“Grace?! She passed away thirty years ago!”

Quick! Name that movie…..yep. Christmas Vacation.

Ok, now that that’s over, reality is most of us don’t have a much better idea of what grace is than Aunt Bethany. My hope is that OneLifers at least grasp the technical definition of grace since we’ve talked about it several times, which is “the opposite of what is deserved.” So we approached the topic this week with a question about what Jesus did for us that we did not deserve. We asked, “Why did Jesus have to die?”

Really…think about that. How would you answer the question? Couldn’t have God found another way to forgive? Why did it require Jesus’ blood?

To boil it down, we learned that the payment for sin is death. Somebody has to pay for our sin. It could have either been me and every other person who has lived, or it could be God. God chose to pay. So He sent Jesus to live a perfect life. He never sinned, but yet he died. And in doing so, he paid for my crime so that I wouldn’t have to. He gave me the opposite of what I deserved. Have gave me life. That is grace.

I wrapped the sermon up with a story I found that illustrates grace beautifully:

One day an Indian Chief discovered that someone in the tribe was stealing. This angered the leader greatly and he brought all the people together. He said, “Let the thief come forward and receive 10 lashes for his crime.” No one came and he upped the ante to 20 lashes. Then 30, then 40 lashes. He stopped there for he knew that it would take a strong man to survive 40 lashes with the whip. The crowd dispersed and the leader sent his men to find the thief. Within a week they brought the thief to him and the leader gasped, for the thief was his own mother. The guards were wagering among themselves as to what this great and wise leader would do. Would he keep his word, obey his law and whip his mother? Or would he let her go free, thus disgracing himself and the laws he sought to enforce? If the crime went unpunished, surely everyone would steal. The leader gathered the tribe together. They brought his mother forward and bared her frail back. “Ah, ha,” thought the people, “he’s going to whip her.” Then, just before the whip master brought the whip to bear, the mother cried out to her son and the leader strode over to his mother, tearing his shirt off as he went and draped himself over her frail body, taking the 40 lashes himself. The crime was still punished, but he took the penalty for her crime. That’s exactly what Jesus did for us. Jesus took our punishment on the cross. We should have rightly died for our sins, but Jesus took our place.

That is grace. Amazing grace.

Bobby Fuller got all the credit! At least that’s what I learned on Sunday. Our band did the song “I Faught the Law” to set up the sermon about, well, the Law. So I thought I’d be clever and look up online who originally did it. The original artist was a not-so-well-known group Sonny Curtis and The Crickets even though it was Bobby Fuller who made it famous. But since I wasn’t around in 1959, I didn’t know all of that! But of course, neither did anyone at our church. So my attempt to work that in to the welcome was an utter failure at best!

But the band’s version of it was not a failure at all. And our discussion of the law – God’s law – was spot on.

Many people get it all wrong when it comes to God’s Law, whether it be the Old Testament version of it or the New Testament version. They believe that God’s law or rules are ways that we earn favor with Him. Or that if God is going to love me, I have to do everything just right. But what we learned on Sunday is that God’s rules are not a condition of his love but are a confirmation of his love!

It’s like being a parent. I would never tell my little daughter, “Mariclaire, if you are good, I’ll strap you in your car seat when we get in the car. But if you are bad, I’m not going to strap you in! I’ll just let you get hurt!” Of course I wouldn’t do that! BECAUSE I love her, I’ll put some protections and boundaries in her life. That’s how God is. He gives us boundaries for our protection because he loves us, not to get us to earn His love.

As you go throughout your week, stay within God’s boundaries. Not to earn his love, but to experience his love!

Watch or listen to the sermon here.

As usually happens, I’m learning a ton by teaching through this series. It always amazes me that snotty, know-it-all Christians like me think we’ve got it all figured out and a series about “the basics of faith” sounds boring and elementary.

Wrong!

I’ve never done a lot of thinking about “the fall.” More specifically, I’ve never given a lot of thought to this question that drove the topic of the day: If a perfect God created a perfect world that He called good in Genesis 1, why is my life and my world so dang imperfect?!

And the answer is simple: Sin changes EVERYTHING!

When sin came in, out went God. He could not longer be in perfect communion with man. He could no longer keep the world in the perfect condition He created it in. From that moment on, chaos ensued. It didn’t take long – only 6 chapters – before it got so bad he had to wipe the face of the earth clean and start over. Then it didn’t take long – about a few verses after the flood – before Noah ends up naked and drunk in a vineyard like a redneck at a campground after a NASCAR race. And it’s been all downhill since then!

But by Genesis 11, God had a plan. He went to a no-name man in a no-name town and decided to do something that would get the world’s attention. He would raise up a nation over the course of hundreds of years and then bring a Savior out of that nation. Then it all happened just as God said it would. Just for you and me to have a relationship with Him.

God has been at work since the first book of the Bible to overcome the problem of sin and the heartbreak of his perfect creation that was ruined. His promise is as real today as it was in Genesis 12. Let’s live like it! We have a promise through Jesus that the brokenness can be repaired.

Check out the full sermon here.

Yowsers! Never has a sermon created quite the stir that this one did…all because we took a stand on believing that what the Bible says is true and used some science to show that maybe – just maybe – science can substantiate Biblical claims.

The stir was mostly positive, people thankful for a confirmation of their faith that, by the way, is shared by 44% of Americans. In fact, only 9% of Americans believe in evolution that does not include God. The other 91% believe God played a role. So naturally most OneLifers were thankful to hear what they heard. But believe it or not, that was not the point of the message!

The point of the message was we can learn much about the Creator from the story of his creation. We learn that he can bring light out of darkness, order and life to chaos, proves his glory in the heavens, and that all creation is so the Creator can have relationship with YOU! Check it out if you missed it here.

Some of my research for this sermon can also serve as further resources for those wanting more “proof” or apologetics on the topic:

• Evidence for Creation – A few scientific reasons that evolution is not hard and fast fact.
• Evolution vs. Creation Debate – A debate from a Canadian television show that raises some interesting points in favor of Creation.
• Expelled – A MUST SEE documentary by Ben Stein that addresses the issue of how any scientist or scholar who dares to consider intelligent design or question evolution as “scientific” is immediately discarded, despite the facts of science that back up the possiblity of intelligent design. Watch all 10 parts for free on YouTube.
• The Case for a Creator – A book by Lee Strobel that is a great introduction for someone wanting some basic scientific arguments for intelligent design. He also lists more resources for the reader who wants more than an introduction.

This Sunday we move to part 3 – sin. What is it, why is it a big deal, and what do we do about it? Going to be another great one!!!

This past Sunday we kicked off a new series where we are looking at the basics of our faith and why we believe what we believe. The first message in the series was about the Bible. Check it out here if you missed it. We discovered that…

• The Bible was written by 40 different authors.
• The Bible was written over a 1500 year time period.
• The Bible was written in 3 different languages: Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic
• The Bible was written on 3 different continents: Europe, Asia, Africa
• Despite all of this, there are no real contradictions (see below) and there is only ONE central message to it all! “The story of God and His people He created.”
• The New Testament is the most reliable historical document of all time. There are more than 25,000 manuscripts dating to as early as the first century, only one generation removed from the actual events. The first runner up is Homer’s Iliad with not even 650 manuscripts and 400 years removed from the actual events!
• Archaeology has never refuted a biblical account. In fact, archaeology continues to prove the Bible. One of the most famous examples is the story of Jesus at the Pool of Bethesda.
• Even historians are baffled at the statistical chances that one person – Jesus – would actually fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament. Taking only 8 of the dozens of prophecies and accepting historical proof that Jesus fulfilled them hundreds of years after they were written leaves us with a statistical probabilty of 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 that one person would do that!

For further study, here are some great resources:

• Nearly Every Question about the Bible Answered
• History of the Canon of the Bible – How the Bible as we know it today became organized
• A List of Bible Contradictions Explained – From the petty attempts to find contradictions to more reasonable attempts, this scholar has a well-researched answer for each.
• The Case for Christ – A great book for the skeptic willing to consider the other side and for the believer wanting to better understand “proof” for our faith.

This week we tackle another fun topic – creation! It’s going to be another great one. See you Sunday at 10 or 11:30 but don’t come alone!