Strong
Timothy, my dear son, be strong through the grace that God gives you in Christ Jesus. You have heard me teach things that have been confirmed by many reliable witnesses. Now teach these truths to other trustworthy people who will be able to pass them on to others.
Endure suffering along with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. Soldiers don’t get tied up in the affairs of civilian life, for then they cannot please the officer who enlisted them. And athletes cannot win the prize unless they follow the rules. And hardworking farmers should be the first to enjoy the fruit of their labor.7 Think about what I am saying. The Lord will help you understand all these things.
-2 Timothy 2:1-7, NLT
What do you think of when you think of a strong person? Do you think of someone who never gives up? Someone who trains hard, fights hard, and gives 110% to the very last second? Someone who is trying to become a champion?
Or maybe, you think of someone who is battling some type of sickness and does so with a smile on his or her face. Someone who smiles even when it's a hard day. Someone who always puts others first and enjoys every moment in life.
Maybe you think of the mom or dad that has dedicated every day to raising a child or children, making sure that child knows she is loved and can become whatever she sets her mind to. She can imagine the world however she wants and even shape the world into something new if she so wishes.
Maybe still, you picture one of our military men or women, or one of our civil servants, who wake up every morning ready to give his or her life protecting others. He trusts the people standing next to him to have his back and the person giving him orders to be leading him in the right direction.
No matter who you imagine as a strong person, none of these people are truly strong without God on our side. At the same time, with God we can all become strong through his Grace and love. We can have the strength to go through our lives and not only survive but thrive as his sons and daughters.
This week, we will be looking into this idea of Grace more as we conclude our sermon series, Amazing Grace. I hope you'll join us.
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.
Is the Bible Sacred?
A friend of mine who is a youth pastor in Texas is bracing herself for the aftermath of burning a Bible in front of her teens. You read that right, and there are no typos, she is burning the Bible. If it helps, she’s ripping out some pages first.
You might be experiencing some anger, curiosity, or panic right now, and that is perfectly natural. She is doing this as part of an illustration on the importance of scripture. I know it sounds counter productive to that thought, but here’s her play. Tonight she is going to ask her students to recite all the scripture they know, and as they do she’ll rip out that verse of the bible and give it to them. Once they’ve recited all the scripture they know, which if we’re being honest will probably be less than a handful of verses per student, she’ll burn the rest of the Bible. The students will be left with just a few short verses, most of them probably clinging to “Jesus wept”. The point she’s making is that scripture is something they “need to KNOW, to memorize scripture because someday they might not have it otherwise. That there are people all over the world who don't have it. And for them to neglect their study of scripture is way worse than me burning the Bible.”
She has already taken a lot of flak from other youth pastors who are horrified that she’s going to burn the word of God. But then again, I’ve had a pastor yell at me for laying my bible down on the pulpit and not holding it while I read scripture. People have been upset about seeing a Bible on the ground. I had a really old Bible that was falling apart and pages were missing from years of use, I didn’t want to just throw it away in case someone saw me so I wrapped it up in another bag and threw the bag away. There is this ideology about protecting or treating the Bible with respect. I’m one of the few that thought it was an awesome idea and thought about stealing it for our students.
As angry as I just made some of you, or as angry as everyone else is at this friend of mine, you would think that the Bible is incredibly important. Her illustration sparked conversations about how to treat a book, something that isn’t God but merely a representation of the word of God, and most people got seriously close to equating the paper and ink with God himself. People couldn’t get past a burning Bible to realize that the thing they felt so deeply about losing was the thing they neglect 99% of the time and the exact reason she was burning the book in the first place. If you were to ask me how many verses I have memorized, I’d stumble through a couple dozen or so but I would have next to nothing compared to what was burned.
A lot of people who care so deeply about not burning a Bible are the same ones who don’t care about it enough to read it every day. How angry are you that she’s burning the Bible? How angry are you that some of her students haven’t ever read the Bible outside of church activities? Jesus often had fun with the pharisees, who by the way loved the scriptures. I feel like they would be in the camp of never burn a Bible. But Jesus said “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life.” The Bible is important, the most important book we have, but it isn’t God. The book itself isn’t even anything special. And unless we are doers of the word as well as hearers, it means nothing.
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.
Grow
For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and in the present age to live lives that are self-controlled, upright, and godly, while we wait for the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Titus 2:11–13, NRSV
Last time, we looked at how God’s grace worked in our lives to enable us to cross the threshold of faith and become followers of Jesus. Now we want to see how God’s grace is necessary for our on–going growth in that relationship.
Healing
By way of analogy, we could look at how our body deals with disease processes. We could be living our lives as we always have, all the while, noticing a pain or other malady in our body. Most days we can function very well, but other days, not so much. We may see other symptoms, as well that indicate some is just not right. Think of that scenario as God’s grace drawing us to him. God is pointing out a problem and that problem causes us to seek a solution.
Eventually, we see a physician who diagnoses the problem and maps out a course of treatment for us that includes surgery and a change of lifestyle. She even gives us some directives to follow so we don’t end up causing further damage.
Decision
We now have a decision to make. Will we trust the doctor’s skill and diagnosis and go through with the surgery, or will we decide that we know better than she does and keep doing as we always have? It is a huge choice. We can’t do anything about what is wrong with us, except to stop resisting and give ourselves into the care of the professional. This is analogous to God’s grace forgiving us and granting us new birth.
We finally decide to trust our doctor, and the surgery goes off perfectly. However, the cure is only temporary if we do not make certain changes to our lifestyle. If we do not, there will be nothing else that can be done medically. So, we decide to make the necessary changes; and they are difficult. This third stage is growth or sanctification.
Now, any analogy breaks down if you push it too far, but it does illustrate the point.
GROWTH
God’s grace does indeed convict us and draw us to Christ. It also enables us to make a decision to give our lives to Jesus, but that is not all. In 1 Corinthians 3:1 Paul calls some of the believers “infants in Christ;” In John 3 Jesus says we must be born again. In many ways, when we begin our walk with Christ we are infants. You would never take a new born and expect her or him act as a full-grown adult. It is the same way with spiritual babies. As a new Christian, a person needs to be fed and nurtured so that they will grow; that is what God expects of us as well.
For the rest of our lives, we will be learning to respond to God’s grace in our lives, and as we do we will grow, if we respond positively that is. In this week’s sermon, we will look at the ways God’s grace enables us to grow and mature in Christ. I hope you will join us.
Blessings,
Alan
CLICK HERE FOR THIS WEEKS 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.
Begin
For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.
Ephesians 2:8-10 (NRSV)
When I was younger, the churches I attended made it clear about how to begin a relationship with God. We had to repent of our sin and ask Jesus to save us so we could go to heaven when we died instead of being condemned to hell. In other words, salvation was a transaction. It was simple, clear and understandable, but it was only a transaction.
I have come to realize that the salvation God offers us is so much more than a mere transaction it is a covenant of allegiance that brings about transformation.
GODS GRACE TRANSFORMS
Grace is God’s unmerited favor granted to us even before we know him and extending through our lives. That same grace helps us begin our relationship with God and a life of ongoing transformation. I have defined grace as God’s unmerited, undeserved kindly regard for us. That grace, God’s disposition toward us, enables us to respond to God’s offer of a relationship.
WE BEGIN WITH REPENTANCE
We begin our relationship with God by responding with repentance and faith. John Wesley said that repentance involved knowing that we are sinners, hopelessly separated from God and unable to do anything about our condition. This self-knowledge prepares us to hear the good news that God has done something about our condition and invites us to as new relationship.
SECONDLY, WE RESPOND WITH FAITH
Our second response to is faith, faith in Jesus Christ. When we know our true selves as sinners and hear God’s invitation, we respond with trust in what God has done through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
The passage of Scripture cited above reminds us of several important aspects of this relationship. First, it was not our idea; neither is it accomplished by our power, but only through the grace of God. God’s grace conceived the plan, offered it to us and then enabled us to respond to the invitation. Second, as I said earlier our response is faith, trust in what God has done in and through Jesus Christ.
NEW LIFE, A COVENANT
Finally, beginning this relationship calls us to a new life, a life of “good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (verse 10). Beginning our relationship with God through Jesus is not a mere transaction, but a real relationship – a covenant. The point of this covenant is not to help us avoid hell and gain heaven, but to enable us to take up our calling to as bearers of God’s image in this world and work with God to bring redemption to the whole creation.
God desires this real relationship, and so God has taken the initiative to create the path and enable us to walk it. And that changes everything.
Blessings,
Pastor 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.
13 Reasons Why
My sister is one of the biggest book nerds I’ve ever known. So every birthday and Christmas she buys me a book that I’ve never heard of, one that is almost always awesome. A few years ago that book was 13 Reasons Why. A few months ago that book became a show on Netflix, suddenly teens and adults are paying attention to it. Without giving away to many spoilers, the book is about a high school girl named Hannah who committed suicide and left behind 13 stories on old cassette tapes about why she killed herself. Each one is how one student did something, sometimes something small, that contributed to her making that decision.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SHOW & BOOK
Now to state the obvious upfront, the show and the book are different. The book is centered around one of the people on the tapes who’s listening to them all through the course of a night. The show brings in several other perspectives of the other students on the tapes, parents, and the school’s administration responding. In other words they make it more dramatic for the sake of the show being more dimensional.
THE REVIEWS
There are so many mixed reviews out there for this story, some are applauding it for bringing attention to teenage suicide, bullying, and rape culture. Others are criticizing it for bad writing, romanticizing suicide, and promoting revenge. There are elements of truth in both of those critiques. Teenage suicide is something we like to pretend doesn’t exist even though it is the third leading cause of death in those 15-24 years old. And for every successful suicide, there are about 25 unsuccessful attempts. Around 30% of teens have been involved in bullying in some way, either as the victim or the antagonist. And people are talking about it more than they did before the show came out.
When I first read the book, I thought I wanted to buy every teen I knew a copy of the book because it gives a lot of insight into what their actions actually mean to others. It ended in the idea that you should help brighten someone else's day and reach out to people who you think might be struggling with depression. It called out what happens when bullying, drinking, and peer pressure go unchecked. A lot of youth pastor’s around the country are trying to figure out how to do series or have discussions based around this franchise.
THE DOWNSIDES
But despite the obvious upsides to the book, there are some downsides. The whole idea of trying to punish those who made your life miserable isn’t explicitly made in the book, but in the show it’s more obvious. Using suicide as a revenge tool should never be an option (not that suicide for any other reason should be an option) but that’s the message some could take away from the show. The show did a better job of trying to make it clear that the tapes weren’t necessarily a collection of definitive truth, that it was her perspective and that she might not always be telling the whole truth.
But for those who suffer from depression and suicidal thoughts, I don’t know if they’ll pick up on the fact that these people on the tapes didn’t actually kill Hannah, that she made her choice for herself and chose how she reacted to all the situations. Non-spoiler alert, she didn’t always make the right choices, but was still a victim. It’s not always a clear line between being a victim and blaming everyone else for your problems. The series portrays Hannah as helpless and powerless to change the things around her. That’s not a message I can support, but one that should be talked about.
THE UPSIDES
And that is why even with all it’s faults, I’d still say that it’s worth a read or a watch for most people. There are a few caveats of course. The first one is that you, the parent, should read and watch it with your kids. Talk to them about what you see. Ask them if they see these things going on in their own school. Ask them if they’ve experienced any of this first hand (or if they’ve done this to someone else). This could be an amazing tool to see what it’s really like for students.
Secondly, there are two scenes which are graphic. One is a rape scene, the other one is of the actual suicide. The producers included them for specific reasons, but a lot of experts are very critical of that choice. They happen in the last two episodes, which thankfully have a warning at the beginning of each episode. I strongly urge you to watch them first before your student does and use your own judgement on whether to skip those scenes or not.
The last caveat is that I would be more cautious with someone who is depressed and a hard no on someone who is suicidal. While this is a great warning tool for most people, it does have the potential to romanticize suicide and might nurture ideas they already have. If you think that might be the case, then get help now, don’t wait. Talk to teachers, counselors, the pastor, whoever you need to talk to that you can trust. There’s a national suicide hotline you can call at 1-800-273-8255. Let them know they are not alone. Show them you care for them. Get them help.
Blessings,
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.