South Fellowship Church

Thirsty - Josh Suddath - Psalm 42

All I Am: Masquerade - Genesis 32-33:3

ALL I AM: Transition Time - Genesis 30 & 31

ALL I AM: Transition Time - Genesis 30 & 31
When I was 11 years old, my dad's company that he was working for in California closed their doors. They had offices all over and we were offered four different places to move. We could move to Sacramento, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City or glorious Denver. Praise be to God, my parents chose wisely!! I grew up in California and that was all I knew. My whole family was really involved there, so leaving that place was like tearing up roots that had been drilled deep into the soil of where we were. It was a difficult thing to leave. I can remember two things about leaving: 1) There were a lot of tears. 2) At one point in time, there was a circle of people who surrounded my family and me. To the glory of God, we all sang, with tears pouring down our face, Friends are Friends Forever by Michael W. Smith.

ALL I AM: Filling the Void Genesis 29 & 30

ALL I AM: Filling the Void Genesis 29 & 30
I have quite the challenge in front of me -- I am preaching on Mother's Day out of a passage that has to do with polygamy! Pray for me. In fact, it's even a little bit deeper than that....not only is it about polygamy, it's sorta of a sister-wives meets "Desperate Housewives" meets intervention. That's where we're going this morning. If you've been with us over the last few weeks, you know we've been studying the life of Jacob, one of the great patriarchs of the Hebrew faith. He's one of the more unheroic heroes in all of Scriptures. If you've been looking for glimmers of hope or shouts of light in the story, you've been left wanting over the last few weeks.

ALL I AM: Stairway to Heaven Genesis 28: 10-22

ALL I AM: Stairway to Heaven
I grew up in a family that went to church every single Sunday. While I wouldn't say I was a begrudging participant, I definitely didn't have a faith in Jesus in the way the Scriptures describe that. My parents were very involved (in the church), but my interest in church, for the first number of years in my life, up to the age of 10, revolved around a man by the name of Randy. Randy had a mental disability. He took the bus to church and sat in the very front row. He had a backpack with him in the front row. About ten minutes into a sermon one time, he unzips his backpack, takes out two cans of aerosol deodorant, shakes them vigorously, crosses his arms, puts his hands under his shirt and starts to deodorize himself in the front row!! As a ten-year-old kid, I'm like praise Jesus, right? I thought it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen! That was the pinnacle for me! We had reached the mountain top when Randy double-barreled deodorized himself on a Sunday during the sermon.
 

ALL I AM: Crazy Uncle Laban Genesis 28-30

ALL I AM: Crazy Uncle Laban Genesis 28-30 Pastor Josh Billings
One of the things I do is read through my passage as many times as I can when I prepare for a sermon. I read through this one a couple times and was asking God what kind of analogy I should use, what kind of story to bring up and something hit me. Benedict Arnold came to mind! One of the greatest deceivers and traitors in American history. The interesting thing about Arnold....I thought I knew the story pretty well, but as it turns out, I had only scratched the surface about what really was going on in Benedict Arnold's life when he betrayed the American forces. The thing is is that Arnold had been dealt a pretty tough hand in life. That's no joke. He had some pretty significant challenges to overcome and he had struggled and struggled to be a successful general in the American Army. He had had some success in several battles previous to his treason, but it was limited. To make matters worse for him, his comrades or his colleagues, other generals had been known to take credit for his very few successes that he had experienced. To make matters worse for ole Arnold, he had very little money. He lived with an incredibly high level of debt and he was constantly borrowing money. At one point, his co-officers took him to court and demanded that he be court-martialed for some of the issues he had. They found him innocent of those charges, but the stigma stuck with him.

ALL I AM - Jake The Snake - Genesis 27

ALL I AM: Trinkets and Treasures – Genesis 25:29-34

December 26, 1919, a decision was made that definitively shaped two organizations for the next 85 years. Harry Frazee sold one of his best players. His name was George Herman Ruth---you might know him as "The Babe." For $125,000, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, sold the rights of George Herman Ruth (the Babe) to the dreaded New York Yankees. For the next 85 years, the Boston Red Sox lived under "The Curse of the Bambino." Babe Ruth, at the time, was a pitcher, but he started dabbling in hitting and the year before he was traded in 1919, he hit 29 home runs, which wasn't all that bad for a pitcher, even back then. Once he was traded to the Yankees, he started to play every day. The first year he played for the Yankees, he hit 54 home runs and drove in 135 RBIs. He followed that up, in his 1921 campaign, with 59 home runs and 106 RBIs. He went on to be one of the most prolific baseball players of all time. He took the Yankees to the World Series seven times and won it four times. Hit 714 home runs, hit .342 over the course of his career and was elected to the Hall of Fame with more than a 95% election rate. He was a pretty decent player it turned out! You read back through it and you go well, why in the world....Harry Frazee, why in the world would you sell the rights....he didn't even trade him, he just said I need cash, that's what I need. I need you to give me $125K and you have the rights to the Babe. Why in the world would he do that?? If you go back and read about Harry Frazee, he was not only the president and CEO of the Boston Red Sox, but he also dabbled in Broadway theatrical productions. Those weren't doing so hot at the time and he needed cash. So he traded the Babe for $125,000 in cash in a loan for $300,000 and for 85 years it haunted the Boston Red Sox. He made a decision that was based on the immediate and he failed to see the way the long-term might play out.

ALL I AM: Family of Promise Genesis 25:19-28

ALL I AM: Family of Promise Genesis 25:19-28
As a kid I used to love to hear my grandparents tell stories. The grandparents on my mom's side of the family (my grandfather specifically) had some stories to tell. I don't how many of them were true, but they were all intriguing, at least the first time around. He used to share about his time in war in the South Pacific where his boots would have been wet for months on end. He loved to share about meeting my grandmother in his parents' flower shop. She walked in the door, at the ripe old age of 18, and they got married. He told stories about working for an engineering firm that was instrumental in landing one of the first shuttles on the moon. He claims that his name is on a plaque on the moon. I haven't been able to verify this, but we can only assume that it's true. My grandmother had some beautiful stories, too. She told us.....Kelly and I were standing in her hallway one time looking at a picture of her passport when she came over from Germany as a grade-school girl. She told us about fleeing Germany when Hitler was starting to rise to power and how her father had the intuition to see this coming. He loaded his entire family on a boat, sailed across the Atlantic and got to the United States of America. What my grandmother remembered about that event was that both literally and figuratively my great-grandfather refused to look back to Germany after he left. On that boat, head straight forward, saying, "We are not looking back. We are not going to be a part of that."

Easter - WALKING IN GLORY Romans 6:4-5

WALKING IN GLORY  Romans 6:4-5
 
January 30, 2009, at 11:37, a nurse at Palomar Hospital handed me a baby.  My baby!  Ethan--6 pounds, 10 ounces, little tiny guy, but as she handed him to me, I had this overwhelming feeling that my life would never be the same.  I'd fallen in love in a way I never knew I could and I also sensed that although he weighed 6 pounds, 10 ounces, he actually weighed a little bit more than that on my heart and my life.  We put him in the car seat a few days later, after those few glorious days where the nurses changed his diapers and made sure that we didn't kill him.  It was wonderful.  We got in the car, strapped him in the car seat, started driving home.  The drive home where you are going 10 mph in a 35 mph zone and you're wondering why everybody else is in such a hurry.  I'm driving along and going my speed (slow) and people are honking at me and waving at me with only one finger.  We walked over the threshold of the door; I helped Kelly get into the house.  I had Ethan under my arm.  When we closed the door behind us, the silence was almost deafening.  It was as though sirens should have been going off somewhere in the universe to alert people that we had absolutely no clue what we were doing.  I had this feeling like is this a joke.  Is somebody going to come through the door and say we know you have no clue?!  I can remember holding this little kid---he weighed 6 pounds, 10 ounces---and he might as well weighed 1000 pounds. The weight I felt in that moment was just.....it redefined the way that I looked at life.