Get a grip...

First off, I love old people! I have been going to the traditional service at church for a few months now and I absolutely adore the older folks. They brighten up my week =]

Today our speaker was Jeff Rosenberry and I thought what he had to say was interesting. So here I am sharing it with you.

He began our time together by sharing a story from his childhood about those awesome jungle gyms made out of metal before the "safe" plastic coated ones came out. He was about five and he would always jump off the edge to see how far he could reach on the monkey bars. 3 bars out was the record but one day he was determined to break it. His friends were there and he took the biggest leap he thought possible using all he had in him (which admittedly wasn't much at age 5). He got the fourth rung! And the momentum promptly made him lose his grip and he swung into the other side of the jungle gym and ripped open his leg on an exposed screw. In afterthought he wished he had grasped the bar tighter.

Now put that aside until later.

In Numbers chapter 15 the Lord tells the Isrealites to make tassels and attach them to the corners of their prayer shawls as a reminder of the Lord's commands. Now the way these tassels were set up was with 5 knots - representing the Torah(the first 5 books of the Bible...super important to the Jewish traditions at the time). There were also 4 spaces in between the knots. Each space was assigned a letter and together they spelled the hebrew word for Yahweh.

So when they looked at the tassle they would see God between the knots. I think that's such a cool picture!

The whole idea with the tassels and the prayer shawl was to hold onto that which is important (the Word of God) and to not forget it or let it go.

Later on in the Bible in Matthew chapter 9 there is a story of a lady who has been sick for 12 years. She has such great faith that she decides that if she can only touch the corner of Jesus' garment she will be healed.

Jesus was a Jewish rabbi so he would've been wearing a prayer shawl when he was out that day teaching. The way that his garment is described in Matthew is that she touched the fringe of it so one can be led to believe that the fringe was in fact one of the tassels on his prayer shawl. She was healed, for there is power in the name of God!

She only touched the very edge of his garment and was healed from a terrible sickness that she had suffered with for 12 years....we are called to embrace the Christ that we serve... how much more then will our lives be changed?

In first Corinthians Paul writes to the church;

Now brothers and sisters, I want you to remember the Good News I brought to you. You recieved this Good News and continue strong in it. And you are being saved by it if you continue believing what I told you. If you do not, then you believed for nothing. I passed on to you what i recieved, of which this was most important: that Christ died for our sins, as the scriptures say; that he was buried and was raised to life on the third day as the scriptures say; and that he was seen by Peter and the other twelve apostles. After that Jesus was seen by more than five hundred of the believers at the same time. Most of them are still living today, but some have died. Then he was seen by James and later by all the apostles. Last of all he was seen by me-as by a person not born at the normal time. All the other apostles are greater than I am. I am not even good enough to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But God's grace has made me what I am, and his grace to me was not wasted. I worked harder than all the other apostles. (But it was not I really; it was God's grace that was with me.) So if I preached to you or the other apostles preachedto you, we all preach the same thing, and this is what you believed.

We are to hold onto the Word of God with everything we've got. Don't let anything get in the way of that grip.

Hold on tight. Reach for Christ!

I've tried this once before...more luck in round two?

Every week I hear something I feel like sharing with the world. However, I seem to have trouble following through when I start something. For the first week or two everything is great and then I get bored with whatever it is that I'm doing.

But I am determined to succeed this time.

I have been making an effort in various aspects of my life to become more consistent and this is going to be my dumping ground for how that's going and what God is doing in my life.

With that said, here is this week's inspiration;

I go to Christ's Church of the Valley (CCV) and as a church we are going through a series called A Tall Order.

Evangelism. That's the tall order. Everyone loves to hear about whole prisons full of genocide inspiring murderers in Rwanda coming to Christ. What about people who are in just as much pain who live across the street from you? Evangelism seems a lot like dieting in that regard; you love it when it happens but don't know if you want to make the sacrifices in order to make it happen.

In church this evening we were talking about a guy named Matthew. Matthew was a tax collector, which in his time and day was just about as scum level as you could get. He was the worst of the worst, no one could be further from God. One day he's sitting there collecting taxes and Jesus comes up to him and says "Follow me." Then he does. Amazing right?

The very next thing he does is throw a big party. He figures he's not too great with words but there's been a big change in his life and in order to tell his friends from his old way of life he'll just invite his friends from his new lifestyle and hopefully they'll walk across the room and let talk to each other about it. He took the steps to connect the lost with the found.

What's the point you say? Here it is, THE CHURCH IS THE HOPE OF THE WORLD! The problem here being this - Holy Huddle Syndrome (HHS) or Christian Ghetto Syndrome (CGS). Christians have a bad habit of only being friends with other Christians. Now, tell me this, how on earth is the world going to know Christ if all of his followers are only hanging out with other Christ followers? Jesus was called a friend of sinners...not an acquaintance of sinners but a friend.

One other thing to remember, when you walk across the room the Holy Spirit walks with you and is working on the hearts and minds of those who are lost and dying. So my challenge for you this week is to walk across the room. Be it walking across the office and asking a co-worker to coffee once a week or having a neighborhood BBQ and inviting a few Christ followers to be there too. Take a few steps in faith to reach those around you who are searching and desperately
crying out for hope.

In Matthew 9:12 Jesus says "It is not the healthy people who need a doctor but the sick. Go and learn what this means: I want kindness more than I want animal sacrifices. I did not come to invite good people but to invite sinners."

It's not the religious people who need a savior but the lost. The sinners. The prostitutes, drug dealers, and that lady who sits in the next cubicle at work, your roommate or neighbor or the guy who serves you coffee in the morning.

Who is it in your life?

Do you love them enough to help save their life?

I hope this inspired and challenged you as much as it did me. To hear the actual teaching click on www.ccvnow.com