Everything and all of it

Do you ever feel like you are carrying the weight of the world on your shoulder? People are counting on you. You feel the weight of it and there is no one that can help? Well, at times like that I think we need a little reminder:

The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it,
    the world, and all who live in it;   - Psalm 241

These are the words of King David, and even as King he realizes that he is not in charge. God is the owner of everything. We live in God’s kingdom where God is on the throne.

David refers to God as “the Lord” and this word Lord can be translated as the self-existent one or the eternal one.

To be self-existent means that no one made God. God existed without us. God does not need us for existence or joy.  And yet God created us out of the overflow of Their love. We exist because of God’s love.  How comforting is that?  To know that the eternal King of the universe made each of us…for love.

God has set His love on you. God has chosen you to be God’s forever.  We belong to God according to this verse.

I will be honest the idea of being “owned’ ruffles my feathers. What if God turns out to be untrustworthy? Yet, that notion quickly passed when I saw that God has been consistently proven to be trustworthy in the pages of scripture .

When you read through the bible and you see the overall meta narrative, you will see a through line of God’s long suffering love and pursuit of his people despite their sin.  God has set his heart on you. God loves you. Do you believe it?

If you don’t, make it your aim to get to know more about who God is.  You can do that by reading through the bible and look for God’s character, personality what God love and what God hates.

What motivates God to do what God does? All that can be found in the pages of scripture.

Where do you mistrust God’s heart today?

Ask God to reveal who God is in the pages of God’s Word.

While Jesus death and resurrection is the most significant evidence of God’s love for you, God delights to show his love for you repeatedly in different ways.

I pray that God will do that for you today. I pray that you will see how God shows up for you today - God knows you, God sees you, God loves you. And in that, there is JOY!

The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it,
    the world, and all who live in it;   - Psalm 241

You are not alone. You never have been and you never will be.

Adoption

This coming Sunday is Mother’s day. It can be a wonderful day of celebrating the women in our lives, however it can also be a difficult day for so many.  People who, have lost mothers; or are estranged from their mothers; or may not even know who their biological mother is.

When my parents came from India, they didn’t know a soul in Canada. Their biological families lived thousands of miles away in a time when a telegram was the quickest form of communication.  If you don’t know what a telegram is, google it ;)

When I was 6 or 7 years old — after my parents separated  — a sweet elderly couple ‘adopted’ my mother as one of their own.  Grace had become my mother’s “Canadian” mother.  Grace, and her husband Dave, loved my mom, and cared for her. They helped her in so many ways and they wanted nothing in return. They had become her Canadian parents and by extension, I had adopted grandparents who showed me incredible love and care.

Certainly it was different than a legal adoption of a child, but for me at that time, it was no different.  I would visit them after school and they always welcomed me with cookies and juice. We played card games together and they always showed interest in what I made in school. (I made some awesome stuff, by the way! ) and exhibited such pride when I showed them my report card.  Though we were not related by blood there was no doubt that we had become a part of their family.
That sense of being a part is only a glimpse of what it is like with God.

Not only has God forgiven us, justified us, and given us free access into His presence, but God has also adopted us into God’s family. Paul writes in Ephesians 1:4-5 (NLT)

 4 Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. 5 God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure.

I stand in awe of a God who has the power and desire to forgive me. But by adopting us, God is going further. God is saying, "Don't just stand there in awe of me. Come close to me." Adoption speaks of a close relationship. And God says, "I want you as my daughter. I want you as my son”.

Whatever your family situation, whether you celebrate Mother’s day or not, I pray you will remember that because of your faith in Jesus, you are part of the family of God forever… and that is something to celebrate.

Celebrating faithfulness!

This weekend marks Amberlea Church’s 40th Anniversary Kick off.  It will be a year of celebrating this amazing God-filled; God-led church in the Amberlea community.

As the 40th anniversary Committee meet over the past serval we wanted to ground the celebrations in Scripture.  Colossians 2:7 became that verse:

Being rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.

This verse describes who we are and who we want to be as a church. Rooted, built up, strengthened and thankful! But this is only part of the verse.

So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, 7 rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.  Colossians 2: 6-7

Paul is encouraging us to not just begin our walk with Christ but continue to grow in Him. And that is what we aim to do at Amberlea.

Brian and I have been married for 37 years in December and I still remember the day that Brian proposed to me. I I get this picture when I read these verses of what if it would have looked like he got down on one knee and he said, “Mona will you marry me?”  I say,  “yes” and there's this excitement, we hug, it's beautiful and then I walk away because that was the moment and that's it.

The truth is that sometimes what happens to us as Christians we start our relationship with God by accepting God and saying God I surrender to you, I believe in what Jesus did for me but it's almost like we stop there.

Accepting Jesus into our lives is opening a door to the rest of our relationship with Jesus and so the same is true here in verse 6.

It says we accept but we must continue to follow Him. So the question is how do we follow Him?

Paul is very clear in this passage that’s what I love about this scripture is it's very clear what we should do.

So I want to give you four things to describe how we need to grow in our relationship with God.

1. Be firmly rooted. We should be firmly rooted. We have a huge maple tree in our backyard… and because of that I find little maple trees trying to take root all throughout the garden, and lawn. If I get them early enough they are easy to pull out but if I don’t catch them early and those roots get a chance to grow and spread out it’s hard to pull them out.

As Christians we need to have the attitude that we will not be moved no matter what the world is saying around us.

We will not be moved. We will be fully rooted in the Word of God, so when the storms come those roots anchor us and keep us

1. We need to have our lives built up on Him. Jesus is the foundation. The foundation is the most critical part of the building. A building can only go as high as the foundation can support and so building on our life on Christ will ensure that he will support the rest of our life our marriage our friendships our careers all those things are based on what we put our foundation on and hopefully it's Jesus Christ.

Third,

1. Be strengthened in the faith you were taught. Look at the second half of verse seven, it says then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught. I did not grow up in a Christian home, but as a child in public school we would recite the Lord’s Prayer. Everyday… and before long the words I said by route were engrained so that  when I was in the middle of a difficult time in life — that prayer, God’s Word would just come out making my faith stronger.

2. Be thankful. Overflowing in thankfulness. I love this one. If I want to see if I'm growing as a believer I want to see one of the tests that I can say is how grateful am I am i noticing the things that God is doing because if I’m spending time in God’s Word and I’m spending time with God, then I start to see all the things God is doing and I will have an attitude of gratefulness.

We have much to be grateful at Amberlea.  I pray you will join us this Sunday as we begin the celebrations!  We celebrate years of faithfulness and service in this community, but more importantly we celebrate that we are rooted in God, built up by God, strengthened through God and thankful to God!