1st Corinthians 13:
11-13. When I was a child, I spoke like
a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an
adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then
we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even
as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these
three; and the greatest of these is love.
The April theme scripture is 1st
Corinthians 13: 12 (italicized above) in Paul’s great ode to loving each other
like God loves. What comes before and
after our theme verse does matter.
The verse before verse 12 calls
us to spiritual maturity. The verse
after reminds us of the three key spirituality words that bind us together: faith, hope and love. The dominant word of the trio is love.
Spiritual Maturity
Your leadership in January and
February took a bold, loving, approach in calling us to move to spiritual
maturity. Our spiritual maturity invites
a redefined vocabulary in how we define our faithfulness at Hilltop. We engaged in a short, but intense, campaign
to ask the congregation to “Step-Up” for Hilltop to ‘see beyond’ ourselves into
a mature, loving future. We have
redefined the vocabulary around how we talk about our church finances.
For too long, we have been reluctant
to name an issue many knew was present: We
are under incomed. We are now, in
maturity I believe, willing to name that and speak to that reality. We discussed and wrote about how we are the
lowest per capita (attendance being our per capita unit) Anglo church with a
full-time pastor in Utah. We must do
better here, and we got ourselves started.
I wish we could report that we
got our $100,000 true objective. We did
not. We came closer to $35,000 and about
50 families/individuals ‘stepped up’ here in faith, hope and love. Thank you to those who stepped up. We will, have to cut expenses, to make the
numbers work, but not as much as we would have if we had not had these fifty
sets of families and individuals “Step-Up.”
Again, thank you, and we are not finished here. There is still much to do.
Faith, hope and love
I am a person of faith and thus,
as a direct result of that faith, a person of hope. Faith and hope are two sides of the same
coin. Hebrews 11: 1 phrases it far
better than I: “Now faith is confidence
in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.” We still “see” in a “dim mirror” but even in
that “dim mirror,” I am a person of faith, and thus hope. I am confident we are emerging into a place
and time where we can see beyond the now, into a faithful, hopeful, and love
filled beyond.
Seeing Beyond
As Jesus journeyed from the
Transfiguration Mountaintop to the Calvary hilltop, he was seeing beyond
Calvary to Easter and the Empty Tomb.
Part of the message of Easter is getting unstuck from grieving over Good
Friday and remembering the Empty Tomb.
We are resurrection people, ‘he is risen, he is risen indeed.’ To see beyond our current state, is to
embrace the promise of Easter, and also the uncontrollable explosion of
Pentecost.
Pentecost is the birthday of the
church. On that day, fifty days after
Easter, the nascent church was able to fully grasp the call to go out into
‘all’ the world and transform it. The
result was an explosion of growth. How
did those early and first Christians do it?
They did it in faith and hope, and they were propelled by the engine of
God’s love fueled through the resurrection.
Yes, we are Easter people, but we are also Pentecost people, filled with
God’s Holy Spirit and powerfully blown out into our world. Following the Holy Spirit, we are propelled,
almost involuntarily, through seeing beyond ourselves to serve God in our
world. We do it by recognizing maturity
in God’s call and seizing the opportunity to make a difference, now.
We are called to make a
difference now, through, our faith,
sustained by our hope, and demonstrating and reflecting God’s love. We must continue to “Step-Up” in order to
accomplish this mature and exciting chance to “See beyond” ourselves to God’s
hope-filled future.
Selah, Pastor Dennis
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