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Foundations
The pastor is only a part of the church. The church is made up of many parts. You are a part of the church. We each have a calling that God has put on our lives to serve the Kingdom of God in a way that witnesses to who Christ Jesus is. The difficult part is figuring out what that call is. Though all our calls might look different, they all have the same starting point. First and foremost, we must believe in who God says we are: beloved, royalty, forgiven, redeemed, God’s!
If I were to sum up my life shaking, chain breaking experience with God, it would be to simply say, “I once was lost but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.” I believe in God, not because of what others have told me, but because of what I have experienced to be true in my own life. God has pulled me out of the grave and then in God’s crazy ways, decided to call me into service for His church. This is my call…
Church: a dwelling place for God. Over this period of Covid-19, for some of us, our dwelling place has taken on a whole new meaning. It has become our working place, our teaching place, our living, eating, breathing, sleeping, our everything place. To dwell is not to just be in one place, but to completely utilize, maximize, and inhabit that place. That is who the church is. The dwelling place of God, the body of Christ, where God’s functions on earth are worked out through you and me.
The Bible is simply pages with ink upon it until it is written onto our hearts by the Holy Spirit and lived out as a witness to the world of who God is. The Bible is both powerful and powerless.
“Ruah” is one of my favorite Hebrew words. It means breath, life. You see this word, or variations of it, anytime you see God’s life-giving breath in the Old Testament. Then, as we move into the New Testament where Greek is largely used, we see “pneuma” as the word for Spirit, wind, or breath. Again, anytime we see pneuma in scripture, we see something that is life-sustaining and life-giving.
Huge sigh of relief… When you spend time talking about the Trinity, it always seems like, once we get to Jesus, we can breath a sigh of relief. Jesus is the person of Trinity that people most often connect with the easiest. Why? Because Jesus was an actual person.
It is impossible to begin the conversation about God without also acknowledging the Trinity. It is impossible to acknowledge and begin to understand the Trinity without first recognizing our own limits on language and human understanding.
I believe prayer is often treated like a last ditch effort. Something has gone wrong, I’ve tried everything else, maybe I should throw up a prayer. Or prayer is treated as a good thought or a well wish. Prayer is so much more than all of that. Prayer is a conversation with the Creator. There is power and there is relationship building in prayer. I believe fully and completely in prayer. It is essential to our well being and our lives.
