For Sunday May 4 - A New Mind for a New Kingdom

Ephesians 4:17-24
"How do I really move forward?" That's one of the big questions most of us wrestle with at various times in our lives. We want to get out of certain ruts, habits, addictions, but we fall back in. We try and try, but end up in those ruts all over again. "At least they only affect me" we say to ourselves. Or we hope they only impact us personally. Well, yes, there might be those in our families who have to deal with our crud. But that's it. Right? Oops. No, that isn't all. The whole point of Paul's "out with the old, in with the new" section of the letter to the believers in Ephesus is this: Believers are the Body of Christ, and are tied together as a Body. There is a unity; there must be a unity. And if one little cell in that Body is sick or messed up, then there's trouble in the Body. And we don't want to be the Corpse of Jesus, but the living Body of Jesus in the world. After all, there's a Kingdom to build and a corpse can't do that very well.
So in Ephesians 4, Paul tries to tackle this idea of how we move forward, getting away from that stuff in our old lives that pulls us back, holds us down, ties us up.
In writing to Gentiles who had come to a knowledge of Christ's new Kingdom and the Truth of God, Paul tries to direct them along a path away from the old worthless crud of their previous life, and onto a new path within the Kingdom. That wasn't easy, considering all the baggage they brought along from GentileVille. But if they want to live, if they want to be a part of a new Kingdom, if the world is really going to know about God's power at all, they have to get a new mind and move on a different path with Christ. Now the challenge is ours. - Curtis

For Sunday October 28 - A Good Heart

Maybe the biggest, most important misunderstanding many Christians have is that we have a "bad heart." Not the physical one, though that's an important topic as well, but I'm speaking of the heart mentioned in the scriptures. There are places that the bible says the heart is "deceitful above all things" or that certain folks had "hard hearts" (a condition much worse than hardening of the arteries). But something happens to the human heart when God re-enters the picture.
Here's something amazing to do: Find all passages in the Bible that talk about the heart. There are a handful that talk about someone getting a sword plunged into their heart, but most talk about a spiritual heart. There are over 500 verses that mention heart, and they have a lot to teach us about what our heart is all about. Many of us have let our hearts grow cold or distant from God and others. It's easy to do. It doesn't take any effort at all. In fact, when we don't put effort into our relationships, that's what happens - our hearts grow cold and hard. I suspect most of us have had periods of time when that happens to us. And we just let it go on and on, and one day we no longer remember what a heart of flesh looks or feels like.
A popular Christian phrase a few years ago went something like this, "Everyone has a God-shaped hole in their heart." That says something true, but it seems to miss the point. We don't just have a gap in our hearts that needs filling with God, we need a whole new heart. Thoughts? Ideas? Post here!