New Life Assembly

One Life: Remain in Christ

This is the audio podcast from Jason Ferando's message two Sundays ago (7/10) from 1 Corinthians chapter 7:

Download 28 One Life - Remain in Christ

The "It's 30 degrees cooler than it was on Friday and I'm so relieved" Monday Reflections

If it were possible to deal with weather like you might deal with a meal at a restaurant, I would have to say that I would have sent everything back from this past weekend.  When you're talking about heat indices and triple digits and the kind of humidity that causes people like me to sweat within one minute of walking outside at 11 PM, then you're talking about the kind of weather I could live without forever.  I'm pretty sure this eliminates Florida as a retirement destination for me, so I think I'm going to start researching retirement homes in Canada or Alaska.

Fortunately for me, at least, we were able to spend the weekend in (mostly) air-conditioned quarters.  We had a few friends over for a four-way combined birthday dinner celebration Mexican style with a heavy emphasis on non-Mexican desserts.  Saturday was mainly a stay-inside-and-read day, and then Sunday morning was at the air-conditioned church.  Notice I said that our church is air-conditioned, so even if you show up on a Sunday for no other reason than that you want to get into the cooler air, we will be glad to have you :).

This week's message from 1 Corinthians 9 built on our thoughts from chapter 8 last week as Paul keeps writing more about the idea of rights within the context of the church community.  While we live in a society where we hold our rights to be self-evident and precious, the church is meant to function on a very different fundamental premise.  While most of us wouldn't think about giving up our rights politically or even economically (nor should we), when it comes to our rights within the church, Paul seems to argue that these can sometimes get in the way of our effectiveness in sharing the message about Jesus.

So when it came to his exercise of rights, he willingly laid them aside so that he could preach the good news about Jesus free and clear, without obligation to anyone else but Christ who called him.  And in that he was willing to walk the more difficult and less traveled middle way where he willingly became all things to all men so that he might provide all with the ultimate service of a true gospel not bound up and constrained by his obligation to tell people what they wanted to hear.

That passion for the gospel drove Paul to take risks that often got him in trouble from both sides.  On the one hand many of the Jewish believer were critical of Paul because he ate with non-jewish believers and ate the food that was considered unclean by the Jews.  And at other times Paul submitted to the Jewish customs that didn't seem to make any sense to the Gentile believers so that he could win a hearing for the gospel there.  In any case, and in every circumstance, he holds this conviction at the very center of what he does:  make sure that the only barrier between someone and a relationship with Jesus is the cross, the gospel truth that we are sinners in need of a Savior. 

That driving passion, that singular focus would win a much wider hearing for the gospel than we could imagine if we were willing to try it.  It's difficult to live that way - we get used to carrying around what I call our Christian Cultural baggage, and we get used to making more out of those things than we do of the cross and the invitation to every single person to come and die so they might experience life in Christ.  When we do that, we've gotten too many things between people and Jesus, and I think we probably need to do some housecleaning to shift those issues to a point later in the process of God's character-development process in our lives.

I know you'll be shocked by this, but next week we'll hit 1 Corinthians chapter 10, and talk about temptation and the power of a bad example.  As always, I'm looking forward to seeing you, and a friend, there with us!

One Life: The Way of Love

This week's message was a reminder that the way of love demands that in the gray areas of Christian conduct, we think seriously about the impact of our actions on the other people in our lives:

Podcast:  Download 29 One Life - The Way of Love

PDF:  Download The Way of Love

*I apologize for the background noise on the podcast - we'll try to clean that up for next week.

The "Back to life, back to reality" Monday Reflections

Last Monday morning I was enjoying the Montana summer weather - mid 80's during the day without a hint of humidity and 50's at night, which to me felt just about perfect.  Today I'm back home to the 80's and sticky weather that comes with living in New England in the summer.  The trade off, of course, is that they had snow in June in Montana and it will start up again in October, so I guess I can bear up under the burden of this sweltering New England summer for a couple more months.

It was also a "back home" weekend for me as I was able to get back to my church family at New Life.  Last weekend I spoke up at what I'll affectionately call a sister church (Common Church Boston), but there really is nothing like getting back home to what I'm familiar with to get me going again.  Every week, in some way big or small, I'm reminded of how blessed I am to be part of such a great church.  This week it came as we closed out the service with a slideshow of some recent photos that our youth group has been putting together for the last couple of months.  They did a great job, but the best part was just seeing the different faces of the different people who have become part of our church community - some recently and some for a long time - but all of whom are being transformed by God's work through our church.

We also got to work through a tough passage in Corinthians again (come to think of it, they've all been tough in their own right) as we took a serious look at chapter 8 and the question of gray areas of Christian conduct.  Try as we might, there are times that God does not give a black and white answer to the question of "can I act this way?" in the scriptures.  When we find ourselves in that gray area, Paul's words to the Corinthians in chapter 8 are particularly meaningful.

His contention is that our question should not just be "can I do this?" but "should I do this?"  Beyond that, he strongly encourages us to make sure that when we ask if we should do something, we ask it not only from our own perspective, but that we take into account the people around us and whether or not we might be, even unwittingly, encouraging them to take a step back into an old way of life.  The funny thing about our freedoms, rights and privileges is that they often look a whole lot like someone else's old life of bondage, addictions, and sin.  We may have the ability to stop short of living destructively in a gray area, while someone else who's watching us carefully to see how we follow Jesus may not have the same strength of conscience yet.

In those situations we have the responsibility to follow the way of love, the willingness to lay down our freedom for the benefit of a fellow believer.  We have the responsibility to ask whether or not our conduct is going to lead others to a better relationship with God, otherwise we'll be guilty of inflating our own ego at the expense of the opportunity to build up one of the people sitting next to us.

Next week we'll keep hitting on the theme of rights and responsibilities as we head towards 1 Corinthians 9.  Looking forward to seeing you (and a neighbor or friend) then!

The "It's Tuesday and I'm in Montana enjoying the 'dry heat' for a couple more days" Reflections

Yes, I said Montana.  I'm in the Big Sky state, staying at the Big Sky Resort, and realizing that I could get used to a summer where it gets warm during the day, stays cool at night, and best of all features a really humidity-free zone.  I say all this while I look at the weather back in Rhode Island talking about low 90's temperatures with that sticky, muggy feeling that makes weathermen use words like "sweltering" and "suffering".

Everything about my weekend to my early week has been off.  I spent Sunday morning traveling up to Boston to speak at Common Church, and left New Life in the more than capable hands of our worship team led by Mark Griffith and the teaching in the hands of Jason Ferando.  It's always a stretch for me to get out of my own church and speak to another group of people, but I've found that, since this is my fourth time speaking at Common Church, I feel much more comfortable and much less intimidated.

I actually spoke out of a passage in James 3:1-12 because they, like us, are working through a book for the summer.  Though I referenced at the beginning of the message that I'd heard a bunch of sermons on the topic, I have to confess that, as far as I can remember, it was the first time I had actually given a sermon on the passage.  It was great because (if you went and looked it up you already know) it's a very straightforward section about the way that we use our words.  I'd suggest that James' message to us is, essentially, that we can either use our words to build a productive life that will be good for us and for others, or we can use our words to build a life that spends more time tearing others down.

I think we can all agree that we'd much rather spend time with people who are building a productive life than a destructive life, which leads me to believe that we'd all much rather be building ourselves into being that kind of person as well - the kind of person who, at the right time and in the right way has the right words to say to us to build us up.

Now I'm out in Montana (after a loooooooooooong day of travel on Sunday) for a conference on the concept of social norms and positive community norms.  I'm here for my work with the South Kingstown Partnership for Prevention, but I'm finding a lot of crossover material that will help me in my work as a pastor.  Primarily the theme of "telling a better story" has resonated deep within me as a church leader.  I'm aware that sometimes in church world we (myself included) approach messages from a negative slant (don't do that), rather than a positive one (do this).  It's something I've noticed from time to time in my own preaching, and a tendency I'd like to work on in my own communication.

So for now I'm off to enjoy some of the Big Sky area, grab some dinner and enjoy connecting with some of the new people I've met since I've been here.  I'm looking forward to being back at New Life this Sunday as we dive into 1 Corinthians chapter 8 and explore what is supposed to guide us in the gray areas (yes, they exist) of Christian conduct.  Looking forward to seeing you then!

The "I ate way too much and you probably did too, but now we're both working" Tuesday Reflections

I hope you were able to celebrate Independence Day in style yesterday.  I know we spent the day by the lake where I grew up in Connecticut enjoying lots of food, games, and a fireworks display that was much less spectacular than it usually was.  But all in all it was a good way to cap off what was a great weekend.

As a kid growing up in church my sermon-listening experience was heavy on salvation messages and talks about the baptism in the Holy Spirit, but there were a few topics that were always in the background that never actually seemed to come up in a sermon.  One of them was the proverbial third rail issue of:  *whisper* sex.  We knew as teenagers that we weren't supposed to have sex until we got married, but we never heard anything that remotely resembled a teaching about why sex was meant to be reserved for marriage.

So when I became a pastor I promised myself that, when the occasion presented itself, I wouldn't shy away from talking about it.  So when I started a series on 1 Corinthians, I knew eventually we would get to chapter 6.  And I knew that when we got to chapter 6, we would have to talk about sex.  And I knew that when we talked about sex, I would have to be able to do so without mincing words or dancing around the issue, so as I prepared for the message, I did my best to make sure I was being as straightforward as I could possibly be in what I was saying.  I also made sure to preface the whole message by saying that, while the principles in the message are definitely applicable to everyone there, I was specifically talking to people who had made a choice to follow Jesus and how they should regard their bodies when it comes to sex.

Everything I said on Sunday was built around Paul's statement to this Corinthian church that their bodies were bought and paid for by Jesus' sacrifice for them.  If their bodies were purchased and redeemed by Jesus' sacrifice, and would be raised again to a resurrected life with Christ, then what we do with those bodies does matter.  When we buy into the cultural lie that devalues sex and says it's just something that you can do recreationally, then we are devaluing our own bodies.  And when we devalue our own bodies, we are essentially saying that we aren't worth the sacrifice that Jesus made for our bodies.  At the heart of Paul's theology about sex is not just about God trying to deprive us of pleasure, but about God asking us to honor him with our entire body and soul.

As I said on Sunday, this stance of saving sex for marriage, and keeping it only within marriage, cuts across the cultural grain for us for sure.  It's not an easy stance to take when we're surrounded by messages that add to sense that "it's just sex", but I'm convinced it's the right stance for us to take.  It's not just right because it's the way God asks us to live, but because it is the way for us to live that is also best for us.

I won't see most of you next week as I'll be teaching at a friend's church in Boston, but Jason Ferando will be bringing the teaching at New Life from 1 Corinthians chapter 7.

 

 

One Life: Purity

This week's message reminded us that because our bodies have been purchased by Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, what we do with those bodies does matter to God.

Podcast:  Download 27 One Life - Purity

PDF: Download Purity