For the week of November 16 – 23rd Sunday after Pentecost
Morning Prayer: O God, in Christ You give us hope for a new heaven and a new earth. Grant us wisdom to interpret the signs of our times, courage to stand in the time of trial, and faith to witness to Your truth and love. Amen. (Lectionary Prayers)
Morning Hymn: #170 O, How I Love Jesus
- There is a name I love to hear, I love to sing its worth;
it sounds like music in my ear, the sweetest name on earth.
Refrain: O how I love Jesus, O how I love Jesus, O how I love Jesus, because He first loved me!
- It tells me of a Savior's love, who died to set me free;
it tells me of His precious blood, the sinner's perfect plea. (Refrain) - It tells of One whose loving heart can feel my deepest woe;
who in each sorrow bears a part that none can bear below. (Refrain)
Isaiah 12:2-4
2 God is indeed my salvation;
I will trust and won’t be afraid.
Yah, the Lord, is my strength and my shield;
He has become my salvation.”
3 You will draw water with joy from the springs of salvation.
4 And you will say on that day:
“Thank the Lord; call on God’s name;
proclaim God’s deeds among the peoples;
declare that God’s name is exalted.
Prayers of Intercession: Thank You, Lord, for hearing our prayers for those dear to our hearts. We now pray as You have taught us: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. Lead us, not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.
Offering spotlight: Orangeville Manor is a retirement and assisted living facility currently housing 23 veterans. These men are so grateful to be living in comfort and safety in the small town of Orangeville.
How can you support these men? There is an Amazon wish list. The residents love home baked goodies. If you don’t have other plans, come to the Lighthouse on Thanksgiving Day to eat with some of the veterans. If you do have other plans on Thanksgiving Day, drop off side dishes or desserts either the day before or Thanksgiving Day.
Offering prayer: Restoring God, Maker of new heavens and a new earth, where sorrow is lifted, and joy takes root. As we bring our gifts this day, may they be seeds of Your promised future—an offering of hope, justice, and mercy in a weary world. Use what we give and who we are to proclaim a kin-dom where none are forgotten, where the wolf and lamb lie down in peace, and where the sound of weeping is no more. Let this act of giving remind us that Your dream is still unfolding—and that we are called to help build it. In Christ’s name, who is our joy. Amen. (Discipleship Ministries)
Hymn of Preparation: #451 Be Thou My Vision
- Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart; Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art;
Thou my best thought, by day or by night, Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light. - Be Thou my Wisdom, and Thou my true Word; I ever with Thee and Thou with me, Lord;
Thou and Thou only, first in my heart, great God of heaven, my treasure Thou art. - Great God of heaven, my victory won, may I reach heaven’s joys, O bright heaven’s Sun!
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall, Still be my Vision, O Ruler of all.
Scripture:
Ephesians 4:12-16
12 His purpose was to equip God’s people for the work of serving and building up the body of Christ 13 until we all reach the unity of faith and knowledge of God’s Son. God’s goal is for us to become mature adults—to be fully grown, measured by the standard of the fullness of Christ. 14 As a result, we aren’t supposed to be infants any longer who can be tossed and blown around by every wind that comes from teaching with deceitful scheming and the tricks people play to deliberately mislead others. 15 Instead, by speaking the truth with love, let’s grow in every way into Christ, 16 who is the head. The whole body grows from Him, as it is joined and held together by all the supporting ligaments. The body makes itself grow in that it builds itself up with love as each one does its part.
Matthew 22:36-40
36 “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37 He replied, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being,[a] and with all your mind. 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: You must love your neighbor as you love yourself.[b] 40 All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”
Message: How do we become more like Jesus? Pastor Becky
We've been in this conversation together about discipleship. The path we take as disciples in response to Jesus' invitation to follow Him; discipleship in our lived out lives, our ordinary comings and goings in connection with Jesus. Everything about us is to glorify God. Some days we do better than others, but our goal, the mark that we're aiming for is glorifying God in our everyday life.
A disciple, for our context, is being defined as a follower of Jesus Christ who is committed to:
belonging to the body of Christ
becoming more like Jesus
and blessing the world
This is how we're going to be structuring our lives together within our fellowship to help us grow deeper in relationship with each other, with God, and with the world.
I shared last week the two questions I received. The first being why are we even talking about this? And the other, how do we even do this? Well, I'm not going to go over question one again, but today we're looking at the continuing answer of how we are going to do this.
We grow in our discipleship by becoming more like Jesus. When you think about Jesus, what about Jesus do you most admire and want to emulate? I mean, there has to be something in addition to salvation; the saving ourselves from hell, getting us into heaven part. If Jesus only function in our lives is to get us out of hell, then it isn’t a relationship. It's a means to an end, a mere transaction. Yet Jesus offers us an invitation into eternal life, abundant life that begins now.
So what do you admire? His prayer life? In John 17 Jesus prays for His earthly disciples, Peter, James and John and the rest and also for us. That is a scope of prayer I can't even begin to fathom. To think that 2000 years ago Jesus was thinking about us. We can see evidence of a scope of prayer that deep when we look at the growing and building of our original church building. 50 people came together to build a building to hold over 200, that is discipleship.
Maybe you admire Jesus' deep knowledge of the scriptures. He knew exactly where to turn in Isaiah to announce the in breaking of His ministry and His Kingdom. We see it in Luke and we see it in Matthew where Jesus turns to the 61st chapter of Isaiah and says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me.”
Maybe you admire Jesus' patience. Maybe it's His ability to feed thousands. Jesus had the incredible ability to be present and actually see people. Maybe that draws you to Jesus. What about His compassion? Over and over we read and reread the stories of Jesus. But what is it about Jesus that you admire most?
Becoming more like Jesus invites us into a life opening to God and a life obeying God. Now let me acknowledge this may all seem overwhelming. This whole discipleship path may seem daunting. We have busy lives. We aren't necessarily looking for one more thing to do or to have our spiritual lives become a list of chores. After all, in the big picture, what we're looking for is joy and peace. Plus, we aren't looking for one more thing to fail at. We're looking for something that we're able to succeed at and we want to be disciples of Jesus Christ.
Much of the work of discipleship overlaps the dimensions of belonging, becoming, and blessing. Prayer crosses all three of these dimensions, along with worship and study of scriptures. When we talk about a life opening to God, we're exploring in the ways that we can place ourselves in the channels of God's grace. Those channels are best described as spiritual practices.
Jesus’ spiritual practices included prayer, fasting, generosity, worship, Bible reading, silence/ solitude and service. He practiced these to maintain a relationship with God. They are useful habits. Jesus knew that these practices would position Him to be in places where He could experience grace to live more fully into the life that God had called Him into. We learn from Jesus that they will help us as well, because they help us heighten our awareness of God's abiding presence in every moment of our lives.
The spiritual practices of Jesus can be divided into practices of abstinence and engagement.
Abstinent practices are solitude, silence, fasting, frugality, chastity, secrecy, and sacrifice. These are the practices that remove something from our lives in order for us to pay attention to the divine.
The engagement practices are study, worship, celebration, service, prayer, fellowship, confession, and submission. These practices call us into community and support us by God being present in the folks that we're with, it encourages us to not only think of ourselves, but turns our gaze out to others and the world around us.
Becoming more like Jesus calls us into lives obeying God. A life obeying God is a life that sees the world as Jesus sees the world. We respond to the world as Jesus would respond, and we pour into the world to partner with Jesus in helping people everywhere discover the Kingdom life God intended. The thumbnail of this dimension is taking in information and inspiration and then devising practical applications to the information and inspiration so that we may be in action. It calls for a response to God, each other, and the world.
A life obeying God is about growing up. We move from infancy toward maturity by gaining a deeper and deeper understanding of the life and teachings of Jesus and then actively putting what we've learned into practice. Being able to be obedient to God fundamentally means knowing the scriptures, knowing what Jesus said, and the scripture Jesus used to base His teachings upon. Do you remember when He talked to the lawyer? It's captured in the 22nd chapter of Matthew. If we look at verse 37, when the lawyer asks what is the greatest command, Jesus says that you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your being, and with all of your mind. He's quoting Deuteronomy 6:5. When Jesus says and the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself, that's Leviticus 19:18. Jesus knew His scriptures.
He is continuing the call of the prophets, and the call of the prophets was to care for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger among us. In order for us to know and understand who the widow, the orphan, and the stranger is, we have to be diligent in Scripture as well, so we can respond faithfully and obediently, because within the Kingdom of God, there's only children of the Most High God. It isn't up to us to decide who is or isn't worthy of the Kingdom. Only Jesus judges and we’re instructed to care for those who are in need of care.
Our hearts move into obedience through studying the Scriptures. This will require some deep reading, not just a short verse, but maybe the whole chapter to get a broader view of what God is saying. There are some basic techniques for these deeper understandings of scripture, different ways for us to be reading our Bibles.
There's a theological Bible study. It asks 3 questions of any chapter that we read and those questions ask us: What does this text say about God? What does this text say about humankind? and What does it say about the relationship between God and humankind?
We can look at the Bible reflectively. We take a text of the Bible, we read it two to three times and identify a word or a phrase that speaks to us, and then that word or phrase becomes a focus of reflection, seeking wisdom from God.
One of my favorite ways to be deeply entrenched in scriptures is by praying the scriptures. We've been using the foundational verse out of Matthew 4:19 where Jesus says, “Come, follow Me and I will make you fishers of people.” That particular verse lends itself so well to placing our own name right after the word come - so that it would sound like, “Come Becky, follow Me and I will make you fishers of people”. We can go as far as looking at Paul's chapter on love contained in the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians, the one that we cling to when we think about love. Love is patient. Love is kind. We replace the word love with our own names so that we can begin to put not only into our mind, but into our hearts the scriptural basis for love.
There are so many different guided studies. We can study through every theme, goal, any person in scripture or events that you could ever want to study or be led to study.
I want to encourage you to not be afraid of commentaries. These are the books that help us to find history and tradition, politics of regions and time frames. They help give us some scriptural dimension where we can look at events and see how they mirror our present day. Which then also helps us be guided by the scripture.
I encourage you to keep a journal for the insights for what you're studying, write down what you're hearing in sermons at church, or sermons that are part of your personal devotion. These collections will help you ask questions like: How does this really apply to my life? What would you do with the information if you would have had it before? Like how you would have behaved differently had you known what you now know?
As you work through the scriptures, I encourage you to then share with each other. Develop shared relationships where scripture is your common ground. Go for coffee and talk them over. We build our obedience with and in community of each other's understanding.
Prayer, scripture, and worship keep us on the path of discipleship as we belong to the body of Christ and become more like Jesus.
In the next week, I encourage you to continue to jot down those moments when you're aware of God with you. Continue to pray for those five folks that you want to share your faith with. And then, if you don't already, commit to a short devotional time and pray for a spiritual friend to journey with you. You may want to explore a spiritual practice that you've never used or you've never heard about before. I would love to have a conversation with you about a new spiritual practice.
Discipleship, above all else, isn't something that we can do alone. It calls us into community and into relationship with God and the world. May you be encouraged this week as you continue to commit to Jesus' call on your life and as you encourage one another in your commitments to Jesus, for our community and for our world. Amen.
Closing Hymn: #467 Trust and Obey
- When we walk with the Lord in the light of His word, what a glory He sheds on our way!
While we do His good will, He abides with us still, and with all who will trust and obey.
Refrain: Trust and obey, for there's no other way to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.
- Not a burden we bear, not a sorrow we share, but our toil He doth richly repay;
not a grief or a loss, not a frown or a cross, but is blest if we trust and obey. (Refrain) - But we never can prove the delights of His love until all on the altar we lay;
for the favor He shows, for the joy He bestows, are for them who will trust and obey. (Refrain) - Then in fellowship sweet we will sit at His feet, or we'll walk by His side in the way;
what He says we will do, where He sends we will go; never fear, only trust and obey. (Refrain)
The blessing: May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face shine upon you this week.
