Union Church

Reflections at One Year

Today Jon shares some reflections and thoughts on Union Church's one year anniversary.

Matthew: Salvation and Presence

Listen in as we look at Matthew 1:18-25 and see how Jesus brings His people across the gaps of life.

Notes/Quotes:

"Sin is not a mistake. A mistake is taking the wrong exit on the highway. A sin is treason against a Holy God. A mistake is a logical misstep. Sin lurks in our heart and grabs us by the throat to do its bidding. One very difficult aspect of sin is that my sin never feels like sin to me. My sin feels like life to me, plain and simple. My heart is an idol factory, and my mind is an excuse-making factory.In accepting misrepresentations of the gospel that render sin anything less than this, you will never learn of the fruit of repentance.” - Rosaria Butterfield

“Here Matthew gives the Messiah two names, by which we learn the essentials of the person and work of their bearer. Jesus is a human Jew—this is what his name says: “Joshua”; Jesus is also the divine Lord—this is what his name means: “God Saves.” Only when Jesus is seen through this dual optic does the gospel of Jesus finally make sense. And Matthew, perhaps intentionally, begins to grind the lens of this dual optic of true humanity and true divinity already in the initial chapter of his Gospel, a lens that will be polished still more in John’s Gospel and brought to a sheen in the Creeds.” - Dale Bruner

“Man's maker was made man that He, Ruler of the stars, might nurse at His mother's breast; that the Bread might hunger, the Fountain thirst, the Light sleep, the Way be tired on its journey; that Truth might be accused of false witnesses, the Teacher be beaten with whips, the Foundation be suspended on wood; that Strength might grow weak; that the Healer might be wounded; that Life might die.” - Augustine

What’s incredible about the Incarnation is not so much that a virgin conceived (remarkable though that might be) but that God became man. “What is truly amazing about the Christian faith,” says the physicist Jonathan Feng, “is the idea that God made the universe—from quarks to galaxies—but at the same time cared enough about us to be born as a human being, to come down, to die and be crucified in the person of Jesus, and to bring forgiveness and new life to broken people.” - Rebecca McLaughlin

The Incarnation is the ultimate reason why the service of God cannot be divorced from the service of man. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise.” Brennan Manning

Matthew: Enter the Story of Jesus

Listen in as we begin our series through Matthew and look a chapter 1:1-17. The good news if found in how Jesus uses and meets us in the gaps of life.

Notes/Quotes:

Matthew 1:1-17

Three gaps many Christian contend with:
1) I believe in God's love but struggle to experience it
2) I believe God is intimately involved, but don't often see it
3) I thought I would be further along by now. 
Minding the gap without legalism, shame & guilt is crucial.
- Steve Cuss

“The book of the genealogy” appears to function not only as a heading for the genealogy itself but also as a title for the entire story to follow: a new beginning with the arrival of Jesus the Messiah and the kingdom of God” - ESV Study Bible

“No words or ordering of words in scripture is without significance. Matthew knows he is telling the story of one that was born a king, yet a king to be sacrificed. God had tested Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice Isaac. By beginning with “son of David,” Matthew prepares us to recognize that this is a king who will end up on the cross.” - Stanley Hauerwas 

Philippians 2:12-13

Bill Berve: One Verse, One Thought, One Quote

Listen in as one of our elders, Bill Berve shares from Joshua 24.

Joshua 24:14 "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord."

"God will not force His will or way in our lives. He will set the choices before us and He will give us the strength to follow through once we have made them, but the Lord will not choose for us, that is up to us." Greg Laurie

Life in the Desert: We Are Sent

Listen in as we close our series "Life in the Desert." Today we see how Jesus meets and sends His people.

 

Notes/Quotes:

John 20:19-23

John 3:16 & 17
Mark 10:45
Philippians 2:5-8

“The ‘as’ in this text (John 20:21) tells us that the mission of Jesus to Israel is to serve as a paradigm for the mission of his followers to the nations. This must determine the way we think about and carry out the mission; it must be founded and modeled upon his. We are not authorized to do it in any other way.” - Mike Goheen 

“The idea is not that individual Christians or churches have authority on their own to forgive or not forgive people, but rather that as the church proclaims the gospel message of forgiveness of sins in the power of the Holy Spirit, it proclaims that those who believe in Jesus have their sins forgiven, and that those who do not believe in him do not have their sins forgiven—which simply reflects what God in heaven has already done” - ESV Study bible 

“It is not so much the case that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission was not made for the church; the church was made for mission – God’s mission.” Chris Wright

Jesus moves us from:
Hurry and distraction to rest and presence 
Anger and frustration to trust and dependency 
Isolation and consumption to community and contentment
Apathy and cynicism to expectation, action and hope

Life in the Desert: A Case for the Sabbath

Listen in as we look at Exodus 20 and see how Jesus leads us toward rest.

Sermon notes/quotes:

Reading: Exodus 20:8-10 Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

“(In Sabbath) drudgery gives way to festivity, family gatherings and occasionally worship, the machinery of self-censorship shut down, too, stilling the eternal inner murmur of self-reproach.” —Judith Shulevitz

“God rested, and in doing so He built a rhythm into the DNA of creation. A tempo, syncopated beat. God worked for six, rested for one. when we fight this work-six-days, Sabbath-one-day rhythm, we go against the grain of the universe. And to quote the philosopher H.H. Farmer, “if you go against the grain of the universe, you get splinters.” - John Mark Comer

“Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.” (Deuteronomy 5:12-15)

“They (the Israelites) invented the idea of social equality. The Israelite Sabbath institutionalized an astonishing, hitherto undreamed-of notion: that every single creature has the right to rest, not just the rich and the privileged. Covered under the Fourth Commandment are women, slaves, strangers and, improbably, animals. The verse in Deuteronomy that elaborates on this aspect of the Sabbath repeats, twice, that slaves were not to work, as if to drive home what must have been very hard to understand in the ancient world. The Jews were meant to perceive the Sabbath not only as a way to honor God but also as the central vehicle of their liberation theology, a weekly reminder of their escape from their servitude in Egypt.” —Judith Shulevitz

“If you want rest you have to go to Him and if you think you’ve gone to Him but you don’t have any rest you don’t know what you have—you still haven’t taken ahold of what you have.” - Timothy Keller

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)

“Sabbath, Anything to index your heart toward grateful recognition of God’s reality and goodness.” -       John Mark Comer

 

One Verse: Elliot Wolfinger

Today Elliot Wolfinger shares Psalm 46:10 and how hand washing has helped him connect with God.

 

"Be still and know that I am God." - Psalm 46:10

 

"All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." JRR Tolkien

Life in the Desert: Finding Family

Listen in as we look at how Jesus gathers and forms His people in hearing and doing the word of God.

Notes/Quotes:

Luke 8:19-21

“Jesus did not (like Mohammad) write a book. Rather, he formed a community to be the bearer of this good news” Al Wolters

Acts 2:42-27

Micah 6:8

“The church need not worry about whether to be in the world. The church’s only concern is how to be in the world, in what form, for what purpose…The church is the bridge where scripture and people meet. We serve the world by showing it something that it is not, namely, a place where God is forming a family out of strangers."  - Stanley Hauerwas

“Human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered "intrinsic" to human happiness and far outweigh "extrinsic" values such as beauty, money and status.” - Sebastian Junger

“The church isn’t a group of holier-than thou saints who’ve formed a club it’s a remarkable, otherwise impossible communion of people who, by the grace of God, stick alongside one another.” James K.A. Smith

A family who:
Is all about Jesus
Is present and patient
Is outward focused and expectant

One Verse, On Thought, One Quote - Crystal Cross

"May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in his works" Psalm 104:31

"May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in his works" "Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” - GK Chesterton

Life in the Desert: Sheep, Wolves, Snakes, Birds

Listen in as we look at Matthew 10:16 and see the heart of Jesus for his people in a hostile world.