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Hey there, friends… Building on our thoughts from last week, what is the goal of our Christianity? Good Friday is one week from today; Easter just 9 days away. So what? What does this really—practically—do for us? Might the whole goal be something different than we think? Let’s talk in Deeper Thoughts below…
BUT first…
OK… that’s it for today for you email skimmers and those who hate long emails… BUT… Some Deeper Thoughts I asked you a direct and somewhat poignant question last week. Here it is in case you missed it: Have you matured past your faith only being about confirming a ticket to heaven and having God answer prayers for your wants and needs? And, as I emphasized last week, this question is not to shame you at all. It is to offer you something amazingly better. This Sunday, I want to go a layer deeper on something I think we can all relate with. It’s in the lane of forgiveness. I believe that many of us—maybe most (*I know this is true of me)—began our faith journey with Jesus focused on the forgiveness of sins. When I was first introduced to Jesus, that was what I needed him for. I didn’t want to go to hell when I died. I knew I was sinning a bunch and didn’t want God to be mad. Someone told me Jesus died to forgive my sins, and I’d better ask him into my life so those sins would indeed be forgiven. Awesome deal. Count me in. I’m saved, praise God!! As I got older, sin became less frequent. Maturity does a thing or two for us. But also as I got older, the less-frequent sins sometimes became more consequential. Enter the story of David and Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11. If you’ve been with us on The Daily Six this week, we have explored this tragic story of the “man after God’s heart” spiraling into tremendous, gut-wrenching, life-destroying sin. Adultery, cover-up, murder. It was a BIG deal. On one front, I hope David’s story encourages you that even the most godly among us can still blow it—meaning that you are not a freak when sin trips you up. You haven’t lost your place with God. But it still matters. Sin is still a BIG deal. And this is where we enter the goal of the story. Over the course of this week, we’ll move through the holiest cycles of the Christian calendar—from Palm Sunday through Good Friday into Easter. The meaning of these sacred days is unmistakable. Messiah has come as King of the Jews to die on a cross so our sins can be forgiven. Death could not hold him down; three days later he rose victorious over death and hell, and we have been set free! But do we misunderstand the goal? David knew that he needed forgiveness of sins. Check. So do I. But wait… there’s more! Forgiveness of sins is only the beginning. This Holy Week, let’s look at the life of David and how God met him in the most horrific cycles of his life. Read Psalm 32 and Psalm 51 in advance—two beautiful chapters of the Bible he wrote while tumbling through this worst of moments. We will see something sure to broaden the goal for us… and it will be far, far more abundant than just the forgiveness of our sins. Curious? Then, let’s meet! Sunday, 10:00 a.m. sharp… Don’t be late… bring your Bible and a pen!! Much love to you all… Chris Eads Mt. Hope Pastor Friend
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Hey there, beloved… Question for you: Why are you a Christian? What good does it do you? What do you hope to get out of having a relationship with God? These are critical questions. And while there may not be right or wrong answers, what we feel and believe about these things determines everything about how and why we live out our life with God. More on this in Deeper Thoughts below…
BUT first…a few quick updates…
BUT… Some Deeper Thoughts My little 12-year-old self was terrified of our house burning down in the middle of the night. We had a neighbor’s home catch fire down the street, and you can image how that effected my immature little brain. I had just recently been introduced to the idea that God exists by my buddy Chris Foley who lived across the street. In between wintertime sledding down his steep backyard hill and summertime playing soldiers in the woods, Chris explained to me who Jesus was and how to be born again. I saw an excellent deal in what he offered. First, I could be sure to not go to hell when I died, which held an eerily similar fear to my housefire phobia. And secondly, I could ask God every night before I went to sleep that He’d prevent our home from burning down. That’s all kind of cute, isn’t it? As I matured a bit, my newfound pivot from atheist to Christian broadened only slightly. When I finally gave into accepting Jesus and truly being born again at the age of 14, the assurance of heaven became more real, and the prayer requests evolved to things 14-year-old boys are concerned with—namely God’s favor with the young ladies I was growing fond of. It would be another couple of years before I realized Christianity was far bigger and much more meaningful that just a ticket out of hell and a God to whom I could appeal for a few key things I wanted. May I ask you a poignant question? While I trust that most of our readers have a greater natural maturity than pre-teen little Chris, have you matured past your faith only being about your eternal security and your hope in God’s blessings and provisions for your wants and needs? This question is not to shame you at all. It is to offer you something amazingly better. I think a great number of Christians haven’t been told that God offers something SO much more meaningful and life-transforming than access to heaven and an audience to our prayer requests. Certainly, many believers have never experienced anything more. How do I know this? I listen to how we pray. Again… please… feel no scorn in this. But stop and consider: When you pray, do you simply and only ask God for things? They may indeed be quite important things. We pray for a loved one to get over their physical ailments (this is our most common prayer request, and almost exclusively what we pray for in group settings). We might pray for an unemployed friend to get a job. Or we might ask God to comfort someone we know who just lost a loved one. These are good things to pray for, and the Bible tells us to do so. But I almost never hear someone pray out loud for an internal, spiritual transformation. It’s super-rare to be in a small group where somebody boldly and persistently asks God for His tangible presence to fill their hearts. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been with a brother or sister who fell on their faces before God in a group setting to plead with the Lord for His healing of their souls rather than the healing of their bodies. It’s almost unheard of to see someone crying out to God in deep, heartfelt repentance. People kneeling at the altar at church on a Sunday just about never happens. It didn’t used to be this way. Wind the clock back just 30 years ago or so. At least in the Fairfax County church I grew up in, there was a deep and passionate appeal to God at the altar every Sunday where I would see dozens of adults kneeling around prayer benches at the front of our sanctuary. Loud voices could be heard as they cried out to God for His mercy over the hardness of their hearts. Believers would weep for the presence of the Lord to wash over them. The response to a sermon from God’s Word was bold and hungry as believers came forward to offer God their whole hearts in prayer that He would help them align with this biblical truth. In short, these believers were believers for much more than receiving heaven and help. They hungered for the tangible presence of God, where an abundant life of joy and a clean and holy conscience was the outcome of their faith. They wanted to see God in their spirit. They wanted to hear God’s voice in the inner quietness of their soul. They cared far more to find God’s heart than to get God’s help. King David longed for this same thing. And as He broke through his own hardness of heart, he found the tangible presence of God which was filled with crazy levels of joy. Would you like this kind of breakthrough? Do you know how to get it? This Sunday, I want to explore this from a rather unlikely text of scripture. Dig around 2 Samuel 6 and 1 Chronicles 15 for a bit before Sunday… it’s where we were all week on The Daily Six. Then, let’s meet! Sunday, 10:00 a.m. sharp… Don’t be late… bring your Bible and a pen!! Much love to you all… Chris Eads Mt. Hope Pastor Friend [email protected] … your clocks… (and your heart??) Don’t forget that Saturday night we change over to Daylight Savings Time. “Spring forward” to have one hour less sleep before church…yippie! But then, let’s meet to discover the heart change that God can bring when we are willing to surrender all our ambitions to the One who knows far better how to get us to our best life! More on this in Deeper Thoughts below…
BUT first…a few updates…
OK… that’s it for today for you email skimmers and those who hate long emails… BUT… Some Deeper Thoughts There is a type of heart that God wants for us. Some of us are there, some are not. All of us can gain this heart… it’s a heart that God Himself will forge in us if we let Him. Jesus explained the heart problem we have. He used soil as the illustration, revealing that our hearts are found along a spectrum of hardness to softness. Read all about it in Matthew 13:1-23. Heart problems are serious. In the physical realm, hardened arteries lead to big difficulties. Stuff gets hardened enough, the surgeon needs to go in and replace a few things. In the spiritual realm, the greatest of all Surgeons promises a full-blown heart transplant: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26). Do you notice who is the one replacing the heart? Often in Christian spirituality, people hear teachings about the things in our hearts that have gone wrong. We hear that we need to surrender destructive patterns in our hearts—pride, ambition, controlism, etc. We hear teachings like we’ve been reading about King Saul and King David where God “does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). We hear all these things, and then immediately go to work trying to change our hearts. We try to fix what we’re told is broken inside. But what if the role I play in a spiritual heart change is not what I think it is? It might sound really silly, but can you imagine me assembling all my tools by the bathroom mirror and planning to handle my own clogged artery bypass? Not possible, correct? In the natural realm, the only role I could play in my own heart surgery is to show up for all the appointments and surrender to the surgeon. Lay down. Surrender my plans. Clear the calendar. Submit to the surgery. And it would save my life. In the spiritual realm, the surgery is no different. I have no more power to change my spiritual heart than I do my physical one. The Great Heart Surgeon alone has the skills and ability to do the transforming. But I do have to show up for the surgery. First, I must recognize the need to see a doctor and be diagnosed (spiritually: Be in the Word of God to learn what is unhealthy about me). I must attend the pre-op appointments to learn what needs changed (spiritually: Be in the Word and learn what a clean heart looks like). I must accept the Surgeon’s authority and wisdom to renovate my heart (spiritually: submit to the Lordship of Jesus over everything I value, believe, and desire… let Him change my mind on all manner of ideas). I must clear my agenda for the many weeks of the Surgeon’s work and recovery (spiritually: surrender my plans and ambitions to the Lord). Then I must show up and lay down in the operating room (spiritually: get on my face before the Lord… go to the altar… surrender). Friends, we need profound change in our hearts. We all do. But those changes cannot be driven by us. We play a huge part—we must show up and surrender to the surgeon. But the change of heart belongs to the Lord. And if we show up, He promises us He will do the surgery. As we study the Old Testament characters of Saul and David, we are looking in on the very messy lives of Israel’s first two political leaders. Men of great power, the pressures and temptations they faced were astronomical. Both were men that God could have worked with to accomplish great things for His people. But only one had a heart that was ready to respond. Join us this Sunday as we continue our new mini-series exploration of “Finding the Heart of God.” We will see some parallel patterns we likely have with their story… but not so we can come away with a heavy heart and assemble our own surgery kit by the bathroom mirror. We won’t be able to fix ourselves… nor do we need to. We have a Great Physician who promises us SO much better care! I can’t wait to be with you all on Sunday, 10:00 a.m. sharp… Don’t be late… bring your Bible and a pen!! Much love to you all… Chris Eads Mt. Hope Pastor Friend [email protected] 703-999-4845 (c) |
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Jesus said, “Love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, & with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.” - Matt. 22:37-39
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