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I wanted to address an issue today that has come up multiple times in my life in the last couple three weeks. It got talked about yesterday, some, at Men’s prayer. I’m going to tell you right up front, several of you are going to think I am preaching this because of you. You’re right. The thing is, I’m not preaching this just because of you, I’m preaching because of twenty other people, also. Very real, very right now subject matter for a bunch of folks in my life. I suppose then probably, for me personally, as well.

So, what I’d like to talk about first is things that identify us. If you go on a fire call with me, you see all these guys – and let’s actually make it a fire, not just show up and do medical work, because we show up to do medical work in our street clothes and in volunteer departments, whatever we show up in is what we have – but when we actually do a car accident or a fire, we have to put our turnouts on and actually get in uniform.

You can tell all sorts of stuff about us just by looking at us. You can pick out the guys who have their jobs based on the color of their hats, for example. And if you’re close enough, you can read the little rockers on the hats and it’ll actually tell you. Mine says firefighter EMT on it, Sarah doesn’t have rockers on her helmet yet, but hers is just EMS. It’s got a great big thing on the front of it that says, “No entry.” She can’t go into a burning building. And Sarah has red stripes on her helmet. “Racing stripes!” Probie stripes. Because, as somebody new to the business, she has these stripes that identify her clearly as somebody that I’m not going to put right on this hose line and say, “I want you to make initial fire attack.” Even once she’s cleared to go in burning buildings.

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A fascinating thing happened this week. I sat down to prepare for Tuesday night bible study and Tuesday night, we are also working through a gospel. I sat down in my office and I opened my bible up there to look at it and I went, “Wait a minute, that’s the story of the triumphal entry! And we’re doing that on Sunday, too.” It’s the first time that’s happened to me here in our multiple studies through books.

We came to the same story in two different gospels over the same week. That caused me to stop and scratch my head a little bit. I have a theory: if God says something to me a couple times, I probably should be listening.

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He was actually pretty calm but I’ve got his baby here. This is Ben’s treasure, here, right? He’s awfully fond of this guitar. And he should be, it’s a fine piece of equipment. A lot nicer than any guitar I laid my hands on at 14 or 15 – a whole lot nicer.

And I grab it (I thought about grabbing it and running) because I wanted to pose a question this morning about something in your life which is valuable to you. And, of course, that guitar is pretty valuable to him. There are things far more valuable but that guitar is worth a lot and not only is it a nice guitar, so it’s worth something monetarily, but it’s got some emotional ties to him now, as well. And we won’t even talk about what it would take to pry the black one out of my fingers. Because, not only is that a nice guitar, but I’ve got 20 years of leading worship on it, now. Got a lot of miles on that guitar.

I bring that up because I wanted to pose that question, what is it in your life that holds some importance for you? It could be something with some monetary value, right? It could be something that, frankly, you can’t afford to replace, it might be something that has some mental/emotional value to you.

Some things we have develop emotional ties to us. Wende and I had an old motorcycle like that, once, just for a variety of goofy reasons, we had a lot of emotional ties to. Maybe me more than her.

And then, the next question would be, how willing would you be to give those things up?

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Sunday morning sermon April 22, 2012 Listen

Sunday morning sermon April 15, 2012 Listen

Before we get into the gospel, I get to tell a story on myself and I’m going to warn you ahead of time, this is kind of an unsanctified story because I had a decidedly unsanctified period in my life.

As a freshman at the University of Oregon (a small town boy moved to the big city of Eugene) I joined the University of Oregon marching band, amongst other things. And one evening that fall there was no home game on Saturday, so the marching band didn’t have to play and so that Friday night they decided that they would have a little “gathering,” which is the polite, churchey way of saying they had a par-tay. Actually, they called them “sectionals,” right? Because you’d get all your little instrument groups together and work on your music. Like I said, from a decidedly unsanctified period of my life.

I went to said party with some expectations. I was a member of this band, been a member of this band for a while, I understood secular college life pretty well, already. Those of you who did secular college life and especially those who did it outside of Christ, you understand some of what my expectations were.

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Palm Sunday remembers the triumphal entry, called Palm Sunday because in one of the other records of this, not only are they throwing their coats out, but they have palm branches that they are waving. They’ve cut them down off the trees and they are waving these palm branches, as well, as Jesus comes in.

This crowd has gathered around Jesus and they have this sense of excitement and that sense of excitement drove a kind of amazing day. It’s funny how crowd mentality works. How many of you bought a lottery ticket last week?

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I had a buddy who told me one time that I was probably born to be a preacher. I grew up in sheep ranching country and my first job, as a kid, was working in a vineyard. Both things of biblical importance.

That may well have been. And growing up in sheep ranching country, I learned a beautiful illustration. My father has raised sheep – actually bought his first couple while we were still living in the rental before moving out to the ranch where he lives now and he has had a flock of sheep on there for thirty-some-odd years, now. And so, I’ve been around sheep all my life, pretty nearly.

Dad’s always had a small flock, admittedly, not a lot of sheep. You know, some times more than others. But he’s always had these sheep here, a couple times over the course of those thirty years, he’s had a couple decent sheep dogs and he could sort of push the sheep wherever he wanted, but by and large – and he still does this today – he works his sheep alone.

How many of you have tried to move sheep? And how easy was that?

Dad works those sheep by himself, without a dog a lot of the time, and he does it with his voice and a bucket of corn. There’s an amazing thing that happens that is very, very biblical. He’ll throw a little corn in the bottom of a 5-gallon plastic bucket and he’ll walk out on the hillside and he’ll call those sheep.
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And here is the link for the March 18 sermon. Sorry for the delay. Listen

Before we read the words of John, I’d like to remember the words of a guy by the name of Jefferson. “We hold these truths to be self evident, that…”

“All men are created equal.” Some of you can finish it. All men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are…”

Why do you know those words? Because your third grade teacher made you memorize them. For my children, because Dad drags that crazy document out every once in a while and just reads it because.

We know the words from the Declaration of Independence because our freedom matters. It matters to us just from a kind of an emotional standpoint. I mean, clearly our freedom matters because we’re gathered here in safety, this morning. There is nobody knocking down the door. We don’t have the windows curtained over so that nobody knows that we’re here and we don’t have to park miles away and walk in in twos and threes. You know, there are people who worship like that still today. That is not the stuff of history, that is the stuff of right now.

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Vision requires light. That’s why Gene goes around putting wires in houses. Actually, you don’t do houses anymore, you do commercial, but it’s the same deal, right?

If he’s putting lights in warehouses, why is that? Yeah, so you can see, so you don’t trip over stuff! You ought to try to get through my house in the dark, sometime. There are a lot of us crammed into that little house and we are not particularly great housekeepers and so there’s stuff and it’s dangerous to walk through there without a light.

A couple of Tuesdays ago, I got to go out on an accident scene of sorts. I had a friend who got his van stuck in the ditch out in front of the phone company. It was after bible study, it was late and dark, rainy and the tow truck driver was all the way in Salem and and and and and… All this stuff worked into it. The long and short of it was, it was dark out and so, since I had easy access to a fire department, even though we didn’t need the fire department, no one was hurt, I went in and I got cones and I got flares and I got one of the big old orange flashlights…

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We’ve talked a little bit this morning already about the concept of a celebration. Today is a celebration! Having a baptism is a celebration. It’s a huge event. Any time somebody gets in that tank, we need to remember and we need to make a big deal of it – and not just because we almost overflow it in the middle of Sunday School (although it was a pretty big deal. We got the water warm and we didn’t flow it out here onto the carpet, so you know, I considered it a success this morning). But it’s a bigger event for more reasons than that, clearly.

What I want to do is just take some time this morning to talk about why we do it, why we baptise people, why we do the things we do.

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A story about a moment that didn’t go so well. This was when we were down in Lowell. A whole gaggle of good Christian folk all sitting around. We were sitting around outside, I guess it was summertime or something, and we were all sitting around outside. We’ve had our noses in the Word, we’ve been talking and somebody gets going from scripture and heads off into popular political topics and the issue of abortion came up. It’s not only a political issue but a spiritual issue, a biblical issue. The discussion came up and it went the way most good, solid, biblical, conservative Christians would go and part way through this conversation, a girl gets up and leaves the circle.

Now, you know where this was headed, don’t you? A young gal, she couldn’t have been in any more than her twenties. Yeah, she’d been there, done that and the conversation was pretty tough for her to take.

Nobody was after her; she was our friend. But, it was a tough conversation for her.

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