Dying Well
“Do you never think about [death]? Why do you not? Are you never to die? Nay, it is appointed for all men to die. And what comes after? Only heaven or hell. Will the not thinking of death, put it farther off? No; not a day; not one hour.”
This might seem to be a strange post for Holy Week but I think it's a perfect one, because the reason we, as Methodist, die well, is because of Christ's death and resurrection. Let me back up and explain.
Living Like You're Dying
The early methodists were known as people who died well. They had grace and assurance of God's love and forgiveness for them, so they did not fear death. Furthermore, John Wesley (the founder of Methodism), made it a point to share the stories of those who died and went on to glory. Wesley knew that if we are going to die well, then we must live well. We must live every day honoring God so that we are ok if it is our last.
The country song "Live Like you are Dying" has it right in the title, but wrong in the words. It's not about taking extra vacations (although you should spend plenty of time with your family). We should live every day in a way that if we were to die, we would be proud of the lives we lived when we stood before God.
Lent and Easter
If you read my post on Lent, then you know that Lent is really about a time for us to mourn Christ's death. If you go to an Ash Wednesday service, you'll hear something like, "From ashes you came, and to ashes you will return. Repent and you will be forgiven." The point of this is to remember that we all will die one day.
When Holy Week comes (the week between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday), we really crank things up. On Maundy Thursday, we relive Christ's last supper in different ways, then on Good Friday, many people go into mourning on an extreme level. Many churches cover the cross in their sanctuaries. The Catholic church always cover's the crucifix and it's the one time the Christ candle is burned out and the tabernacle is emptied. Christ has left the building.
But then, on Easter morning, Christ overcomes death and returns to life! For us as Christians, this is our reminder every year that when we die, our death isn't permanent. One day, we will be physically resurrected and rejoined with everyone we love in the life everlasting.
Ushering into Glory
A couple of weeks ago, I had the distinct pleasure to usher a young girl, just a few years younger than me, into glory with her family. I always consider this to be one of the most unique honors I have as a pastor because it's a living testimony of this girl's life. I get to listen to her family share of the life she lived for God and we get to ask God to welcome her into his loving arms. In the end, we pray that he will care for her until we all get to meet her again one day.
This is the hope of our faith. It's the most beautiful thing to watch people, who in their grief, still see God at work. I want to live my life in a way that people will look back on it and know that I spent every day dedicated to God. This was one of the things Wesley wrote in his death accounts, and I hope someone can say it about me when the Lord takes me home:
“She was a woman of faith and prayer; in life and death adorning the doctrine of God her Saviour.”
Blessings,
Faith
Read more: http://www.seedbed.com/dying-well-according-to-john-wesley/
Faith Parry serves as our Associate Pastor, and has been at the church since 2015. When she's not preaching and teaching, she enjoys documentaries and TV. Read more about Faith here.
Rescue: Justified
But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit. This Spirit he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that, having been justified by his grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
Titus 3:4-7
What is Justification?
Justification is one of those old Bible words and most of us read over, but only have a vague idea of what it means. The word comes from the Roman law courts and means the be declared not guilty, to be acquitted. If two people come before the court with a dispute, the one who the court agrees with is the one who is justified. This justification says nothing about the person’s character or morals, but that just in that specific case the court has sided with them.
Another closely related word in the New Testament is the word righteousness. Again, it is a standing in the law courts. The person’s case that prevails in court is said to be righteous in the case before the court.
As is often the case, words take on additional nuances when used by the biblical writers; especially because they are writing from a Hebrew perspective. To be just or righteous in a biblical sense is to be in right standing with God; to be a member in good standing in the covenant.
It is wonderful to know that when we place our trust in God and the work God did in and through the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus, God declares us “not guilty” of all our past sins! We are freed from the burden and guilt of those behaviors and are acquitted. That is true freedom indeed.
But we are also placed in a new relationship with God and in that relationship, we have benefits and responsibilities. The benefits are numerous: forgiveness, continued grace and the presence of the Holy Spirit, to name just a few.
But we also have responsibilities, namely to live in a way that demonstrates our new relationship. Just before the verses I cited above, Paul tells Titus some of those responsibilities: we are to submit to the authorities over us, do good works, avoid quarrels and evil speaking, and be gracious toward everyone.
Why are we to do these things? He goes on to say that because we used to be different people with different motivation, God has done something very real in our lives and now everything has changed.
As we gather for worship this Sunday, let’s celebrate our justification, our rescue and determine to live as justified people.
CLICK HERE for Faith Notes
Alan Cassady serves as Senior Pastor at Navarre UMC, and has been at the church since 2011. When he's not preaching and teaching, he enjoys sci-fi movies and FSU Football. Read more about Alan here.
Rescue: Citizens
He brought this Good News of peace to you Gentiles who were far away from him, and peace to the Jews who were near. Now all of us can come to the Father through the same Holy Spirit because of what Christ has done for us.
So now you Gentiles are no longer strangers and foreigners. You are citizens along with all of God’s holy people. You are members of God’s family. Together, we are his house, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. And the cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself. We are carefully joined together in him, becoming a holy temple for the Lord. Through him you Gentiles are also being made part of this dwelling where God lives by his Spirit.
Ephesians 2:17-22, NLT
Immigrants and Refugees
Something that's been on our minds a lot recently and in the news even more is refugees and immigrants. We talk about illegal immigrants, keeping them out or letting them in, legal immigrants and helping them stay in our country and then refugees and how much time is appropriate to spend making them wait to get to safety while vetting them.
Something that an immigrant and refugee has in common is they are a stranger and a foreigner in someone else's country. That's a feeling that most of us really don't appreciate. Sure, many of us have traveled to another country before, or gone on a cruise, but we've never had to leave our country because of poverty, our lives, or the safety of our families.
The Jews were Refugees
This was a feeling that the Jewish people knew well, and still know today. When I was in seminary, I took a course on other religions. In that course, we watched a series of videos that took us into a Hasidism Jewish community in Europe. What stroke me about one of the videos was a man who was a butcher. He was from a long line of butchers.
He said that his father told him (I'm paraphrasing), "We're butchers, because in the case that we become displaced again and have to leave this place, we will know that we will always be able to feed our families in the ways that God calls us according to our laws. It's not a glorious job, but it's honorable."
It struck me because it's been so long since the Jews were persecuted in a way that they had to leave their homes, yet they still carried this with them generation after generation. This is something that we, as American Christians, will never understand.
Equal in God's eyes
The first century Gentiles were often treated as second class Christians by the Jewish Christians, so Paul writes that we are all equal in God's eyes. This Sunday we will be looking more into the idea of what it means to be a Citizen of Heaven and be a part of God's family and household.
Blessings,
Faith
Click here for this week's Faith Notes
Faith Parry serves as our Associate Pastor, and has been at the church since 2015. When she's not preaching and teaching, she enjoys documentaries and TV. Read more about Faith here.
What if God didn't create the world in 7 days?
Wait a minute - Hear me out.
At the risk of my reputation, your trust, potentially even my job (or future employers who do extensive internet searches and stumble upon this blog), I want to ask you what would you do if you suddenly learned that God didn’t create the world in seven 24 hour days? Would you leave the church? Would you give up on Christianity altogether? Would comets suddenly plummet to the earth and wipe out all creation?
Maybe I should back up and ask something smaller. How would you feel if I told you that Isaiah might have actually been written by three different people over decades? Most of you probably don’t care because, honestly, who’s taken the time to really read all 66 chapters of Isaiah carefully enough to tell the subtle differences that experts fight over. It’s just a fun fact that there’s an actual debate on whether it was written by one person or three, but it has very little impact on most of our faiths. But there might be some of you who can’t believe that it’s possible, that if God used three different people then we’d have three different books and God wouldn’t have allowed us to believe a lie for centuries. I had a pastor once say from the pulpit that if you believed that Isaiah wasn’t written by one person you might as well not believe the rest of the Bible either. The awkward part was this happened a week or two after I had talked to the youth about this subject.
So back to creation. What if God didn’t create everything in seven days? Some of you probably jumped to the conclusion that I meant that God didn’t create anything, that I’m just talking about random chance or evolution without a God. There are actually at least 5 theories for a God centered creation. The one where God created everything in seven 24 hour days is called young earth. This says that the earth is between 6,000-10,000 years old and they came up with this age by going through all the genealogies in the Bible. We also have the Old Earth theory where most of what science (the what and when) says is true, but the acting force (the who and the why) behind everything was, and is, God. They say vastly different things about creation and how we should interact with science.
In his best-selling book, Velvet Elvis, Rob Bell made the comparison of this situation to a brick tower and a trampoline. Trampoline springs can be taken off, looked at, flexed, and put back without causing the whole system to fall apart. But if you have a bricks stacked on top of bricks and pull one out, the whole thing can come crashing down. Me believing God created the entire universe in 168 hours or over the course of 4 billion years doesn’t change who God is. The fact that the Sun wasn’t really the thing that stopped moving in Joshua 10:13 doesn’t mean that the whole Bible is wrong. It means that the way that the author who wrote Joshua used terms and ideas that he understood to talk about what he saw God do. It doesn’t change who God is or what he did, only our understanding of what He did and who He is. If God didn’t create the world in seven days, he would still be God, he would still be the maker of heaven and earth, he would still be the hope and savior of the world.
Be blessed.
-Nathan
Nathan Persell serves as our Youth Director. When he's not leading devotions and playing basketball with teenagers, he enjoys disc golf and bike riding. Learn more about Nathan here.
Rescue: Redeemed
Say therefore to the Israelites, ‘I am the Lord, and I will free you from the burdens of the Egyptians and deliver you from slavery to them. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. You shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has freed you from the burdens of the Egyptians.
Exodus 6:6–7
I will find you...
We love stories of redemption. Whether a Disney animated film or an action adventure like Taken, we love to see people make real changes or helpless people rescued. Redemption makes movies and books intriguing. It also fills us with the hope that we could be redeemed as well.
That is what the gospel is all about - redemption. And it all started with the Exodus, Some 400 years before that event God told Abraham,
Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years; but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions (Genesis 15:13–14).
In the book of Exodus, we read how God kept the promise he made to Abraham and brought the people out of slavery and made them his very own people. But the redemption did not end there.
The people God brought out had not existed as a nation for 400 years; they did not even know the God who redeemed them, except by way of stories they had heard about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For their redemption to be complete, they would have to know this God for themselves, see God’s power, know God’s care, and hear God’s voice.
God brought the people to Mt. Sinai to meet and experience God’s presence. They saw God in the thick darkness and lighting. The felt God in the earthquake. They heard God in the thunder and the words Moses gave them.
God had delivered them as an act of sheer grace – a promise kept. Now, they would demonstrate their gratefulness and love to God through worship and obedience. In those ways, they would become God’s people and Yahweh would be their God.
That is what redemption is all about. It is not only about being set free from something; it is about being set free for something, namely God. God redeemed us because of his great love for us. And, God redeemed us so we could cooperate with God in the redemption and rescue of the world.
Blessings!
-Alan
Alan Cassady serves as Senior Pastor at Navarre UMC, and has been at the church since 2011. When he's not preaching and teaching, he enjoys sci-fi movies and FSU Football. Read more about Alan here.