Jamie Grace - You Lead

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFmSzL2ppvg

Jamie Grace- You Lead

God leads and you follow.  Is it easy to follow God in the world we live in? (No) Why not?

1.        We have a lot of distractions. Most of us are really busy.  You have school work, chores at home, sports, plays, speech, band, dance, work, and plenty of other things going on.  Obviously these aren’t all bad things.  They actually can be great things to be involved in, but there is no doubt that it takes away from time you could be spending with God.

2.      A lot of the stuff around us doesn’t exactly portray a Christ following lifestyle.  I turned on a local station and the first song playing is talking about getting drunk, doing drugs, and getting with all of the girls.  Turn on the TV at night and people are hooking up with someone different every episode.  No one respects anyone else or themselves.  Absolutely no one honors their mother and father by doing what they are supposed to.  That would be “un-cool.”

3.        Don’t even try to check out the news because that feels like it is always focused on people at their worst.  All day yesterday the sports talk shows were about Lance Armstrong “kind-of” admitting to cheating.  He took steroids, or something like it, in a sport that almost everyone else cheated.  He came back from testicular cancer to win 7 Tour de France titles, but he apparently made some unethical choices along the way.  At the same time, he created the Livestrong foundation that, according to their website, has raised over $470,000,000 to support cancer victims.  Now that he cheated a cycling, it apparently wipes out any good that may have come from Livestrong.  I think you could find thousands of people that have benefited greatly from Livestrong and would say great things about it and Lance, but that isn’t what sells news stories.  The local news isn’t much better.  It always seems to focus on death, scandals, and political bickering. 

4.    If you look around the world, we spend a lot of time trying to find people to lead us, but the qualifications seem to be lacking.  A significant number of our leaders also seem to not follow God, at least not in their daily decisions or actions.  If our leaders don’t follow God it tends to make it harder for us to follow Him. 

If we go back to Israel around 1050 BC there is only one king and his name is God.  God appointed judges to help lead the people but these judges were followers of God.  At around 1050 BC the people of Israel went to the judge, Samuel, and told him they wanted a king like everyone else had.  This made Samuel mad because he felt like the people were disrespecting him.  The Samuel prayed to God about what to do and God responded in 1 Samuel 8:7 “it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king.”  Samuel warned the people in 1 Samuel 8:10-18 about how bad it would be if a king was appointed, but the people wanted it anyway.  Do you know the saying “be careful what you wish for?”  That saying fits perfectly here.  God gave them exactly what they wanted, a king who looked impressive.  Saul was an impressive young man a head taller than any of the other Israelites.  God selected Saul because he would have been like the kings of other nations, impressive looking.  He also had a bad temper and frequently disobeyed God. 

Overall, Saul turned out to be a less than perfect king.  This was the start of Israel’s roller coaster of kings.  Some of them, like David, were considered to be good kings.  More, like Jeroboam and Rehoboam, were marginal at best.  Even the good ones like David made some pretty big mistakes that upset God.  When the Israelites asked for a human king like other nations they appeared to have forgotten that humans make mistakes.  They could have stuck with God as king, but they thought they knew better.  They actually asked for the problems they had.

I don’t want to get in to a political debate.  Multiple polls have shown that the approval rating of our current and previous president was around 50% or lower.  The approval rating of Congress has typically been even lower than the President.  So I think it is safe to say that a lot of people don’t think we have selected good leaders.  So we need to make a choice to follow God’s lead.  Make the time to talk to God.  Tell Him “You lead and I will follow.”  Then you actually need to follow.  It doesn’t matter who our elected leaders are, the choice to follow God can only be yours.   

The Afters - Never going back to OK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TTVGt9dNuHU#!

1-9-13

Who here plays video games?  I’ve always played mostly sports games.  Does this sound familiar to you at all?  You’re playing NCAA Football and you pick your favorite team, the Hawkeyes (of course) and you are playing some poor team like Minnesota.  You know you are going to win easy so you are going to just run up the stats.  You throw the ball deep…it’s intercepted.  Okay, no big deal because you have plenty of time left.  You get the ball back, run it up the middle and BOOM, you fumble and the other team recovers.  Now you are starting to get a little angry because the game is cheating you.  Your down 2 TD’s now and you need to get some points fast so you go deep again and the intercept it again and return it for a TD.  Now you’re mad because the game is “cheating you.”  What usually happens next?  You hit the reset button.

Every year about this time a lot of people hit the reset button on some part of their life.  They call it a New Year’s Resolution. Do any of you have a resolution you are working on? The most common resolution usually involves working out and losing weight.  Think about the words from the song.  “I’m afraid,” “I feel alive and it hurts,” and “I’m never going back” all sound like the sayings of someone starting a work out plan.  Scared they aren’t going to be able to do it, knowing that it’s going to hurt after the workout, and planning to get in shape and make a “lifestyle” change.  I’ve just renamed their song The Resolution song.  I’m sure they are thrilled.

One resolution I am working on this year is a commitment to reading the Bible every day.  It’s a similar plan to what I had last year.  I did a better job of it last year than I did the year before, but I can still get better.  That is what I think of when I hear the song “Never Going Back to OK.”  Do you think resolutions are a good thing?  I think resolutions can be a great thing if we treat them like we are hitting a reset button.  Too often we get hung up on what we have done in the past.  We dwell on the mistakes that we have made.  We refuse to forgive ourselves.  We focus on the times we have failed in the past, possibly with last year’s resolution.  We can’t treat it like we are just re-trying something that we already failed at.  We have to hit the reset button and completely start over. 

Did you know that the idea of a reset button comes from the Bible?  When we get into the book of Genesis we start with the first family, Adam and Eve.  Adam & Eve had kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, etc, etc, etc.  When we get to Genesis 6 we learn that the Earth wasn’t a very great place anymore.  Of all the people living only one family is still worshipping God, the family of Noah.  God saw how corrupt the Earth had become and he was prepared to hit the reset button.  So he gave Noah a job to build an ark.  God gave Noah very specific details of how to build the ark, including the enormous size that was needed.  Do you remember how big the ark needed to be?  (450’ long, 75’ wide, and 45’ tall)No cranes or forklifts, just Noah and his sons, and the help of the animals if you have seen Evan Almighty.  If we were unsure of Noah’s faithfulness before, it would have been very clear after seeing the ark. 

After the ark was built God told him to get in with his family and bring 2 of every animal, a male and female.  Then God hit the reset button and flooded the Earth.  For 40 days and 40 nights the flood water came and stuck around for 150 days.  God wiped out all of the bad things and started over.  That is exactly what we talked about with the resolutions.  God could have just left things as they were.  Things weren’t perfect but God had still filled the world with living things. That had to feel somewhat impressive.  God didn’t want to settle for a world that was just ok though.  He also could have just turned off all living things in the world.  He could have decided that the whole game of life wasn’t going how He wanted it and hit the “power button” and turn off the lights.  God went the resolution route and decided to give man another shot to live life the right way.  You may want to argue that we are failing again, but that is where the challenge returns to us.  We have to live a life that strives for perfection in our relationship with God.  We can’t settle for just ok.  We need to make the resolution to grow in our faith and the Never go back to ok.