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Day 5: Settle

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It would be easy for us to say, “I am just a sinner, saved by God’s grace so it doesn’t really matter what I do because God will still love me, forgive me, and extend His grace to me.”

It would be easy, but it also would be a lie.

To further facilitate this point I would like to share something from my “John Wesley Common English Study Bible” :

For John Wesley, there was both an inward and outward dimension to personal holiness. Inward holiness refers to the cleansing and renewing of our hearts and minds, which begins with faith. When we recognize God’s forgiving love in Jesus Christ, we are filled with love for God. Out of this love, the Holy Spirit cultivates thoughts and habits in us that are pleasing to God, including the love of our neighbors.

To make it simple.

If you are a true believer and devoted disciple of Jesus Christ then your life should reflect that. It should be completely obvious that you are a disciple to a perfect stranger by the way you act in all things. Now, the rub in this is that we will never do this perfectly, but thanks be to God that is why He extends grace, but as John Wesley implies when God extends His grace you extend it as well.

The operative process is that God loves us, then we love God, and then we make it our mission to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.

Let’s settle for that.

Amen.

 

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Genealogy

“This long genealogy is given for a good reason: to show how this Jesus fulfills the prophecies that tell us the Anointed One will be a descendant of Abraham and David. Some of the women in Jesus’ line are given to show how God is gracious to everyone, even to prostitutes and adulterers. Because some of the women listed weren’t Israelites, but were strangers and foreigners, they foreshadow all the foreigners God will adopt into His church through Jesus. Some of the children in God’s family are conceived under strange circumstances (like Tamar’s twins being conceived as she played the harlot, and like King Solomon being born to adulterous parents). Now that it has been established this is an unusual family, what happens next shouldn’t be a surprise – the conception of a baby under very strange circumstances.” (The Voice New Testament) 

Last night at Pulse Wednesday Night we started a new focus that I am really excited about, what makes it so awesome in fact that it is so simple. Sometimes in youth ministry we can invest so much time in looking for the best curriculum ever and we trust someone from another state in completely different church to give us the curriculum that we need, but the bad thing about this is that the writers don’t know the students at St. Philip’s, and really if I am honest I don’t know a lot either.

I know who does though.

God knows my students better than I ever could.

So, thanks to my genius intern, Marianne we decided to read the entire gospels with our students on Wednesday Nights. By reading a chapter a week we can slowly let the great story ever told sink into the hearts and minds of Pulse Students.

Like I said I am very excited.

Last night we talked about our preconceptions about people.

Sometimes as humans we have the habit of thinking we know more about people than we really do and I think that through Matthew 1, God tells us what He thinks about people. Throughout the genealogy we find plenty of people that really have no place in the family the comes before Christ. Tamar, seduces her father-in-law to keep the family line alive, Rahab is a canaanite prostitute who helps foreigners sneak into a foreign land, and lets not forget the whole David-Bathsheba thing. 🙂

Point is God truly saw these people for who they really were.

He knew their story intimately.

After all He created them and His own image.

Let this be an encouragement as you live your life know that there is no limit to God’s love and grace. The family that God has chosen to associate with is most definitely unusual, but isn’t interesting how unusually amazing and brilliant God is.

His grace is for all people.

Amen.