Breve resumen del tema compartido el Domingo 29 de Junio en Esperanza(Ministerio Hispano de Chapelwood UMC en Houston Texas)
faith
do i really need to go to church?
Do i really need to go to church?
It’s not about me but it is for me.
The Excuse
Throughout my lifetime I have heard innumerable times people neglecting the church, claiming God is everywhere (which He is)so therefore there is no necessity to come to church to be in communion with Him, besides the church is full with hypocrites and so they don’t want to waste their time there.
So the other day my wife found this post on Facebook from a well-known author who we are very familiar with and do the title was a bit unusual (This is why I don’t go to church) she thought to herself that it could be one of those catchy titles just to get more people to read it (very common practice) but to her surprise once she finished reading the article she realized that it was not a catchy article, he really meant that, he truly believed that he gained nothing from going to church and finally he was ok with that because he still connected with God in other ways.
I got to tell you, I love when my wife rages in holy anger, I love that she gets upset when someone messes with the sound doctrine, she is not a fan, of anything or no one and she has a good reason:
“when you become a fan you are no longer objective, your passion gets in the way and your judgment is compromised, you can no longer question the person you put on a pedestal”
So allow me to share with you a few points me and her discussed about the dangers of thinking of the church in this way.
La Igleisa: El cuerpo de Cristo
The problem
The Bible is pretty clear about the church reason and mission:
First of all the church is Jesus bride, Paul says in Ephesians 5:32 that Christ and the church are one , verse 25 says Christ loved the church so much He gave up his life for her. Heads up** insulting someone’s bride is not a smart move =P
Secondly: Matthew 16:18 says Jesus himself builds the church and not even the gates of hell will prevail against the church.
Thirdly: Hebrews 10:25 says
And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage one another, especially now that the day of his return is drawing near.
There are many more reasons but I think this should do.
Its not about me
As days go by consumption culture is more and more evident in our churches and this is a dangerous issue, we come with a client mindset not a worshiper attitude, if all we can think of is if the music was ok by my standards, was it easy to park, is the preacher cool, do they have good seats… then something is really wrong with us. We are forgetting why we come together whenever it is you do that, it’s not about me or you, we come to gather as one in God’s presence to give Him our praise.
God in His goodness blesses us and that’s awesome but if we come to seek and not to give we are getting it wrong.
And it is not just that we come to worship, in the church we find community which helps us to grow in our faith, in the church we find purpose, we come to receive instruction, to hear God’s word because ultimately as Romans 10:17 says
So faith comes from hearing, that is, hearing the Good News about Christ.
We come to the church to be equipped and to be sent to the world for Jesus said:
Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
A dangerous weapon
“For if we could control our tongues, we would be perfect and could also control ourselves in every other way.”
James 3:2b
I know that what I am about to write might bother some people and others might think I’m exaggerating, but I believe the way we express ourselves and the conversations we have matter.
It’s quite easy and for some people it’s even fun to upset others on social media, as for me, I decided not to be part of those conversations anymore. I’m sure many will not understand my decision and might even judge me for it, some might say it’s ridiculous, over the top, too religious of me, etc. but one must ask “what is important to me” and I do not know about other believers but my wife and I made a decision to be congruent between what we say we believe and how we live.
Those who know me remember me as one who loves to argue and as I once post in a blog, I would rather win an argument than a friendship, and that’s wrong but we must not let our past mistakes define who we are and who we can become, we cannot go thru life with a “this is who I am” or “I have always been this way” attitude, God calls us to change, to grow, to mature, not to imitate this world.
”Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect..”
Romans 12:2
What really gets me is how we are miss using our time, our words, God called us to speak life not death, He called us to lift one another, to love each other, not to tear us apart on Facebook.
Of course I can’t tell you what to do with your life, what to post or not, God gave you freedom, but what I would like to do is to invite you to be a better steward of the things God has entrusted you and that includes your social media, let’s not forget that we might be the only Bible one gets to read, your life might be the only witness of the Gospel to one of your friends (or their friends), what are your friends being exposed to on your timeline? on your Twitter feed? Are we being light? Are we being a good example?
It hasn’t been easy for me to take this step forward, to avoid the arguments, it’s not easy to against your impulses but one of the fruits of the Spirit is self-control and it was about time for me to allow the Spirit to do what He does best… transform me.
“But no one can tame the tongue. It is restless and evil, full of deadly poison. 9Sometimes it praises our Lord and Father, and sometimes it curses those who have been made in the image of God. 10And so blessing and cursing come pouring out of the same mouth. Surely, my brothers and sisters, this is not right! 11Does a spring of water bubble out with both fresh water and bitter water? 12Does a fig tree produce olives, or a grapevine produce figs? No, and you can’t draw fresh water from a salty spring.”
James 3:8-12
The best story of my life
I love the story of Jesus walking on the water; we can read about it on Matthew 14, there are a few things we could focus on:
- Jesus demonstrating his deity as he defies the laws of nature and walks on water
- The flimsy faith of Peter as he first shows courage and then sinks for his lack of faith
- How the other 11 stayed on the boat, etc
But let’s talk more about our good pal Peter
28Then Peter called to him, “Lord, if it’s really you, tell me to come to you, walking on the water.”
29“Yes, come,” Jesus said.
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that everyone on that boat were in the middle of a storm (a scary one), the Bible tells that they were fighting heavy waves, and when they see Jesus they freak out, do you blame them? I would be one of the freaked out ones; I mean… who walks on water? No one right? They had no clue what it was that they were seeing, but Jesus tells them:
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Take courage. I am here”
But despite Jesus words, the storm is still raging, and I don’t know about you but I would be thinking, cool Jesus you obviously you don’t know nothing about physics but I do, and water can’t hold me up the surface…
And when your life depends on how good a little boat can stand the rage of the sea and you can tell the waves are winning it’s not easy to keep calm.
And what was Peter thinking? I have no clue what he thought was going to happen but something went completely wrong cause we all know what happened next…
30 But when he saw the strong
wind and the waves, he was terrified and began to sink.
But don’t we all go thru that experience? Or is it all rose and bunnies? How many times things dong go as you planned them? The school year is not as easy as you thought it would be, that professor seems to be speaking a foreign language; you made an investment thinking it was pretty safe but now you regret taking that step, you took the challenge of a new role in the company and the new responsibilities overwhelm you. Etc.
Sometimes we take a step of faith in the middle of a life storm and we hope that as soon as we step in faith the storm will stop and the sun will come out once again and that’s hardly the case, the storm keeps raging as before and just as Peter we shout… “Save me, Lord!”
I don’t want us to focus on the fact that Peter doubted and he sank, you and I would have the same outcome, but in that moment of terror when he saw himself lost, as soon as he recognized the danger he was in, the Bible tells us that he didn’t try to swim back to the boat, nor he asked help from his friends, his immediate reaction was to ask for help to the only one with the power to rescue him, that’s the key!, the only one who could save him from the storm he was in was the only one not being affected by it.
the only one who can save you from the storm you are in, is the only one not being affected by it.
Jesus not only saves him from drowning, His next move is to guide Peter back to the boat walking on the same water that was pulling him down seconds before.
How many steps Peter walked from the boat to Jesus?,,, no one knows but with Jesus he walked all the necessary steps to go from the drowning place to the safe place inside the boat, and once there, the winds stopped.
Let me leave you with this…
The worst moment in your life, that moment you fear the most and from which you are trying to desperately escape can be the most memorable moment of your life, it can be just the place where your best story will come to life.
Good people vs Bad people
Good vs Bad
Good vs bad… this is how we normally think, we have been trained to think this way since we are kids, who doesn’t remember
- Superman vs Lex Luthor
- Batman vs The Joker
- G.I. J.O.E.S. vs Cobra Commander
- Thunder Cats vs Mumm-Ra
- Smurfs vs Gargamel
- Autobots vs Decepticons
- X-man vs Magneto
- Apple vs PC =D
And the list can go on forever.
We either associate ourselves as good or bad, we are part of the good team or the bad team, well,,, if you ask the bad team if they are bad most likely they will say no, we are the good ones, our cause is worthy of the sacrifices we make.
And the funny thing is that in our church world is the same, since the times of Jesus, the Pharisees and the leaders of that time truly believed they were serving God when they had Jesus crucified, in their minds they were defending God against this blasphemous dude named Jesus.
Most people do bad things out of a good heart as crazy as that might sound, they don’t mean to be bad or do bad and that is the trap with religiousness, we actually believe that we are good, that we can be worthy of God’s favor because of our good deeds or our good intentions, we miss it completely, we lose sight of the simple truth, and I love how Louie Giglio puts it, Jesus didn’t transform bad people into good people, He brought us from death to life.
As Ephesians 2:4-5 says:
4But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved
So if we don’t forget the fact that it is because Jesus is good and He gave His life in ransom for ours that we now have this new life, now we are called sons, daughters, not for anything of our own doing but His, it’s easier to love people, it’s easier to keep our feet in the ground and serve our neighbors even when they are still dead as we once were.
Instead of judgment our hearts will be filled with compassion, instead of arrogant we would be humble, instead of boasting in our selves we would boast in the grace that we found, the grace that bought us and brought us back home.
Let’s not forget that church was never meant to be a museum of saints but a hospital for the sinner and the broken, a hospital for you and me, a place where the doctor is not you, its Jesus.
Rerouting
1The Lord gave this message to Jonah son of Amittai: 2“Get up and go to the great city of Nineveh. Announce my judgment against it because I have seen how wicked its people are.”
3But Jonah got up and went in the opposite direction to get away from the Lord
Ok so I am a man and men do have a reputation about being lost and still we don’t want to ask for directions, im not saying I have been in such circumstance but I heard of guys with that issue…
OK to be honest I’m pretty bad at following directions, so much so that one time I was going to the airport to pick up my wife here in Houston and not only I failed to reach the correct terminal I ended up at the gate where the airplanes fill their fuel tanks =/ LOL that’s how bad I am.
But being a bit more honest, it is not just that I am bad following road map directions but also its hard sometimes to follow God’s directions for my life, I have found myself thinking thinks like “this is not where I wanted to end up” or “why am I still stuck here” and yet there I was… hurting, with regrets, ashamed, trapped by my own mistakes and bad decisions knowing that there is no one else to blame but me, God’s voice was perfectly clear and still I choose a different path.
The good news is that not all is lost, just like Google Maps or Apple Maps (depending if you are a son of the darkness or the light =P) have a Rerouting feature that sends you back to the right route whenever you missed to follow the indications, God has provided us with an amazing gift called GRACE and His holly Spirit takes us from wherever it is we are at and reroutes us back to His will.
Just as Romans 11:6 says
And since it is through God’s kindness, then it is not by their good works. For in that case, God’s grace would not be what it really is—free and undeserved
God’s love is so big that when the Gospel of Jesus leads us to repentance, He does not condemn us or judge us but on the contrary He fills us with His undeserved love and no matter how far we were from His will or purpose, His Spirit leads us back to where He always wanted us to go.
It’s time to follow the right route!!!
The beauty in darkness
The beauty in darkness
***This week I was so blessed by a message from Pastor Steve Furtick that I want to share what it learned with you****
Tick Tock, Tick Tock, Tick tock… Annoying isn’t it? So it is waiting isn’t it?
Especially in the time we live in is so hard to develop the virtue of patience because we have learned to get everything fast, and if I can have it right this second even better. The other day I was watching the Vergecast (www.TheVerge.com) which is a great podcast that discusses technology and culture, and they were talking about the announcement Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) gave at 60 minutes the other day about how in the next 5 years if everything works right, they would launch Amazon Air, a delivery service that would bring your product to your door in 30 minutes thanks to the Drone technology (flying robots how cool is that!)… WOW!! I’m not sure what amazes me the most, the fact that we could have flying robots delivering stuff all around us or that we can’t even wait more than 30 minutes to get our stuff.
For those of us who have grown up in church there is a phrase that I’m sure will be familiar, “God Moment”, I have used it, maybe you have used it, it’s something we have even heard from the pulpit, it’s just part of our culture, it’s when something amazing happens that wakes you up spiritually, something you needed and only God could do and then…BAAAMM!! It happens and just makes your day, but let’s be honest, those days are the least among our days, but why??
In the New Testament we find 2 Greek words translated as time: CHRONOS which means clock time, real time, you know, like, I’ll meet you at 2:30pm, that’s chronos. And we have KAIROS which literally means the right moment or the opportune moment and it describes that moment when God blows your mind, when He breaks in and touches the mundane and makes the natural, supernatural.
And I know there is no harm intended when we use this expression, I mean I get it, I know what we mean by it, but if I were God (which thank God I’m not =D) I would be a bit frustrated by it because well, He created time, all of it, every second of every minute of every hour…you know where I’m going… time is His so since when God only gets credit for bits of time? How come we don’t feel the same sense of owe all the time?
Eugene Peterson wrote a commentary on Galatians 6:7-10:
Acts of faith aren’t like pebbles dropped in a pool that make a few temporary ripples and then sink to the bottom, inert. They’re seeds planted in the soil of life, and they will come up one day. The harvest is inevitable.
Don’t be misled: No one makes a fool of God. What a person plants, he will harvest (verse 7). Decisions are seed. Attitudes are seed. Acts are seed. Prayers are seed. Thoughts are seed. And all of it will come to harvest.
The person, though, who looks for quick results from planting seeds of well doing, will be disappointed. If I want potatoes for dinner tomorrow, it will do me little good to go out tonight and plant potatoes in my garden.
Long stretches of darkness and invisibility and silence separate planting from reaping.
Many times we miss the blessing because we are waiting on the blessing…excuse me? Yes, we are so desperate to see the fruit that we miss all that God has for us between the sowing and the reaping, God is as much God when the seeds are being planted as He is when we enjoy the fruit of the labor, God is there in the dark moments, in the invisibility, the silence, while the seed is buried in the soil, He is there in every second, it is us who can’t see because we don’t know what to look for.
We don’t see Kairos because it’s dressed as Chronos, we don’t see the tree because its dressed as seed, we can’t recognize the divine because its dressed as mundane.
Let’s put our impatience aside, let’s learn to enjoy each season, each day, and lets look for God on every moment of our lives, He is there, even in the mundane waiting for us to open our eyes, He came into our world and changed everything when He send His son Jesus to die for our sins on the cross and He not only died but after 3 days of darkness, invisibility and silence, broke through again and transformed our eternity forever!!!
Let’s stop living in Chronos waiting for Kairos and let’s remember that Kairos is living in our chronos.
The God of disappointments
I will never forget how a few years ago the soccer dream of an entire city (my hometown) was about to come true, 5 minutes on the clock and Tigres (my team) was beating Santos 2-0 and our city Derbi was about to take place in the championship finals, something that had never taken place until then, a championship game vs Rayados seemed inevitable… we suffered a mayor disappointment when at the end of the game we were no longer the victors.
Your disappointment is directly related to the expectation you have for something.
Have you ever felt disappointed by God? Is it even possible?
John 11 tells the story of Jesus and Lazarus and we can read the kind of relationship Jesus had with Lazarus and his sisters, it’s clear that Jesus loved them, so when Lazarus was deadly ill, his sisters send a message forward to Jesus who was already famous for His miracles, so we can totally understand the expectations Mary and Martha had in the middle of this scenario…
3So the two sisters sent a message to Jesus telling him, “Lord, your dear friend is very sick.”4But when Jesus heard about it he said, “Lazarus’s sickness will not end in death. No, it happened for the glory of God so that the Son of God will receive glory from this.”
However we read on verse 17 when Jesus arrived at Bethany, he was told that Lazarus had already been in his grave for four days.
For those of us who already know how the story ends this is dangerous ground and sorry, spoiler alert!!, Jesus brings back Lazarus from the death, so the thing is that we can miss the fact that Martha and Mary had no idea of how the story ends, for them their loved brother was cold dead and Jesus didn’t make it on time, there was no miracle, there was no reason to celebrate, their brother was buried in a tomb….Disappointment!!!!
And Jesus disappointed many people while he walked this earth, you don’t believe me?
Israel waited for a Messiah, a political figure not a servant, someone born from a royal family not from a humble farm girl in a manger.
Peter was hoping Jesus wouldn’t heal her mother in law and He did…. Ok that part is not true LOL
Our disappointment comes when our expectations are not aligned to God’s expectations and Jesus teaches us that His plans are different and always better than ours.
Back to Lazarus account, Jesus arrives 4 days late (Jewish tradition claims that the spirit abandons the body at the 3rd day) when all hope if any hope was left was gone, and He does the impossible, what no one could have ever dream of… He brings back Lazarus from the grave!!! Jesus is not after your expectations, He wants to exceed them.
Don’t base your expectations in what you can see because what you can see can change in a heartbeat, anchor your expectations in the immutable truth of Jesus in your life, believe what He has declared for you and don’t hesitate nor fear despite your circumstances, Jesus is faithful and He will keep his promises.
Martha in the midst of her grief replied to Jesus
22But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask
I encourage you to expect the unexpected, don’t leave the game before it finishes.
Don’t place your expectations in something, place it in someone… place it in Jesus.
Today i don’t want to worship
“When you don’t feel like giving praise to Jesus that’s when you need to do it the most.”
Let’s be honest, not every morning you wake up feeling awesome, like a rock star living THE LIFE, the American dream, there are days not everything goes as you planned, finals are around the corner and you are not ready, you see the bills and are terrified by them, your relationship is not where you would like it to be, your job… well you get the idea.
There are days you not only don’t want to worship or be grateful but you are almost not sure what you believe anymore and let me tell you something, you are not alone, many of us have felt this way at some point, but it’s in those moments we need to remember this:
“It’s not about what I fell but about what I know”
I love this phrase I Heard from pastor Steve Furtick “there are 2 ideal moments to worship God, when i fell like it and when I don’t” lol I couldn’t agree more.
That is why I am suffering here in prison. But I am not ashamed of it, for I know the one in whom I trust, and I am sure that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him until the day of his return. 1Timothy 1:12
Paul reminds us that is not about our circumstances, he wrote this letter from prison (not the coolest place to write from) after being scorned, beaten and shamed as if he was a criminal, the crime: preaching the gospel, he was telling people about the freedom Jesus bought for us and for that he was in chains, so he tells us that our faith is not in something we believe but in someone we know… JESUS.
And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect. (Romanos 12:1-2)
Our society has thought us that our behavior must go hand by hand with our circumstances; if we are happy we ought to celebrate but if things are not going our way it’s ok to be sad, to be depressed, we even have songs to play as the soundtrack of our meltdown and a culture that celebrates our rebel behavior, we lift our glasses and our fists against heaven and we dare to say “I don’t need you!” but Paul invites us not to imitate worldly behaviors but to let God transform us by changing the way we think.
I have seen a big change in my own life simply by believing God regardless how crazy it may seem, Psalms 32:1 says “I will praise the Lord at all times. I will constantly speak his praises.” and at all times means exactly that, all times, even the times when everything is falling apart, and i can testify that when we focus in God’s goodness and we are grateful with what we have and stop complaining about what we don’t have today, something happens, when we give God the glory despite our circumstances, our circumstances change or our perspective about them changes.
So next time you find yourself not wanting to praise Him or with an ungrateful attitude, remind yourself that God is worthy of praise at all time, shake off your troubles and instead of raising your fist, raise your hands and your voice to Him who is worthy of all glory and honor.
He took care of it.
John 19:30 (New Living translation)
30When Jesus had tasted it, he said, “It is finished!” Then he bowed his head and released his spirit.
WOW!!!! That’s freedom right there….
I grew up in a church culture where your relationship with God was based on a list of activities, if you did certain things it meant you had a good solid relationship with God, if you didn’t do those and on the contrary you did another set of things “less holy” your relationship with God was poor or nonexistent. Maybe you had an experience similar to mine or maybe that’s your life today and you are in the middle of that culture.
I don’t pretend to know it all nor to have the TRUTH but I do think that the word of God is pretty clear and I love how Paul sets things clear on Galatians 2:15-21
15“You and I are Jews by birth, not ‘sinners’ like the Gentiles. 16Yet we know that a person is made right with God by faith in Jesus Christ, not by obeying the law. And we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we might be made right with God because of our faith in Christ, not because we have obeyed the law. For no one will ever be made right with God by obeying the law.”
17But suppose we seek to be made right with God through faith in Christ and then we are found guilty because we have abandoned the law. Would that mean Christ has led us into sin? Absolutely not! 18Rather, I am a sinner if I rebuild the old system of law I already tore down. 19For when I tried to keep the law, it condemned me. So I died to the law—I stopped trying to meet all its requirements—so that I might live for God.20My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. 21I do not treat the grace of God as meaningless. For if keeping the law could make us right with God, then there was no need for Christ to die.
This is the Gospel friends!!!
We have been declared righteous before God because of our faith in Christ not because of our impressive performance, Jesus said on the cross “It Is Finished”, there is no need to add anything more to it, His sacrifice was enough, He didn’t missed any sin when He took our place on that cross. We were bought with a price of bold not because we deserved it
8But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.
Romans 5:8
We were still sinners when Jesus took the cross, it’s a mistake to think that at some point our actions made us worthy, Jesus didn’t went to the cross because He saw the potential in us, He did it for love, because He is good not because we are good.
For some reason we have changed the meaning of Christian, we have lived with the wrong impression that Christian = Perfect when Christian = Forgiven.
I am not inviting you to sin freely, on the opposite spectrum, I just want us to be aware that our good works are not a necessity (to be OK with God) but a byproduct of this new nature we have in Jesus, it’s a response to His love.
Remove the pressure, enjoy the freedom of His love, Jesus paid the price; His love has no limits, the rest… He took care of it.
Leo Lozano 