Sunday Morning

Are you interested in spiritual vitality for your life? Do you have a desire for spiritual growth but aren’t sure how to get there? In this changing and fast paced world, do you need help keeping a close relationship with God? Beginning this Sunday, Pastors Bob and Aaron are starting a new series designed to help you get spiritually fit. Just as we can fall out of physical shape, we can fall out of spiritual shape too. But God hasn’t left us hopeless. His grace is always available and free all the time. And He has designed classic spiritual practices to help you appropriate His grace and use it to grow in new and powerful ways. This week, we will explore the spiritual practice of prayer as a means of growing closer to God and transforming us. Taking cues from Jesus and other biblical examples as well as from Christ followers through the ages, you will learn practical steps to make your prayer life more spiritually catalytic and a deeper source of God’s amazing grace too.

So, when Pastor Bob and I were talking about who was going to preach which sermons of this series, I felt
compelled to preach on something I struggle with: Solitude and Silence. Over this past month, I’ve been thinking,
praying, and trying to understand why we avoid Solitude, and how Solitude can fill us like noise cannot.

There is quite a story to tell when we consider the ministry of Christ Church all these years. This new series will help us remember our past, celebrate God’s work among us now, and look forward with great hope and anticipation to our future. This congregation has enjoyed a rich heritage of impactful ministry, and it’s important to remember and praise God for all He has done. Psalm 145:4 reads, “One generation will commend your works to another; they will tell of your mighty acts.” (NIV)

Imagine you are Simon Peter. You’ve left everything to follow Jesus. You’ve had incredible moments with Jesus. He told you that he would build his church upon you. You walked on water with him. You saw him feed 5000 people, and you were one of the few to climb the mountain and see him transfigured with Elijah and Moses. Imagine telling Jesus that if everyone else passed away, you would never leave him or forsake him. But you did. In the moment of truth, you denied him. Not once, not twice, but three times before you left in shame and fear. Certainly, you would not be ok. The truth is that sometimes we are not ok because we have messed up, we have sinned. We have done things that have hurt ourselves, our loved ones, and others. The story of Peter doesn’t end with his failure.

Someone once said, “Don’t tell me that worrying doesn’t work. Everything I worry about never happens.” Life is not just what happens to us (see my sermon from last week), but it is also what happens inside of us. We worry. We stress. We fret. We assume. We dread. And our internal thoughts and feelings provide the framework for how we engage in the world. And some of us say things to ourselves that we would never say about another person.

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