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If there is one thing God is good at it is asking questions. However, if God knows everything, what need does He have to ask? Perhaps the asking is not so much for information which is lacking and more about having us reveal ourselves to God. This is the dance of relationship. God invites, we respond. God calls, we answer. God asks, we open up. In Genesis 3 God asks His first question, ‘where are you?’ What is it He is really asking of us? How we answer the question is of utmost importance. Looking forward to seeing you all on Sunday!

Now what? This question, or something like it, always comes when something happens to transform or change our lives. It was asked after John the Baptist called people to turn from sin, it was asked after Peter preached at Pentecost. I don’t claim to put myself on par with those two but after this teaching on what kind of community Jesus is calling us to be, now what? Now, hopefully, prayerfully, a new adventure begins. The adventure begins or continues as we become. As we wrap up this teaching on community and ask the question, we look to the Bible again for answers. As gather on Sunday for worship we’ll seek to answer the question, now what? I look forward to seeing you there!

One of the distinctive marks of the community of faith is worship. We worship God together. Yet the ‘why’ of worship is often eclipsed by our preferences, the ‘how’ of worship. When worship is placed in its proper context we find ourselves being challenged, corrected, comforted, and so much more. Let’s join in worship this Sunday and be reminded about why we worship. See you then!

Several months ago we looked at the lie many of us have learned about God. This lie goes like this, God is stingy, reluctant to give, blessings have to be wrestled out of His hand. The truth we hopefully learned, God is generous beyond anything we can imagine and delights in blessing His people. Believing the lie makes us stingy people, a stingy community. But if God is generous then we too can be generous as a community. If God delights to bless us then we can, as a community, delight in blessing others. On Sunday we are going to talk more about God’s call to generosity and I look forward to seeing you then!

Robert Mulholland Jr. has a simple definition of spiritual formation. “Spiritual formation is a process of being formed in the image of Christ for the sake of others.” It’s deceptively simple. The last part of this definition “for the sake of others” takes spiritual formation out of the realm of our private faith and brings it into the open of the community of faith. And yet we resist, even in the community of faith, having our transformation happen in public, giving others permission to hold us accountable, having someone point out bad behaviour, being called out of our comfort zone to a higher level of discipleship. But isn’t this one of the first priorities of the community of faith? To spur one another on to growth and move us out into mission? Let’s see if we can answer this question on Sunday. Hope to see you there!

Grace makes an impact. At least it’s supposed to make an impact. The grace Jesus offers to us is life transforming. But some, who have been part of a community of faith for decades, have gotten used to hearing this. We have become gospel hardened, not because the good news of Jesus isn’t great but because it’s too familiar. This is how the community of faith can lose its focus on Jesus, turn inward, and start fighting with one another and the world. The Apostle Paul tells us we have been reconciled to God through Jesus and we have now been given the ministry of reconciliation. Grace reconciles us to Jesus. What would it look like to offer the same grace to people around us and then also be reconciled as well as reconciling? Let’s see on Sunday!