Let’s face it, we need each other!

Why do the New Orleans Saints all wear the same uniform?  To identify that they are all on the same team.  Why do married people wear wedding rings?  To symbolize their commitment to a partner.  Why do we Christians get baptized?  To go public with our faith in Jesus Christ.

In the same way, church membership identifies your willingness to formally and publicly align with the mission, values, and beliefs of The Grove Church.

There are many reasons for having formal membership.
Here are a few…

ONE
Formal membership is valuable to the leaders of the church as they guide the church body.  Our mission here at The Grove Church is “to connect people to God, to others, and to service.”  We have been left on earth by God to reach unbelievers.  So at some point it is important to identify those who truly comprise the “family” at TGC, the core that can be counted on to build and sustain the ministries of this church.

TWO
Accountability.  While it is true that everyone can participate in just about anything around here, there are certain leadership responsibilities that are reserved for those who have made themselves accountable to the church through membership.  Even if you are not ready to become a leader yourself, you may be relived to know that those members in leadership positions have agreed through membership to support this ministry and to be held accountable.

THREE
Even though you will not find the term “church member” in Scripture, it seems that the concept of belonging is found throughout the New Testament.  Believers clearly identified themselves with a specific local body and were challenged to become devoted participants.

FOUR
Experience shows that membership benefits the individual.  In a culture where commitment is no longer highly valued, recognizable membership is an important step that moves each of us off the sidelines and into the game.  It is letting the church leadership know, “You can count on me.”  Members typically feel more ownership in the church.  They feel like shareholders rather than spectators.  They usually find it easier to connect with others and build lasting relationships

So, while you won’t receive an engraved plaque or a reserved parking spot when you become a member, you will draw great satisfaction from knowing that you are a part of something bigger than yourself, something eternal.  We want you to partner with us in reaching our world for Jesus Christ.

Over the next few weeks, you will have the opportunity to mark on your Connection Card, “I would like to join The Grove Church.”  I encourage you to commit to membership as early as possible. God bless!

Jesus stepped down from Heaven and into the world.  But, it was really more than that.  The Message paraphrases Philippians 2:6-7 as saying “Christ had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death—and the worst kind of death at that—a crucifixion.”

Talk about a change.  God, the one who created the universe and is all powerful, stepped into flesh as a baby, knowing all the while He was arriving for a death sentence.

Why?

There is a reason, and I want to help you discover that reason so that you can do whatever it takes to make Christ’s death – and resurrection – count.

Jesus died so that you can have a Fresh Start – both here on earth and with God in eternity.  Jesus said in John 10:10 “I came to give life—life in all its fullness.” NCV  What would your life look like if you lived your life to the full in Christ?

Would you:

• love passionately?
• live with purpose, on purpose?
• go the second mile?

Let me throw an idea out there. Living life in all its fullness is not about getting everything you want. For many people, that turns the idea of Christmas upside down.  A “self help” book may tell you to set your mind on what you want and do everything you can to get it, regardless of the cost to yourself or others. I have some advice for you from the scripture: “Don’t act out of selfish ambition or be conceited. Instead, humbly think of others as being better than yourselves.” Philippians 2:3 GOD’s WORD Translation

But  you may ask, why would I even want to live that way, and what does this have to do with eternity with God?

Good question.

God has a plan for you. This plan lives lives to the full, and ultimately joy.  If everybody followed the plan here on earth perfectly, we would have peace and joy like the world hasn’t seen from the very beginning.  But there is a problem.

Jeremiah 7:9 says “The heart is hopelessly dark and deceitful, a puzzle that no one can figure out.” MSG

Two questions for you:

1. How can we live this full life of selflessness with this deceitful heart? and
2. How does this dark heart affect our relationship with God and eternity?

Jeremiah goes on in verse 10: “But I, God, search the heart and examine the mind. I get to the heart of the human. I get to the root of things. I treat them as they really are, not as they pretend to be.”

When God gets to the root of our problem, our heart, what is the verdict?

“For the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). We get what we deserve: the death sentence and eternal separation from the love and joy of God. That is Hell.

But there is good news.  Remember the beginning of the Christmas story.  Jesus came for a reason.  The Bible says, “But God proves His own love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8)

When Jesus died on the Cross, he was our substitute.  The payment for us not living the lives God had planned for us was paid it full.  The question is, has this payment been applied to your account?  There is only one way.

If you were driving down the road and someone asked you to turn, what would he or she be asking you to do? They’d be asking you to change directions, right? In the Bible, to turn  means to repent. We must all turn from something – sin and self. Jesus warned his listeners in Luke 13:3, “…unless you repent (turn) you will all likewise perish”. But we not only turn from something (sin and self) we must also turn to Someone, Jesus Christ. We must trust Christ only! I Corinthians 15:3 says, “Christ died for our sins” and Romans 10:9 tells us that “If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus…you will be saved”.

Jesus has always been giving Fresh Starts. From Mary 2,000 years ago, to myself 9 years ago, to countless others.  It is time for yours.

I was always an emotional kid. One time my brother was picking on me and I remember my mom telling him to leave me alone, since I was so emotional. So when things went bad, I usually took it pretty hard. My childhood was bad, but looking back on it after hearing of people’s own hurts and struggles reminds me how I had it better than many people.

You can just about trace most of my problems to my dad. School ended at 3 pm and that meant it was time to ride the bus home. What would have been the best part of the day for many kids was dreaded by me. You see, my dad worked the night shift at Waffle House, which meant he was the one to watch my brother and I until mom got home from her secretary job. I admit that many kids get much worse than I did, but I considered what was happening to me as a 1st grader on up through middle school to be torture.

Dad wasn’t exactly a forgiving person. Even as a kid, you were expected to be perfect. I wasn’t. One day I spilled some orange juice. The result? I was put in a cold bath tub to try to soothe the marks left over from the belt I was whipped with. Say anything that rubbed dad the wrong way and it was a spanking and off to the “electric chair”. If you are not familiar with the electric chair, it is when you get up against the wall and lower your body until it was if you are sitting on an invisible chair. You were then to keep yourself up on your toes and hold out your arms out perfectly straight for an hour. Because I would get tired and couldn’t hold the position, a spanking along with more time was added to the “chair.” The electric chair name is appropriate, because you would begin to shake uncontrollably.

At least those punishments were for something I could try to limit: be careful what you say to dad and don’t spill any drinks. Some punishments were for things you could not control. One example would be the bed wetting I had a trouble with as a young child. My dad decided that this wasn’t going to happen anymore, so he would make me drink several, several tall glasses of lukewarm water until I felt very sick. He would then lock all the bathroom doors and tell me to go to sleep on his bed. I was instructed not to leave the bed or I would get punished. Finally, when I couldn’t hold my bladder any more and wet the bed, I was spanked. He told my mom that I wet their bed purposefully. Nobody listened to me about what was going on and I felt like nobody was on my side.

I wasn’t alone though. Some charismatic church held a Backyard Bible School in our trailer park for a week. I went everyday and through those loving volunteers, I prayed to receive Christ as my Savior. Because my dad didn’t want to go to church, we rarely went as a family. I eventually did get some Bible education by being picked up to go to a local independent Baptist church though. I wondered why my dad didn’t want to come to something that was so important. I’m not saying I was the perfect church kid. There were several times I’m sure I was hard to get out of bed to get on the church bus, but I did wonder why my dad wouldn’t go. He did seem to have some spiritual beliefs, as twisted as they were. One day before I was to be spanked, I knelt over a table and looked at a picture of a woman holding onto a lamb. Though my dad will deny it to this day, he told me “Jesus is the lamb. You better pray to the lamb that I won’t kill you.”

Add all of these experiences together and I can see why I was a socially awkward kid when we moved homes. We moved out of the trailer park into a nice community between my 6th and 7th grade years of school. After the move I heard my dad on the phone talking to some woman. I brought it up and was accused of trying to ruin my parents’ marriage. It’s true that I wanted my parents to get divorced – at one point I begged my mom to leave him. But that had nothing to do with me trying to find out what was going on with my dad late at night.

It did turn out that my dad was cheating on my mom. At this point my dad had moved up from Waffle House to obtaining a nurse’s license from a local college. While our family struggled for my dad to go to college, he was hooking up with a woman he met in nursing school. Several attempts were made to keep the marriage together, but the divorce eventually did happen. I felt to blame, even though my dad had been guilty of so much.

I felt alone. I felt unloved in my home and friendless. A young middle school student should not feel like I felt. What was the answer? One day I opened the mail and saw a newsletter from the youth ministry at Calvary Baptist Church. Inside were pictures of young people – SMILING. Though I had been saved as an even younger child, I had been out of church for a while and I had never been a part of youth ministry. I looked and saw that the youth got together on Wednesday. “Wednesday!? Church only meets on Sunday,” I thought. I went to mom and asked if I could go. The next Wednesday rolled around and I was dropped off at the church. The kids were having fun and the message hit me right where I needed guidance. I got involved and began to be happy. Out of my normal comfort zone, I agreed to go to youth camp where I rededicated my life to Christ.

Since then my mom remarried to a deacon and they are both active in church life. Though I still had many problems, I now felt hope. But something remaining hidden deep within me. I hated my dad. Though I never went to see him, he was heard of often in our house. My mom was having to go back to court to collect child support. My dad, who at this point had lost his nursing license for stealing morphine, was back working at Waffle House and could not afford payments. Each time I heard his name, I got madder.

I couldn’t hate anybody. I was now a leader and respected in my church. People praised me for being a Christian leader while things back home were still sour. It all stemmed from my hatred of my dad. Did this make a difference to my dad? No, of course not. The irony is that your feelings against a person really end up just hurting yourself. It eats at you. Forgiveness does not come naturally. It is a choice.

You know what? I am a sinner as bad as my father and anyone else in this world. But Jesus died and forgave me. I went before my church and talked to the pastor. I told him that I was choosing to forgive my dad and asked for his prayers to help me. I am now free!

I went and saw my dad recently. I ate a late night breakfast at around 11 pm at Waffle House. I hope and pray that he will be a changed, saved man. Whether or not that happens though, I can love him because Christ first loved me. This is my forgiveness story. What is yours? Write it in the comment box.

Tickets – $5

Proceeds benefit “To Write Love on Her Arms” (An organization that aids in the prevention of suicide and other forms of self harm)

Doors open at 5 pm

Concert Starts at 6 pm

July 16, 2010

Featuring:
The Violent

Flight From Below

Across the Meridian

To Love a Monster

Humans are Humongous