One More Thing

Hi Five Oakers, The weekend’s coming and there are a few things I don’t want you to miss:

 The Weekend

Have you ever thought about what it must be like to have gone to school with or taught or worked with someone who later went on to be president of the United States? Of course, at the time, you would have had no idea, especially if the president didn’t come from an influential family.

Now imagine going to synagogue school with Jesus or teaching him as a child or young adult. Imagine having hired him to build something for you. And then you see him after his resurrection and discover that he was God in the flesh!

One of the things we’re going to look at this weekend is reality that while Jesus was here on earth, he sang songs, learned Scripture and worshiped. He was a worshiper. He wasn’t just going through the motions, keeping up appearances, while actually basking in the worship that went on around him. He worshiped. And the fact that he worshiped has huge implications for our worship. Encouraging implications. Come ready to be encouraged.

Links You Might Like

// Questions to ask Yourself about Electronics

// Struggling with Singleness 

 One More Thing

 The late Christian philosopher Dallas Willard wrote that God is "the most joyous being in the universe,” and he explains why:

While I was teaching in South Africa some time ago, a young man … took me out to see the beaches near his home in Port Elizabeth. I was totally unprepared for the experience. I had seen beaches, or so I thought. But when we came over the rise where the sea and land opened up to us, I stood in stunned silence and then slowly walked toward the waves. Words cannot capture the view that confronted me ….

[I realized] that God sees this all the time. He sees it, experiences it, knows it from every possible point of view, this and billions of other scenes like and unlike it, in this and billions of other worlds. Great tidal waves of joy must constantly wash through his being ….

We pay a lot of money to get a tank with a few tropical fish in it and never tire of looking at their [beauty] and marvelous forms and movements. But God has seas full of them, which he constantly enjoys …. We are enraptured by a well-done movie sequence or by a few bars from an opera or lines from a poem. We treasure our great experiences for a lifetime, and we may have very few of them. But he is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right ….

"All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness.” (The Divine Conspiracy)

Blessings to you all, Pastor Henry

Ten Tweets

Here's my sermon from last weekend in 10 tweets: “Holy, Holy, Holy” (Isaiah 6)

1// “I’m just afraid I can’t be the mother this situation may call me to be. It’s overwhelming.”

2// Isaiah’s overwhelming assignment: Preach without fruit until everyone and everything is destroyed.

3// Without the vision of God’s holiness, Isaiah would likely have been too overwhelmed to accept his assignment.

4// When your assignment is overwhelming, you need a reminder of God’s sovereignty He’s still on his throne & in control.

5// You need a vision of God’s beauty. The angelic beings are fascinated with God. They can’t get enough of him.

6// Dimming the light on your iPhone to preserve the battery is like asking your wife not to smile to preserve her face.

7// When we see God, our fascination will never fade as it does with things that fascinate us here.

8// We need an assurance of his presence. Deeper love comes from a deeper appreciation that I can be in the presence of a holy God.

9// Your overwhelming assignment doesn’t mean God is angry at you or has abandoned you.

10// Millions have responded to Isaiah’s preaching about a divine Savior who will carry our sorrows & bear our sins.