New Life UMC

•John 6 – When we began “Not a Fan” six weeks ago we looked at a story from John, Chapter 6. Here we find great crowds following Jesus. He was doing some pretty cool stuff after all, and when he said, “anyone” could follow him he really meant it. In this story there are 5,000 men gathered around Jesus, listening to him. That means with woman, children, and servants there could have easily been 15,000. I guess Jesus liked mega churches after all. After a full day of teaching and sharing the people were getting hungry. The disciples wanted to send them home, after all to feed that many people would cost a fortune. But Andrew came to Jesus and told him there was a young boy with five loaves of bread and two fish. What did Jesus do? He took those loaves and that fish and fed everyone! Not only that there was food left over. Full and content, the crowd decides to stay where they were for the night so they could be with Jesus the following day. They were pretty committed fans. Morning comes and as they wake up their stomachs growl, but Jesus, their meal ticket, is nowhere to be found. Then someone sees that Jesus and the disciples have cross over the lake. They could have gone home at this point, but these are pretty committed fans, so they seek out Jesus. Sadly they weren’t looking for him. And not having missed breakfast they were ready for lunch, but Jesus wasn’t going to serve them another free meal. In verses 26-27 Jesus says to the crowd, “I tell you the truth, you are looking for me, not because you saw miraculous signs but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.”

Tonight, Jeff and Tom recap the past two years of ministry and tell what New Life has meant to them.

•John 8:2-11 – there are a lot of good stories of rule breakers in the Bible, but one comes to mind. It is found in the eighth chapter of the Gospel of John. Jesus is teaching in the temple and is suddenly surrounded by a group of religious leaders. With stones in their hands they bring a woman before Jesus and proclaim, “We found this woman in bed with a man that was not her husband! The LAW says we stone her. What do you say?” These religious leaders were already upset with Jesus and were trying to trip him up. If he said, “Yes, the law says it is right to stone her” he would have undone all the work he had done and all the things he had said about God loving sinners. He would also be violating Roman law, since the Romans didn’t let the Jewish people carry out executions. BUT if he said, “let her go” then he was breaking the Law of Moses. Either way he would be breaking the rules and the religious people of the time LOVED rules.

•Comfort Cross – but in Luke 9:23, Jesus says, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me.” So what do comfort-craving fans do with the cross? After all, how can you be a Christian and ignore the cross? Sadly, fans have found a way to make the cross comfortable. They create a comfortable idea of what the cross means. Fans throw around phrases like, “we all have our crosses to bear” to refer to some of the most menial tasks or inconveniences. The cross gets pushed back in our minds until Easter and since most church jump from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday without ever considering the cross, fans may miss it completely. Most modern churches don’t even have crosses in the building. Sure, fans wear crosses around their necks, and crosses adorn their t-shirts and bumper stickers, but they don’t talk about it. After all the cross is a pretty hard sell. It is bad enough Jesus had to suffer and die on a cross; but we’re supposed to take up our own crosses? That kind of thing does not put butts in seats. That doesn’t get people to return to our worship. That may even turn people away from Jesus; and isn’t that what we are about, bringing more people to Jesus?

•Fear of Intimacy – intimacy is pretty terrifying. It is terrifying because when you are truly intimate with someone else you make yourself vulnerable; and making yourself vulnerable allows for the opportunity to get hurt, rejected, and even be humiliated. Now imagine being vulnerable with God. God is bound to find some less than desirable qualities, habits, and traits; things we are less than proud of could surface. Now think of that woman in Luke 7. She was a sinner, doesn’t matter what she did, she was defined by it. She was considered unclean. No one would give her the time of day. She was certainly not worthy to touch the cloak of the Messiah. Neither are we. But she knew, and followers know that an intimate relationship with God is worth dealing with our past, worth facing our sins, and even worth a little humiliation.