April 28, 2024 • Trevor Harrison • John 10:10, Matthew 11:28
For the past few weeks, we’ve been looking at God’s definition of blessing. The reality is that we all want to invest our lives in pursuing things that matter—we don’t want to waste our lives chasing after meaningless things. So, we’ve been taking a closer look at God’s Word to see if what He has told us is worth pursuing. This week, we continue that quest to adjust our views to align with His. As it turns out, when it comes to the idea of blessing, Jesus often made statements that run counter to what we assume. Since we live in a broken world, a lot of His words and actions run opposite to the way we understand life. This week, we’re going to look at another one of those statements, a moment where Jesus’ words are challenging. But according to Jesus, this idea is a big key to understanding true blessing. And this counterintuitive idea is this: it is more blessed to give than to receive. That seems completely backward—giving doesn’t feel like a blessing, receiving does. But this week, let’s look at God’s Word so He can recalibrate our understanding of blessing. That way we can seek even more blessing in our lives, like He wants for us.
BLESSED - Week 2
April 21, 2024 • Trevor Harrison • Philippians 1:7, Philippians 4:1
Everything in our lives is interconnected with relationships. Our families are a little group of people doing life together. Our neighborhoods are homes filled with people. Your job is filled with coworkers who have the same goals you’re striving toward. (Even if you work remotely, there’s a person on the other end of your emails.) Your sports league is made up of relationships with people who love the same game you do. If you’re part of a hobby club, those people love the same hobby you do! Sadly, the pandemic robbed some of us of so much of what we get from each other. We couldn’t hug each other. We couldn’t go to big events together. Sports leagues and hobby events were put on pause. And when the pandemic happened and society shut down, we were really missing out. That’s because relationships are crucial to life. This week, we’ll look at how relationships are one of the gifts God gave us to bless our lives. We’ll look at some of Paul’s writings to see how relationships may be common, but, more importantly, they’re one of life’s richest treasures. And as a rich treasure, relationships are worth our attention, and also our investment. It turns out that with relationships; we are rich indeed!
BLESSED - Week 1
April 14, 2024 • Trevor Harrison • Matthew 5:3–10, Mark 8:36
The word blessed has become a pretty common word used in a lot of different situations. We use it to describe anything from winning a game or award to signifying wealth. We sometimes think we’re “blessed” when we feel like things are going the way we want them to. It seems like our sense of being “blessed” ends up depending on the day, the time, and what’s going on in our lives. In other words, our view of blessed is often tethered to a continually changing spectrum—our circumstances. If life is good, in our view, we’re blessed. If life isn’t going well, in our view, we’re not blessed. But is our definition of being blessed—life going well—the same as God’s? The next few weeks, we’re going to take a look at how God defines blessed. It turns out, we’re very likely missing how blessed we all really are—regardless of what’s going on around us.
