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Shepherds from Renaissance Church on Vimeo.

Wise Men from Renaissance Church on Vimeo.

Our Advent devotions are now online! Each day between now and Christmas Eve we’ll post a short devotion designed to help you prepare spiritually for Christmas. Whether you use them as an individual or as a family, we hope you’ll take a few minutes each day to focus your heart on Jesus and His arrival. You can access the devotions by clicking on the Advent Devotions button on our home page.

If you’ve attended Renaissance in the last few months, you’ve probably noticed that we’re doing a lot more with video.  For several years now, I’ve been working on assembling a team of artists that create films to help move people to a deeper faith in Christ.  We achieved critical mass in late summer, which allowed us to hit the ground running in the fall with an interview with John Bartlett for our message series on Proverbs, followed by several short films profiling the members in the Renaissance Band.  For our Standing Firm in a World of Uncertainty series, we decided to take a humorous look at some of the world’s biggest problems.

Big thanks go to: Chris Marcus, Jaleh Teymourian, Dave Macarone, Josh Dyke, Dean Kelly and Joe Narciso for making these films happen!

Here are the three America In Crisis films:  

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by guest blogger: Rob King

I’m a nerd. I like crossword puzzles — especially the New York Times puzzles. They start easy every Monday and get progressively harder through Saturday. The Sunday puzzle is big (21×21 squares instead of the 15×15 dailies), but about the same difficulty as a Wednesday or Thursday puzzle, so doable for me. The puzzles are especially fun because they have themes and puns and clever tricks, even visual ones. Working a puzzle is like being the detective in a verbal murder mystery — you have to find and connect the clues to determine whodunit.

This past Thursday’s theme was a quote by Allan Meltzer in four separate across entries: “Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin.”. (Note the symmetry — 10 letters, then 14, 14 and a final 10.) I won’t comment on the application of this assertion to the current financial and economic crisis. But I will reflect briefly on its insight into our relationship to God.

Many people wonder why, if God is truly an all-powerful and loving God, would He allow us to screw up and hurt ourselves, others and even Him. Why is there evil and sin in the world? Why didn’t He simply design a world where people are not able to fail morally, to fall short of His perfect moral standard? A world where we behave righteously all the time and please Him with every thought and deed?

Because then we would be like robots. Our actions would not mean anything because they would already be hard-wired. It would like playing the card game War — no thought or choice, just mechanical, with the outcome already pre-determined.

Instead, God gave us free will — the ability to exercise our own initiative in choosing how to behave. When we trust in God through Jesus as our savior, follow His teachings in the Bible, and cooperate with the Holy Spirit guiding us, then we succeed. Everyone benefits and God is glorified. When we don’t, we fail. The natural consequence of sin and evil is brokenness and pain — for us and others — and God is grieved. In giving us free will, God gives us the freedom to succeed and the freedom to fail. You can’t have the former without the latter.

To stretch the analogy a little further, thankfully God has also provided us a “bailout”. Knowing that we would invariably fall short of His standards, God gave us Jesus as our savior to take the penalty and consequences of our failure. He’s our Chapter 11, our bankruptcy court, where our moral debts are forgiven so we can make a fresh start unencumbered. That’s grace — and it’s certainly more than we deserve!

In giving us free will, God gives us the opportunity to experience the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. It’s great to be on God”s team. And it’s a lot more exciting than playing War. Or even completing a Friday crossword puzzle!

My problems go from bad to worse. Oh, save me from them all!

Is that a quote heard recently on Wall Street? Or maybe it was uttered in your office this week. Or was it what you heard when your friend went online and checked his portfolio?

There is no doubt, we are living in very unusual and stressful times. I have been privileged to talk to so many in the last few weeks who, while trying to figure out where the economy is going, are asking for prayer. Thus the above quote.

No, it wasn’t heard on “the street” or on the floor of the stock exchange (actually it might have been uttered in all or one of those places). The actual quote comes from about 1000 years before Christ. Yes, these are the words of King David in Psalm 25:17 (NLT). Some prayers are timeless and relevant in any age!

Here’s the thing. David prayed when his life was threatened, his family was in danger, his kingdom was about to be toppled, and when the economy was in the tank (which actually happened several times during his reign). May we unashamedly pray the same way, even if it’s just one line.

Trust me on this — don’t miss church this Sunday.  We have a guest artist that is going to blow you away!  Kendall Payne is a singer/songwriter from Southern CA who has toured with the Lilith Fair, Dido, Third Day and Delirious. She’s also an award-winning songwriter whose songs have been featured in films such as “Never Been Kissed” and TV shows like “Felicity” and “Grey’s Anatomy”.  You’ll love her so much that you might even want to attend multiple services — she’s that good!  What a great opportunity to invite some friends.  Arrive early to get a good seat!

Here are my Notes & Quotes for Sunday, June 1.

Heroic prayer is spilling your guts, praising your God and asking for vigor.

Our prayers may be awkward. Our attempts may be feeble. But since the power of prayer is in the one who hears it and not the one who says it, our prayers do make a difference.

– Max Lucado

The people who related to God best—Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah—treated Him with startling familiarity. They talked to God as if He were sitting in a chair beside them, as one might talk to a counselor, a boss, a parent, or a lover. They treated Him like a person.

– Philip Yancey (Disappointment with God)

What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.

– C. S. Lewis

Heroic prayer comes from pretty un-heroic people with un-heroic faith. However, people with weak faith are still blessed by God and still can accomplish great things.

³⁶Then Gideon said to God, “If you are truly going to use me to rescue Israel as you promised, ³⁷prove it to me in this way. I will put some wool on the threshing floor tonight. If the fleece is wet with dew in the morning but the ground is dry, then I will know that you are going to help me rescue Israel as you promised.” ³⁸And it happened just that way. When Gideon got up the next morning, he squeezed the fleece and wrung out a whole bowlful of water.

³⁹Then Gideon said to God, “Please don’t be angry with me, but let me make one more request. This time let the fleece remain dry while the ground around it is wet with dew.” ⁴⁰So that night God did as Gideon asked. The fleece was dry in the morning, but the ground was covered with dew.

– Judges 6:36-40

• The reason Gideon’s prayer was heroic wasn’t because it worked. It was heroic because it was honest. It came from a weak-hearted, insecure, not-so-sure-of-his-faith believer.
• The “fleece” concept of prayer is driven by weakness, insecurity, and doubt. It was never an act of a believer with a mature, growing faith.

• When you ask for tangible signs you’re treading on dangerous ground. Does God answer prayers in that way? It might happen sometimes, but not usually.

• If your life is based on a series of “sign posts” that you pray for, you are going to be very unstable, develop an almost false faith, and at best be a dysfunctional, emotionally-crippled believer. You cannot reduce a life of faith to a series of signs or you will live a very unstable, superstitious life.

All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.

– Eugene Peterson (A Long Obedience in the Same Direction)

I’ve been reading an interesting book, The Question of God, that compares the lives of Freud (as in Sigmund) and Lewis (as in C.S.). It’s fascinating actually. That comes from a guy who regularly reads ESPN.com!

I’m so drawn to this book (and I’m not endorsing all of its conclusions) that I’m quoting from it in my message on Sunday (May 18). Obviously I have been “moved” (if that’s the right word) by the book and just wanted to share the last paragraph here.

The answer to the question of God has profound implications for our lives here on earth, both Freud and Lewis agree. So we owe it to ourselves to look at the evidence, perhaps beginning with the Old and New Testaments. Lewis also reminds us, however, that the evidence lies all around us: “We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always easy to penetrate. The real labor is to remember to attend. In fact to come awake. Still more to remain awake.”

– Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr.

If you’re interested in the book, you can find it on Amazon.com: The Question of God.