First United Methodist Church - DeRidder, LA

Pentecost Sunday - the day Christ gave birth to the church through sending the power of the Holy Spirit to unite all people in Him - is a day those of us in 21st-Century America should probably struggle with more than we do, for the crucial message of Pentecost flies in the face of the "Lone Ranger" mentality so many of us bring to the practice of our faith.

We conclude our Easter series (Seeds of Resurrection and Redemption) and our journey through 1 John by examining the six brief verses that begin the last chapter of this letter that contains a message that is crucial for our own faith and our attempt to faithfully influence others. In these six verses, we will discover and explore the implications of truly believing in the power of God's love for us and the potential in the power of our love for God.

In the second-to-last of our Easter series (Seeds of Resurrection and Redemption) we continue our journy in 1 John, being reminded that true love is intentional, along with all the implications that statement has in our faith and how we live life.

Words are cheap. An old phrase that, unfortunately, is so true in so many circumstances. Easter people, however, know and worship a God who is about far more than words. In this installment of our Easter 2018 series, we are confronted with John's concept that our faith, our love for God, is personal and a faith that spurs us on to action due to our love of the Resurrected Christ.

It does not take much effort these days to find people who will go to great lengths to convince you and anyone who will listen that we live in a world without hope. Unfortunately, these sentiments are also found amongst more than a few of the faithful. As people of the resurrection, however, we know that we find ourselves in a position where our hope is not found in the things or circumstances of this world, but in the evidence of the empty tomb discovered on Easter morning!

On this second Sunday of Easter, we being our "Seed of Resurrection & Redemption" Easater 2018 journey through the letter of 1 John by absorbing and reflecting upon the reality that far from being a senitmental Spring festival, the story of Christ's life, death, and resurrection has a specific, eternal, and essential purpose for all of creation.

We conclude our "Let Me Tell You a Story..." series by looking at Christ's resurrection through the lens of a non-believer, confronting the reality that to fully embrace the reality of the resurreciton will lead one to be considered foolish in the eyes of so many - and the absolute essence of steadfastly holding to the faith no matter the opinion of others.

We begin Holy Week in the same place where the church has started Holy Week for almost two milllenia - amongst the gathered faithful who welcome Jesus for what starts out as the promise of a great week of celebration God's work through the Passover, while also looking at this great day through a post-resurrection lens, where we can see what those gathered on that first Palm Sunday could not because the seminal events of the week had not yet occurred.

Remember the guy you would see at football games holding up the "John 3:16" sign? The sign refers to a seminal biblical truth about God's love in Christ, but what's the context for this well-known citation? In this week's installation of the "Let Me Tell You a Story..." series, we explore Christ's words before and after John 3:16 to learn additonal eternal truths about God and how those truths cannot but influence the way in which we live our life in Christ.

What is is that you believe is impossible in your life right now? What if I told you one of the more well-known stories of the Old Testament, where we discover that God take a 99-year-old man married to a woman whose womb is barren, is not at all about the man or woman, nor is about infertility?