The amount of information we have access to, and the amount of sheer noise we navigate on a daily basis robs us of all of the gifts that come with just a bit of quiet, including the gift of being a non-anxious presence in a highly anxious world.

I imagine this onslaught of noise, information, opportunities, and frenetic pace makes you feel cluttered, even trapped in a cooperatively constructed prison from which there is no escape.

And this is just wrong. It is wrong for you and I to live under such pressure and be imprisoned by the pace, sounds and chaos of our host-culture.

We have fast, distracted, overextended lives. All of us do. And because of it, we are missing out on actually living. For those who follow the Way of Jesus, we also miss Jesus in all the hurried distraction. It is for this reason that Dallas Willard said, “hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.” It is why psychologist Carl Jung wrote, “hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil.”

Hurry is killing our spiritual, physical and emotional life. We all want a healthy, whole life, even if we are unsure how to get there. What if the answer was simply slowing down and un-hurrying? What if all you had to do was slow down long enough for your blur of a life to come into focus? What if slowing so that your spiritual, emotional and physical wellbeing would return to flourishing, would you do it?

Slowing is part of the antidote, but to experience full healing from hurry we must slow with Jesus. Jesus offers us an unhurried life. He offers us a life that allows us to “live freely and lightly,” as the late Eugene Peterson put it. But we have to slow long enough to accept His offer and live into it, which is precisely what we will see today in his encounter with the two sisters, Mary and Martha.

We have what Comer calls Hurry Sickness, and it is robbing us of an abundant life. What is Hurry Sickness, you wonder?  Cardiologists Meyer Friedman and R.H. Rosenman coined the term Hurry sickness in their 1985 book “Type A Behavior and Your Heart.” It isn’t an actual medical condition, but it is the cause of several medical conditions.

Do you constantly feel rushed or anxious? Do you live with a feeling of urgency to get things done when there is no need. When you are chronically in a hurry, it can mentally and physically affect you. Friedman and Rosenman found that hurry sickness… may even lead to stress-related heart issues.

Over the next six weeks we will journey through the big ideas of John Mark Comer’s fantastic book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. The book itself does a masterful job in drawing out the desires Jesus has for us, and how Jesus’ desires for us to have an abundant life are in direct conflict with the way we have been trained to live life in our busy, hurried, hectic world.

We don’t see the fullness of the church. Why is this important? Because in the west, being in Christian community is a casual endeavor with part-time investment. 

Of course, there are exceptions to the convenient path of the majority Church culture. A dear sister in our community shared shared this with the pastors recently, “My Christian background is largely based in the Korean church, where we meet for morning prayer, Wednesday services, youth group, Korean School on Saturdays and weekly lunches post-services. Though there are also principal dangers with spending too much time together, there was definitely unity and understanding within my church community.”  When the Church started, it was very much as is described here, a people committed to one another and Jesus in every area of their lives. A community of people committed completely to each other—that's the church!

If you would like to join a small group visit renovationchurch.com/smallgroups. 

We believe this year is the year of freedom. Freedom in every aspect of our lives. Financially, relationally, spiritually, emotionally, and whatever other category you may have. 

We believe freedom is found in the context of community. 

If you want to be free, it requires the people of Jesus. That gets us to the next two weeks. This Sunday and next Sunday are all about why you need community and giving you the opportunity to be part of one. We call those communities small groups. So upfront, I want to give you the goal we have as a church. 100% participation in small groups

Fifteen years ago, during a recession, Breanna and I began our journey of starting Renovation Church. We had no money. We had no team. All we had was the hope and Vision God put in our hearts—to plant the gospel, in hopes that a community would form, that would birth a church that represented God’s desire to form a family for Himself from all people. So much has happened since we started this journey and so much has changed, but we are both still so energized by what we believe God still has for this city and our church and us.

It is what today is about, prayerfully envisioning where we might go next in pursuit of God’s vision for our church and broader community. Today will be a bit different than a normal sermon, but I know it will engage your mind and I hope to thrill your heart as you see what the year might hold.

You can access all the materials from todays sermon at renovationchurch.com/vision-2023

We have more faith in the practise of medicine than we have in the promises of God.

Now, as I said last time we were together, I am logical first. It is how I am wired. And I have a great deal of respect for the medical profession and medical professionals, but even their expertise is a gift from God. (Genesis 1:26-27) 

And I am not telling you to reject medical care, so let me say it outright before I get any blowback—if you need medicine for a physical, emotional or mental diagnosis of any kind, get and take your medicine! 

This is not an attack on the practise of medicine, but a challenge to our paradigm of belief. We trust people God made more than we trust God! And that is the bottom line.

Yet, what we see from scripture is that if our faith is placed in God, it is never misplaced. If our trust is invested in God, it is a good investment! And God still heals, but we must have faith to believe He can and does. The early part of Dr Luke’s record of the first church shows us this, without caveat.

One of my favourite movie lines of all time is, “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing the world he did not exist.” But he very much exists, and he is very active in this world. The reality is that we struggle to embrace the supernatural and miraculous aspects of the Scriptures… and the implications of those things on our life and faith. Some people, even those who say they are followers of Jesus’ way, outright reject them. 

But it is not just the Devil, demons or the idea of incarnate evil that trips us up, it is miracles of any kind, and anything we cannot explain through what we define as rational. Yet, so much of the natural world we engage every day lacks the explanation of “how,” including the wind, or the earth’s ability to dually spin and not fling us from it.Further, for those of us who are followers of Jesus, the Scriptures are clear that the supernatural—both redemptive and non-redemptive—is real and we embrace their reality when we embrace Jesus.

Miraculous signs should accompany the lives and works of followers of the Way. If they do not accompany my life, or yours, then there is an opportunity for us to truly trust Jesus, and seek to see these things in His name. Only then will the church be all that God designed and designated it to be.

Note: there are some technical difficulties with the audio for this week. This was recorded at our 10:00a corporate worship service on 1/8/23.

For the next few weeks, as we enter our Bi-annual season of Prayer and Fasting, it is this belief—among other things—for which we are praying. We want to believe God for things that are certainly impossible for human beings, but inevitably possible for God.

Though Thomas Jefferson painstakingly cut every miracle from his New Testament, desperately trying to reduce Jesus and His narrative to that of a good man with great wisdom, the reality is that the Scriptures are filled with the miraculous activity of God, and of people God works in and through. Our three week look into this is but the tip of the iceberg.

There can be miracles, if we believe. 

Did you know that the first song to ever play on the radio was a Christmas Carol? Indeed it was, and that song was the incomparable O Holy Night, brought to the airwaves on Christmas Eve in 1906 by a thirty-three-year-old university professor and former chief chemist for Thomas Edison, Reginald Fessenden.

Using a new type of generator, Fessenden spoke into a microphone, and for the first time in history a voice was broadcast over airwaves—a reading from Luke’s Gospel record. To the few who caught the broadcast, it must have seemed like a miracle. Fessenden was likely unaware of the sensation he caused on ships and in offices. He could not know that men and women—used to receiving coded impulses through their wireless devices—were now rushing to them to catch the Christmas Eve miracle.

Where does O Holy Night come into play, you wonder? After finishing his recitation of Jesus’ birth, Fessenden picked up his violin and softly played O Holy Night into the microphone, the first song ever sent through the airwaves. When the Carol ended, so did his broadcast, but the world would forever be changed as music found a medium that would take it worldwide.