This Sunday we continue through our series, "For The Valley" by looking the importance of praying for the Valley. We Christ urging to Ask, Seek, and Knock within Luke 11.

This week, we explored how we can be For the Valley by being a people who operate out of a place of rest- that in doing so, we are less distracted, less concerned about our own status and appearance, and more fully able to invest in those around us. We saw how the book of Hebrews, in chapters 3 and 4, compares Christ-followers to those who followed Moses in the Old Testament. Although the people alongside Moses saw what amazing things God had done, they eventually “hardened their hearts”- they stopped believing that, no matter what they were up against, God was strong enough and that He was for them. This turned them against one another and cost them their God-promised rest. Jesus, as a better and more perfect Moses, has made a way for us to enter a more lasting rest that God offers us. But the same thing threatens that rest- disbelieving or being distracted from the fact that God hasn’t abandoned us with our problems, our shame and our sin. We can “strive to enter” His rest as a part of the fight of the Christian life- both with individual practices of spiritual nourishment but also in encouraging others against sin’s deceit.

March 1st, 2020 - Pastor Travis teaches through Acts 1:6-11 and the necessity of allowing the Holy Spirit to inform not only a “vertical” relationship with God, but also to seek out “horizontal” relationships with others in response to Christ’s love for us.

Jesus’ “high priestly prayer” in John 17 is known as such because Jesus stands before God the Father and prays earnestly on behalf of the church, similar to what a High Priest would do for the Jewish people. Jesus’ prayer is filled with longing to see the church be unified, to be “one” in the same mysterious, unbreakable way that God is one between Father, Son and Spirit. He even goes so far as to say that when the church is “one” in this way, there will be no greater proof for Jesus being who He says He is- God in the flesh. Remembering this prayer may be great to motivate us for a time, but can be gut-wrenching when we look around and see how the church falls short of that kind of unity. That is because the enemy seeks to thwart our attempts at this unity by discouraging, distracting, discrediting, and dividing us (or using us to discourage, distract, discredit, or divide others within the church). The good news is that as Christians, we have One inside of us that is greater than these attempts. At the cross, Jesus is strong enough to carry the weight of our disunity-causing-sin, freeing us for the oneness that reflects the glory of God. We cannot be For the Valley if we are not for one another.

This week we had former Riverbend elder Matt Kay visiting us from the church they have planted in

NYC: Hope East Village. We looked at Jeremiah 29, the context of which is God addressing an

Israelite people who just found out that they weren’t to be in exile in Babylon just 2 years (as a false

prophet was previously saying), but actually it was going to be 70 years. An entire lifetime. The way

God addresses them in chapter 29 gives us a vision for the way we live our lives wherever it is we

find ourselves. Be present. Invest in people in that place. Seek the well-being and shalom for the

community around you. It can be easy to always think of, and be wrapped up in, the “next step”, and

when we do that, we miss out on the fullness of what God is doing in our present situation- both

through us and to us.

This week we started a series called “For the Valley”. Often, Christians are characterized more by what they are against rather than what they are for. Looking at Jesus in Matthew 9:35-38, we see that he is moved deeply when he sees people that are spiritually needy. He is the shepherd that was foretold in the Old Testament, but not just to those who are “in” with God, but to those who are far from Him. We are to be like him in this way, proclaiming the invitation to the family that a lost world was always created for. With nearly 1 million people of the Lehigh Valley, there are hundreds of thousands of our neighbors who look to things other than Jesus as their shepherd. Rather than look down on these people or ignore them, the Church is to be like Jesus and have compassion on them, pray for them, and be laborers in the harvest of bringing them to an awaiting Savior.

Throughout the New Testament, the early Christian church was marked by followers with lives steeped in generosity. Many of these people were in extreme poverty, like the Macedonian people Paul uses as an example in 2 Corinthians 8-9. These people, though they had little resources, gave relief to other Christians and funded Paul’s mission trips to much wealthier areas and churches. It is in this context that Paul encourages the (much wealthier) Corinthian church to be generous in 2 Corinthians 9:6-15. The heart of Paul’s message is not to shame them for their greed, but to paint a picture of what they are missing out on when they do not give generously. When we give cheerfully, we share in the love of God for others- who for our sake gave up the riches of the entire universe to become poor in the form of Jesus (2 Cor 8:9). There will always be questions of “how much” or “in what situations” when it comes to giving, and instead of having firm answers here, these are better answered by further examination of our heart and motives. Does our giving create a burden on the lifestyle we would want for ourselves? Does our giving bring us joy as we see how God uses it to further His gospel message? Does our giving cause us to be reminded of the fact that nothing is ours?

Pastor Joe looks at the story of Joseph, and his foresight in saving during a season of plenty, to save many lives during a season of famine.

The Roman government often exploited its citizens in cruel ways. Rather than instructing the church

in Rome to rebel or leave, Paul tells them to give to this government what is owed (taxes, respect,

honor). However, Paul warns them not to owe anything, a warning against voluntarily going into debt.

While so commonly accepted in our culture, debt is still something Christians ought to view as

counter to the freedom that God desires in our lives and should seek to get out from debt- with

wisdom in borrowing and wisdom in repayment. Paul also reminds the church that because of Jesus’

costly act of purchasing the church with his blood, we have an unpayable debt to love one another.

Continuing the series “In God we trust – the heart of money”, we see Paul’s warnings to the church about the ever-present temptation of greed in 1 Timothy 6. Greed is an affront to God, because what God desires for us is a contentment that says “I have more than enough”, but greed says “I will never have enough”. We constantly strive to live financially as our friends, family or culture say we should. We end up walking down an uncertain, ever-shifting, never-ending path and missing out on “that which is truly life” that comes through acknowledging that all that we have is from God, for God, and ultimately to God.