Can You Keep A Secret?—by Jacques Genis
July 3, 2023
Sermon summary:
Matthew 6:1-8, 16-18 Secrets to keep are our secret world of righteousness (giving, fasting, praying). Our motivation must be pure and give glory to God, not ourselves.
Ask yourself: Who will be glorified by what I'm doing?
Secrets not to keep include temptation and sin--A secret world of concealment of sin. Psalm 32: 1-5 Don't care more about your repuration than righteousness. Read Psalm 51 together with Psalm 32. Wrestle to keep your keart soft, be honest, vulnerable and radically open with your life.
God sees everything done in secret.
Watch the service in full
here (the sermon starts at 41 mins).
Because Jesus reconciled us to God through the cross, we are called to pursue reconciliation with God, one another, and the world around us.
Jesus reconciles us to the Father and teaches us to extend his grace, helping us forgive one another, heal relationships, and walk together in peace.
The physics of the pendulum Picture an old grandfather clock in a quiet hallway. Its long brass pendulum swings steadily: tick, tock, tick, tock. Now give that pendulum a hard shove to the right. It does not simply glide back to the center and stop. It races right past the middle and sways just as far to the left. Left to its own momentum, a pendulum never rests at either extreme; it finds peace only when it hangs still at the center, held by gravity and its fixed point. The church behaves in much the same way. Push her too far toward one side of a truth and she does not gently settle into balance, she swings. Often for a whole generation toward the opposite error, and then back again, wounding people at both ends of the arc. And here is the crucial thing the clock teaches us: the pendulum comes to rest not by being frozen in place, but by being held. Balance is not the absence of force; it is the fixed point that keeps opposing pulls in tension so that the weight can finally hang still.