The Cross In Our Daily Life Series

The Cross in Our Daily Life

1. Attention

I went to bed close to midnight last night and got up at 4:30. So if I nod off during my sermon some one punch me.

ILL>>>> A pastor and young boy in a church that loved good fellowship, always served coffee after the sermon. One Sunday the pastor asks a little boy if he knew why they served the coffee. "I think," said the boy, "it’s to get the people awake before they drive home."

If you have to fall asleep this morning try not to snore.

ILL>>> Typical of last minute Christmas shoppers, a mother was running furiously from store to store. Suddenly she became aware that the pudgy little hand of her three year old son was no longer clutched in hers. In a panic she retraced her steps and found him standing with his little nose pressed flatly against a frosty window. He was gazing at a manger scene. Hearing his mother’s near hysterical call, he turned and shouted with innocent glee: "look mommy! it’s Jesus - baby Jesus in the hay". With obvious indifference to his joy and wonder, she impatiently jerked him away saying, "we don’t have time for that!"

2. Need - Do you have Time for Jesus?

America is a mission field for Hindus, Moslems, Buddhist, and a multitude of world religions.

Recently I saw an advertisement for a car named karma and another model named_____?

Are you relying on karma or good works to get you to a heaven your not even sure is there?

ILL>>> Christmas shopping, though fun, can be difficult. Did you hear about the guy that

bought his wife a beautiful diamond ring for Christmas? A friend of his said, "I

thought she wanted one of those sporty 4-Wheel drive vehicles." "She did," he

replied. "But where am I gonna find a fake Jeep?"...

There are a lot of fake substitutes for the real thing.

ILL>>> In a recent issue of Forbes magazine, secular thinker Peggy Noonan, one of the brightest journalistic minds around. She says this in an article entitled "You’d Cry Too If It Happened To You." In Forbes magazine, September 14, 1992, in which 11 men and women were asked to answer the question "Why are we so unhappy?" They all agreed we were unhappy because we had lost our moral and spiritual center. Listen to what Peggy Noonan says:

"[Poet W. H.] Auden called his era ’the age of anxiety.’ I think what was at the heart of the dread in those days [just a few years into modern times] was that we could tell we were beginning to lose God--banishing him from the scene and from our own consciousness, losing the assumption that he was part of the daily drama or its maker.

It is a terrible thing when people lose God. Life is difficult, and people are afraid, and to be without God is to lose man’s greatest source of consolation and coherence ..."

Have you allowed yourself to be trapped by the world and the way of the world today?

Have you taken time for Jesus in your life?

We may choose ...Greed over God? Time for yourself and money over God and your family?

If you are to busy to worship God, your putting your money and yourself over God.

If you refuse to give God your time and money then who are you worshiping?

So what does it take to put Christ back in Christmas and Jesus back in our lives and homes?

3. Satisfaction Turn to ----- 1 Cor 1:18

ILL>>>>Every state in the U.S.A. has a state flower and a state tree as symbols. Some also have a state fish, a state stone, even a state insect. Massachusetts has nineteen such symbols. Christianity has only one, the cross.

I. Center on the Cross v10-17

Paul saw their divisions & contentions.

A. Center your church on the Cross v10

1. speak the same thing = same purpose= no divisions

ILL>>>>Unity

Illustration: There can be union without unity: tie two cats together by their tails and throw them over a clothesline. There you will have union, but certainly not unity!

ILL>>>-- Oswald Chambers

The highest Christian love is not devotion to a work or to a cause, but to Jesus Christ.

2. perfectly joined together - by God - God’s priorities = the cross

Jesus told us how he sees disunity in Matt 5:...21“You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder, and whoever murders will be in danger of the judgment.’ 22“But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. ... But whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be in danger of hell fire. 23“Therefore if you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, 24“leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.