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Showing posts from October, 2018

Sermon, "Serve Jesus," Mark 10:35-45

Sermon 10/28/18 Mark 10:35-45 Serve Jesus Today, we’re concluding our series looking at the components that will make up our intentional discipleship plan, the method, the approach we’re going to use as we try to focus on our purpose of making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Our hope is that we will help folks to Meet Jesus, Follow Jesus, and Serve Jesus as we journey on the path of discipleship. We talked about how we want to work to bring folks into Jesus’ presence to meet him, and how we will do the hard work of choosing to follow Jesus, even when there are sometimes many paths we’re tempted to choose. Today, we think about how we continue to grow in the life of faith. As followers of Jesus, we commit to serving him, and the best way we’ve found to serve Jesus is in serving one another, serving our neighbor. Jesus always links together loving God and loving neighbor. We demonstrate our love of God and our service to Christ when we work to

Sermon, "Follow Jesus," Mark 10:17-27

Sermon 10/21/18 Mark 10:17-27 Follow Jesus We’re continuing to explore today our outline for our intentional discipleship plan . If our mission is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world, how will we go about fulfilling the mission? What’s our plan for doing that here in Gouverneur? We’re going to try, as much as we can, to focus everything we do around these three steps: Meet Jesus, Follow Jesus, Serve Jesus. Last week we talked about meeting Jesus, and we asked ourselves what we would do to get someone to Jesus. What would we do to make sure someone had the opportunity to be in the grace-filled, healing, life-changing presence of Jesus? Today, we’re digging deeper into what it means to follow Jesus. Once we’ve met him, once we know who Jesus is, we have to decide what place Jesus will have in our lives. Is he just someone who preaches a good sermon? Someone interesting to listen to? Or is he someone worth following? And if we say we want to

Sermon, "Meet Jesus," Mark 2:1-12

Sermon 10/14/18 Mark 2:1-12 Meet Jesus Last year, I was compelled by a book that I read as part of our district Pastoral Leadership Development group called Simple Church by Thom Rainer and Eric Geiger - I’ve mentioned it to you before. In it, they talk, among other things, about how in our desperation to try to keep people interested in and connected to our churches, we have so complicated things with events and activities and programs, that we have no clear message for people about how they’re actually supposed to become disciples. The mission of The United Methodist Church, and thus of this particular United Methodist Church is “to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.” Since it is our mission , our purpose, everything we do should be able to point us to our mission. Activities and programs that are nice or fun but don’t actually help us in the work of making disciples who change the world? Well, they really don’t make sense for us. But if