Today was intense. It was a hard message for me to preach. We had a lot of audio, video and lighting elements and I must say that our production team did a fantastical job! Seriously! If you listen to the podcast, just know that it won't do justice to what happened today. But listen to it anyway if you missed. Warning though: if you are churched, it may be a hard pill to swallow. I know that it was for me. Here are a few random thoughts.
-Our preferences are often times prejudices.
-We had a packed house today!
-Jesus is stirring the hearts of people with excitement about what is happening at Oasis and in Greenwood.
-We had a family today who is planting another church in Greenwood. It's called New Vision and they meet in the Greenwood Community Theater once a month right now. Dickey is a great guy and a great friend. He loves Jesus with all that he is. God is doing something amazing in Greenwood now!
-We make big statements with our small actions that come from our prejudices.
-Your kids know why you want let them spend the night in the home of people of other races! It speaks of your heart to your children... Just so you know.
-When we get to heaven, we will be worshiping with people of all Nations, tribes and languages. The same people that we treat as second class citizens will be at the feet of Jesus right beside us. At the great white throne! Why can't we worship beside them now!?
-We didn't talk about this today specifically, but when it comes to interracial dating, here is a statement that I think is ridiculous. "Well you don't see redbirds with bluebirds." man! a friend reminded me of that statement today after church. I've heard that so many times, and before I knew Jesus I bought that crap. I didn't just buy the crap, I took it home, cooked it and ate it... yea, ate the crap! But you know what I realize now... It's just a load of crap!... You know what, by that same logic we could justify walking up to visitors who come into our homes and humping their legs as a welcome.... Seriously! we've all seen the dogs that hump peoples legs. When I was growing up, we had a little black poodle that would hump everyone's leg. Needless to say, we got rid of the dog. But I mean, if we are going to justify our actions and prejudices by what we see in the animal kingdom, then HEY, let's at least be consistent. Why don't we all just start sniffing each other's butts every time that we see each other. If you are going to be prejudice, please find a better way to justify it.
-Jesus went to the socially unacceptable places and showed grace, mercy, love and kindness to those who were referred to as dogs back in the day.
-I'm so sick of justified hate in the church!
-I think that often times, the most prevalent prejudice from church people are of those who we deem dirty and hopeless. Oh, we would never say it, but our actions say more than our words could ever say on this issue.
-The first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord, and the second is to love your neighbor. You can measure how well you are really living up to the first commandment by measuring how much we live up to the second command. If we truly love Jesus, the rest WILL follow.
-BEER!
-Wow, how many of you cringe at that word? Maybe for legitimate reasons, but is it because there is a prejudice within you?
-We have got to take active steps to tear down the walls of prejudice in our lives and the walls that we build in the lives of others.
-God commands us to share Jesus with the world, but we tend to actually build walls between people and Jesus with our preferences... Prejudices.
-I'm going to post the videos that we used in our gathering today on Facebook and You tube.
-Here are the you tube links
-Video #1
-Video #2
-Video #3
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