Every road trip starts with an explosion- gas hits the starter, and a little bomb goes off in your engine. But thats not the only kind of explosion; the energy to move anywhere is begun by an explosion (however small) of dissatisfaction about where you are.
The psalms of ascent follow the rules of the road trip. They begin with an explosion. But the destination of the journey is radically different. The journey ends in Jerusalem, at the presence of God. Listen to the sermon below:
Fairy tales are our truest stories. They are so true that we tell them to our children, to help our kids understand what it means to be human on a basic level. So when a short fairy tale has been retold for a thousand years, and has corollary stories in cultures as diverse as Germany, India, and South Africa, we should pay attention. We are encountering something that is not a-cultural, but trans-cultural. Something deeply, deeply human.
The tale in question is humpty dumpty. Its the story of a cracked up life; a life that nobody could fix, not even the king’s horses or the king’s men. Who among us hasn’t felt like that? It’s a story that asks a question; a question whose answer is found only in the King himself. A king who descended on Pentecost to reach us where we are, in all our loneliness and shame, and reorient us around himself. A king who responds to our prayers. Full sermon below.
How do you delight in something as mundane as a urinal? When you realize that somebody (somebody famous?) put it there. What if the discipline of Sabbath forces us to be enjoy ourselves and our world, because somebody (somebody famous?) put us/it there? New sermon on below!
“When I dream, I don’t just dream any old dream. No, sir. I dream about being three-time Golden Globe–winning actor Jim Carrey. Because then I would be enough. It would finally be true, and I could stop this – this terrible search, for what I know ultimately won’t fulfill me.”
What does Jim Carrey know that we don’t? What if God’s Sabbath provides a way out? Watch the speech here, and new sermon at the link below!
Everybody loves rest. But sometimes it feels like nothing gets in the way of a restful Sunday like a worship service. We think of worship as a thing that we have to do in order to keep God from being angry at us, and so worship and rest seem diametrically opposed. Worship is work.
The author of Hebrews sees it another way. What if worship is isn’t about making sure that God is faithful to us, but that we remain faithful to Him? And what if it is only in Him that we find any rest at all?
The images of Notre Dame burning this past week were tragic for historic, cultural, and religious reasons. But one of the reasons this event shocked us is because we can identity. We are all cathedrals, but we are all on fire. How do we get renewal? Check out our Easter sermon below.
Some of us want to move forward toward Utopia; others want to conserve the Utopia that we lost. But one thing we have in common, at one time or another, is this: all of us want the Kingdom without the King.
Western culture values two things: image, and ease. Put them together and we have created people stuck in what Mark Sayers calls the P.A.C.T- the Passive Aggressive Consumer Trap. What sorts of structures and leadership is necessary in a world like this? Listen to our sermon at the link below.
A church is fundamentally a covenantal community, founded on the belief that promises power passion, and not the other way around. This is the last in our series on the promises that we make to one another as we join the church. See others in the series here.
“Q: In loving obedience, do you submit yourself to the government and discipline of this church, promising to seek the peace, purity, and prosperity of this congregation as long as you are a member of it?”
Once on a church mission trip in Louisiana doing hurricane relief, our group was forced to sleep in a bunkhouse with two other groups from different parts of the country. After a long day of building houses, clearing rubble, and hauling it away, we were ready to sack out. Unfortunately, our newfound traveling companions were asleep before us, which wouldn’t have been a problem, except for the snoring. I remember lying awake in the middle of the night, listening to what sounded like two lawn mowers running over tambourines on a tin roof, when one member of the other group shot up in bed and screamed, “PLEASE, JUST BREATHE THROUGH YOUR EARS!”
Apparently this is possible.
This membership question is an attempt to help us be good traveling companions to one another, on the journey from where and who we are now to that day when we see Jesus as he really is, when the new heavens and the new earth are revealed to us (Revelation 21). It spells out that the government of this church (known as the elders of the Session) will, as their mission, invite us to do three things:
1. Seek peace. Peace is not the absence or cessation of conflict. Instead, it is the deep, abiding intimacy that comes from truly knowing your brothers and sisters in Christ. Peace takes time to cultivate; it takes grace, as we learn to bear with one another. It takes courage, to keep from running from one another. Sometimes, it takes humility, as we learn to “breathe through our ears” so that we don’t keep one another awake.
2. Seek purity. Purity invites us not to avoid one another, but that we strive to be instruments of God’s healing and holiness for our fellow traveling companions. We are involved in one another’s lives, not for the sake of being busybodies, but because relationship with the body of Christ is one of the ways in which God crafts us into the image of his Son.
3. Seek prosperity. Seeking prosperity means that we long for our group to succeed in the pursuit of its kingdom mission. As members of this church, we serve in its ministries and missions, not those of other churches, as valuable as they may be. When (not “if”) our church is deficient in some area, we strive to improve it, rather than consuming a better product at a different church like we are in the buffet line at Ryan’s.
A church is fundamentally a covenantal community, founded on the belief that promises power passion, and not the other way around. This is the last in our series on the promises that we make to one another as we join the church. See others in the series here.
“Q: Do you accept that the doctrines and principles of the Standards of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church are founded upon the Scriptures?”
If you were a high school student in Columbia, SC in the late 1990s (like some of my older friends), there was only one place to get any sort of frozen goodness- the TCBY on Forest Drive. All of your friends worked at TCBY, increasing the chance that you could get a decent sized free “sample” from behind the counter. So we were confused when the TCBY shut down, all our friends got fired… and a Baskin Robbins took its place. Wasn’t it all ice cream? Then, not three blocks away, the new ice cream revolution continued- a Marble Slab, followed by a Cold Stone Creamery. Options abounded.
In many ways, denominations are like ice cream stores- they arise in response to different cultural situations, providing unique insights, emphases, strengths and weaknesses to the witness of the church down through the ages. The important thing to remember is that, though there are many options, its still all ice cream. The Associate Reformed Presbyterian (ARP) Church, of which Christ the King-Savannah is a part, delights in the unity we have with any denomination which is founded on the confession that “Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God,” (Matthew 16:16) as made explicit in the Nicene Creed. At the same time, we believe that our heritage as ARPs uniquely situates us as a group of churches testifying to the truth of the gospel in our own cultural moment. It is all ice cream, but this is our ice cream, and we love it. To find out more about what it means to be an ARP, click here.