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Showing posts from January, 2006

Greatness in Worship!

We all, if we were honest with ourselves, long for our lives to be great! We long for our actions to outlive our bodies. We long for life to mean something! We are certainly at no loss, especially in our culture, for definitions of success. From media to marketing, to friends and family, to bosses and bureaucrats, everyone is pushing a definition of greatness! Books have been written to help us “reach our potential!” And we are assured, that if we follow these 20 easy steps, we too can be great! But we are Kingdom people. We are a people whose citizenship lies in God’s country. So it stands to reason that if we long for greatness, we should seek for what greatness means in our homeland. What makes someone great in God’s Kingdom? Most of us have heard the answer, but how quickly we expatriates forget. Listen to Jesus' words in Mark 10:43-45, “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of man also ca

All Things New

Yes, it’s that time of the year again! It’s time for a brand new calendar; a clean slate of endless possibilities, with all those empty boxes begging to be filled. We are a resolved people! We are resolved to do better this year than last, to love stronger, to forgive easier, to exercise more, and eat less. Every year it’s the same. We (if you’re like me) resolve to produce more positive fruit! And (if you’re like me) every year, it only takes a few weeks to get disillusioned and downhearted. But I learned something new this past week in church, and if you had the pleasure of being there, you did too! We weren’t made to produce fruit in our lives! We weren’t made to do better, and be stronger. We were made to bear fruit. The Spirit of God produces the fruit in us. So how will we make this year different? How can we enter the New Year in such a way that we meet our resolution expectations? We Abide in Christ as He abides in us. In John 15, Jesus lays out a comprehensive command to abid