This is the weekly podcast of Legend Community Church, in Cincinnati, OH
This week we're starting a new sermon series, looking at Paul's constant refrain of being a servant to everyone. Instead of describing himself as a leader or as a visionary or as someone elevated, Paul constantly goes back to the idea of servanthood and slavery to describe his work. We'll start looking at ways we can really understand servanthood, and how who we serve is an important part of the kind of people we are becoming!
It's been 10 years! These are things to celebrate, but also to dream out, and to imagine more and bigger and better than we ever could have, because God's vision is bigger than our own!
After 10 years as a community, Legend has worked out both a mission statement and a strategic plan! We think it's God's purpose for this community to tear down ANY and ALL barriers that come between God and his people - and we need your help to see that mission through.
The next wall we’re looking at is one that only “priests” get in. We’re to talk about the purity lines - their origin, the good of them, and how we have taken it a step in the wrong direction
The second courtyard that people experienced in Herod’s temple was the court of the women - a point past where women couldn’t go in their worship of God. We find in Jesus a breaking down of these kinds of barriers, as he brings women into his full community and full worship - and so the call goes out to us to build our church in the same way. How can we ensure that our community reflects the community of God in a fuller way?
The apostle Paul was asked to give up everything he had known and built when he was confronted by God on the road to Damascus. When called upon, can we go through the same process, and be part of a new thing God is doing in our own time?
Hopefully by now we have seen that our believe in God and in how real we believe the divine is, will be the measure of our faith, hope, and love. And many times it will call us into the unknown.
If faith is something that God gives to us in individual measure, then hope is something we actually work to develop. What can we do to make more hope in our lives, in the face of a world that simply doesn't have any.
The next island we are exploring in our venture into our soul is hope. What does hope look like uncharted? What would our lives be like if we lived bathed in a life of hope?
It's easy to get to a point where we lack faith - in both the big things and the mundane things, the world is beating us down as we go along. Jesus' answer for us where we can't believe is to come to him, and to have our faith increased, and to see how much he can do with just a little bit.
