Vision: Celebrating Jesus

Vision: Celebrating Jesus - 5/21/17

This week Chuck focused primarily on the fourth part of the vision for Colossae: The form, purpose and dynamic of our Sunday gatherings as a prominent celebration of Jesus and the Story of God – that infuses us with energy and perspective for the rest of the week.  We admit that for the first several years of our congregation we tended to simplify and minimize the energy spent on Sundays, trying to keep our focus on Monday through Saturday.  But we want to put more energy into celebrating Jesus and the Story of God on Sundays. Hopefully you can see this in some of the recent changes to how things look here now. 

However, any time we look inside rather than outside we can easily become preoccupied with what we’re not doing right and Satan can quickly use the power of sin to bring shame and guilt.  But, if we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus as it says in Hebrews 12, then God will use that same sin to bring us to him. The fact that you have to work through a sin in your life is God ordained and evidence that God is leading you to him.  God is revealing your sins and disciplining us so that we can experience his life and share in his holiness. 

If we’re honest, when it comes to sin, most of us live with some sort of shame or guilt that can seize and warp our view of scripture and God.  When this is the case, faith becomes just another way of bettering ourselves so that God will accept us – making him out to be our moral manager.  Then my morals and behaviors become the focus and we make Christianity about us – working toward a perfection of our personal conduct.  But, when we see God as a self-giving, loving relationship then we’re invited into union with him today! 

In this, we allow the process of relationship to properly direct our love and celebrate what we’ve been freely given.  When our faith is about relationship, this is an exciting place to be because we’re freed from the slavery to deeds and free to live into and explore the grace of God that invites holiness and participation without shame or guilt.

Questions for Reflection: 

1.       Have you ever had the tendency to see God as your moral manager rather than a loving father with you along the way in your mistakes? If so, how could this have shaped your perspective of him?

2.       When you deal with sin in your life what is the normal sequence you go through in resolving it? How is God involved?

3.       Since our faith is about relationship with God, what do you now think personal holiness means?

Contributed by Sky Cady