Lord, I have heard of your fame, I stand in awe of your deeds, Lord. Renew them in our day, in our time make them known (Habakkuk 3:2).When we experience tough times, it’s easy to get discouraged. Discouragement simply means that we’ve lost courage. Courage to face a challenge or courage to change course. A difficult economy can even stretch the limits of a natural-born optimist, putting a damper on his or her courage.It’s tempting when we face difficulties to begin doubting whether or not God can doing anything about what we are going through.Habakkuk’s prayer (printed above in italics) is a reminder that we serve a God who is more than capable to not only meet our needs but to exceed them as well.His prayer is a call to action, a plea for God to exhibit his power in Habakkuk’s day as he did in the days of Habakkuk’s…
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Hannah sat down this afternoon and said she would write my sermon for tomorrow. Here is what she came up with:Today’s sermon is about Christmas. Christmas is a time of joy, happiness, love, compassion, and many other virtues that lots of people forget. For those people in our towns, cities, states, and even our own personal lives, it’s not even about those virtues. The typical, non-Christian person’s idea of Christmas is a long morning full of unwrapping gifts and drinking hot cocoa next to a fire set ablaze.The Christian’s idea of a Christmas scene is a Nativity manger under a shack-looking thing with shepherds and wise men huddled around the newborn baby Jesus and his earthly parents, Mary and Joseph. How different is that from the other’s view who don’t see it like that? It might be identical. The wise men brought gifts, so do we need to automatically assume…
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I read the obituaries in the paper. I think it originally started while we lived in Georgia and the local paper was much smaller than the Union-Tribune. To feel like I was getting my money’s worth I felt compelled to read every last bit of the paper. That included the police blotter and the obituaries. On any given day, there was a good chance I would know someone in either list.Even though the Union-Tribune is a larger paper, I still read the obituaries. It’s interesting to me how a lifetime gets summarized in three or four paragraphs. What gets told? What gets left out? How will the person be remembered, if only for a few inches in the local paper?There are obituaries of people who have lived over 80 years, typically with a picture from their late teens or early 20’s. You can usually tell by the hairdo or the…
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LifePoint has become involved with the San Diego Food Bank. The food bank estimates that over 400,000 people in San Diego county will need food assistance at some point this year; of that number, over 100,000 of those will be under the age of 12. We did a small food drive at church, participated in the 5k Walk for the Hungry, and spent a few hours last Saturday sorting and boxing food at the warehouse. In 2009 we expect to become even more involved on a regular basis. It's hard to believe that in a county as beautiful as San Diego that people go hungry but it's true. When we were talking about ways of serving our community, it seemed that this was well in line with what Jesus himself did - feeding the hungry.
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I just added three new podcasts -- the last two messages from our series on discovering life's purpose and the first message of our Christmas series. You can grab all of our podcasts at the LifePoint podcast site.
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