One of the core beliefs of Christianity is “God with us.” In fact, that is the literal meaning of “Emanuel,” the prophesied name for the Jesus, the Son of God. He came in meekness. He came as a baby, was scoffed at by people, and was eventually killed.

Because of His meekness, sometimes we make light of the glory of God. In Isaiah 6, we see a different image. Isaiah was overwhelmed by the vision he saw of God’s holiness. He was convinced that he was a dead man because he was not worthy of the glory of the presence of God. He then experienced the grace of God as the angel touched his mouth with a coal from the altar. After receiving the grace, he was then commissioned to be a messenger for God, sharing both the holiness and the grace of God with people who had made light of God’s presence. (Listen to the sermon from Sunday.)

In what ways do we make light of the glory of the presence of God today? How should we approach Him in pray and in worship? What can we do to encourage each other to remember the awe-inspiring glory and holiness of God?

God comes Meekly

John 1:1-18 expresses some of the greatest surprises in the Bible for me. One is that God would become a human being, a man, with flesh and blood. He got tired and hungry. He eventually died. All of this while He was fully God. And all of this so that He might rescue those who were opposed to Him. That’s surprising.

Related to that is the surprise that God allows (at least for a time) people to oppose Him. The Word (aka, the Son, Jesus Christ) shines in the darkness. The darkness doesn’t understand and cannot control the light, yet the darkness still remains. The Son came into the world He created, the world that continued to exist by His own power, and they didn’t know Him or receive Him. In fact, they eventually killed Him. And He allowed it.

God came into the world with great meekness (listen to the message from Sunday). He lets us ignore Him if we choose to. What are you doing to choose to listen to God? To choose to seek Him?

An Upside Down World

In Luke 18:9-14, Jesus contrasts the prayers of two different men. The first man, a highly respected man in the community, expressed thankfulness for the things which people admired in him. He actually was someone whom people looked up to and wanted to be like. The second man, who was despised by the people, expressed a very simple prayer: “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.” And everyone would have agreed that this was the only prayer he could pray.

Jesus said that those who ‘lower themselves’ (like the second man) are honored by God while those who ‘raise themselves up’ (like the first man) are not.

Pride is so quick to invade our hearts! In fact, it is actually naturally at home there. How easy it is even to say, “Lord, thank you that I’m not like the proud man!” (Listen to the sermon from Sunday to hear more.)

The most direct way to apply this passage is to pray the prayer of the second man and to let the attitude of that prayer pervade our thinking. Comparing ourselves with others before God is rarely a helpful thing. Whether we thinking highly of ourselves or poorly, either way we tend to make ourselves the focus. How much better to say, “Lord, have mercy.”

How else does pride or humility show up in life? Pray that God would sensitize your heart to your own pride, and to lead you to the humble prayer before him.

Living for Others...

At the heart of Christianity is the call to live for the good of other people. Certainly that is at the core of God's actions. What He did in creation was for the good of what He created. What He did in providing salvation was for the good of those who had rebelled against Him. An essential part of God's identity is that He serves.

Since we have been called to be like God, to live in His Image, we also are to serve. As Pastor Tim challenged us on Sunday, one way we are to serve, as the writer of Hebrews says, is in spurring other people on to love and good works. We should behave in a way that leads other people to love others more and to act in better ways than if we weren't there.

So how might we do that? What is one thing you can do today that will lead the people around you to love more and to serve more? It is easy to lead people to judge and dislike each other. What could I do today to increase kindness and reduce judgment?

One simple thing that we can do is to meet together with other Christians with the specific intention of helping them grow. We might do that over lunch or in a small group meeting, like a Bible study. But it takes more than being with people. It takes challenging them, perhaps sharing with them something that we are learning. It certainly involves some risk, but it is also a key part of being like God. You don't have to become an extrovert if you are more introverted. But whatever your natural tendency, you do need to find ways to help someone else live more like God.

So if you aren't in a small group or meeting with someone else regularly with the goal of helping each other toward love and good deeds, why don't you move toward that today? Join one of our small groups, or ask someone else if you could meet with the goal of helping each other grow. And trust God to bless that effort to put into practice His Word.

Seeking the Kingdom of God

Longing for the coming of the Kingdom of God. It sounds like a very abstract concept. And it sometimes seems disconnected from the daily pressures and activities of life. But in contrast to thinking about daily necessities, Jesus said, “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” (Matthew 6:33) What would it mean to seek God’s kingdom?

Some people have described it as longing for people to live according to God’s perfect direction. That is, to long for a situation where people would live wisely, with self control, focusing on the good of others. In effect, it is the desire for things to be like they were in the Garden of Eden. When you see someone whose life is going down a bad path, it is easy to see how they need to have a life more like that, one that follows God’s good design.

As Pastor Tim’s brother David Andersen shared on Sunday, we long for God’s will to be done, for a flood of people to recognize the need to adopt God’s ways rather than their own, for a sense of renewal as we reorient our thinking to that which is true and right.

That’s something we can pursue each day, no matter what else happens. We can pray even now, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Christians in a non-Christian world: A useless invention?

People have created some pretty useless inventions. An alarm clock that doesn’t make any noise – it just waves a flag – is pretty useless. You have to be awake and looking at it for it to work! A DVD-rewinder is another pretty useless invention. It gives a sense of benefit for those who remember VHS tapes but it really has no value.

Jesus said that salt that isn’t salty is another useless invention. If it isn’t salty, there isn’t any point. And the reason he talked about salt is what the salt represents: a Christian that isn’t noticed by the non-Christian world is, in some sense, useless as well. Christians are meant to stick out as being different. But not just different. They should be distinctively God-like. That’s how people will come to glorify God. They’ll see His character and His values which are so different from the world’s. When Christians live and speak like God, the world will see His glory! (Listen to the message from Sunday.)

So what are good ways to live out the distinctive values of God in a society that doesn’t share those values? Perhaps it is seeking the good of those who have hurt or offended us (aka, our enemies). That certainly would stand out as a different approach to life! And it is just like God to do that. That’s the Gospel. God's plan is that people would see that in us.

Blessing your enemies (and maybe just annoying people…)

Pastor Tim challenged us Sunday with Jesus' bold claim of a different way to live than we are inclined to live. (Matthew 5:43-48 and Luke 6:27-36) "Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you." (Luke 6:27) That is challenging! Don't merely stop short of getting revenge. He actually said to do good to them.

As Pastor Tim said, we are tempted to change these words to be more agreeable to us. We want to justify our desire to judge people or to hope for their harm. But Jesus' words are clear. Seek their good!

How can we do this in practical ways? Sometimes I figure that I don't have personal "enemies" so it doesn't really apply to me. But if I'm to pray for (not against) my enemies, and try to bring good to them, shouldn't I do also the same with the people who are just annoying or mildly offensive? Say someone cuts me off or makes an unkind or rude remark. Surely I should love them and do good to them as well.

Who is it in your life right now that is most like an enemy? Maybe it is just an annoying person, or maybe it is something very serious. Whatever it is, what good can you do for that person today?

If you do it, you'll be like God, who is "kind to the ungrateful and the evil." (Luke 6:35) As His children, we should long to be like Him with His power working within us!

"We cannot keep quiet..."

As Pastor Tim shared on Sunday from Acts 4:18-22, Peter and John said that they had seen and heard something that was so compelling that they were not able to keep quiet. It was going to come out. Even threats of violence against them, and eventually the violence itself, wouldn’t stop them.

What they saw and heard was the man Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified and then resurrected. Jesus had told them that He alone was able to bring people to God. He alone was the Way.

This claim was not made by someone who was crazy or who had any hint of self-promoting or self-serving. He was a servant even to death, never wavering from this message, and never wavering from the perfect ways of God.

Peter and John had seen it all happen, and nothing could stop them from telling what they had seen (Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection) and heard (Jesus’ claim that He was God, and that He alone was the Way to God).

So what have you seen and heard? May the Holy Spirit give us boldness, and stir us so that we also cannot keep quiet but are compelled to share what we also have come to know!

Bless are you when you are persecuted...

On the surface of it, Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 5:10-12 is not hard to understand. In some sense, we should be pleased when we are treated poorly because of our connection with Him, because we’re in good company (we’re grouped with the prophets whom God approved of) and we have a great future reward in heaven.

Of course there are plenty of ways that we can get it wrong. For example, as Pastor Tim shared on Sunday, sometimes people treat us poorly because we have behaved poorly. There’s no benefit in that. We should only consider ourselves ‘blessed’ if we are treated poorly because of ‘righteousness.’ And we shouldn’t seek trouble so that we can increase our reward in the future.

But in some deep sense, we should rejoice when we are treated poorly because of our association with Christ. So what does that mean to us in Michigan today? Certainly we aren’t persecuted the way many have been in the past and many still are today.

But consider this very simple situation: what if the next time you go out of your way to follow God’s ways, such as being kind to a person who is not kind to you, and they are all the more unkind … what if you rejoiced in that? Of course the natural reaction is to be upset. But it seems that Jesus’ words at least mean that we shouldn’t be upset when people don’t respond well to our efforts to do what God wants. When we are kind and patient and others are not, we should find satisfaction in our association with God and expect that in the future, God will more than make up for whatever ‘cost’ we experience today in doing what He says.

So instead of being riled up by unkindness in return for our efforts at kindness, let it go and rejoice that God will clearly show that walking in His road, even if it seems costly at first, is always by far the best road to travel!

Blessed are the Pure in Heart

We are a very practical culture. We like to be productive and to pay attention to things that “make a difference.” Because of that, sometimes we overlook the significance of the quality of our internal lives, of our thoughts and attitudes that often go unspoken and (we rationalize) we don’t do anything about.

Jesus said something very different. In telling His disciples what He valued, He said that those with “pure hearts” are to be considered blessed, because these people will see God.

As Pastor Tim shared last Sunday, this quality of purity of heart includes:

• Sincerity or lack of hypocrisy. When we come to God, we should come without masks, honestly confessing who we really are -- since He obviously knows already!


• Seeking His cleansing. In coming with honesty, we are then able to receive His forgiveness of that which is offensive to Him.


• Seeking His transformation. Through His power, we are to clean up our thought lives, rooting out pride and lust and greed and all that is contrary to God’s perfect nature and ways.

We find in God the Father and in the Son, Jesus Christ, a being with a perfectly pure heart who is also judge. Yet because of the sacrifice of the Son, He will also forgive and cleanse as we confess and entrust ourselves to His Grace.
-- John

Loving God by necessity includes taking action

Loving God is not primarily a spiritual thing, though God is a spirit. He does not have flesh and blood, but we do. Amazingly, to express His love for us, God the Son became flesh and blood. In the same way, for us to express our love, we must take physical action.

In particular, as we saw Sunday (“Truly Living” in the story of the Good Samaritan), our action must include meeting the needs of people we encounter in our paths of daily life. People have all sorts of needs, including:

• the basic necessities like food, clothing, and shelter


• safety from threat and actual harm


• love and friendship


• a sense of the value of oneself

Part of our love for God is a love for those we encounter in life who have these needs. We should treat them as if they were us, as if we were the ones in that position. That’s exactly what the Good Samaritan did: he performed kind acts for the man’s sake, as if the Samaritan were the injured one.

We should go and do likewise, go and perform acts of mercy and kindness, meeting needs of people we encounter using what God has given to us.

So what are some examples of this? How have you seen people, in small or large ways, brought refreshment and encouragement, or perhaps met very deep and pressing needs? How can we do this more effectively?

For those who don’t deserve mercy…

It can be hard to be merciful when people don’t deserve it. Perhaps they have hurt you or someone you love, and they deserve to pay in some way. Sometimes it is just the superiority we feel in comparison to them, and we want them to realize it. So when you show mercy, you risk losing that. It’s something that your “inner accountant” doesn’t want to give up … that accountant warns you that being merciful will make you the loser.

Jesus, however, said something quite different. “Blessed are the merciful.” That is the right place to be, He said. Somehow, rather than being worse off when you forgive, you are better off. To see the benefits of being merciful, there are two key things we need to see, as Pastor Tim said yesterday.

1) Mercy is never deserved. It can only be given to people who deserve something worse. So it always involves risk because we have to give away something that seems like it is ours.

2) We need mercy from God more than people need it from us. (Okay, so that’s an understatement! We cannot calculate how much more we need it!) We don’t deserve His forgiveness but rather His punishment.

Jesus said that those who want and receive God’s mercy are the same people who must learn to show mercy to others. "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy." (Matthew 5:7)

So where can you show mercy? When have you received mercy? What makes it hard? What makes it rewarding?

Pursuing Behavioral Righteousness

There are two ways to think about our righteousness: legal and behavioral. An illustration should make it clear. If you break the law, such as parking illegally, you deserve a ticket since you are guilty. But it might be that an authority will take pity on you. Once I got a parking ticket in Topeka, Kansas. But they noticed that we had an out-of-state license plate, and so the note on our car said that they would forgive this parking ticket. I was guilty, but an authority said that, from a legal perspective, I would be considered innocent. I was forgiven. That is legal righteousness.

Behavioral righteousness, in contrast, is when you actually park only where it is legal. You don’t need forgiveness because you didn’t violate the law.

The clear teaching of Christianity is that our right standing with God is based only and entirely on the first type of righteousness. That is, we are unquestionably guilty of putting ourselves before God, acting as though we are more important and wiser and better than He is. So our only hope is that somehow we would be forgiven. Amazingly, through the death of Jesus, the perfect Son of God, in our place, God the Father is willing, even pleased, to declare us not guilty as we trust in Him! What great news!

But that isn’t the end of the story. As we looked at yesterday (listen), in 2 Timothy 2, Paul says that we are now to pursue behavioral righteousness. In fact, he commands us to. And, he says, if we want to be useful tools for God, we have no choice.

He then says that this behavioral righteousness includes two things. We are to flee ‘youthful passions’ and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace along with others who are doing the same.

So what might that look like in life? In particular, what would it look like to pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace? And how can we help each other do it? Your thoughts?

Blessed are those who hunger for righteousness

As Pastor Tim taught yesterday (listen), Christianity is a faith for the unrighteous, not for the righteous. Jesus proclaimed blessing on those who know their own emptiness. It is so easy for us to be self-deceived, to think that we are better than most people. And when we think that way, we are outside of Jesus' favor. We convince ourselves that we are basically good people who are led astray by forces outside ourselves, like the people who annoy us and make us angry, or the temptations that cause us to stray.

Jesus promised a righteousness that comes from outside us as a gift from Him. And it is a gift for those who realize they need it and don't have it.

So how do you see yourself? Do you think of yourself as basically good, as being "more good" than the next person? If so, Jesus said that you are outside of God's blessing. His blessing is for those who realize their own need for a righteousness that they don't possess.

Or do you think of yourself as dirty beyond self-recovery? If so, Jesus declared blessing on you, for in Him, you will be satisfied. That dissatisfaction with self is great news if it is replaced with satisfaction in Christ!

Do you hunger for righteousness, for something that you don't have? Then give thanks to God for helping you see yourself more clearly, and ask Him for the blessing He promised you with being satisfied with His righteousness!