. To the Pharisees, all of life hinged on making sure you did every single thing just right and if someone did something wrong, finding out who did it and what exactly they did wrong.

God does not want us to be monitors and recorders of who wrongs us either. The Pharisees had a complicated flow-chart life of answering every moral question they could have. On what day should we circumcise a boy? What if that day is a sabbath? What if that day is a feast day? They could just click through the flowchart and think they knew what God wanted. Fast-forward that a couple thousand years, and they forget who that flowchart came from, and who it points to.

Saturday, my next door neighbor had a fire in his kitchen. Joe (my neighbor) severely burned his hands and had to be taken to Louisville for a few days to save his fingers. He is still there. He called me and asked me to take care of his dog and house and bring his stuff to the hospital, namely his laptop so he could skype his wife in Taiwan. On my way home I thought about Joe, and I thought about calling a guy at church that helped us move down here and get into living in the inner city.

At that moment I realized that for the past few years, maybe even a decade, I have viewed everyone I’ve worked with or been neighbors with as someone to be targeted, served, witnessed to, and converted. I haven’t been very open about that, but it has come out some as I talk about them, or think about them, or pray for them. That was my whole life with every person I came in contact with in Asia, and my whole point of moving to where I’ve moved.

But as I was driving home, I was praying for Joe’s fingers, and he just became Joe. He is a computer guy by trade, and if he lost his fingers it would be a big big big deal. I didn’t care about finding a way to witness to him or wonder if I should have slipped a bible into his computer bag or prayed by his bedside or something, I just cared about him being healed.

I feel like in my flowchart lifestyle, I’ve disconnected myself some from people God loves, and just gone off of a self-created mandate to do christian things for people. I think God is starting to free me from my christianese and showing me how to just follow Jesus. He’s working into me a real love for my co-workers and neighbors that doesn’t keep track of a law and how they are breaking it, but instead is beginning to sincerely love them and care about them as normal people and not field goals. I can only imagine how much more the life of Jesus will shine out to real people instead of goals, but I’m not going to concern myself with that, else I just go right back where I was. I’ll focus on Jesus, and His glorious ways, and love my neighbors at the same time.