The Ultimate Relationship

Doing good?

We've been here since sept. and people always ask what have you been doing. WE've been trying to fit in. We've stopped saying yall. Plural. We've started using utensils.

Potholes, you have obstacle courses

In cincy we drive the speed limit. I'm thinking we vote to have ish printed on the speed limit signs.

Accent.

People ask us how its going? How are things for the new church coming along. Let me tell you. We learned a few weeks ago that the financial support we would receive from our sponsoring organizations was a little bit less than we'd expected. 10's of thousands of dollars less. The day I found out I began furiously running numbers. How can I make this work. How can I make this work? Do I call my mommy? I'm 31 years old and my mother still gives me lunch money. I know I'm spoiled, but its true, if I'm at home in Cincinnati, my mother will just slip me a twenty. Mom, I wonder if I could get a 50 year advance on my lunch money. I wanted to fix it but I couldn't. We were just plain short ten's of thousands of dollars. I prayed. God, I'm not sure what to do here. I prayed and prayed but I didn't really feel any better. I read my Bible. All the verses I could remember about God providing for his people and God being faithful, but honestly it didn't really provide much comfort.

And then I did something I'm almost embarrassed to tell you. I was desperate to hear from God and so I flipped through my Bible and asked God to speak to me. I landed on John 6.

"Jesus Saw a large crowd coming and asked phillip where will we find enough food to feed all of these people.

Hah-I thought kind of like us launching this church. WE've got this crowd coming on launch day, and we don't have enough money to buy the equipment we need to resource these people spiritually.

John 6:? "Jesus asked this only to test him, because he already knew what he was going to do."

I wondered. "Is this verse for me?" Jesus has allowed this lack of funds to happen to test us, and he already has in mind what he's going to do." I started to feel a little better. A little more confident and I read on.

Phillip said, Lord it would take eight months wages to feed all of these people. And it was then that it occurred to me that the amount of the money we needed was exactly eight months of our staff salaries.

[twilight theme song]

And that's how its going. We work. We run into seemingly insurmountable obstacles. God sweeps in at the last minute and saves the day. if you ever doubt whether or not God is real, whether or not God really cares, whether or not God really is faithful, my advice to you is maybe you should start a church, because it really feels like God is with us.

It really feels like God is looking over our shoulder all the time ready to step in when we need Him

And that's what I'd like to talk about today. The idea that God is with us.

You know this past summer my daughter was throwing a ball into the air. Over and over she looked up in the sky and threw it up. She asked me why God didn't catch the ball. Have you ever felt like God was a far off God?

In the OT, people viewed God as this far off God. He lived in the temple. He hung out on mountaintops. He dealt with people through prophets and burning bushes and plagues. He's this transcendent, unapproachable, far off God.

700 years before Jesus was born the prophet Isaiah uttered these words and in Matthew 1:23 the angel repeated these words to Joseph"Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and shall bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel, which translated means, 'God with us.'"

Jesus means God is close to us. Jesus means God is approachable and that He's not some detached, distant and disinterested deity,

And that truth seems pretty simple but it has huge implications for how we live our lives. And that's what I'd like to do with the rest of our time this morning is look at three implications for the fact that God is Immanuel.

The first one is kinda scary: EVERY TIME WE blow it, GOD KNOWS IT. And that's sobering truth.

Someone forwarded this email to me about the dumbest crooks in America. I don't usually read forwards, but this was good

Jamie O'Donnell stole a car and headed North. Somewhere between Austin and Arkansas he picked up a hitchhiker. When he reached Virginia, stopped at a rest area to use the bathroom. When he came back out the car was gone. That's right, stolen car was stolen again, this time by the hitchhiker. His problems were further complicated when he called the cops to report the heist. It didn't take them long to figure out Jamie was the first thief. And it didn't take them long to find the second thief, either. They're both under arrest for stealing the same car.

Two men tried to pull the front off a cash machine by running a chain from the machine to the bumper of their pickup truck. Instead of pulling the front panel off the machine, though, they pulled the bumper off their truck. Scared, they left the scene and drove home. With the chain still attached to the machine. With their bumper still attached to the chain. With their vehicle's license plate still attached to the bumper.

I was reading these stories and thinking, "Anybody would have to be dumb to be a thief! Don't they know that eventually they're going to get caught?"

AND THEN IT HIT ME. How often do you and I fool ourselves into thinking that we're getting away with something in our lives? How many times do we think, what really matters is whether or not we get caught.

I think we tend to have the notion that its not about whether we have character or not, its just about whether we got.

You know what's at the beginning of every racist joke?

As if its OK to tell a racist joke as long as they don't hear us.