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The Message for Jan 5, 2020Matthew 2:1-12New Year Fresh StartRob Miller, PastorVideo: we begin a new worship series we are calling (picture)…center12319000We all need a fresh start from time to time. We worship a God of fresh starts. God gives us a new day, a new week, a new month, a new year, a new opportunity – they are all fresh starts. Love makes every fresh start possible. Please remember this, as we begin this new year 2020, God loves us and God forgives us so we can have a fresh start – a fresh start with God and with each other. God sent Jesus to show us how to have a fresh start, every day, through love and forgiveness. Know this, God forgives you. So… please - please - please find a way to forgive yourself. One very important fresh start in our lives begins when we forgive ourselves. A friend of mind posted this on Facebook and I had to share it. It fits with our fresh start focus here this morning.1181100000That is sooooo good. What a great approach to the new year.Over the next four weeks, we will consider how God is doing a new thing, a fresh start in us and through us as we begin to develop a 20/20 vision in 2020. We started that process last week when I invited you to consider the question: What one word describes 2019 for you? Here are your answers…4 - challenging3 - peace2 - change2 - blessedblurcertainly?somethingthankfulnesshoperecoverypatienceunsettlingprayersconflictingawkwarddiscernment(That last one was my answer.) Those answers -- these one-word descriptions of 2019 -- tells me that we tend to be people who take the good with the bad. Life is full of good and bad. We go with the flow. We grow with the flow. Good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people. That’s how life is lived in this world. And we make adjustments as we journey through life, through the good and the bad. Let’s turn our attention to the future. Let’s see if we can begin to develop a 20/20 vision in 2020. I invite you to consider this question…What do you need from the church? As you ponder that question let me clarify something. I believe the Church universal and every local church exists for God’s purpose – not our purpose. The church exists to carry out God’s mission in the world. Sometime we drift off course from that mission and we make the church about something it is not. So let me suggest an answer to that question. Consider this: what we all need from the church is help and support for growing and maturing in the faith. We need each other to do our part in making this church a faith-filled community. We need to fill-up each other every time we get together in large groups or small groups -- so we can be poured out into the lives of those who are not yet part of this faith community. (repeat)Imagine each one of us is a pitch of water, at times we are being filled-up and other time we are being poured-out. It’s about sharing with others what God shares with us. I invite you to see the church as God’s vehicle to carry God’s love into the world so that people (all peoples) can experience God’s love through us. If you don’t remember anything else, I say here this morning, please remember this… We don’t come to church -- we are the church wherever our faith journey takes us. We gather regularly to be fed and nourished in the faith to then be sent to live the faith in our everyday world. That means we all have a part to play in God’s mission to change lives for good by loving people as God loves us. I believe that over the centuries we’ve made church more difficult than it needs to be. As we saw in the video at the beginning of this message – we are to Love God and Love People. In other words, we are to love people as God loves us.We get that from Jesus who said the two greatest things we can do with our lives is to…‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ ?The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’?There is no commandment greater than these. (Mark 12:30-31)We are to love the people in our lives as God loves us. If you made a new year’s resolution list, I encourage you to put that on your list. As a matter of fact, the only thing we need on any new year’s resolution list is this… Love God Love People What if we made that our #1 goal for 2020, to love the people in our lives as God loves us. What if we made a commitment here today to help each other and support each other in doing just that? Imagine the possibilities…That brings us to our reading for today from Matthew 2:1-12Matthew 2:1-12 (printed out)There is one verse that I want to focus on here this morning, verse 3…When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him. (Matthew 2:3)One word describes that year for Herod and all the people living in Jerusalem – disturbed.There was a new king in town - Jesus. Born in Bethlehem. He was a threat to King Herod and a threat to the way of life the people had developed in Herod’s kingdom. A kingdom of fear and hatred, kill or be killed, take - take - take and if someone gets in your way destroy them. Take, take, take, live for yourself. I wonder, if maybe our world today has become just like that. A world driven by fear and hatred, kill or be killed, take, take, take, live for yourself. Herod was so disturbed, he wanted Jesus dead. That’s why he sent the Magi in the first place to find out where Jesus was, so he could go and “worship” Jesus too. Yeah right – Herod didn’t want to worship Jesus. Herod didn’t worship anybody but himself. He didn’t care about anyone else. Herod lived for himself and the people in Jerusalem lived for themselves too. That is never good. God had a bigger plan and sent the Magi home by a different route. That spoiled Herod’s plot. Herod was the real Grinch of Jesus’ day. And believe it or not, he is part of the unfolding divine story of Christmas. He is one of the characters in the story we ought not be like.Who should we be like? We should be like Jesus. Jesus was the fresh start the world needed then and he is the fresh start the world needs today.The Magi perhaps knew that. That’s probably why they brought Jesus the gifts?of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. These gifts were symbolic of the importance of Jesus' birth…the gold representing his royal standingthe frankincense representing his divine birththe myrrh representing his mortalityThat begs the question for us here this morning, what gift did you bring for Jesus? Might I suggest the best gift you have to give to him is yourself, your forgiven self. And the best way to do that is to keep your life simple – Love God Love People.Happy New Year! Welcome to a fresh start. Amen. ................
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