Life In The Valleys

“Life in the Valleys”

“The next day, when they came down from the mountain, a large crowd met him.” Luke 9:37

Intro: This week we begin to celebrate the Holy Season of Lent starting with Ash Wednesday.

Lent is a time to reflect on how we live out discipleship in the world around us.

Sometimes, we can’t measure what we need, so we invent a substitute.

We come up with something that is much easier to measure and stands in as an approximation.

TV advertisers, for example, could never tell which viewers would be impacted by an ad,

so instead, they measured how many people saw it.

Or a model might not be able to measure beauty, but a bathroom scale was a handy stand in.

A business person might choose cash in the bank as a measure of his success.

A book publisher, unable to easily figure out if people are enjoying a book, relies on a rank on a bestseller list.

I wonder if churches today have chosen a false proxy.

How do you measure your life as a Christian?

Do you measure how often your attend church?

Do you measure how much you give?

In fact, every week these are two things that we count.

How many people show up and how much they give.

After all we read in the Gospels and the about the first Church in the book of Acts and the rest of New Testament a lot of verse about numbers. Jesus feed the 5000. There were 3000 added to the church in Acts.

Paul mentions the number of churches in the region.

Certainly keeping count of things are very important.

But sometimes counting can become a substitute for success.

A false measurement of how much we impact other people lives.

A maybe even how much we have allowed the songs, the prayers, and the sermon effect us or not.

Yet there is no way to truly know how every person who attends a worship service on a given weekend has actually been impacted. It’s often assumed that attendance = impact. But this is not necessarily so.

How can churches truly measure impact?

What if churches actually focused on disciplemaking

and determined that their focus would be to make disciplemakers?

A Pew Reasearch article this week said that there are 8% fewer people

who identify themselves as Christians today as there were 8 years ago.

If that is true Christianity has decreased 1% a year for the past 8 years.

Here is the difference I am talking about.

During Lent people are often encouraged to do “Random Acts of Kindness.”

But I am convinced that this is another false proxy. Random Acts of Kindness sets the bar way to low.

Jesus set the goal to change “Random Acts of Kindness,” to “Deliberate Acts of Kindness.”

We are called as believer to “Purposeful reflection and to meditate on our actions

and to serve with thoughtfulness.”

Not hit or miss, here or there, some random acts, but purposeful, persistent, meaningful, intentional

relationship building, long term commitments to transformation of a peoples lives.

If you want to give up something during the Season of Lent that is fine,

but what God really wants is over the next few weeks for you to search your heart

and make a decision to give yourself everyday to something.

Give yourself to someone. Be a servant. Be a disciple.

Don’t settle for randomly putting quarters in washing machine at the laundry mat.

Set down and talk to the person who doesn’t have a washer and drying in their home.

Get to know their story. Share in their lives. Learn about them. Listen.

Don’t tell them about how you use to walk in the snow barefoot up a hill both ways home from school.

You are not there to get their sympathy.

You are there to earn their friendship.

Take a moment and live in the valley.

The bible is filled with stories about mountains and valleys.

Abraham goes up the mountain of Moriah to offer Isaac as a sacrifice.

Moses goes up the mountain Sinai and received the ten commandments.

Elijah goes to mountain of Carmel and has a showdown with the prophets of Baal.

Jesus takes the disciples Peter, James, and John up on Mount Herman.

As Jesus was praying something happened.

Strong’s 438, 4314, 3700 traces the Greek meaning back to the word “visage.”

As in his facial features changed.

His facial expression became different.

Let hold that thought for a moment. I am going to come back to it.

Jill had worked at the auto plant for 12 years.

So when rumors of the “downsizing” spread though the break room she wasn’t too concerned.

She wasn’t the longest worker there but she knew that several hundred had been hired in after she was