Pastor Brent describes why Christmas truly is the most wonderful time of the year. Spoiler: it’s not about Santa or the gifts!

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Pastor Brent Clark explains how our understanding of Santa Claus always watching to see if we’ve been bad or good has seeped into our understanding of God.  But the good news for us is that God saves us through the gift of his grace!

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Pastor Ryan describes how our heart leads us after all sorts of things on a search for happiness, but our only true, lasting satisfaction comes from a relationship with Jesus.

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Pastor Brent kicks off The Christmas Album and looks at songs like White Christmas and I’ll Be Home for Christmas and how often our expectations don’t match our circumstances but by keeping our focus on Christ we can see that our unmet expectations can be redeemed and quite possibly lead to more than we could have hoped or imagined.

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Pastor Ryan shares how God wants each of us to leave our mark on the world by choosing to be generous with our abundance.

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Pastor Brent looks at how even though many today consider church to be optional, Jesus considered the church the best and most effective way to change the world and the importance of those following Jesus to leave a mark on and through the church.

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Pastor Amy Becker looks at the impact Timothy’s mother and grandmother had on his life and shows how each of us can leave a mark on our families and the importance of our family legacy.

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Pastor Brent kicks off a new series that looks at how we can leave a mark on the world and live our lives for more than just ourselves. The first message shares the story of Ben and how being prayerful, alert, and ready gave several people around Ben the opportunity to share Jesus with him.

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Pastor Ryan shares how our God is a peacemaking God and as a result, followers of Jesus should be looking to bring peace everywhere we go as well.

 

Fences: Tearing Down Fences Through Peacemaking

Matthew 5:9, 2 Corinthians 5:18-20

Today’s message is the capstone on our series Fences where we have been looking at how to maintain healthy relationships.  The reason we did this series is because, when you really think about it, relationships are the air we breathe in this life.  Every high and every low moment in your life is intricately shared with others in some shape or form. As much as even the most introverted people may like, if you live in West Des Moines, then there is no escaping from a life full of relationships with others. And whether the relationships are familial or romantic, business or pleasure, the fact that the other person is unique and different than you pretty much guarantees that at some point the relationship is going to go through a rough spot. And going through those conflicts can make or break a relationship – even a long standing relationship.  And that’s why we wanted to show you how the Bible encourages us to have healthy relationships with others:

In our first message in this series, Pastor Amy taught us to set healthy boundaries for ourselves, by caring for ourselves, taking the time to connect with God, making margin in our lives, so that we can be the best friend and supporter of others.  If we spend all our time doing what others request of us, we will burn out and be useless – so we need to set healthy boundaries.

The following message, Pastor Brent taught us how some relationships in our lives might be in need of repair, that we need to mend some relational fences.  He showed us how the best way to deal with conflict is to take initiative and with humility, maturity, and love, address it rather than letting it fester and ruin the relationship.

In the 3rd message, I talked about the greatest cause of conflict in our lives, that we often assume the worst about others, making mountains out of molehills.  We will all be better off if we can remember that our family and spouse, our church, and our God are all on our team and want what’s best – so let’s stop assuming they are our opponent.

And in the most recent message, Pastor Brent shared about our opportunity for radical hospitality to tear down fences with others and allows the Gospel message of Jesus to reach people in our lives where we might never otherwise get a chance to talk about Jesus.  He showed us how the Greek word, at its root, means Love of the Stranger. But that will only happen if we create the space in our lives to slow down and invite others to join us at the dinner table.

God’s Plan for Peace

And in this message I’m going to show you how the goal all Christians should have for every relationship around us is to follow our God’s lead and be Peacemakers on this earth.

God’s original intent for this earth AND his plan for our final destiny is one of perfect peace.   The Hebrew word for peace – Shalom – means completeness and wholeness. And that’s what God wants for us all.

But the result of that very first sin in the garden, the disobedience of Adam and Eve, was that chaos entered this world.  Peace was broken and God has been working ever since to restore the peace. He gave us his law to point us toward peace with others.  He established nations and governments to bring peace to entire peoples. The prophet Isaiah wrote about God’s promise to bring send the Messiah, the Savior, who would be the Prince of Peace, to restore the world to a time when the Lion and the Lamb would lay down together.

And when the Prince of Peace, Jesus,  came to this world, he instructed us, his followers, to pursue the same goal he was striving for – to bring peace and wholeness to this fractured, chaotic, broken world.

Blessed Are the Peacemakers

In Jesus’ most famous sermon, his Sermon on the Mount beginning in Matthew 5, he begins with a sort of Prea

Pastor Brent looks at what the writers of the New Testament teach about hospitality and how through hospitality we can tear down the fences between us and those around us in the world.

 

Fences: Tearing Down Fences Through Hospitality

Romans 12:13, 1 Peter 4:9

Introduction

I am fascinated by social media. Not so much by what everyone is posting, rather I am fascinated by what social media has done to our culture. Specifically, how someone can have 792 friends and still be so isolated and alone.

Where technology should make us more connected, it seems to have done the opposite. A study in 2017 actually found that even though social media allows us to be connected to our loved ones 24/7, it’s actually making us feel lonelier. The report suggests that if you spend over two hours a day on social networks, your chances of feeling socially isolated are twice as high.

Another aspect of social media I find interesting and also disturbing is how it has changed the way we communicate. And while some of the changes have been positive, like being able to see first-hand, in real time, events that are happening half-way around the world, it has also had some devastating effects. Increasingly, it seems like people are more concerned about making comments than having conversation. If they can come up with a comment, and it doesn’t matter if the comment is true or not or if it hurts someone, as long as I can post it, then I am satisfied.

Back and forth, all day on Facebook and Twitter people lob these electronic hand grenades with little care or concern to the casualties or devastation to themselves or others. They rationalize, as long as I get to hide behind my social media account and say what was really on my mind, nothing else matters. And to compound the issue, we gravitate towards those groups of people just like us, who think just like us, talk just like us, and we exist online in an echo chamber of insignificance.

Don’t get me wrong. I like social media. I don’t often post but I like keeping track of things going on in your lives when the Facebook algorithm chooses to let me know. More and more, I am convinced that social media creates pseudo-connections, a false sense of community, and as we think about our relationships, in order to get to a place of healthier relationships, it may be time to tear down a few fences.

How do we do that? Does that mean we need to get off of social media? It probably wouldn’t hurt and it would probably make many of you happier if you did. But that’s not the ultimate solution.

Social media really isn’t the problem. It just brings the problem to the forefront. Because the issue isn’t whether it is right or wrong to post a picture of your lunch for the world to see. The issue is do we really see people and do we really want to be seen? Or are we more concerned about the facade or the fantasy others and we portray? Do we really love and care for others, their thoughts, ideas, and beliefs? Do we care about what they’re going through? Do we want to hear what they have to say?

How do we combat isolationism and loneliness that seems to be increasing? How can we push against this natural desire that tells us we don’t need anyone else? The solution is hospitality.

The Pursuit of Hospitality

Pastor Amy did a message on the Lost Art of Hospitality back in February. In that message, she addressed what we often think of when we talk about hospitality. After all, we know businesses in the “hospitality industry” – hotels, restaurants, theme parks, cruise ships.

We also have countless magazines and television shows dedicated to entertaining and hosting. I know that when we say the word hospitality, we all have an image that comes to mind. I would like us to set that aside today. I want to challenge us to think beyond the Martha Stewart hospitality and the American idea of what this means to broaden our understanding and seeing what most of the world already knows about this.

At its core, hospitality is about answering on