Ethos | Roots | 2 Peter 1:12-21 | Week 7

If you haven't been with us, let me catch you up on where we've been the last six weeks. We started by talking about our mission as a church, which is to help people live in the way of Jesus with the heart of Jesus.  We started exploring these values that we want to shape us over the coming months and years that we have together.  The value of presence of God---that we'd be people who pursue the presence of God, who experience the presence of God, who soak in the presence of God.  That we would be people who believe that Jesus has come, not just to save us so that we go to heaven some day, but to heal us and lead us to wholeness TODAY.  We believe that we are a people designed, and wired into our being is that we're people of habits and practice and disciplines that would help, by God's grace, shape us to be more and live more in the way of Jesus.  We believe that God has intended us to live together as family, as a community of faith.  We have different gifts, different passions, and different backgrounds, but God has planted us together in this body of faith, that we would be more together than we would be as individuals added up together.  Last week, we talked about the invitation that God's given us to join him in the world.  He is on mission.  The end of the story is not just that you and I are saved, but that his world is renewed.  He invites us to link arms with him as HE is on mission in this world.  Finally, on this Memorial Day weekend, it just so happens (it lined up perfectly) that we're going to talk about the fact that we want to be a rooted community.

Tomorrow we'll celebrate our history and Memorial Day.  In 1868, the United States started celebrating the people that have gone before us to give the ultimate sacrifice of their very lives to lay a foundation of freedom that we now stand on and are incredibly grateful for.  Amen?  If you're a student of the Scriptures, you will, as you read through the Scriptures, come to see that God constantly reminds his people to be intentional about remembering.  He brings them out of Egypt.  They pass through the Red Sea.  He passes over them and commands them to be a people who celebrate the Passover --- Do not forget what I did in passing over you and bringing you out of Egypt. (Exodus 12)  After their wandering in the desert for forty years, they pass through the Jordan River, and as the Jordan River is held at flood stage, people go back into the middle of a dry river bed and they pick up rocks and make an Ebenezer, a memorial.  God told them that every time you pass by that stone structure, you retell that story.   Because you'll forget...