Sunday Musing

Happy Mother's day! May you receive the honor and love that you deserve. Never mind that such should be poured out upon you 365 days a year, and not just one, but that is another story for another time.

Great weekend...
Friday night's wedding of Jeremiah and Carrie. I'm so use to calling him Jeremiah, that it was hard to try and remember to call him by his given name, Jeremy. Somehow Jeremy just didn't seem to fit in my mouth. Of course my counter part in this wedding thingy was Seth Barber, and he had his own troubles...He always refers to Jeremiah as Jerome. But we did manage to pull it off without offending anyone by using the wrong name. Blessings on the couple as they move out in life together to face whatever comes their way.

Last nights VRC was a kind of milestone I guess you could say.
God is taking our focus in a new directions. He has called us to become a place of "equipping". To train and send back out those who have entered into a new relationship with Jesus. Last night's message a was the unveiling of this new direction, and I think it went well. Also, because of the wedding on Friday night, we had to clear the stage of all our musical gear. The stage was cleaned off for the first time in a number of years. So when it came time to put everything back, I felt that we were to use our original sound system that we used during our years at Rapha. Don't ask me why I felt this. I just had been hearing God say that this was a time of resetting. So last night we cranked up our sound system. I think everyone on the worship team would agree that we could hear each other much better and it was easier to follow the flow of the worship.

We taught from Matthew where Jesus saw the multitude and had compassion on them because they were like "Sheep without a shepherd". He told his disciples that such was like a field that was ready to be harvested. I related how most read these verses and say that the harvest is souls that need to be brought into the Kingdom through salvation. So we get all excited about harvesting. We fill our barns....we celebrate the harvest...bu then what? No matter whatever it is that is harvested, it is done so because that crop has a purpose. If it's wheat that you've harvested ,then the wheat has been grown and prepared because it is going to be used in a specific way. Seems to me that the church is all about the harvest, but not so much in making sure the wheat becomes what it was intended to. I compared this to recovery meetings. We are so excited when people come to the meeting. We are so giddy when people get saved....but then we don't know what to do with them....we don't train them and help them learn what it means to follow this Jesus. In other words, like the wheat, the harvest never realizes the full potential of why they were harvested.

VRC is going to be such a place. We do so with complete understanding that you don't mass produce disciples....such are made one person at a time. Who better to go back out into the world to be a voice of reason and an emissary of God to rescue those who are trapped in addiction, than someone who has been delivered from such?
Still not sure how this process is going to work out, as we are probably going to be a work in progress ourselves. But we will push forward and see where this whole thing takes us....
Pray for us if you will that we don't get off in the ditch too bad.

God on you...
mbb