Faith Community Church Of Hopkinton

To watch the video Pastor Mike references this week, go to: https://storycorps.org/animation/the-road-home/ The Bible consistently talks about the importance of welcoming people who are new to our community. They may have moved from another area of the country or they may have moved from another country. Either way, they are struggling to adapt to region. They lack the connection of relationships that provide acceptance and assistance. They may even struggle to speak our language, understand our customs, and know how to navigate their way through our society. Whether just new to our community or new to our country, the Bible has always touted hospitality as a virtue. It is an act of compassion and possibly a means of helping people connect to the family of God.

“When people ask, ‘How was your Sabbatical?’ I don’t know what to say. It was one of the greatest gifts I have ever received. It was a deeply moving, restorative journey with God. It was a blessing to my family. Through this series, I’ll be sharing insights I gained for my life and our church. One thing I hopes come through clearly: it was good to pull away – it is also good to come home. I love this church.” – Pastor Mike Laurence

God creates us to be in relationship with him. He then invites us and provides us with resources to start and grow that relationship. This invitation is never given just once, but stands as an open invitation to seek God every day.

For many of us, we spend the majority of our adult lives working. Sadly, for many, those hours feel wasted. Work is something we do so that we can get money to enjoy the rest of our lives. But God sees work as valuable and important. One of the first things he did in creation was give his newly created people work. We can find enjoyment and satisfaction in work if we discover the way God sees work, and how he sees our work specifically. Knowing how God thinks about work guides our thinking, which will guide our actions. We can experience God's transformative power in our work lives too and find vocational health.

Very little is possible in our world without money. Money interacts with almost every area of our lives. Viewing money with a biblical mindset and dealing with money according to biblical principles will help us experience transformation and financial health. This includes dealing with issues like giving, saving, debt, budgets, and spending. Beyond that, we touch on a key biblical virtue regarding money - contentment. Knowing what God says about these areas and thinking correctly about them will help us develop healthy financial habits that will allow transformation to happen in us.

We all carry hurts from our past that have left emotional scars on us. Most, if not all of us, struggle to find the balance between allowing ourselves to feel our emotions and being controlled by our emotions. God is concerned for our emotional health too and wants to heal our emotional life. God is able to deal with our hurts, even turning them into opportunities to see and experience his grace. He offers us his peace, his presence, his healing power, his forgiveness and his joy amongst others to help us be transformed in our emotional lives.

The only way to truly change your life is to change the way you think. Your thoughts control your actions. So if you want to change the way you act, you must start by changing the way you think. If you want to be like Christ, you must learn to think like Christ. The goal of this change in thinking is transformation. To transform means "to change the condition, fuinction, nature, character or personality" of something. Transforming is something God does to us.

When your body is not healthy it affects how you work, think, act, and respond. God is concerned about our physical bodies. He provides for our needs because he loves us. God wants us to take care of our bodies, not only because that's where we live, but also because that's where he lives. Our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Physical health is a spiritual discipline.

We are thinking people. God created us with thought and reason. Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am". How we think affects how we act. For many of us the battle of true transformation is a battle of and for our minds. What we read, watch, think about and interact with affects how we think. As we learn more about how we think, we also discover a host of mental health problems that we need to overcome. God wants to transform us by helping us find mental health. What we discover is that we might need to adjust our mental diet just like we need to adjust our physical diet to find healthy transformation.

A guardrail is a standard of personal behavior that becomes a matter of conscience. When we establish guardrails we discover that we feel a tension. We are drawn towards the unhealthy, inappropriate and addictive side of the rail. This is nothing new, we need to make up our minds to do it. The reality is whether you give in to the tension and break through the guardrail or live with the guardrail, the temptation will always be there. But if we break the guardrails we discover that it becomes easier to break them. It does not erase the tension, it just weakens our resolve. We establish guardrails not to deal with the tension, but to honor God. When we follow the guardrails we find that God directs and protects our lives. We can avoid future regrets if we make up our minds today.

A guardrail is a standard of personal behavior that becomes a matter of conscience. To avoid greed and irresponsibility: give, save, live. We live in a society filled with the consumption assumption. Get more, spend more. John Ortberg calls it the shadow mission of America - more. Contrary to popular belief, God does not need your money. He does not want something from you, he wants something for you. He wants to protect and direct us in life to void the ditches of consuming and hoarding. In other words, guardrails around money direct us away and protect us from greed.

A guardrail is a standard of personal behavior that becomes a matter of conscience. Setting some clear guardrails in your marriage around other relationships, parenting, money and work (ministry) is essential. These guardrails can be established at any time, even now in your marriage. They can also be established before you are married to help you choose a partner. Knowing the guardrails of your married friends helps you to respect them and support them in their marriage too.

A guardrail is a standard of personal behavior that becomes a matter of conscience. If every desire requires guardrails, your desire for physical/sexual intimacy requires reinforced steel. The struggle with sexual sin is not that God finds it more offensive, but rather that it causes immense damage to us and our families. Far too often we flirt with sexual sin instead of fleeing from sexual sin. In this area, culture baits us and then chastises us when we cross the line. The best defense is to flee sexual immorality, not flirt with it.