Element Christian Church

You might have heard of Samson as a kid, seen a cartoon, fantasized about his great strength, but none of it does justice to how much of a knucklehead this guy was. I have a hard time even understanding why he would be talked about in Hebrews 11 as an archetype of faith…unless we can properly understand the word faith a bit better and who God is.

The overarching message of the Bible is the story of God’s redemption of all His creation. The miracles recorded in the Bible were for the primary purpose of accomplishing that redemption AND making it clear who God is (His nature and His glory) to all people of every generation. For us today, when we think of God as a Savior, we point to the cross and to Jesus as our Savior and Lord. When we celebrate communion each week, we’re reminded of what Jesus did on the cross that permanently defines God’s saviorhood for all time. However, if you were to ask an Israelite in the OT how he knew God is a Savior and Redeemer, they would point to the Exodus where God delivered His people from Egyptian slavery.

We are in the middle of a topical sermon about Miracles, and today we take a look at the miracle of the resurrection! Jon spoke about how there are historical facts surrounding the resurrection that are difficult to avoid. The historical facts are that: 1) Jesus was a historical person. 2) Jesus was crucified and buried. 3) three days after His death, Jesus body went missing. 4) There were reported appearances of Jesus over the course of 40 days to both believers and unbelievers. 5) Individuals who Jesus appeared to during this time had their lives transformed and began to proclaim Christ’s resurrection even up to the point of being martyred for their proclamation. 6) By A.D. 325, 51% of the Roman Empire claimed Christ as Lord!

Today, as the church, we are to be God’s ambassadors to the world, what the world will see of God is how we now live. Healing for the world will come as God’s blessings flow out from us as His people. We are called to pour out our money, power, and opportunity as genuine sacrifice to Jesus in this world. If our giving leads to trouble or genuine sacrifice, that should not surprise us. One commentator said, “The healing of the world comes through the sacrificial death of the church.” He says that God brings life to people around us the same way He brought life to us… Where we sacrifice for others like Jesus sacrificed for us. How we navigate life will show those around us that we have a joy that goes beyond the pleasures of this life or the pain of the grave! Our suffering is not about our sin, but God’s glory. God’s purpose for trial is not punitive for us, but redemptive for others.

God uses the metaphor throughout the Old Testament that He is like a groom and His people are His bride. When Jesus comes, He uses the same metaphor for Himself, that He is our great Bridegroom. He will give Himself for His bride in order to restore her. The emotions of love and delight, like a bridegroom feels for his bride, is how Jesus feels about us (in a non-sexual way). The words God uses for people are words of intimacy and closeness, we cannot be close when there is sin that separates us. The point is that He has done everything for us and because of what He has done on the cross all our imperfections are not just covered, but REMOVED to where we are an absolute beauty to Him. Why? Because He is that committed to us…that is the good news of the Gospel.

In the New Testament, God sometimes used supernatural miracles to help people in need, but also: - To prove that Jesus was the Son of God, the promised Messiah. - To confirm the authority of Jesus, - To prove that His words were true, - To show that He had Divine Power in several realms.

The beauty of God rescuing us from our broken places in life shows His desire to seek and save us even when there is nothing “good” in us. Many religious traditions say, “The good are in, and the bad are out. The disciplined are in, and the undisciplined are out,” but God rescues us because of His grace, not our merit. The glory of the gospel is that because of the grace of Jesus, the humbled are in, and the proud are out (though still being called and offered a life of humbleness). God comes and works in our normal, ordinary existence, and we must realize that there are not a lot of quick fixes in our life. When we serve, we will find that serving others is hard because people are hard and will try our patience. The ordinary is where God develops Christlikeness, character, and a life that gives God His glory.

The book of Jonah brings all of us under the conviction that we love the things that God has given us (homes, cars, hobbies, health, friends, etc.) more than the great city we live in. There are spiritually blind people whom we pass every day and ignore because our minds are consumed with ourselves. The question that Jonah leaves us to ponder is who would we be if God simply left us to ourselves and stopped running after us? If Jesus had not come, died, and risen after 3 days, where would we be? Lost and alone. If we don’t make this personal, we will miss the point of Jonah: that we are Jonah.

The words faith and belief in the New Testament was not this idea of something we muster up by trying really hard to hope something is true; faith/belief meant trust. What you see is that everyone in the bible struggles with trusting God for all God says that He is. Today we will see how a father, as well as some of the disciples struggled in trusting Jesus for the healing of a young boy. In our day we tend to go full “Doubting Thomas” and say that God needs to show up how we say, when we say, or He must not truly be God. Thomas started like this, as did all the disciples at one point. Where they ended up is where we need to end up, astonished that we have an opportunity to live in relationship with God while He does His miracle of revealing His majesty to us through salvation. The miracle is that He saves us even though we do not have perfect faith (trust); where we realize that it is not about how much faith we have, but WHO our faith is in. DOWNLOAD PDF SERMON NOTES HERE

The theme of this week is that there is no man or woman on earth who is wholly and completely righteous. No one has ever been righteous on their own merit except for Jesus. Solomon is reminding us that wisdom is found in being honest enough to acknowledge that we all have failures; these failures should point us and remind us of our continuing need for Jesus. DOWNLOAD PDF SERMON NOTES HERE

This week we will take a look at blessings and sufferings and how our belief about those things dictate how we respond to God, others, and ourselves. Solomon talks about how wisdom comes from God, but he understands that wisdom in and of itself will not spare people from suffering. Wisdom can and will allow people to respond well to situations instead of being made worse by our initial reactions. DOWNLOAD PDF SERMON NOTES HERE

We are in week 17 of our sermon series on the book of Ecclesiastes. This week is the last of four weeks that have gone together to provide an overall view of life, money, and satisfaction. The overarching theme of the past few weeks has been the following question, “Have you ever thought about how much you need God?” Many times we do not live in a place where we consistently remember how much we need to trust Jesus and His grace over us. Most of the time we live our lives and only think about God when something or someone falls apart around us. We do not live with a consistent, Gospel-centered life of surrender; trusting in the person of Christ. DOWNLOAD PDF SERMON NOTES HERE

Today, Aaron interviews Christine Soltan, Executive Director of CareNet Pregnancy Center in Santa Maria. Read more about CareNet at their website: https://www.carenetsm.com/

We are in week 16 of our sermon series of Ecclesiastes. Solomon, the writer of Ecclesiastes, has been on a roll about satisfaction in life not coming from man-made things, but from God Himself. The more we try to make the temporary things in our lives INTO eternal things the less and less they will satisfy. The existential hangover is about attaining everything we think we want to make our existence meaningful only to wake up the next morning and realize it didn’t fulfill us. What do you do when you get everything you thought you wanted, and you actually accomplish ALL of your dreams…now what? DOWNLOAD PDF SERMON NOTES HERE

Today we are in week 15 of our look through the book of Ecclesiastes. Solomon keeps steering us back to our understanding of what is truly meaningful in life. It is not what we produce (though it can add to it), it is what we receive from the hand of God. Satisfaction doesn’t come from things, it comes from our God who can (and does) bless us with the ability to enjoy things. Today Solomon is going to continue his look at money and how we use it (or it uses us). DOWNLOAD PDF SERMON NOTES HERE

Easter is a day that centers on the resurrection of Jesus. It is a day of celebration and hope because God was and is true to His promises. Instead of looking at the reasons for the Resurrection, today we are looking at the miracle of forgiveness. We are a people who consistently turn from who and what God calls us to be: His image bearers in the world. Even though we have broken relationship with God, Jesus comes to bring restoration to that broken relationship through the miracle of forgiveness. Forgiveness is an interesting concept because to truly want forgiveness we must agree with someone else that we have done something wrong. This is why it is so hard for many in western culture to get their heads around the concept of sin. We consistently tell ourselves that our actions against God are not as bad as they actually are. This is where the miracle of forgiveness comes in; God forgives us in Christ for our sins against Him and others before we truly understand the depth of what our sin actually is. Hi

Ecclesiastes is about living in a way that honors God first. Ultimately that is what will bring us satisfaction. It starts with our hope in the person of Jesus as He rescues, saves, and makes all the difference. Jesus tells us that if anyone is in Christ they are a new creation; they are His children, and they are precious. When we build our satisfaction on others we find dissatisfaction, because only Jesus can sustain the weight of our expectation. Only Jesus knows how bad we are and is prepared to completely redeem us. This is why Solomon keeps coming back to the idea that our satisfaction must be found in God or our lives turn into meaningless messes. We have a whole new way of looking at all of our messes as we perceive them through the lens of Gospel; the good news of what God has done to rescue us in JESUS. DOWNLOAD PDF SERMON NOTES HERE

Solomon turns his attention to worship. Worship comes from Latin and it means – to ascribe worth to. It could almost be said as the word “worth-ship.” In the Christian context, Worship is knowing who God is and responding to Him as He has revealed Himself. It is getting our worth-ship/worship out of the realm of the created into the realm of the eternal, focusing on the one who is already worthy. Unfortunately, we tend to worship all sorts of created things rather than our Creator. DOWNLOAD PDF SERMON NOTES HERE

We are in week 12 in our series on the book of Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes is a look at an old man surveying his life and realizing that everything apart from God is meaningless because there is no purpose in life if there is no God. Solomon will make a lot of comparisons throughout the book, he will make these comparisons to help us understand what is actually better in life. Trusting God, community, friendships, good food, and wisdom are all better than their counterparts of loneliness, foolishness, despair, and vapor. Today Solomon starts to run full force at our need for friendships with one another, he will do this in practical ways by speaking about safety and security. DOWNLOAD PDF SERMON NOTES HERE

Today we are in Ecclesiastes Chapter 4 where Solomon will talk about work and rest in the context of life “under the sun.” The book of Ecclesiastes keeps coming back to center on the idea of what happens when you get everything you ever thought you wanted, when you attain whatever goal you set for yourself, and then you wake up the next morning and you are still you…what do you do then? It shows how life and our work seems to fall apart on a constant basis which makes the writer call it all “meaningless” or “vapor” or “vanity.” DOWNLOAD PDF SERMON NOTES HERE