2017 MESSAGES
Can you believe it? August marks the beginning of a new school year!! Back to school we go! What a great time to revisit this fun and exciting special focus using the animated children’s films Inside Out, Zootopia, and Moana. This is going to be a blast! It will be like “going to the movies” but even better! Come and check it out! And bring your friends! It just may make “going back to school” a little easier! Oh, and we just may have an “ah-ha” experience or two as we see how these stories reveal things about ourselves and how our stories intersect with the story of God for us in Jesus! Don’t miss out on this fun adventure!
Have you ever heard the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words?” The idea is that one could use a thousand -10 thousand – words to describe something to you which is beyond words…and in just one moment of seeing it, you would have a greater understanding than all the words in the world could give you. Such things as the vastness of the ocean stretching beyond the eyes…or the crashing of 20 foot waves on the shore…or the awesome grandeur of the Rocky Mountains… or a blanket of snow that covers the Great Plains for miles. This is why Jesus used stories –pictures put to words – to describe how the kingdom of God works, so that we might see a picture of the hidden kingdom revealed and come to a greater understanding than all the words in the world could give us
INVITE, CONNECT, APPRENTICE, SEND
Blueprints. When I was 9 years old, my mom and dad put an addition on our house. I will never forget when they rolled out the blueprints and showed us what it was going to look like! It was so much easier to visualize after seeing those blueprints! And, of course, without those blueprints, the builders would have had no directions, no guide, no “map” with respect to what they were doing!
Did you know God is a God of “blueprints?” All one has to do is to look at a living cell or the DNA molecule as well as countless other examples in nature! It even says in the Bible, talking about our lives together as the people of God, that, “God is not a God of disorder but a God of peace.”
Have you ever watched a movie which was a true story and at the end of it they tell you what happened to the various people in the story as their lives continued? “Remember the Titans” was one movie that did it. So did, “The Greatest Game Ever Played.” And just recently, “Heartbreak Ridge.” It really pulls everything together, doesn’t it? It reminds you that these were real people and their stories continued….and in fact, maybe they lived through a number of stories after the one you just saw.
A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a friend of mine – a young guy about 30 years old. We were talking about God-stuff and applying it to our lives when all of a sudden he looks at me with a smile on his face as well as in his eyes and says, “Imagine how it would change you if you came face to face with Jesus right now! Wouldn’t that be amazing?”…What do you think?...
