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Psalm 131 – Journey Through the Psalms Series

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Psalm 131 – Journey Through the Psalms Series PSALM 131 – JOURNEY THROUGH THE PSALMS SERIES Good morning Life Fellowship. It is good to be with you today. I did want to make a couple of points since my brother Tim pointed out that I had a couple of details wrong last week. He told me that I was off on how many earths can fit inside the sun that I talked about. I told you that a hundred earths could fit inside the sun, and he said it was actually 1.3 million earths could fit inside the sun. And so I told him that even makes it better to think about. And I am thankful for Tim bringing that out as I was trying to recall a lot of that information off the top of my head. And then Tim told me that I had said that sometimes I freak out thinking about traveling at the speed of light here on earth and we are really going 66,000 miles an hour and the speed of light is 66 million miles per hour or whatever. So I thanked him for the clarifications and there you go. A good brother will always keep you in check. I also wanted to say to those who came out to Web Talks last week that we are thankful to have you. I love the name Web Talks. Pastor Roland is the one who coined that term and I am sure he is going to be doing a lot more with that in the future and I don’t want to take credit for that name. We are looking forward to that tonight and if you know any couples that are struggling in the area of communication, tonight would be a good night to come out and join us for the Web Talks. We are also moving forward in this idea of volunteerism. You may have seen some videos on that. This is one of the initiative’s that flowed out of our elder retreat. We are striving together to see more volunteers step up and serve at Life Fellowship. We want to ask you to consider being a volunteer here. For example, on the production team alone, just to pull off the Sunday morning services we have 25 volunteers. And did you know the average person on the production team serves nine hours a week? So by the time we come in here that team has put together about 225 hours of service work just so that we can respond in worship. Isn’t that incredible? Do you want to know how many people we need on Sunday mornings to pull off a Sunday morning service on the whole campus? With Kid Life, Student Life, and everything else we need at least 180 volunteers just to pull off Sunday mornings. Folks, that is the size of many churches, and that is how many volunteers that are helping us week by week to pull this thing off. Not to mention the ministries during the week that we have - Bible studies, Women’s studies and so on which probably takes about 250 volunteers a week. So here is the way we see it. If we have production team people serving like nine hours a week, can’t we who are members and those who call Life Fellowship their church home, give an hour a week somewhere to help out? This church is not a cruise ship. And if we are showing up wanting to be catered to and served, and we think that church is about coming to be fed and that’s it, then that is a cruise ship mentality of church. The church Page 1 of 14 pages 3/18/2018 PSALM 131 – JOURNEY THROUGH THE PSALMS SERIES is a battleship, folks. We are at war and we need warriors and we need to do this together. Right? (Applause.) Now some of you are clapping and you need to sign up to serve somewhere. (Laughter.) We have done some videos for you which take a lot of time. That means we need responses, we need people to step up and help us. We want to be serving in the community and we want to be serving in the church. It has been nicely said before that no one basically has enough time, but we just have to have the heart to do this thing. In fact it was said like this in a statement: “Volunteers do not necessarily have the time. They just have the heart.” So when you think about this, 250 people a week kind of helping to get things going, that is about 20 percent of the people doing 80 percent of the work. Listen, there is a place for you to serve. Maybe it is in Kid Life or Student Life or even with the missional niche. It could be out in the community. What would it look like if we dreamed of being a church whereby we tithed our time? Let’s pray. Father, I pray that as our church family takes these cards with the challenge for us to serve that we will step up to it, and that you will help us to realize it is not meant to be a burden; it is meant to tap into the very gifts that you have given us so that we can be used and have a sense of purpose in life. And I pray, Lord, that we will think about how to engage the community through acts of service, through missional living, so that we can be salt and light as a church. I pray that you will guide us in all of that. Thank you for the volunteers that have served so wonderfully in our church family, those on the production team that we celebrated through clapping this morning, and those over in Kid Life and in Student Life as well as the greeters and Life University teachers. For all of them we thank you. Lord, we just pray right now as we turn our focus onto you that you would be glorified through this message. In Jesus’ name. Amen. This morning I was preparing I was thinking about how I wanted to open up this message, and I came across this story while I was doing some research. It was about two girls in Southern California several years ago. They were dear friends and they went out together to the cliffs. They were feeling totally empty and hopeless. So after using drugs they tied their wrists together. Then they walked to the edge of the cliff and jumped to their death together. I read that story and I just thought how tragic that was. It was a sad story to read how that these two friends had felt so hopeless that they killed themselves. When we stop and think about that moment in their lives we can’t help but wonder what was going on with them. Were their hearts pounding before they jumped? Were they talking to each other asking if they were sure this is what they wanted to do? Did one of them try to talk the other one out of it? But they stood there on the edge of Page 2 of 14 pages 3/18/2018 PSALM 131 – JOURNEY THROUGH THE PSALMS SERIES that cliff with their wrists tied today and then they jumped to their death together. Two friends that couldn’t see the way of the future because of their hopelessness. I would imagine that in a room this size there are some of you here this morning if you were being honest you might say that you feel a little bit hopeless, empty, confused, in despair or feeling like you are in a dark night of the soul with no lights in front of you. After these two girls had jumped to their death, their friends went out to that cliff. And they lit candles and played music in the girls’ memory. One of the teens there made the statement, ‘Life really sucks.’ Now I don’t like that word but that is what the teen said. The article then said, “You know teens really struggle sometimes just feeling misunderstood, even by their parents.” And when we think about this idea of being hopeless, of not feeling understood in the world, we realize that it can create the most loneliness that we can possibly imagine. Maybe it is not feeling understood in our marriage. Maybe it is not feeling understood in our friendships. Maybe it is not feeling understood with the people we work with. That feeling of not being understood - maybe that is in you this morning. Now what else could lead us to feel hopeless sometimes in our lives? Well, it could also be like those girls who had no sense of the future, seeing no way forward. When we don’t know what we are here for, when we wake up and we feel like we are just existing but we know that we are meant to do more than that. We want to do more than exist, we want to live. We want life. It could be that we are in a hopeless place because of a betrayal, or because of a strained relationship, or because we have been out of work for quite some time. It could be because we are fighting a disease or because of the loss of a loved one. It could be just because we are shifting from a young age to middle age or from middle age to elderly age.
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