Introducing Romans

We have all heard stories that begin with a messenger announcing, “I have some good news and some bad news...” God’s story had been around for thousands of years when Paul encouraged the congregations in Rome to continue to hope in God. He gave them both good news and bad news. The bad news is that we have failed to honor God and live well with one another. The really bad news is that some people are saying that God doesn’t even care. The good news is that God knows our failure and doubt. The really good news is that God is faithful. He loves us and provides the right relationships we are longing for. God’s provision allows us to act with hope for the future.

Pastor Jeff has challenged us to read Paul’s Letter to the Romans each week. You can think your way through Romans with this simple outline:

Romans 1-3: God's provision of right relationships.

Romans 4-8: God's establishment of right relationships.

Romans 9-11: God's right relationship with Israel. God is faithful to His promises!

Romans 12-15: How do we act as God’s people?

The outline can be expanded for deeper study:

Romans 1-3: God's provision of right relationships.

Paul’s Introduction: 1:1-17

Why non-Jews need God’s gift of right relationships: 1:18-31

Why Jews continue to need God’s gift of right relationships: 2:1-3:8

Why we all need God’s gift of right relationships: 3:9-20

God’s provision of right relationships in Jesus: 3:21-31

Romans 4-8: God's establishment of right relationships.

God gave the gift of right relationships to Abraham because of his faith: 4:1-25

God offers the gift of right relationships even to His enemies: 5:1-21

God’s gift of right relationships is meant to free us from slavery to sin: 6:1-23

God’s gift of right relationships gives us hope even when we continue to sin: 7:1-25

God’s gift of right relationship will finally bring our resurrection to real life: 8:1-39

Romans 9-11: God's right relationship with Israel. God is faithful to His promises!

Romans 12-15: How do we act as God’s people?

We are “living sacrifices” and we live for one another: 12:1-21

God’s love calls us to cooperate with proper authorities in our communities: 13:1-14

God’s love allows us to serve the weak among us: 14:1-23

God’s love allows us to bring glory to God as we accept each other: 15:1-13

Paul’s mission illustrates how God’s love can work through us: 15:14-33

Romans 16 encourages us to celebrate God’s faithfulness in many lives and to greet one another “with a holy kiss.”

Peak Performance Camp 2011 - Sun., June 19th

Adoration

Justin Henderson taught this morning on the meaning and nature of worship. He referred to one of my favorite verses, Colossians 3:23 -- "Whatever you do, do your work heartily as unto the Lord rather than men."

Worship can happen anywhere at anytime and is not contingent upon music. It is an attitude of the heart. You can worship while playing music, sports, working, etc. The word, "worship," is a derivative of "worth-ship." Who is worthy of our love, trust, thanks, and praise? Who alone but Jesus who died for us and gave his life for ours.

The Big Game was "Fox-tail." The game has undergone several evolutions. It orginally had the name of "whip-n-strip" when Mim and I learned it in Minnesota. You tuck a sock in the back of your pants and try to capture other items from your opposing team. The winner is the one who has collected all the items. You are out of the game when your sock is pulled, but can be "healed" back into the game by a medic on your team. It is a fun game and usually devolves into the utter chaos of a free-for-all, with no respect for the rules.

Jeff Stephenson taught the evening session accentuating the morning's theme. He illustrated the point with a famous hymn "It is well with my soul," which was penned by Horatio Spafford in 1873, who wrote the hymn on a return trip from Europe, having collected his wife after her survival of an ocean disaster in which their four children were lost at sea. Two years prior, they had lost their youngest child and all of their investments in the Chicago Fire. Broken-hearted, yet full of peace in the Lord, Horatio wrote this beloved hymn of faith.

We sang to worship CDs with words on the screen, even though we have a fully capable worship team/band, to illustrate that you can worship anywhere.

The evening ended with prayer.

More tomorrow.

Pastor Jeff

Peak Performance Camp 2011 - Sat., June 18th

Peak Performance Camp - Lakeside, MT

We are at camp again located on the northern end of Flathead Lake, Montana, hosted by Flathead Lutheran Bible Camp. We are able to run our own week of programming while hiring kitchen and waterfront staff to assist us.

I've never blogged this camp before, even though I have been attending every year since we first came here upon the recommendation of Kim Barton (now Iceman) who attended a Youth With a Mission discipleship training course in Lakeside. I think we've been coming here at least 12 years.

I rode the bus with our kids. The youth (Junior and Senior High) were filled with excitement the entire 11-hour trip up. We stopped at our traditional half-way point in Dillon, MT and invaded the local Safeway Store and McDonald's Restaurant.

The camp's theme this year is ACTS (adoration, community, truth, and service) and is based upon the history of the early church in Luke's book of Acts of the Apostles.

The schedule is fairly standardized:

7a - Staff Meeting
8a - Breakfast
9a - Rotation #1 (Teaching, Prayer & Devotion, or Group Initiatives)
10a - Rotation #2
11a - Rotation #3
12n - Lunch
2p - The Big Game (outdoors)
3p - Free Time
4p - Canteen is Open
5p - Small Groups
6p - Dinner
8p - Worship

I'll write more on each daily theme.

This year, I'm here with my daughter, Rebekah, who is a college-age student serving on the worship team. It is the first year, in a long time that I have attended without my wife, Mim.

I'll write more specifically each day. Suffice it to say, we are all pretty tired and sleep is inviting.

Pastor Jeff

Russia Mission 2011 - June 10

As I said, I woke up at 06:54 completely disoriented. I set my cell phone last night, but I didn’t reset the location. Of course it is on Airport Mode, and so it couldn’t find a signal. The main screen on my phone said 8:54. This meant I had slept through my alarm, missed breakfast at 8:30, and morning training was about to begin. I rushed to the dining hall, the seminary… everything was abandoned. I couldn’t imagine what had happened. I finally checked my phone and the computer and discovered it was really 7:10 AM. I misread the 8:54 PM time on my phone in my sleep-deprived haze... Breathing a sigh of relief, I made coffee, and reset the phone AND location so that the screen and alarm will function at the right time. A couple of cups of coffee later I was ready to write the first part of this first blog. :)

We spent the day today in team training. This included a brief history of the Eastern European Mission’s involvement in Russia, a discussion about our curriculum, and an orientation to Russian culture. We gave brief testimonies about “How I got here” in Koltushi, Russia, as part of this English Bible camp. A lunch with some kind of “rice and meat” meatballs (think of a non-tomato base meat loaf made with rice, and served as two-inch ball shaped portions), cold borsch, and coleslaw made us sleepy. Seeing that we were falling asleep in the afternoon sessions, we finally walked to the village center and identified the bus stop so that team members could find their way back home if they ever got lost. “Smile and say ‘Koltushi.’ Follow the direction they point.” The hope is that eventually you would get to this bus stop and be able to walk back to the seminary. It works in theory. :) Thankfully, we haven’t ever lost anyone, so we’re not sure how it will work in real life. I hope we don’t find out!

I am completing this first blog at 4:45 during our afternoon free time. Dinner will be at 5:30. I think we will also have free time this evening so that we can get to bed early. The jet lag induced by a ten-hour time difference makes your whole body feel heavy...

Russia Mission 2011 - June 9

We arrived in Frankfurt at about 9:30 AM (11:30 PM Salt Lake City time). Brooke said she slept a few hours. Jennifer, Wendy and I were didn’t get much sleep and we were pretty wiped out. Wendy and Jennifer both took photos of me sleeping on a double seat in the airport in Frankfurt. Oh joy. (You will have to ask Jennifer for that photo.) I didn’t think I had really slept. We had almost five hours before our flight to St Petersburg.

Our Lufthansa flight to St Petersburg was on an almost new Airbus A320-200. It was half full, and without incidence. We cleared Passport control and collected our baggage. All but one of our bags were present and undamaged. My personal bag had one outer pocket ripped open. I lost most of my gifts for my kids. :(

Bill Moberly met us at the airport and we had an interesting ride in a minivan to Koltushi. Our driver followed Russian rules for driving. It seems the basic rule is to keep two wheels on the pavement. We stopped at a small market, bought water, cheese and crackers, and arrived at the seminary about 9:15 PM. We had a brief meeting to thank God for our safe travels, and headed for bed about 10 PM.

Russia Mission 2011 - June 8

Eric Wollesen dropped his wife Jennifer, Wendy Jepsen, and myself (James) at the airport on Wednesday morning at 6 AM. Check-in, finding Brooke Gecsey (our accountant Debbie Turner’s daughter: actually Brooke found us!), our pass through security, and our first flight on Continental on a Boeing 737-800 to Houston Texas were all uneventful. We asked a barista at Starbucks in the SLC airport to snap our picture. [DENISE/FFEG: please add an instruction about where they can see the photo so you don’t have to email it to everyone].

We had a scheduled 4 hour wait in Houston before boarding our Lufthansa flight for Frankfurt, Germany. The Boeing 747-400 jet is one of the reason they coined the term “Jumbo-jet.” It seats over 300 people. There were no empty seats. We were in the very lowest class of service, at the back of economy section. I have never had a flight to Europe with so many children. All but one of their mothers had their heads covered, and I’m guessing they were Muslims from somewhere in the Middle East. For the most part, the children were well behaved. Brooke had a great window seat with lots of room. Although I confirmed aisle and window seats for Wendy and Jennifer, they wound up with non-reclining seats in the middle of a four-person center section, and just in front of the bathrooms. They listened to toilets flush the entire way to Germany!

I had an aisle seat eight rows from the back. I was seated next to one of the largest men I have ever seen. He wasn’t tall -- about 5’10” -- and he wasn’t fat. But he easily could have played line-backer on any college football team. His chest was wider than the seat so that his arms took about six extra inches on both sides. He had asked for an aisle, and got stuck between me and a woman in her 60’s from Sweden. We were all uncomfortable. I had to lean into the aisle to stay in my seat. For ten hours... Oye! Of course then I didn’t get to sleep on the plane...

But here is where it gets interesting: He is a petroleum engineer from Kazakhstan and specializes in “additional extraction methods.” I think this means that he specializes in getting even more oil and gas from otherwise exhausted wells. He had just finished an executive MBA at Texas A&M and was returning home. And he was a very talkative and inquisitive Muslim. I am the first pastor he has ever met and so we talked about God for almost an hour. He told me he was not a good Muslim, because he no longer prayed or kept Muslim customs. He asked a lot of questions! The focus of our conversation came down to this: We agreed Jesus was not God’s son conceived via a sexual union, for God doesn’t have a body. We agreed that one man could take the punishment for another man, but not for two or five. Since Jesus took the punishment for all people in the world, Jesus must be more than just a man, and so maybe there were other ways to understand him as God’s Son. He seemed satisfied with this logic, and so we talked about how one person can represent the character of another. Ambassadors do this. Sons represent their fathers in many Middle Easter countries. My fellow traveler was eager to agree that Jesus could represent as much of God as we humans could learn. It was as close as I could bring him to recognizing who Jesus is. He agreed that he needed to think more about Jesus.

Acts 17

Our sermon considered trying to hear where people are in their lives. What do they really want? Can we speak to their need for meaning? To their need to be loved? To their need to have a hopeful future?

The Apostle Paul bridged across cultures to consider Athenian needs in Acts 17:22-31. Can we speak about our living hope in a way that connects to people’s wants and felt needs? This is the call in I Peter 3:15-16. Let us do it with gentleness and reverence. Amen.