This Sunday begins a new sermon series on Confessions of a Everyday Christian. The premise of the series is that all of us have as many questions as we do answers about our faith. Some of our questions are on topics very basic to our faith. Over the next six weeks we will talk honestly about our questions. This will include questions about prayer, sin, heaven and hell, Christians who embarras us and the relationship between our faith and our money.
This Sunday we will focus on a basic question. Who is Jesus? What do people mean when they talk about a personal relationship with him? Am a still a Christian if I am not sure I accept what everyone else says about him? Is Jesus the only way, really?
The questions we have are important to acknowledge and share. Sometimes church can feel like a place where it is not right to admit we are not sure, struggle with or even disagree with what the accepted teaching seems to say. This series will take head on our doubts and questions. Hopefully it will also destroy the notion that having doubts and different thoughts is a bad thing.
I am asking for your help. If you have any questions, doubts or wonderings about Jesus, please let me know. Just respond to this blog and share with me what is on your mind. Then come and lets talk about them on Sunday. I look forward to your questions and thoughts.
We seem know very little about Jesus' life before his ministry in the Gospels, other than some of the Apocryphal stories. Do you think his life as a child and young man was typical of his peers at the time, or special in some ways?
ReplyDeleteThis is a core issue for me. Jesus was given to us(me) to strengthen my belief and the biggest gift of all - all I have to do is believe and my sins will be forgiven. I'm essential new again. Then why do I fight it so? Is it that I have no other experience in life (so far) where something is given to me without asking for something in return? Or that I just don't deserve this gift? Whatever it is I struggle daily on understanding who is Jesus and then reflecting that into who I am. ckelly
ReplyDeleteOften I ramble on. While driving to work in the morning is a quiet comfortable time for me. Any time I suppose will work, but some feel more personal. Yet my thoughts ramble. I am comfortable with this. With different prayer thoughts popping in and out of my mind while my mind highlights some of them more then others.
ReplyDeleteI believe this is OK. I believe God knows me well enough. I believe He has followed my life long enough, knows what I am experiencing and where I am heading to sort those ramblings out and make sense of them. Even if I don't completely finish a thought pattern, i.e. "Lord I am so so grateful you watched over her when" …Oh I need to make a left turn. God can finish the statement and knows what I was expressing.
Am I alone? Learning to pray...I am intrigued as to what exactly that means....count me in.
When my son Matt was in the hospital for some major surgery, Rick, you remember when we prayed as the nurses wheeled Matt away? You left then Sherry VanderVeen stopped in and stayed with Connie and me for several hours. There was a time when I got up to get a drink of water and the whole room was thick. It truthfully was hard to walk. I could feel them. I could taste them. Prayers were coming in so fast that they absorbed right into my body and into my heart. I Knew God had saved up those prayers, collecting them from friends, from work and from our church family and sent them down all at once, just at the right time. Just at His time. I will never forget that warm feeling and that, “Thank you for being there Lord” moment.
Through my prayers I have given thanks, but those who prayed for my son and our family, do they understand how much it meant?
Jeff