Food stand Sunday
We survived! We did it!
It feels so great to be here now, done with fair, worship God, singing praises….and just being with one another.
The reading is all about being together as church. Some years ago you all gathered and formed a Mission/Vision Statement. I think it might be written around her somewhere. Might be in your bulletin! There it is.
Can we read it together?
Our mission is to prayerfully:
Seek God
Grow in Faith
Love and serve others
For the transformation of lives.
So how do we do that? As individuals?
More importantly today-how do we do that as a church, as one congregation?
Many, if not most, church have these statements. I am not sure what Paul’s reaction would be to these statements but that is what he is getting at in this chapter of Ephesians. What is your focus, together as all the people of FUMC, and as the church.
There is a rub, or a tenseness in a mission statement, in a epistle, even in Jesus ministry that he calls us too—individual, versus cooperate. We all work our relationship with God. Yet it is not a personal thing-we are called to be God’s church, the church universal, the church local-not the church individual.
The foodstand, the fair week is a week of working together. It is not a week that I live that mission statement as an individual. It is a together week. I may have the love of Jesus in my heart but really it is about the love of Jesus in our hearts together as we run this food stand.
I want us to hear two sentences….I want us to hear the point.Read from verse 4.
You are…
One body
And there is one Lord
One faith
One baptism and one God and Father of all (over all, through all, and in all)
One!
The subject is unity. How do we as God followers be together, serve together and unify together? I think we did this week.
A little bit about being unified when we are diversified. I mean we are not all the same.
We are all different.
We are all to equip the saints for ministry-our gifts, our likes, our knowledge, our diversity.
About that word equip-greek katartismos meaning the setting of a bone. It does not mean piling up knowledge, or skills. It means to line things up, to reconcile, to restore, to create.
To grow our ministry mans to align ourselves with God’s intentions.
I asked last week-that we would see all the people. How did that go?
Discussion.
There were a lot to see? How did seeing “all” work when we got busy?
Did you have time to see all on both sides of the counter?
In the grill porch, through the bitty windows?
God is speaking to us ….not suggestions, not niceties, not busy work. God is speaking…
God equips us.
Unity is our goal. Not agreement, not a likeness, but unity.
God’s goal is our maturity
No tricks, no misleading.
Verse 15-16
It was a lovely fair, seeing all the people and uniting together.