LOVE, GROW, SERVE

Archive for the ‘youth messages’ Category

Happy New Year!  I hope everyone has had an awesome, exciting, enjoyable holiday season and all you students are well on your way to doing great at exam time…right?  I’m sure you were studying all during Christmas break. 

I am consumed.  I am filled with thoughts about…you guessed it!  Love!  Anyone who knows me knows that I can’t really ever stop talking about love.  Love and God are pretty much inseparable…because God is love.  Therefore, I am consumed.  This Sunday, Michelle is going to get us started on a series about our new process/vision/mission as a church (and that includes us, Common Ground): LOVE, GROW, SERVE.

My counsel for you is simple and straightforward: Just go ahead with what you’ve been given.  You received Christ Jesus, the Mater; now live him.  You’re deeply rooted in him.  You’re well constructed upon him.  You know your way around the faith.  Now do what you’ve been taught.  School’s out; quit studying the subject and start living it!  And let your living spill over into thanksgiving.  (Colossians 2:6-7)

You better get used to that verse, because you’re going to be hearing a lot of it around Life Church.  After Michelle gets us geared up with the idea, I am going to start talking about the nuts and bolts, the specifics of what it means to love God & people, grow deeper in our relationship with Christ, and serve God & the world around us.  Hence, I’m all caught up in love right now.

Some ideas to chew on:

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’  This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matt. 22:37-40)

If you love me, you will obey what I command.  (John 14:15)

If anyone boasts, “I love God,” and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar.  If he won’t love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can’t see?  The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people.  You’ve got to love both.  (1 John 4:20-21)

Stay tuned for January 10, 17, 24, and 31 at Common Ground as we wrestle with LOVE, GROW, SERVE!

We are finally celebrating Christmas at Common Ground!

Because of other Sunday night activities at our church, we usually don’t get to do much during Christmas (besides, of course, our annual Christmas party).  This year, it’s different!  And I’m excited.  To be totally honest, usually by this time of year I am totally ready for a month (or more) break.  But really, this year, I’m looking back to September (when we started youth group back up for this school year) and wondering where the time has gone??  Time flies when you’re having fun, I guess.

Last Sunday (November 29) we talked about skipping Christmas–all the secular cultural things that surround celebrating Christmas in the U.S., such as stress, overbooked schedules, debt, excess in eating, excess in stuff.  And we talked about how we really do miss the point sometimes when we allow ourselves to get caught up in the hype of Christmas.   (Hey, remember that baby who was born in a manger?)

When we talked, mostly everyone could articulate the true meaning of Christmas.  We even had Mike Moore’s rendition of A Charlie Brown Christmas in the form of reading the passage describing Jesus’ birth out of the book of Luke (thanks, Mike!).  But I think many of us, myself included, get so wrapped up in all the stuff that we forget why we’re doing all this stuff to begin with.

We then broke up into small groups and talked about what each of us plans to do this Advent season to remember the simple reason for the season.  In my group, people shared about making gifts that have real meaning rather than focusing on the spending, being sure to take time with family because those are the people who matter most, and restricting activities so that Christmas is a joyous occasion rather than a draining one.  I was excited and proud of our students!!

Stay tuned for this Sunday where we will discuss Advent further–our challenging question will be, “What are YOU waiting for?”  Don’t miss our last “real” youth group of 2009!  (Dec. 13 will be our Christmas party!)

I’m working on the next youth group series about temptation (coming to a youth group near you, AKA Common Ground, starting October 25). Temptation is a funny thing, isn’t it? In Christian circles, we blame temptation for a variety of things: problems in our lives, bad decisions we’ve made, sins committed. There are so many things we’re tempted by, and yet I think sometimes we bury our heads in the sand and try to pretend it’s not there. Until it is.

As I’m studying what God says about temptation, I came across this passage in James 1:
“When people are tempted, they should not say, ‘God is tempting me.’ …But people are tempted when their own evil desire leads them away and traps them. This desire leads to sin, and then the sin grows and brings death.”

Wow. Ouch. What this tells me is that, despite what you may have heard (even in church! heaven forbid!), God doesn’t tempt us with evil desires just to test us or see how faithful we are. God is, by definition, good. Instead, temptation is so scary because it’s a glimpse into the darkness of the human sinful nature. It’s a snapshot of what I like to call the “yuck” — the ugly stuff that resides in our hearts, the stuff we’d rather not talk about, think about, or let anyone else see.

I am no neat freak, but I like to keep the house pretty clean and picked up. Especially the living room–the very first part of the house that any visitor sees (and sometimes, the only part of the house a visitor sees). The living room, despite being the room that our family “lives” in the most, is almost always the cleanest room of the house. I want it to look good, be comfortable, and I want to feel peaceful by sitting in a peaceful room.

In contrast, our bedroom is almost always the messiest room in the house. It’s the one place where I don’t usually worry about putting things away, cleaning things up, and obsessively vacuuming the floor. Know why? Because no one ever sees our bedroom except us. Whenever we go to work and our babysitter comes over, the door is shut. Whenever we have guests over, the door is shut. I can successfully shut out the ugly truth about our messy room.  (Well, only for so long, until we can’t find our bed under the piles of clothes, but that’s another story.)

Sometimes I think we try to do that with the yuck that’s in our hearts. But despite our best efforts, sometimes the yuck surfaces. Then what do we do?

James says we run back to God. Just recently, we were at Target and Ethan (our 3 year-old) ventured up to one of those full-size skeleton things you can put on your front porch at Halloween to scare little kids. Not expecting it to do anything, he walked right up to it. Suddenly, it began to move and talk in a scary voice. You should have seen his eyes as he ran back to us as fast as he could go! It was actually pretty hilarious. Only with us, his Mom & Dad, did he feel safe.

And we can only be truly safe from temptation as long as we stay close to God and depend on Him daily, and allow Him to shine a light on the yuck inside us so He can deal with it in His love!!

These are just some of the things I am thinking about.  Come to youth group over the next 4 weeks or so and we’ll explore this monster called temptation together!!