Resonate Church

For Jameel McGee, a day that started out as a normal day like any other ended with him being arrested for a crime he never committed. When falsified reports and a lying police officer landed him in federal prison with a ten year sentence, all he wanted to do was get out and hurt the man who put him there. That man's name was Andrew Collins. Andrew's crimes eventually found him out, and he found himself in prison as Jameel's conviction was overturned. The two met again years later, but things didn't go the way they might have expected. Andrew and Jameel's story could easily have been one of hatred and revenge, but God had a different plan.

We all seem to have conviction when it's easy, when everyone agrees with us. But that's not really conviction. What happens when what we say believe is put to the test? When hard choices come, will we kneel to what's easy or will we have the conviction to stand in the fire?

Our everyday lives are made up of a series of decisions. Sometimes, even if we don't always make the right choices, it's easy to know what we should do. Don't kill, don't steal, don't lie, and so on. There are plenty of choices that are black and white. But what about when things seem a little gray? Not every question has an easy answer, some definitive moral stance that will tell you what to do no matter what. What is the secret to living black in white in the black and white, but showing grace in the gray?

"For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future." If you've been around church for a while, you've probably heard this verse a billion times. It's been highlighted in our Bibles, printed on our coffee mugs, and preached to us from countless stages. But what about when it doesn't seem like we're being prospered? Where's that "hope and future" then? Hope may not come from where we think it should or want it to, but when we really understand where it comes from we can begin to rise above our difficult circumstances and live well in a difficult world.

Life is better together, and sometimes so is preaching. This week, Davey brings several members of the Resonate staff on stage for a special panel discussion about what community really is, why it's important, how to find it, and more.

We all experience hurt in relationships from both sides of the problem. We know the feeling of being hurt, and we know the feeling of hurting others. Whenever there's hurt, the natural progression is bitterness. It's so easy to hold on to that resentment for someone else after the wrong they've done, but all that does is poison ourselves. To move on, we have to make a conscious choice to forgive and be reconciled with the people around us.

We live in a world where the statuses of the people around us are constantly in our face. Our neighbors have a nicer house, our coworkers get that promotion, old friends post pictures of their perfect families online for the world to see. It doesn’t matter what we have, we’re constantly focused on what “they” have that we don’t. When we concentrate on measuring our lives against others, it kills any chance of healthy relationships for us. Comparison is the cancer of our communities, and the only way to cure it is to look at it in a different way.

"It's impossible to do alone." That's the whole point of this series, the truth that we want to make clear. It it absolutely vital that we have other people in our lives. But what if there are too many voices around us all the time? If we only surround ourselves with people and take what they give us, then what to we bring to our communities? Our relationships are best when we can bring what God has filled us up with into them, but we can't bring what we don't have. For us to bring Jesus to the people around us, we have to first learn to be filled up when we're alone.

What do say if someone asks "Who are you?" You give them your name, right? Our names are how we identify ourselves, tell the world who we are. It's easy for us to take our identities from what we do, but it's not healthy. To truly know who we are, we have to let our community, not our activity, define our identity.

What's your relationship to authority? Maybe you have a boss you don't see eye to eye with, a parent you want to rebel against, a leader you have no interest in following. Maybe you are the boss, the parent, the leader, and there's a tension you can't quite shake between you and those under your authority. For most of us, we've probably been on both sides of this equation. We know that there's nothing easy about working together on either side. When we struggle with authority, it's usually because of one simple divide between us, and the only way to fix it is to close the gap.

It's hard to argue that relationships with other people are an important part of life. Everything we do, every part of our lives, is made better by sharing it with other people. We need friends, don't we? But do we really know why we need them? It's easy to approach community because we want it for ourselves, to look to the people around us make us happy, but that doesn't work. The only way to build real community is by setting ourselves aside and truly putting other people at the center of our relationships.

Everyone loves a good story. The guy gets the girl, the knight kills the dragon, and everyone lives happily ever after. Every great story follows the same pattern, and recognizing that pattern can change everything for us. When we see that God is writing our stories, we can learn to let our stories point others to Jesus.

The message of the Gospel isn't particularly "safe." The idea that we're all sinners, that we need God to save us, that Jesus died for us and rose again - to an outsider, all of this might sound crazy. But for those of us who know Jesus, we should want others to experience the same life change that we have. If we want to see people meet Jesus, we have to start by making environments around us where those people can feel safe to begin to engage with the "unsafe" truth.

Where we sit can mean a lot. A seat can represent comfort, status, and more. As Christians, it's easy to stay in the seat we're in. We can keep sitting where we are, resting on our "blessed assurance" and waiting out the rest of our lives in comfort. But what does that accomplish? Will we keep sitting where we're comfortable, or will we get up and move to a different seat?

The church should have everything for everyone, right? An answer for every question, a different ministry for every group, a list of do's and don'ts for every aspect of life. That idea might sound good, but it doesn't quite line up with what Jesus actually said. The church is called to be light for the whole world, and the whole world is awfully big. Kaleb White from NewSpring church explains how to reach a big target, we have to start with a smaller focus.

It's only natural to expect the church to build us up. That's what Sundays look like for most Christians, right? We come in to church to worship, to connect with God, and hope to leave encouraged and inspired. The church builds up the people of God, but who builds the church? What would it look like without the people who give their time and effort to reach people for God? How can our abilities be used to partner with something bigger? And what does that mean for us?

It's easy to have a vision of what our lives should look like, isn't it? We can see a picture of what we want to make, and we're holding all the pieces to build it. So why don't we? In the face of our future, it's easy to make excuses to keep ourselves comfortable with how things are. But to make a life that's built to last, we have to refuse the easy excuses, pick up our pieces, and start building.

If we're honest, we probably think we know what our lives should look like. We make plans and chart out the routes to take us to where we want to be, give us all the "blessings" we think we should have. And who knows, maybe God will come along for the ride, right? But what about when we don't end up where we think we should be, when the blessing we expect to receive looks more like a burden? What do we do when God puts a wide open door in front of us that doesn't look like the one we want to walk through?

We'd all like a "blessed" life, wouldn't we? Blessed families, blessed finances, blessed careers, the list goes on and on. There's not one area we wouldn't choose that for, or at least that's what we say. But do we really mean it? God offers us a choice. We can choose to tap into the way he designed the universe to work and end up with a life built on a solid foundation, one in which we see God's blessings in every area, or we can choose to build our lives on the shifting sands of our own ways of doing things.

What does a successful life look like? If we make an impact on those around us now, is that enough? Will that last? We can focus on changing the lives of people around us now, making a difference in "our time," only to have everything we've built crumble as soon as we let go of it. To make a difference that lasts, we have to be willing to invest in the future, and in the next generation of people who can carry our vision further than we can see today.