Monday May 06, 2019
Brave in the New World | Donkeys and Elephants, Oh My! | Mark 12:13-17 | Week 2
I'm really glad that you're here today. We are on week two of a series that we're calling "Brave in the New World." A number of months ago we did a church survey, and one of the questions we asked on that survey was "What are some of the things you'd like to see more teaching on?" Turns out, you guys like hard subjects and we made a series out of a lot of those answers, so over the next few weeks, we're wrestling with a number of difficult subjects. We're calling the series "Brave in the New World," because in case you haven't noticed, the world is changing. How many of you would agree? The world is changing at a pretty rapid pace, and if you're a follower of Jesus.... First of all, if you're not, we're really glad that you're here today, because you get sort of the window-shopping view of how the church wrestles with difficult issues, so I'm glad you're here. But if you are a follower of Christ, my guess is you're wondering how in the world do I live out my faith, in the public sphere, in a world that's changing so quickly? That's the question we're going to be wrestling with over the next few weeks. Essentially, if it's off limits at Thanksgiving dinner, we're going to talk about it over the next few weeks. If you say to your friends and family, "We don't talk about that here, because we all want to remain friends," it's coming up. I sort of jokingly said that maybe after this series we'll do a teaching series on church unity, because we're going to need it.
Last week we said that the church of the future will be a creative minority that has influence without power. Essentially, the way forward is the way back. The early church had almost NO power politically or socially, but over a few hundred years, developed great experience. We opened up Acts 4 and we saw the way that the church had influence, in the way that it proclaimed Jesus and that its message was very, very clear. In the way that it embraced the fact that there was going to be opposition and they didn't expect a red carpet to be rolled out. In the way that they prioritized being people who had been with Jesus; we said, last week, that the world needs more people present in it who have been present with Jesus...
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