Perfect Work: In Progress Series

Perfect Work: In Progress, by Pastor Rob Ketterling

Well, it's about that time of year where I start looking at the final couple weeks of the year, and I'm trying to figure out how the year is going to close out; if the rest of the year will be the best of my year, and if I'm going to hit all my goals. If you don't know this about me, I'm a goal setter.

I'm looking at, like, okay, I said I would read this many books, and I read about

30. I have 12 books in process, and I think I can get all those done, and maybe three more to about 45. So I'm doing that. I set a goal to read one hundred of the old-school sermons, and I'm at 90, so I've got ten left. I think that's no problem. I'll do that. Becca and I looked at our Kingdom Builder goal. We said with three more pay periods we are going to hit our goal this year, and we are excited about that. That's what I do. I start to look at how will it close out, how will this year close out.

And then I want to let you know in a couple of weeks I'll transition completely over to 2015. It will still be 2014, but I will transition, and I will start setting goals. I will start. As a matter of fact, I've been adding them to the list. I've got a whole file of things that I'm praying about for next year in goals. But it is just transition. It is like, all right, now we are looking forward.

And I want to let you know that as I was looking at the year and kind of, all right, we are closing this out, how did we do? How are things going with all the goals for the church, for my life, for our family?

All of a sudden I realized that at the beginning of the year we started a series called Perfect Work. How many remember the series we did, Perfect Work at the beginning of the year. Okay. We did a series there where we did it actually as a whole church together. We did it together as an interactive thing where we had the weekend services and then the Lifegroups that were partnered with that. And we are going to do the same thing

again in 2015. New series. The series and the theme for next year is going to be Greater. And we are going to believe it is going to be a greater year for us.

But this year our theme was maturity, that we wanted to mature. So we said we are going to let Christ do his perfect work in us, that we are going to mature and we are going to add to these virtues, and we are going to keep moving forward and this is going to be our theme. We are going to just make sure that God moves us to maturity. We read the verse James 1:4, Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

And in that series I actually did a sermon where I had four chairs. Okay, by show of hands, how many remember the four chair sermon? Raise your hand. All right, so we did the four chair sermon. And we enjoyed it. We had the infant, the toddler, we had the young adult and the mature follower of Christ. I was like you need to move from this one to this one to this one. And we talked about the challenges that they face; you know,

what happens when they read the Bible, what happens with money, what happens with their language, and suffering and sin, and we said all this stuff. And so I was just moving people forward.

Well, as I'm kind of recapping the year, I just realize, all right, how did we do?

How did we do with maturity? Did we move people from not knowing Christ to being infants? Did we move people from infants to toddlers, toddlers on up? Did we move people along in the process? And as I was praying about it and focused on it, I felt I just wanted to do a refresher here and take two weeks, so this week and next week. And this week we are going to look at chairs one and two. We are going to look at people that are spiritual infants and people that are spiritual toddlers. And then next week will be young adults and the mature.

If you're young adult or mature and you're like, "Oh, this isn't for me," yes, it is.

Because the infants and the toddlers need you to be pouring into them. They need you to be taking care of them. So don't check out. You should have your eyes on who are the infants and who are the toddlers.