Today’s service focuses on praising God for inviting ordinary people to join Him in bringing His love to people of every nation until His vision to be glorified throughout the whole earth is fulfilled. We are grateful for and extend a loving welcome to Don and Janet Guizzetti, as well as some of our teens, for joining us today, modeling this way of life and reminding us of this beautiful reality during our service today.
Sermons from August 2014
The world is packed full of hopeless, dark, desperate, dead-end situations. God’s people often find themselves in seemingly hopeless situations. But, how do God’s faithful ones see the world around them and respond? They see the world with God’s very own eyes! They see themselves, other people, and situations the way God sees them. This is how Elisha lived – by faith, by the eyes of God. If we are Christ’s hands and feet, we ought to see the world with His very own eyes.
These four verses are one of those “head-nodders” of scripture. One of these short nuggets that’s easily passed by, because it makes enough sense and sounds familiar enough on the surface, not to feel the need to go deeper. But when we engage Jesus’ words, we find more there than we first realized. Our eyes are the lens through which we perceive reality, and they’re closely connected to our hearts. What we see informs what we serve, and what we serve informs what we see. What we believe leads to what we perceive. What we choose to focus on, leads to what we become. Jesus is the light that our eyes need to be focused on, to expose our own inner darkness, so that we can become wholly bright!
The heroes of the Old Testament that Pastor Kaskubar presented two weeks ago delivered the messages God gave them for their day, but they were unable to make out the future and see clearly how God would provide salvation from sin and its consequences for the human race (Hebrews 11:13). If they stepped into a time machine and saw what happened in Acts 2, they would be amazed to find that God created the church through the Holy Spirit’s power to be the vehicle for reaching out in love to a lost world with wonderful resources at our disposal.