The Vine Church OC

Pastor Michael Swanson continued our series looking at what it means for the Kingdom of God to come in our lives, this time digging into Jesus' parables about the hidden treasure, and the pearl of great price. The Kingdom is better than we can imagine, and worth giving up everything for, and Michael invited us to do just that - to let this be a time of total surrender.

We spent another week in Matthew 13 with Jesus' parables - this time, the mustard seed and the yeast. Pastor Michael looked at these parables and how they describe the Kingdom of God. Its beginnings are small, and may seem insignificant; but when it is full-grown, it changes everything around it. Sometimes the growth seems negligible, and it's easy to be impatient, get frustrated, and give up that God is even at work. But kingdom growth is a gradual process, and even breakthroughs are preceded by a lot of time of simply being faithful. And in the seed of the kingdom is unstoppable power, so our job is to wait with anticipation, watching the kingdom come in our lives and participating in it.

In the parable of the Sower/the Soil, Pastor Michael asked this week: How receptive are we to the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God in our lives? If we pray the Lord's Prayer, "let your kingdom come", how would we know if that prayer was answered? We looked at the way Jesus used parables to evoke a response on the part of the listener, and considered our own response to hearing his voice.

Mike McNichols finished up our Christmas season by talking about Epiphany this week, looking at the revelation of Jesus as a displaced refugee, who ministered at the margins of society. Instead of remaining distant and detached from the human plight, he entered fully into it. And he came to rescue us ALL.

Dr. Dave Horner spoke this week, as the Christmas season continues, about Jesus as God with us. We looked at how influential Jesus as a person has been throughout the many centuries since his birth. As the incarnate Word of God, Jesus shows us both what God is like AND what true humanity looks like - and he chose to dwell among us, to be-with us.

Greg Ganssle finished our Advent series, Prepare The Way, by looking at the letter to the "lukewarm" Laodicean church. He noticed parallels between that city's church and America's. We tend toward independence and self-sufficiency, and all the while Jesus is knocking on the door of our hearts. How we respond to that knock affects the spiritual temperature of our lives.

We looked at Jesus' letter to the church at Pergamum this week, as Pastor Michael continued our Advent series: Prepare the Way. Pergamum was a city known for Emperor worship and was hostile to Christians in the first century. This tempted the Christians to compromise to the cultural coercion they experienced, but the invitation of Jesus was to turn away *from* the idolatry and *to* him. We explored how "repent" is a loving invitation, and what it might look like in our own lives.

We continued our Advent series, "Prepare the Way" this week, by looking at Jesus' letter to Smyrna in Revelation 2. In this letter, Jesus doesn't rebuke the church, but instead reminds them that he sees them and knows them, in the midst of their suffering. We, too, are seen and known by God, and the encouragement for us is to persevere in this season as we prepare for Jesus to come (again/in our lives).

This first Sunday of Advent, Pastor Michael began a new series, "Prepare the Way", exploring what it means to be looking not only to celebrating Jesus' first coming and anticipating his second coming in this season... but to prepare the way for his coming in our own hearts and lives now. We will be looking at a different one of Jesus' letters to the churches in Asia in this series, and we began with the church at Ephesus, who lost their "first love" - the love they had for God and each other when they first started out.

It was Christ the King Sunday in the church calendar, and our guest speaker was Josh Harrison, pastor to Canopy, a group of house churches in Orange County. Josh is passionate about nothing more than Jesus being king. Jesus is King because he is God, and he created and sustains all of life as we know it - it's all his. So often, we tend not to acknowledge the kingship of Christ in our lives and in the world - it is indeed a tricky subject for us in America where the will of the people functions as "king". Josh related this to the way we approach politics as Christians, and offered us a few challenges as we soon enter 2020, an election year.