Sunday, February 26, 2006

“Bringing The Vision Into Focus”

(This sermon was preached on Feb. 19th.)

In life it’s really easy to remember HOW to do something, but forget WHY we’re doing it.

Seth Godin, an author I’ve quoted before, who wrote the book “Purple Cow” had this post called “The Reason” on his blog last Wednesday. In the post he gave all these reasons why we do things nowadays that lost their meaning…. (See here. Don't worry! It opens new window).

We have to know the reason why we’re doing something or two things happen:

1. What we’re doing loses its effectiveness and becomes empty ritual. (like Seth is talking about)
2. We lose the motivation to keep doing that thing.

Not only is having a reason important, but have to have a sense of direction in life.

In Lewis Carrol’s book “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” there’s a scene where Alice is asking the Cheshire Cat where to go. Listen to what he says…

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? (Asked Alice). “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where__” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

If we don’t care where we end up, then it doesn’t matter which way we go this year, but if we do then we need to be really careful which way we go!

Today I want to do two main things...

1. Have a check up with where we’re at. In order to do a “Check-up” you have to know what healthy is or looks like – where we’re headed. Within this “check-up” we’ll look at the WHY of what we’re doing.

2. Last year I taught a sermon called “The Missing Ingredient To Success” and told you the missing ingredient is action. Most of us know ALREADY know enough to see massive change in our lives IF we just did what we know. We’ll review some of what we’ve talked about last year and see how well we’re doing these things. We’re going to talk about how to apply what we’ve been learning even more so we can become more of who we feel God’s called us to be.

Before We Start:
I’m going to look at most of these things from the angle of how we’re doing as a group, but as you listen you can check yourself and see how you’re doing personally.

We’re going to use the picture of the first church in Act 2:42-47 as our check-up list to see how we’re doing...

Hear the message below:

MP3 Stream
Download