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May 08, 2022
The Conspiracy of God | Choose Life
Our message series, The Conspiracy of God , will take us through the Sermon on The Mount.
A conspiracy involves a secret power at work behind the scenes, undermining those that currently hold sway. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is God’s invitation to participate in his great conspiracy by apprenticing to Jesus.
Listen to an audio version of the message
Songs for this week: Spotify
Matthew 7:13-14
Message Questions:
- Describe a time when you needed to make a major decision. How did your choice impact your life thereafter?
- “Enter by the narrow gate.” How would you define the narrow gate? How does Jesus’ statement challenge our culture’s ideas of spirituality?
- Where do you see the wide gate and easy path in the world around us today? Or in your own life?
- How do Christians experience the way of life to be “narrow” and “hard”? How do you reconcile this with Jesus’ statement that his “yoke is easy and his burden is light” (Matt. 11:29)?
- How is Jesus challenging you to choose the way of obedience to him today?
Practice:
Read and meditate on Psalm 1 this week, reflecting on its two ways.
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Recent Sermons
Paul never recovered from God including the Gentiles in the salvation invitation.
Like some of us, perhaps, he felt like some people should be excluded by virtue of where they were born or how badly they have behaved.
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Human beings need reminders about how to get along, and Christians are no exception. We especially need reminders about how to love each other while we disagree. Paul draws the believers' hearts and minds back to what Jesus has done, and that paves the way for loving each other well through conflict.
How do we live with Jesus in a society that opposes him? Paul tells us to wake up to our resurrection hope. When we do that, loving others and rejecting sin in our own lives makes sense.
Romans 12 is the description of what happens when God’s mercy overflows in a church’s life. Lifelong attitudes change, love becomes genuine, mocking enemies are not met with equal and opposite force but, quite the opposite, with peace and gentleness. Be praying even now for how God will speak uniquely to your small group.
All along, we’ve been saying that God’s heart is to see us INCLUDED. That’s why Jesus came, and that’s the subject of Paul’s letter to the Romans. At times, Christians forget God’s radical inclusion of them and go back to the old patterns of competing and comparing. Sadly, that was happening in the Roman Church. Paul has one powerful dose for that sickness.
The resurrection changed everything! The story includes an invitation, a blessing, and a commission for the first witnesses … and for us today.
