Sunday Sermon

Sunday Morning Sermon

Sunday Morning Sermon

Extravagant Generosity is an Expression of Your Heart

God-sized vision requires faith & stepping out of your comfort zone

Relationships are Matters of the Heart: Your relationships with one another prove we know Christ

Sharing and Good Deeds

We are healed through our offering of giving. We saw so many acts of giving in the immediate days after 9-11. We have witnessed on outpouring of love and giving of time & talents over the past decade. It is in giving that we are best healed from the damage, brokenness, etc… of our chaotic world since 9-11, when we as a nation truly lost our innocence.

The word "Sabbath" ("shabbat" in Hebrew) means to desist or to cease or to rest. The word "holy" means "different." Therefore, we could render that sentence, "Remember the rest day and keep it different from the other days." The Jewish Sabbath is sundown Friday until sundown Saturday. The Christian movement changed the Sabbath to Sunday because that was the day Jesus arose from the dead. Sabbath is a gift to us. Overworked, we will simply destruct. We need our rest, our relaxation, our fellowship. To make our recovery complete - mind, body, spirit - we need to process ourselves through God, thus “holy rest”.

The Ten Commandments are the lowest possible standard of humane living. They don’t represent the best we can be, but are the least we can expect from each other and still remain human. Erwin McManus declares that "Anything below these standards is choosing to live like an animal, a barbarian. The Ten Commandments don't call us to the extraordinary spiritual life; they call us to stop dehumanizing one another. The law is the minimum of what it means to be human. The reason the law condemns us isn't because of our inability to live up to an extraordinary measure. We couldn't even pass the test with a D. When God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, God was establishing a nation for himself. God was giving them the tools to form an ethos that, through honoring him, would result in the nurturing and elevation of the human spirit." If we don't build our lives on this firm foundation that makes us humane, we can't begin to live as God is calling us to live.