Pastor's Reflection for the day

God constantly brings those who profess faith and an unconditional desire to follow the example of Jesus Christ to the edge of an unfathomable wilderness. Standing there, peering into the unknown, God will asks, "Do you trust me enough to lead you through the dark and mysterious places that you cannot see?" Many of us experience anxiety, if not fear, when we find ourselves looking into unknown places where there is no light. We may imagine sounds and sense danger, and in total darkness we lack the ability to know where our foot needs to go. Add to this uncertainty the fact that in saying ‘yes’ in faith, many times we do not know where or why we are going. An unconditional desire to follow the example of Jesus Christ will lead us exactly to the wilderness where our uncertainties and weaknesses can only be overcome by knowing that God will never abandon us. Without faith, only a fool will enter this kind of wilderness.

Activities for Sunday 3/7/10

This is the day that the Lord has made - let us rejoice and give thanks to God in worship and praise.

Our morning worship is at 9:45

Pastor's Reflection for the day

Nothing will ever change the love God has for Creation. This is especially true of the love God has for humankind into which He has poured the Holy Spirit and endowed with powers of wisdom and understanding similar to the essence of Divine Nature. God may at times be disappointed and angry, or pleased and merciful, but God’s steadfast love will always remain because love is the very nature of God. It is impossible for God to turn away from His essential nature. We, however, are not as steadfast in our essential being. We can, and often do, abandon the perfect love that God has put within us. When we turn away from God, and our compatibility with our Divine Nature, we abandon the love that seeks to unite us in the joy and peace humankind has sought throughout history. But even in our rebellion, God's love remains unchanged. The presence of the fruits of the Spirit in our life is only, and directly, proportional to the unity or separation we create in our relationship to God's perfect and steadfast love.

Activities for Saturday 3/6/10

11 am - Soup Kitchen in Long Branch

Pastor's Reflection for the day

No matter how hard we labor in our devotion and spiritual discipline, we will never experience the full peace and joy of God's presence until we take the final step of total self-surrender to God's will. We can see the perfect example of this level of moving beyond self in Jesus as he struggles in the garden of Gethsemane. But what we may not immediately comprehend in our reading of this Scripture passage is the presence of God's grace that enables Jesus to move beyond every desire of his own flesh so that humankind can be reconciled to God. We see Jesus sweating blood. We hear Jesus asking for the cup to be removed from him. We watch Jesus chastise the sleepy disciples for not being able to stay awake with him. We can even imagine the anguish of Jesus in the damp coolness of the garden night. But to fully understand the significance of the human struggle in that place, we must recognize the presence of God's grace that enabled Jesus to move totally beyond self to perfectly exhibit, "Not my will, but yours be done?"

Activities for Friday 3/5/10

Youth lasagna fund raising dinner: 6-7 pm
This promises to be fun, hot, and cheezy
Take out orders welcomed

Lenten Bible Study: 7:30 pm
In the chapel

Pastor's Reflection for the day

In My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers writes: “[God requires] a faithfulness to what we discern when we are in the closest possible fellowship with God." This requirement means that we must be willing to experience a suffering similar to St. Paul as described during his road to Damascus conversion: "I will show him how many things he must suffer for my name's sake" (Acts 9:16). To attain the closest possible fellowship with God, we must first be in constant prayer, and devote ample time to studying Scripture, to insure that we are communicating well with God. Following this, if we are certain that we have committed our essential being to moving beyond self to discern God's call on our life; we must faithfully travel the journey on which God leads us. If there is suffering, (which is almost certain when giving our whole being to a purpose the world seldom understands), it will become a source of joy in knowing that as we follow the example of Jesus we are serving the Living God.

Activities for Thusday 3/4/10

Voice lessons at 7 pm with Marty Garland

Choir practice at 7:30

Pastor's Reflection for the day

While we are thinking and considering how we can best use our time, talent, and energy to build the Kingdom of God here on earth, God will not be able to utilize the gifts we have received for that purpose. It is only when we cease trying to decide ourselves what would be best for us to do that God will be able to perform the unexpected miracles that require our help to succeed. Serving God to the utmost of our ability requires us to surrender all of our objectives and ideas of what we think we ought to do so that God can put the mind of Christ within us, fill us with the power of the Holy Spirit, and enable us to do the very things we might consider to be impossible. Having the mind of Christ empowered by the Holy Spirit to do the will of God often requires that the world perceives that we have no mind of our own.

Activities for Wednesday 3/3/10

A BIG day for the future of Old First UMC

Please join us at 7:30 this evening as we begin a "Road to Renewal" - a discussion led by the Rev. Dr. Dour Ruffle. We will talk about how we can grow our ministry inside and beyond our church in the coming years.

You are also invited to join us in our Prayer Circle at 6:45 to help prepare our hearts and invite the Holy Spirit to join us in our Road to Renewal.

Pastor's Reflection for the day

The love that Jesus demonstrated during his teaching, suffering, death, and resurrection is beyond the love we experience in our human emotions and sentimentality. The love and compassion of Jesus enabled him to heal and feed thousands of people. The only requirement on the part of the healed or fed person was that their faith be strong enough to receive the divine love that was being offered. Jesus will ask us, "Do you love and trust God?" If so, God will provide our every need. The love that heals and feeds the world is not a love that can be achieved through human labor and decision. It is a love attained solely by a deep faith in God who is love (“Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” – 1 John 4:8). As we are able to grow in faith and move beyond self, we are healed by, fed, and then called to exemplify and share this divine love in the world unconditionally.

Activities for Tuesday 3/2/2010

This looks like a good day to begin reading our Lenten Bible study material for the third week of Lent. We will touch lightly on the material for the second week we had to skip because of snow.

Also, a reminder that tomorrow (Wednesday) evening we will be discussing "Road to Renewal" at out Church Council meeting. If you have a copy of the book, please skim through it. If you do not have a copy, please come to the meeting and join us along the way.

Be blessed as you are a blessing!

Pastor's Reflection for the day

The love that God wants us to experience will remove our perceptions of “other.” But before we can experience this kind of love, we must confront the biggest challenge we will ever have; namely, to move beyond self. To live in the unconditional love to which God calls, us, we must look beyond our protective self -- the self that reserves the right to be respected and served. It is our defense of this inward self that is the primary obstacle to living in the unconditional love Jesus was referring to when he asked Peter, “Do you love me?” Jesus, in his question, presents to us a window through which we can see a new and divine love if we are honest enough to open our eyes to our limiting perceptions of self and “other” that stand in the way of God’s infinite grace.

Pastor's Reflection for the day

Love is an emotion that we all seek to give and receive, especially when experienced as a happy and fulfilling gift from God. The love we find easiest to share with another person is love that affirms our existence and fills us with joy and visions of sunrises and flowers. However, when Jesus asks Peter three times, "Do you love me?" he is pointing us to another kind of love. After passing through the cross and into the resurrection, Jesus invited us to look beyond our pleasurable human love to see if we are committed to the kind of love that nourished him as he suffered the pain and betrayal of the world. God is already aware of the level of commitment and capacity of our love, so the question Jesus asks us is really only intended to invite us to examine our own heart, and our own ability to comprehend and participate in the unconditional love of God for humankind.

Activities for Saturday 2/27/10

Digging our of the snow and preparing our hearts for worship tomorrow morning.

Please do your shopping today so that we can keep our Sabbath holy.

Pastor's Reflection for the day

God's omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence mean that He is both deep within us and far beyond us. We can limit the actions of God in our life by seeking and acknowledging only those aspects of God that are within ourselves -- the things that we can see, touch, smell, taste, hear, and comprehend. When we perceive God only in terms of our life on earth and discoveries of the universe we have been able to explore through science, we confine God's omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence to the capacities of humankind. But God is far greater. In faith and in prayer, we can avail ourselves of the Divine reality that lies beyond self, and become open to experiencing the infinite potential of God. Speaking to God in prayer can be an opportunity to reach out for what appears to be miraculous in our human understanding.

Pastor's Reflection for the day

Our faith in God is limited only by the size of the box in which we perceive Him. If we understand God in the box of our intellect, the power of God is confined to those things that we can deduce from our human experience. If we place God in the box of our physical world, our perception of God is limited to information gleaned from our five human senses. If, on the other hand, we understand God to exist inside and outside the confines of our human intellect and sensory perceptions, the reality of God will enlighten us into an unlimited faith wherein moving beyond self becomes an exciting opportunity to attain life, light, and love that exceeds anything we could possibly experience in any other way. When we are blessed by God with this kind of faith, we are compelled to share these gifts of the Holy Spirit as soon as we receive them.

Activities for Friday 2/26/10

Because of the snow:

Youth Lasagna Dinner - CANCELED

Lenten Bible Study - CANCELED

Activities for Thusday 2/25/10

Stay safe

Be blessed

Be a blessing

Pastor's Reflection for the day

The Gospel of Jesus Christ asks that we become like broken bread and poured out wine, becoming like the body and blood of Christ. The Gospel tells us that our movement beyond self and into brokenness is needed to decrease our rebellion against God’s divine plan, and thus become strong representatives of the Heavenly Kingdom in the world. These are easy words to say, and an ideal that many Christians would agree expresses an objective in their heart. Yet there is a counter-language in the Gospel to which we also aspire that calls us to be healed and made whole; a language that beseeches God to make us strong so that we will be able to defeat powers that strive to pull us away from our obedience to God’s will. It requires a strong faith in the unconditional love of God to bring these two points of view into a common purpose -- to be broken and poured out so that God can prevail, and also remain strong in our resolve to not yield to the temptations of the world. Paul makes the resolution of these seemingly contradictory desires most clear in 2 Corinthians 12:10 when he states, “Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.” The Gospel teaches us that in being broken, (moving beyond self), we are made strong for the purpose of God.

Pastor's Reflection for the day

The amount of freedom in our spiritual self largely depends on our willingness to surrender freedom in our physical life. Freedom in our spiritual self is attained as we permit the power of God to reign supreme in our heart, mind, and soul in such a way as to guide every action and deed in which our physical being participates. When we are free in our spiritual self, our entire physical life is surrendered to the purpose of God. The freedom, peace and comfort that comes from this surrender increases proportional to the liberation of our spiritual self from all desires of our physical life to exercise our own free will except to be obedient to God. The dichotomy here is that as we surrender the freedom of our physical life, freedom in our spiritual self grows exponentially. To see the truth of this dichotomy expressed in its purest form -- look at the freedom attained for all humankind on the cross.

Activities for Wednesday 2/24/10

12 noon - Ecumenical Lenten Lunch at St. Luke's UMC in Long Branch

6:45 PM - Prayer Circle in the Prayer Room

7:30 - A meeting of the Nurture, Outreach, and Worship (NOW) committees in the chapel

Greetings

The purpose of this blog is to keep members and interested people up to date on activities at Old First UMC, and to provide an online space to share thoughts and ideas.