Speaking Sunday
In the Genesis poem of creation, God makes the world with words. God says light, night, sky, land, seas, sun, moon, birds, fish, animals, human beings. And it is all so good.
Every day we make our world with words, too. Happy, sad, afraid, want, listen, hope, stop, heal. What we speak, we understand. What we want, we name. What we hope for, we shape with consonants and vowels. Words are powerful things.
Faith is built with words, too. And if you have been a person of faith most of your life, you’ve spoken the language of faith, well, for what seems like forever. And maybe some of the faith vocabulary has become numb for you.
But if you’re new to this Jesus story, maybe words get spoken around you and you find them strange, hollow, and opaque. So maybe you don’t feel numbness, just confusion.
Let’s have a common conversation about the words of faith. Let’s speak Sunday all over again.
Bonus Material
Sometimes the words that surround a word are really important. For example, are you being saved "from" or "by" God? Those are very different stories. So think about prepositions that shape your image of salvation.
Bonus Material
Doubt and faith are not opposites. In fact, they are inseparable. So learn to make friends with your doubt and choose the best way forward regardless.
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Sunday we talked about being chosen and as lovely as that idea is I think one of the problems can be the assumption that if we are chosen that must mean someone else is not. Thankfully God's not limited like that.
Bonus Material
2 More thoughts about Sin
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Believing IN Jesus is easy, it's BELIEVING Jesus and what he tells us about our world is what's hard—and important.
Bonus Material
"Let us not neglect our meeting together." Hebrew 10:25 Is meeting together really just about the physical room? No. But it's definitely about more than watching a video 😳
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We all know we're "saved" by grace. Sometimes we forget we are changed by grace as well.
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"The language of inevitability is the language of the empire. Whenever we hear “We have no choice,” our ears should perk up. It is precisely the strategy of the empire to take our imagination captive so that we think we have no choice. When a certain lifestyle seems inescapable, you need to realize that you are imprisoned. The truth is that we have many choices." —Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmaat
