He wants to prepare them for their purpose

Returning to NORMAL? As we have stumbled through the last 14 months, we have heard and said time and again the desire to get “back to normal” or to adjust to “the new normal.” We want to feel a sense of regularity, that things are dependable, or somewhat predictable. That’s what “normal” means

God cares about friendship, and God designed friendship. In fact, God is so committed to friendship that he actively wants us to be his friend. This is actually where the heart of friendship starts. When we’re brought into friendship with God, we can begin to form deep and healthy friendships with other people. Friendship where we don’t use people or let them use us, but where we are genuinely there for one another, caring for one another, refusing to give up on one another, enjoying being together, and being honest, vulnerable and real about the real us. All of this starts with friendship with Jesus. Jesus wants us to be his friends. Not just his followers. Not just his servants or slaves. But his friends. And in this paradigm of friendship with Jesus we will find seven keys for our friendship with him that will shape us into become real, true friends with another another.

Many have discovered to their great financial benefit that people are looking to grow and become better, newer, more improved versions of who they are. The personal growth industry is a $40 Billion per year industry and is expected to do nothing but grow for the foreseeable future. This movement taps into something that God put into the world and into us: God made the world full of things that grow. He made us, people, with a built-in tendency to grow. Even before sin corrupted our world and our hearts, this was true. And now, after the brokenness of our world due to humanity’s rebellion against God, we not only need to grow, but we need to change because we grow in all sorts of twisted and corrupted ways apart from the grace of God. But as much as the self-help movement has tapped into something that God put into the world, it has also twisted that truth into something that moves people away from rather than toward true personal growth. God wants us to grow. He designed us to grow. And in this message we are going to learn about Seven Christian Keys

We're called as Christians to love Jesus, but how do we do that without being weird?

Marketers for goods and services like insurance for cars and extra warranties for microwaves or lawn mowers have long known that people don’t pay a lot of money to protect their stuff. They pay a lot of money to protect their minds from worrying about their stuff. People are willing to pay and pay quite well for “peace of mind.” We inhabit a crazy, chaotic, busy, noisy world. Our ears, eyes, hearts, and minds are constantly bombarded by incomplete projects, chaotic and noisy family life, exhaustion from Zoom calls, bad music, traffic, vaccination and infection rates, anger that someone didn’t hold up their end of things, and shame and guilt for not holding up our end of things. In contrast, we long for complete project, quiet at home, good jazz, mountain air, sea breezes, and for a sense of inner well-being. We long for peace. But we often find that peace eludes us. Thankfully, Jesus offers peace.

When the the Holy Wind

As Christians today, we can fall into two dangers. It’s been said that Satan doesn’t care whether we fall into the ditch on the right hand of conservatism or the left hand of liberalism as long as we wander off the narrow pathway of following Jesus. On the right hand, we can ignore the work of the Spirit, we can acknowledge him theoretically but without any real personal life experience with him. On the left hand, we can obsess about the work of the Spirit and wrongly elevate him above the Father and Son in our understanding or functional pursuit of the Christian life. The solution is to staying on the path is listening to the biblical testimony. That's what we are going to do in this week's teaching as we meet (or get reacquainted with) the Paraklete, the Holy Spirit.

We have a vague sense that we should do God’s will and that we should pray, and we understand these are connected. But we don’t understand at all the mechanics of it. We often have a superficial meme-level, superstitious understanding.

While Peter was concerned with bravery, and Thomas was concerned with practicality, Philip thinks it’s a problem of sufficient calculation, of resourcing. If they only had a bit more, Philip says, then that would be “enough.”