Our Prayer

Our Prayer

Heavenly Father, I know that I have sinned against You and that my sins separate me from You. I am truly sorry. I now want to turn away from my sinful past and turn to You for forgiveness. Please forgive me, and help me avoid sinning again. I believe that Your Son, Jesus Christ, died for my sins, that He was raised from the dead, is alive, and hears my prayer. I invite Jesus to become my Savior and the Lord of my life, to rule and reign in my heart from this day forward. Please send Your Holy Spirit to help me obey You and to convict me when I sin. I pledge to grow in grace and knowledge of You. My greatest purpose in life is to follow Your example and do Your will for the rest of my life. In Jesus' name I pray, Amen.

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Lifeline Connections Class Lesson May 31, 2015






Connecting with the World



In the past few weeks we’ve studied about the necessity of nurturing connections in our lives. First, we looked at the foundational connection we each need with God. Then, we built on that with the importance of our connections to others. Last week, we explored the need for a strong connection to our church. This week, we’ll build on that church connection as we let our light shine outside the church, making connections that affect every aspect of the world around us.





Matthew 5:14-16

14 “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden.15 Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.




How are we to bring light to the world?







Published on Apr 13, 2015


David Brooks is a political and cultural Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. In "The Road to Character," Brooks argues we have made a wrong turn when it comes to personal morality and that our society is becoming more shallow and self-centered. But he believes some of the world’s great leaders and thinkers show us how to get back on track. Brooks joins “CBS This Morning” to weigh in on some of the 2016 presidential candidates and his book.

See what you think... 


David Brooks - "The Road to Character" 
Click Here to Watch


This article below was written by Brooks, and is a news feed phenomena on several social media sites. He makes some interesting analogies with résumé and eulogy virtues. But he speaks to this "inner light" that we are called to let shine!

The Moral Bucket List
By David Brooks


ABOUT once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you feel funny and valued. You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all.

When I meet such a person it brightens my whole day. But I confess I often have a sadder thought: It occurs to me that I’ve achieved a decent level of career success, but I have not achieved that. I have not achieved that generosity of spirit, or that depth of character.

A few years ago I realized that I wanted to be a bit more like those people. I realized that if I wanted to do that I was going to have to work harder to save my own soul. I was going to have to have the sort of moral adventures that produce that kind of goodness. I was going to have to be better at balancing my life.

It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?

We all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the résumé ones. But our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the qualities you need to radiate that sort of inner light. Many of us are clearer on how to build an external career than on how to build inner character.

But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.

So a few years ago I set out to discover how those deeply good people got that way. I didn’t know if I could follow their road to character (I’m a pundit, more or less paid to appear smarter and better than I really am). But I at least wanted to know what the road looked like.

I came to the conclusion that wonderful people are made, not born — that the people I admired had achieved an unfakeable inner virtue, built slowly from specific moral and spiritual accomplishments.

If we wanted to be gimmicky, we could say these accomplishments amounted to a moral bucket list, the experiences one should have on the way toward the richest possible inner life. Here, quickly, are some of them:

I. THE HUMILITY SHIFT 

We live in the culture of the Big Me. The meritocracy wants you to promote yourself. Social media wants you to broadcast a highlight reel of your life. Your parents and teachers were always telling you how wonderful you were.

But all the people I’ve ever deeply admired are profoundly honest about their own weaknesses. They have identified their core sin, whether it is selfishness, the desperate need for approval, cowardice, hardheartedness or whatever. They have traced how that core sin leads to the behavior that makes them feel ashamed. They have achieved a profound humility, which has best been defined as an intense self-awareness from a position of other-centeredness.

II. SELF-DEFEAT 

External success is achieved through competition with others. But character is built during the confrontation with your own weakness. Dwight Eisenhower, for example, realized early on that his core sin was his temper. He developed a moderate, cheerful exterior because he knew he needed to project optimism and confidence to lead. He did silly things to tame his anger. He took the names of the people he hated, wrote them down on slips of paper and tore them up and threw them in the garbage. Over a lifetime of self-confrontation, he developed a mature temperament. He made himself strong in his weakest places.

III. THE DEPENDENCY LEAP 

Many people give away the book “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” as a graduation gift. This book suggests that life is an autonomous journey. We master certain skills and experience adventures and certain challenges on our way to individual success. This individualist worldview suggests that character is this little iron figure of willpower inside. But people on the road to character understand that no person can achieve self-mastery on his or her own. Individual will, reason and compassion are not strong enough to consistently defeat selfishness, pride and self-deception. We all need redemptive assistance from outside.

People on this road see life as a process of commitment making. Character is defined by how deeply rooted you are. Have you developed deep connections that hold you up in times of challenge and push you toward the good? In the realm of the intellect, a person of character has achieved a settled philosophy about fundamental things. In the realm of emotion, she is embedded in a web of unconditional loves. In the realm of action, she is committed to tasks that can’t be completed in a single lifetime.

IV. ENERGIZING LOVE 

Dorothy Day led a disorganized life when she was young: drinking, carousing, a suicide attempt or two, following her desires, unable to find direction. But the birth of her daughter changed her. She wrote of that birth, “If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.”

That kind of love decenters the self. It reminds you that your true riches are in another. Most of all, this love electrifies. It puts you in a state of need and makes it delightful to serve what you love. Day’s love for her daughter spilled outward and upward. As she wrote, “No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.”

She made unshakable commitments in all directions. She became a Catholic, started a radical newspaper, opened settlement houses for the poor and lived among the poor, embracing shared poverty as a way to build community, to not only do good, but be good. This gift of love overcame, sometimes, the natural self-centeredness all of us feel.

V. THE CALL WITHIN THE CALL 

We all go into professions for many reasons: money, status, security. But some people have experiences that turn a career into a calling. These experiences quiet the self. All that matters is living up to the standard of excellence inherent in their craft.


Frances Perkins was a young woman who was an activist for progressive causes at the start of the 20th century. She was polite and a bit genteel. But one day she stumbled across the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, and watched dozens of garment workers hurl themselves to their deaths rather than be burned alive. That experience shamed her moral sense and purified her ambition. It was her call within a call.

After that, she turned herself into an instrument for the cause of workers’ rights. She was willing to work with anybody, compromise with anybody, push through hesitation. She even changed her appearance so she could become a more effective instrument for the movement. She became the first woman in a United States cabinet, under Franklin D. Roosevelt, and emerged as one of the great civic figures of the 20th century.

VI. THE CONSCIENCE LEAP 

In most lives there’s a moment when people strip away all the branding and status symbols, all the prestige that goes with having gone to a certain school or been born into a certain family. They leap out beyond the utilitarian logic and crash through the barriers of their fears.

The novelist George Eliot (her real name was Mary Ann Evans) was a mess as a young woman, emotionally needy, falling for every man she met and being rejected. Finally, in her mid-30s she met a guy named George Lewes. Lewes was estranged from his wife, but legally he was married. If Eliot went with Lewes she would be labeled an adulterer by society. She’d lose her friends, be cut off by her family. It took her a week to decide, but she went with Lewes. “Light and easily broken ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically. Women who are satisfied with such ties do not act as I have done,” she wrote.

She chose well. Her character stabilized. Her capacity for empathetic understanding expanded. She lived in a state of steady, devoted love with Lewes, the kind of second love that comes after a person is older, scarred a bit and enmeshed in responsibilities. He served her and helped her become one of the greatest novelists of any age. Together they turned neediness into constancy.

Commencement speakers are always telling young people to follow their passions. Be true to yourself. This is a vision of life that begins with self and ends with self. But people on the road to inner light do not find their vocations by asking, what do I want from life? They ask, what is life asking of me? How can I match my intrinsic talent with one of the world’s deep needs?

Their lives often follow a pattern of defeat, recognition, redemption. They have moments of pain and suffering. But they turn those moments into occasions of radical self-understanding — by keeping a journal or making art. As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.


The people on this road see the moments of suffering as pieces of a larger narrative. They are not really living for happiness, as it is conventionally defined. They see life as a moral drama and feel fulfilled only when they are enmeshed in a struggle on behalf of some ideal.

This is a philosophy for stumblers. The stumbler scuffs through life, a little off balance. But the stumbler faces her imperfect nature with unvarnished honesty, with the opposite of squeamishness. Recognizing her limitations, the stumbler at least has a serious foe to overcome and transcend. The stumbler has an outstretched arm, ready to receive and offer assistance. Her friends are there for deep conversation, comfort and advice.

External ambitions are never satisfied because there’s always something more to achieve. But the stumblers occasionally experience moments of joy. There’s joy in freely chosen obedience to organizations, ideas and people. There’s joy in mutual stumbling. There’s an aesthetic joy we feel when we see morally good action, when we run across someone who is quiet and humble and good, when we see that however old we are, there’s lots to do ahead.

The stumbler doesn’t build her life by being better than others, but by being better than she used to be. Unexpectedly, there are transcendent moments of deep tranquility. For most of their lives their inner and outer ambitions are strong and in balance. But eventually, at moments of rare joy, career ambitions pause, the ego rests, the stumbler looks out at a picnic or dinner or a valley and is overwhelmed by a feeling of limitless gratitude, and an acceptance of the fact that life has treated her much better than she deserves.


Those are the people we want to be.



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Well, does David Brooks have the answer? Is the moral bucket list what we need to find and let our inner light shine to the world? 





One respondent writer, Jill Duffield writes, "All of this is well and good. I read the article and found it well written and worthy of attention. But what really struck me was this: David Brooks didn’t come up with any of this. Jesus did! Humility, recognition of our weakness and sin, dependency on others, energizing love, call, knowing what’s ultimate… all of that is biblical. So, why was this so revelatory to so many? Why was my mother, a ruling elder – who like many, many (did I say many?) boomers has not so much left the church but stopped going – so charged by this concept that human beings are not the sum of their worldly accomplishments?"


Luke 12 sprang to mind with the rich fool and his barns followed by the lilies of the field and the need to have our treasure in heaven. What about first will be last and last will be first? That pivotal foot washing scene and the command to love one another? The bit about the Pharisee and the tax collector and which one went home justified? I seem to recall a few passages about call… you know, like: Feed my sheep and Go therefore and you will be my witnesses. Need a moral bucket list? I think I know where you can find it.


Why isn’t Jesus all over my news feed and in my inbox and being exclaimed about by my mother? (No offense, Mom.) Why isn’t the Good News going viral?

Well, as my ruling elder friend in the communications field liked to say at session meetings, “You have a PR problem!” Indeed, I think the church and, dare I say, Christians have a PR problem. You know it, you’ve heard it. You’ve even seen the statistics to prove it. You can likely recite the perceptions with me: the church is hypocritical, judgmental, irrelevant, obsessed with infighting. Meanwhile, David Brooks and a New York Times article are spreading like kudzu.

We have a PR problem. Even worse, I think we’ve internalized our bad press and have started to believe that the perceptions are true. Certainly some of them are some of the time. Perhaps we should start there and confess it. Yes, we are hypocritical. (There’s that self-defeat category, that recognition of sin. Geez, if nothing else we ought to have a corner on that market!) Yes, we are judgmental, but we acknowledge that we are called to judge not lest we be judged. Yes, we are out of touch, but we are seeking to discern the new thing God is doing, badly sometimes, but sincerely. Yes, we too often fight with each other to the exclusion of looking up and out and around at the mission to which God has called us. (Called, we are called, people!)

Yes, but… that’s not all. We have Good News to share. Powerful, transformative, better-than-a-moral-bucket-list news to share and show and live. You don’t have to “work harder on saving your own soul” as David Brooks suggests. Jesus has saved it already, so you are free to live without that burden, in joy and gratitude and generosity in response.

I am so tired of the church, of congregations, of pastors, playing small, preaching small, proclaiming small, and living small. I want euphoric, “ah-ha” calls about the gospel, not about the New York Times. The world is hungry for abundant life and we know where it can be found. We need to fix our PR problem by risking everything for the sake of the gospel so that the Good News will go viral.

Grace and peace,
Jill
 
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What do you think?




"A brave act of kindness can change a life."


Click Here to Watch




Video: This Thai ad is a stirring, cinematic spot in which the daughter of a charity worker visits a Thai woman who helped her father when he was a prisoner of war in World War II.


Connecting with the World

In the past few weeks we’ve studied about the necessity of nurturing connections in our lives. First, we looked at the foundational connection we each need with God. Then, we built on that with the importance of our connections to others. Last week, we explored the need for a strong connection to our church. This week, we’ll build on that church connection as we let our light shine outside the church, making connections that affect every aspect of the world around us.



Matthew 5:14-16

14 “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden.15 Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.

Jesus describes what we are in this passage - the light of the world, not the light of the church. That means we have to get beyond the church walls and take the light out to where it is dark.


How are we to bring light to the world?



Use Your Influence

  • My influence and visibility is a result of who lives in me, not because of what I do. It is God who puts me in a place of influence and visibility.
  • I am merely a steward of my influence and visibility, so it is important I get out of the way and let Jesus work through me.
  • Only God can measure the significance of my influence and visibility. I may influence one person who will then influence the world. My focus is on following Jesus where ever He leads.
You were saved to shine! Don't hide your testimony or be ashamed to take your Bible to work. How do we shine - we live for God!


Hope to see you this Sunday!


In His Love,

David & Susan


 

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