I posted on Twitter on Saturday night that I was really looking forward to the fact that my first "official" act of 2012 was going to involve getting together to worship with my New Life family. Every few years the holidays fall such that Christmas and New Year's Day are on a Sunday, and while it makes for a slightly busier holiday season for me, I really enjoy spending those two days with the amazing people who make New Life possible every single week.
As I typically do, I started the year with a message which I hoped would set the focus and tone for the year ahead at the church. Like you, I'm thinking about the year ahead; goals I have for the year in a lot of different areas, and the church is no exception to that rule. Obviously time is nothing to God in one respect - the changing of one year to the next doesn't change his purpose. But He has also given us time to mark out our lives and to measure what we do within those bounds, and the change from an old year to a new year is a great moment for us to look ahead to what God has planned for us.
With that said, I probably didn't say anything earth-shattering yesterday about the future that I think God has in mind for New Life. It's a future where we continue to be purposeful and intentional about reaching out to un-churched and de-churched folks who may be interested in hearing about Jesus, but who don't have all of their religious act together. Over the past several years I've seen more and more evidence of the ways that God has brought people like that into our midst, and we've seen God do work in their lives that is changing them into the men and women God desires.
But as we said yesterday, this is not an overnight process. If we're going to fully see people become true disciples of Jesus, then we're going to have to become comfortable with the idea that they come in without knowing what we think they should know, or acting as we think they should act. Jesus' call to become a disciple, as we saw in the text of Mark 2 yesterday, was not complicated - simply "come and follow me". It was simple, but it was very demanding at the same time. There was no compromising his call, and even though the 12 men whom he poured his life into didn't always get what he was saying or doing, they stuck with him through the entire 3 year period of his public ministry.
Who knows what took place on those walks from one town to the next? Who can tell how many conversations were involved in the discipleship process? Who knows how many people heard Jesus' words to the crowds, followed for a little while, and then walked away?
As a church we hope to continue to create a space where people can come face to face with the presence of Jesus in his church, where they can see the life and love of Christ in action. We want to be sure that we keep inviting people to come follow Jesus with us, because we believe that Jesus is the one who changes lives, he is the one who turns tax collectors and sinners into disciples and apostles who eventually change the world.
Next week we're starting a new series called "Dashboard", which will be an opportunity for us to check our gauges in different areas of our lives - spiritual, emotional, physical and relational - in order to see what we need to work on in the year to come.
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