from Nehemiah 1:1-2:6
Much of our time, energy, and attention are spent reacting to someone else’s urgent or to our own need to achieve or acquire or accomplish. We have deadlines to meet, meetings to make, assignments due, bills to pay and on top of all of that we set goals and have ideas for things we’d like to accomplish and overcome.
This is life, right? But is this really the “full life” Jesus came to offer (John 10:10)?
What if the picture we grabbed on to for who we could be come or what our situation or the situation of the world around us could look like isn’t born out of our own need for validation or comfort or security…what if it is born out of something that God plants in us?
What if God has a vision for you? A preferred future born out of His call to live life to bring Him glory and invite others into His story?
w/ Vern Collins
from John 15:1-11
A mark of maturity is independence. Whether it is making decisions on your own, setting your own curfew, paying rent, buying a car, owning a home, attaining a job, trying something new, or starting a career, the ability to think, act, care for oneself shows independence…which translates to this world as a sign of maturity.
The problem comes when that thinking or that value system begins to affect our understanding of life with Jesus. No matter how much we accomplish, we are all fragile people living fragile lives.
What if, your maturity in Christ weren’t about exercising your independence, but becoming more deeply dependent on Jesus? In John 15, Jesus calls that, “remaining,” or, “abiding,” in Him.
What would it look like for you to embrace your fragility, rather than try and cover it up with all that you are chasing or accomplishing?
w/ Vern Collins
from John 15:1-17
How is it that we’ve boiled Christianity, that is, what it means to be a follower of Jesus, down to NOT doing the things we shouldn’t do, and being sure to do the things we should?
The invitation of Jesus is to life…a full life to be more specific. Yet, we have somehow bought in to this idea that life with Christ is little more than behavior modification.
In this week’s foundation of Connecting, we consider that what we DO for God is simply not as important as how we are WITH God through our connection in our relationship with Jesus. Perhaps the fruit, or what we “do” comes as a byproduct of abiding in Christ as He calls us to do in John 15. Not only in relationship with Jesus, but in relationship with one another do we find that God is able to bear fruit in and through our lives that is beautiful in His sight.
Rather than focusing on, “doing and achieving,” what if your focus became, “abiding, and being?”
w/ Vern Collins
