by Pastor Rick | Jan 6, 2025 | Click Date to Respond
Hey there MABC family & friends,
I wanted to start out by saying “Good Morning” but when it “feels like” -15 degrees outside that is hard to say!
Yesterday morning on Facebook I did a live feed with a devotion about the patterns of life. Every year we hope for a better year than the year before but every year follows the same patterns. We will have opportunities, struggles and loss, and ultimately some victories. Good years, bad years – doesn’t matter. I think how we approach those things is the biggest determination on good and bad. You can see the video by going to this link that Les shared in his Monday update: https://www.facebook.com/MABCWichita/videos/476201291853440
It is the opportunities area I want to focus on this morning. I mentioned that we need to be intentional about taking advantage of opportunities to grow both mentally and spiritually but I feel like the greatest opportunities we have to take hold of this year are the opportunity to serve and to share the gospel. I think the importance of these two activities are summed up in the Great Commandment:
Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with
all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest
commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as
yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two
commandments.”
Matt.22:37-40 NIV
If we love the Lord, we will serve him. If we love others, we will serve them and share the gospel with them. How can we truly love others if we aren’t willing to meet their needs and share the hope of Jesus with them?
This coming Sunday I will share more about my thoughts on this for us a church family in the coming year. I have been doing a lot of reading on this subject lately! Right now, I want to give you a hint about Sunday’s message by sharing a couple of verses. These are from the Message version which is not my favorite but there is an interesting word in these passages I want you to take note of. See if you can figure out which word I am referring to! (There might even be a hint in the Great Commandment passage which is from the NIV)
The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, Generous inside and out, true from start to finish.
John 1:14 MSG
Jesus sent his twelve harvest hands out with this charge: “Don’t begin by traveling to some far-off place to convert unbelievers. And don’t try to be dramatic by tackling some public enemy. Go to the lost, confused people right here in the neighborhood. Tell them that the kingdom is here.
Matt. 10:5-8 MSG
We have been together for a year now so it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out!
P.R.
by Pastor Rick | Dec 30, 2024 | Click Date to Respond
Good Monday morning!
Here we are…the last Monday of the year 2024. I am guessing that a few of you have New Year’s resolutions in mind but I would venture to say that most of you don’t! I am not a fan of resolutions because they are often “pie in the sky” without any real plans or intentions of making them into life-long changes. Most resolutions have to deal with our physical health. Many people will make a resolution to lose weight or to go to the gym only to fall away in a month or two. They lack a plan to be a good steward or manager of their wellness.
The Bible calls us to be good stewards. There are hundreds of verses in the Bible that speak to the idea of stewardship and it is more than just our finances. Charles Bugg defines stewardship in the Holman Bible Dictionary as “Utilizing and managing all resources God provides for the glory of God and the betterment of His creation.” Some of us do a great job of being stewards financially. Some of us do a good job about being stewards of earthly resources. How many of us think about stewarding our bodies?
God gave our bodies to us, and He wants us to take care of them and avoid anything that might bring them harm. Many of the laws that God gave to the ancient Israelites in the Old Testament were meant to help them stay healthy and avoid sickness. God knew about things like blood borne illnesses and dietary issues long before modern science came up with them. Jesus devoted much of His ministry to healing the sick and restoring them to health because he understood the importance of physical health. The Bible says that when we give our lives to Christ that includes our bodies:
Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit,
who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong
to yourself, for God bought you with a high price. So you must
honor God with your body.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20 NLT
Wellness is an all-encompassing field that includes not only the physical aspect of the body but the intellectual, emotional, social arenas and yes, the spiritual as well. As Christians we always strive to be good spiritual and financial stewards but do you realize that not taking care of the other areas of our wellness can cause us stress, using valuable resources that could go to further the kingdom? For example, most of the money spend on health-related issues that are a result of lifestyle choices that we make…not being good stewards of our body. And the toll health issues take on our mental and emotional well-being? That can be even greater than the financial stress.
God is the commander of the heavenly armies and like the United States Army, He wants you to “be all that you can be.” I want you to “be all that you can be” because I care about more than just your spiritual well-being. I am willing to help you come up with a plan to be intentional in your stewardship…just ask. We all need to be “all we can be” to do the kingdom work of sharing the good news of the Kingdom. We need to care for ourselves so that we can take care of those God entrusts to us.
Have a happy and healthy new year.
P.R.
by Pastor Rick | Dec 23, 2024 | Click Date to Respond
Good morning MABC family and friends,
It case you missed it and weren’t paying attention, the Advent calendar says only two more days until Christmas! Tomorrow night is Christmas Eve and we will be worshipping together at 5:00 pm. We will sing together, pray together, share in the communion together and praise the Lord Jesus together. Hope you can make it! Don’t forget to check the card box in the foyer. As we close our first year together, I want to thank you for your faithfulness to attend worship services on Sundays. Now, I know that church attendance doesn’t make you any holier or get you into heaven, but it does show me a level of commitment to your faith. The Bible urges us not to forsake meeting together (Hebrews 10:25). Your faithful attendance attests to your desire for community which is one of the greatest benefits of being in a church body.
One of the great debates out there is whether or not being religious has any effect on mental health such as depression. I came across an interesting study being discussed on NPR’s Hidden Brain radio program. One of the thoughts being discussed was this idea that church attendance leads to better mental health. The hypothesis put forward was that it wasn’t church attendance itself that made a difference but family. Families considered more stable tend to be church going families. So is it the stable family and not church attendance? My thought was maybe the family is more stable because they are faithful church attenders! One of the researchers finally alluded to that and that was the conundrum. How do you sort that out?
One of the things they did then was to study students 13-18 years of age and their classmates. This took the family aspect out of it. Did they have friends who tended to be religious or more friends who were not? How did that effect the student’s mental health? The interview I read didn’t provide any of the details of the methodology or data but it did come up with one very important find:
When we look at the most depressed individuals, what we find
is that increasing religiosity by one standard deviation – which is
going from not going to church at all to attending church once a
week – decreases the probability of being at risk for moderate to
severe depression by as much as 20%.
Jane Fruehwirth, Economist, University of North Carolina.
God knew this years and years ago when he led the author of Hebrews to encourage the readers to gather together. If attending church once a week made a significant difference in the mental health of the students studied can you imagine what two times per week would do? Or maybe even three? I know that at one of those points the decrease would not be as great and it would level out but what is that number? P.S., as a former wellness instructor at the college level I know there are some studies that show that regular attenders are also healthier physically!
Thank you all for being regular attenders and a part of the MABC family. Continue to pray for and encourage one another as look to 2025!
Merry Christmas!
P.R.
by Pastor Rick | Dec 16, 2024 | Click Date to Respond
What a beautiful weekend! And what a great start to the week! By Friday the temps will take a dip though. Look at the temperatures forecasted for the next week beginning today:
57 – 57 – 44 – 56 – 40 – 46 – 48 – 52
I don’t know about you but that seems to the pattern of life doesn’t it? Up and down, highs and lows, good times followed by some harder times. It is a good reminder to me that God has never promised an easy life. Our life will be marked by times when things seem to be going well and then a mild “cold front” moves in and we experience a little hiccup in life, a minor setback. It could be that a huge “cold front” moves in and the temperature plummets drastically. Have you ever just been going along with everything seeming to be hunky-dory and then…BAM! It seems like the storm of all storms hits. We may feel lost and even hopeless.
It is in those times when the angel’s words to the shepherds in the fields surrounding Bethlehem ring true the most. “Do not be afraid!” We are to trust in the Lord but sometimes we are trusting for the wrong things. We are trusting in him to take care of our financial needs…our health needs…our relational needs. Know that God will meet your needs but on that night in Bethlehem God took care of your greatest need – the forgiveness of sin once and for all so that you might have eternal life in Heaven where it will always be perfect weather. No matter what earthly needs the Lord takes care of here on earth, there will always be another need…another problem…another heartbreak. We are not afraid because we know that these issues are only temporal. God has taken care of the biggie!
Don’t be afraid! Psalm 23 says the Shepherd will lead you to greener pastures and still water but you will walk in difficult places at times (the valley of the shadow of death). Don’t fear for he goes with you…his rod and his staff comfort you. He doesn’t say I will meet you over there…HE IS WITH YOU! That’s good news! Jesus promised to be with us when he gave us the difficult task of the Great Commission. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
Some of you are in a tough season. Maybe you are caught in the middle of a couple of fronts. When those fronts meet up we often have great storms. Yet, even the most severe storms pass and the sun comes out again. And it will be so with life. But the Son will shine on us…do not be afraid…He is with you.
P.R.
by Pastor Rick | Dec 9, 2024 | Click Date to Respond
Hey MABC family & friends!
If you didn’t make it last night to the Christmas program…you missed it! And when I say “it” you missed the story of a young girl who didn’t believe in Jesus, the virgin birth…you know, the whole Christmas thing. As she was led through the biblical account of Jesus’ birth, she slowly began to see the “light!” You know, the light we have been talking about the past couple of Sundays in worship. Please check out the MABC Video Live Stream on YouTube.
The truth is there are a lot of people celebrating Christmas this year who don’t believe in Jesus or at least don’t have the right relationship with Jesus. While a recent Lifeway Research study found most Americans (72%) say Christmas celebrates a historical event, many aren’t sure exactly why Jesus came to earth. Another study finds only 22% of Americans believe they can retell the entire biblical Christmas story accurately. If they are not sure why Jesus came to earth, I doubt they can have a right relationship with him. Maybe, just maybe, they need to attend a worship service this year so they can begin to hear why Jesus came to earth! Maybe, just maybe, they need a personal invitation to attend that worship service. Maybe, just maybe, that personal invitation comes from you. You have two Sundays left before Christmas and a Christmas Eve service. Would you ask the Holy Spirit to reveal to you someone that you know, may encounter, cross paths with who needs a personal invite to worship? If you are intentional about it…pray earnestly about it…I am sure that someone will be brought to mind.
If you are a Facebook person, would you please do me and our church family a favor? First of all, like our Facebook page. The more likes we get the better exposure we get on Facebook. Two, share our posts with your friends and family. Again, our message has a greater reach when it is shared. I am not just talking about getting people in the doors but maybe a Monday morning recap of the sermon strikes a chord with someone and compels them to seek out Jesus like the shepherds did. I just posted about our Christmas program from last night. Share that with your friends and family. Do you know if any of your “Facebook friends” are like the little girl in our program…they just don’t quite believe? You can participate in sharing our desire to be a “neighborhood church’ and resource by sharing our “Parents Day Out” event and post so that the word can spread about that little church in the Delano District doing something cool! Who knows, just maybe, a child from a family who doesn’t go to church will show up and hear something about Jesus? Maybe, just maybe, that child shares what they heard about Jesus with their family? Maybe, just maybe, they make their way to a church between then and Christmas. Any church…as long as they find one!
Don’t forget to pick up some invite cards and share them. I know you will be out and about over the next couple of weeks. Share a card with someone whether it is the Advent series card or the MABC card. The good thing about the MABC card is that they can scan the QR code and hear the gospel. Maybe, just maybe, they seek out a church family to learn more about Jesus and Heaven will rejoice.
I am working from home today. Having some hardware issues and data retrieval I am working through. Don’t forget our Christmas night with AWANA and youth group tonight. Going to be a blast!
Pastor Rick
