We are going to be working our way through the Gospel of John for a little while. If you are interested in taking a closer look at what we are studying on Sundays please read through the Gospel and be praying for God to illuminate it to you. Also, I am going to be looking at A.W. Tozer’s “And He Dwelt Among Us” so if you enjoy reading and want to follow along as we study please pick up a copy. Along with that, text Bible.Org has some good resources that help in our study of Scripture so be sure to check those out!

I am praying that God’s powerful truth would cause us to long for more of Him daily.

As we step into the New Year I am excited and nervous. The Lord is doing good things and changing life up in some beautiful and painful ways for us here at Medford Friends Church. We have an opportunity to step into some new relationships and find ourselves connecting in new ways with God through them. I look forward to the ways in which we seek these things together and how God will continue to show His love and favor to us as we step into these new things. But the saying goes, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” So even as we step into these new things we continue to be faithful to God and seek to worship Him day by day, to point to Jesus in all that we do. Even when the world changes and things seem like they won’t ever be the same for us that truth remains: God loves us and is shaping our lives to reflect that love to the world!

This is Advent season. This means that we participate in the expectation of Christ’s return and the remembrance of His incarnation. We celebrate this season as a time of looking forward and looking back. It is a season of hope and joy, of peace and celebration. We are called to an expectant waiting on the Lord to reveal Himself to us again. A hope in the future that Christ has offered to us and is offering to us each day, a new life in the Kingdom of God. This is not the anticipation of a trip somewhere else but the expectant waiting for our King to return and reclaim what is rightfully His. As we step into Advent we are stepping into this expectant hope and the celebration of what Christ’s incarnation and His return mean for us.

November is a time for us to consider the blessings that God had granted us over the course of the last year. We take time to celebrate those blessings with friends and family. Our moments of remembrance and communal acknowledgment of God’s blessing in our lives is something special. This is a great practice and part of me wonders what it might be like if we did this more often.

^“16 Rejoice always, ¹⁷ pray without ceasing, ¹⁸ give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

Scripture encourages us to always be celebrating what God is doing and in constant communication with Him about what is going on in our lives. We are to give thanks at all times, recognizing what God has given us and thanking Him for His power and presence in our lives. God’s will for us is a continual stream of communication and connection with Him. To understand that we were created to have that kind of intimate relationship with God is a pretty powerful thing. As we move into this season of Thanksgiving, let it be only the beginning of this process and practice of communicating with God that we are grateful for all He does for us, not just one day or one month a year, but every day of every month of the year.

What are you thankful for today?

And he called the people to him again and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand: There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable. And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”

Mark 7:14-23

In this passage we see that Christ is challenging the idea of dietary uncleanness within Israel. He uses the biological process He created as an illustration for teaching. Food goes into your stomach, is processed, and then expelled. By highlighting this process Jesus is showing that it is not food which defiles a person but their hearts. What goes into you isn’t defiling, what comes out of your heart is.

Christ says that it is what comes out of our hearts that matters. The thing that reveals what we are consuming in our hearts is what we are producing from them. Good goes in and good comes out or evil goes in and evil goes out. Sometimes we receive evil things and, through God’s processes in our hearts, He is able to make good come out. A healthy heart is revealed by its output. We are known by our fruit. As we go into fall, a time of harvest, I wonder what kind of fruit is being produced in our hearts and what bounty the Lord will gather in us.

“‎Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, ‎whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, ‎that sends out its roots by the stream, ‎and does not fear when heat comes, ‎for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.” Jeremiah 17:7-8

The idea of trust as the thing that roots us and sustains us is a pretty amazing one. In the passage above we are told that trust in the Lord is essential to getting through life’s difficult times. Trusting God’s goodness to sustain us is not always easy though. We experience a lot of pain and suffering in this world and it often makes us question God’s goodness. We wonder why He would allow terrible things to take place. Or why our loved ones have suffered in the ways they have. Or why He hasn’t come back yet.

Whatever we wonder it isn’t unique to us. Humanity has been asking these questions about God’s goodness since the first time we questioned Him in the garden and found ourselves in a broken relationship with Him. Yet over and over again throughout scripture God continues to reveal His goodness and love to us. He remains faithful to provide a source of life in the deserts of life. Sometimes it is hard to trust in His goodness but it is the only way to make it through the darkness and the drought of pain and sorrow. God provides fruit for our lives even in those seasons when we trust in Him and allow Him to be our sustainer.

I spent last week at our annual Yearly Meeting sessions in Newberg at George Fox University. It was great to gather together with so many Friends from our region to work on the business of our church. As we headed into the sessions there was a palpable energy to be felt in the space. Expectation, trepidation, wonder, and hope. We were presented and approved our new super intendent Jim Le Shana. Besides that outstanding news we also had our board meeting and time to learn in workshops presented in the afternoons. Our meal times were great to fellowship and further discussion of the Yearly Meeting business. There were opportunities to pray together and worship was joyful.

            One of my favorite parts of my week was spending time with Youth Yearly Meeting participants as part of my role on the Board of Youth and Young Adults. I met with students and another of our board members to talk about their experience of the event and hopes for how it might look going forward. Going forward. It is nice to be able to say that. For the past few years it has felt as though we were stuck. Held to the same discussions and frustrations. We were not a body that was able to speak well to one another always. We often had confrontation and there was a general mistrust of others. People had to determine which “camp” you were a part of. That kind of fractious and tribal activity was not something that we wanted. But when it is clear that two groups were trying to lead and control a space it ended up being obvious that there was a fracture. We acknowledged that brokenness and took steps to free both groups to pursue ministry in the ways they feel led to. That space, that freedom, is what resulted in the hopefulness at our Yearly Meeting sessions.

Looking back is great to show us where we have been but looking forward is the way to get where we want to be. Going forward is what we want to do as a Yearly Meeting. Part of me is wondering how we can participate in that vision and activity as a church in Medford. What our role is in the Yearly Meeting and our area. How can we share the gospel with our community? What does it look like for us to be the church here in our neighborhood? How can we continue to be faithful to the calling of the Lord to be His people and live in His kingdom? What does going forward look like for us?

I just got back from a trip to Mexico. I went down with a group to help build a house for a family in extreme need down there. We partnered with YWAM Central Baja to help this family. Four days was what we had scheduled to build a house from the ground up; the foundation was already poured and dry but we were doing the rest. We did the framing of the walls and roof panels, attached the exterior, painted it, and put it all together in four days. Going down there I was a little nervous about how little time we had. Four days isn’t enough time to get a building permit here so how were we gonna build a house in that time? I was amazed at the team and how we all worked together to get this new home built for this family.

As I think about the experiences I had working on the house I am reminded of the beauty of the church. When we all work together and pool our skills we can do things that we never thought possible. What might seem like an impossible task can be accomplished with what we think is not enough. God showed me that if we pull together with Him we can accomplish amazing things.

I said goodbye to a friend today. My buddy Orlando is moving back to the east coast after a year out here in Oregon. I am going to miss him. We had a lot of laughter over the last year that is going to be missing from my life now. As we ate lunch today and talked about his plans for going back and the trip I was excited for what the future holds for him. I don’t mind leave takings like this one, where a person is heading off to do life somewhere else and is excited about it.

Tomorrow I am doing a memorial service for a family. Talking with families about their loved ones who have just passed away is a hard thing. You see the sorrow in their eyes as they recall stories of the good times and the laughter they shared. You are a part of their grief and mourning. You offer hope and prayer for comfort to them. You try to honor the individual and the family in the best way possible, by pointing to Jesus’ goodness.

As I sit in my office and think about saying goodbye to Orlando and prep for helping this family mourn I can’t help but compare the experiences. In one case it is leaving by choice, in another it is the inevitable leave taking we all face as fragile human beings. Both have elements of sorrow and joy, personal and communal. We celebrate and send off. We mourn and let go.  For my part, it helps to remember that goodbye is really “see you later.” As Christians our hope in in Christ that we will partake of the resurrection. When we say goodbye to those we love it isn’t final. We could honestly say, “see you later.” Even to those we have lost to the grave. I, for one, am grateful for that hope today. 

As many of you know, I love video games. I spend a lot of my down time playing them, they help me clear my head and think about something else for a little while. Their stories take me to another world (or several, for sci-fi games) and give me an experience I never could have here in the real world. I love the escapism of video games, but sometimes they give me very real frustration. I find “bugs” that make the game not work or end up being something that costs me time because I have to redo things in the game and while you would think that this would just be an excuse to play more it is really frustrating to progress and end up having to start something over which you had accomplished already! These “bugs” are often fixed through a process called patching, someone who made the game continues to support it by adding the fixes that the various users bring to their attention. Some of these fixes are pretty major while others are just making sure a particular door is sitting right on its hinges. All of them are necessary for the game to be its best version.

I think that the Christian life is a little like those video games sometimes. I have a version of life that seems to be working well, when all of a sudden, I find a “bug” or glitch in the life I am living. I then need to assess the problem and see if it was user error (maybe I was just trying to use it in the wrong way!) or if the issue lies deeper in my code. If the issue is something wrong with my “code” (my heart is misaligned, or I haven’t slept enough, or I am not spending the time I need to with Jesus for our relationship to grow) I have to report this error to the developer of my life so He can fix it. Christ designed us to live a certain way, because of some bad code that got added by an early user (see Genesis chapter 3 for more details) we have to deal with some “bugs” that happen now and then. Christ is so gracious as the developer of our lives that He has continued to support this broken version even though it wasn’t His actions that caused the issues! He desires for us to have the best version of our lives and is willing to sit down with us and help us find the fixes for the “bugs” that pop up in life. He has offered us a way to restore what has been broken through His sacrifice and wants us to accept His offer for ongoing support and care as we figure out what living without the “bug” of sin in our lives can be like. Will you accept that help? Or do you want to continue to live with the “bugs”?