lockwoodchurch.org

How often we miss what is happening around us. Because we don’t see it, we think nothing is happening, that God is on break. But Jesus helped us to see that his Father is working all around us, all the time.

Though I am a very imperfect father, my love and commitment to my sons is a reflection – distorted and inaccurate but real, nonetheless – of God’s love and commitment to us. He too is a father. He is the Father.

All of us start with distorted ideas of God. He’s a celestial policeman, looking to bust us for having a little fun. He’s an upscale version of the most religious person we know – all into candles and hymns and long prayers. He’s a kind of cosmic vending machine, spitting out favors … but only if our account is sufficiently funded by good deeds. Jesus helped people see God clearly and, in doing so, debunked many false ideas about him. Because of Jesus, people who thought God disliked them discovered that he really loved and wanted them. When they walked away from a meeting with Jesus, they were saying, “Wow!” about God.

In Luke 22, Jesus is meeting with the leaders of his movement, the Twelve. He has been exceptionally eager to spend this time with them. He knows that his “hour” has come, that he will soon be arrested and executed. Before that happens, he has some final things he wants to say to and do with his team. One of those things has come to be known as Holy Communion or The Lord’s Supper or The Eucharist. Why was that important to Jesus on the last night he was with his friends? Why is it important to us? Why does the church, after 2,000 years, still eat the bread and drink the cup?

In basketball, the worst kind of foul is the technical foul. A technical foul not only gives the opposing team free throws, it forfeits the next possession. At home, the worst kind of foul is hypocrisy. What can we do about hypocrisy? Almost all of us have fallen into it at one time or another. Can we ever get out of it? How?

Ann Arbor has one of the weirdest museums on the planet: The Museum of Failed Products. The shelves and aisles look like a supermarket—except there’s only one of each item. But these items aren’t in a supermarket nowadays: they are all failures, products withdrawn from sale after a few weeks or months, because almost nobody wanted them. If the museum has a message, it's that failure isn’t a rarity; it’s the norm. I wonder what the failure rate of Jesus’s people is? My guess would be 100%. The question is not whether we will fail but what we’ll do after we’ve failed. Because of God’s grace, there is an “after.”

We're again thinking about winning homes – whether comprised of a single adult, a couple, or parents with a house-full of kids. We don’t want to drop the ball when it comes to making our home a Kingdom of God base of operations. What do we need to do? What do we need to guard against?

There are all kinds of homes. Homes with intact original families – mom and dad, three children, and a dog. We also have homes with mom and step-dad (or dad and step-mom), three kids and a cat. We have homes with a single parent, with grandparents, without kids, with lots of kids, and homes with one single adult. During the month of May, we will be looking at four keys to a winning home (however it is comprised). We’ll be thinking about what it takes to have a home that honors God, blesses people, and makes a difference in the world.

We’ll be rounding out our study of the Book of James. We’ll see that the life that is “finished and whole” (James 1:4) is one where God is our center. Whatever’s going on at the periphery of our lives – whether really bad or really good, calm or wild – we can hold together because the Center holds.