Blessed are the meek... Week 3

FHUMC Kingdom Experiment Week 3 from Chris Cummings on Vimeo.

Blessed are those who mourn - Week 2

Week 2 of the Kingdom Experiment! Check out the video to find your challenges. Come back and add a "comment" to share your story with how it is going.

FHUMC Kingdom Experiment Week 2 from Chris Cummings on Vimeo.

Blessed are the Poor - WEEK 1

FHUMC Kingdom Experiment Week 1 from Chris Cummings on Vimeo.

THE BEGINNING!

For the past couple months, we have been talking about the Kingdom of God.  And I have been noticing that it seems like you all really understand the concept, and on Youth Sunday you all did a great job even teaching about it, which is the highest form of knowledge (when you can teach someone else).  But with all that, there is a problem; the problem is that the Kingdom of God and Christianity are not just about knowing it, but living differently because of it.

The problem with the church in Jesus’ time, and now; it that we have reduced God, Faith, Church, and the Kingdom of God to just knowing about God, knowing about faith, knowing about the Kingdom; all the while failing to wake up to the fact that God calls us to a life living out the Kingdom by loving selflessly. Jesus was our example and brought the Kingdom wherever he was because he lived knowing he was called to live differently, not just know about it.

It is not just here; everywhere in the USA there is a huge trend of what they are calling “Almost Christians”. The idea is that many church-goers both young and old know much, but don’t live differently.  This is not a new idea either, John Wesley who founded the Methodist church, even wrote a sermon called “Almost Christians”, where he states that the difference between an almost Christian and an altogether Christian is love.

So, if living differently and truly loving selflessly is what takes us from Almost Christian to Altogether Christian, then it seems to me we need to start living differently.  Now I have for sure seen some of you guys make choices where you live Kingdomly, but as a group, as a church, we need to be much better about this.

So, I propose that we do a Kingdom Experiment; that for the next 8 Sunday Night youth group sessions, we stop just talking about the Kingdom of God, but start living like it.

So, we are going to use the Beatitudes to help guide us in this experiment.  The beatitudes are how Jesus started his only recorded sermon in scripture.  They mattered a lot then, and now because they take those we might see as the bottom and put them on the top.  It turned everything backwards; the Kingdom is backwards. “The eight beatitudes, or blessings, are given by Jesus…They aren’t catchphrases or a “top eight” list to happiness meant to stand alone…so just memorizing them or listing them as your favorite verses on Facebook doesn’t really make you a good Christian.  They are meant to be lived.”(KE p14)

“Often when we read [them] outside of the full story, we turn them into conditional statements. If I want God’s blessing, then I better seek after persecution.  But that’s missing the point. These blessings aren’t necessarily mandates but rather natural effects of kingdom living.”

ARE YOU READY FOR THE CHALLENGE TO LIVE DIFFERENTLY FOR THE SAKE OF GOD'S KINGDOM?