We were made for God. We were made with desires that simply cannot find satisfaction outside of Him and the Life He gives. One of the most wonderful discoveries I’ve found is that this Life literally spills over into everything. It isn’t limited to strictly “religious” activities. It isn’t restricted to particularly spiritual moments. This Life, this Joy-in-and-through-Him pours out through the Cross and by the Spirit to fill up and transform all of life. It has to do with food and family and friends and a well poured glass of wine. God intends to be trusted and loved and obeyed but there is literally no sphere of life where that is not immediately and directly relevant.

This week we will finish 1 Corinthians 12 and find Paul making the case that this Life in the Spirit comes to the whole of the church. No one is exempt. No one can opt out. If you are a part of the local church you were made to be wielded by the Spirit for the good and life of all.

Tonight we’ll look at what this sort of life looks like with our children. I encourage you to sign up on the city and join us as we examine the kind of Life God calls us to in our homes, with our children, pursuing Joy.

Joel Limpic will be leading our music on Sunday. Please take the opportunity to meet him this weekend if you haven’t yet. He and his family will be moving to Denver in the next few weeks. Also take a look at a side project he has been working on here. It is called The Verses Project and is a collaboration of a number of artists to help the church memorize scripture.

Hello Park Church,

I hope you all had a good Memorial Day Weekend. Our family spent a few days in the mountains with some friends and got to hike, relax a bit, and get used to school being out for summer. Nick did a great job wrapping up our study of the first 2 chapters of Acts and has left us in a good place in getting ready for 1 Corinthians 12-13.

Our Gospel Community hosted a BBQ last night at Cesar Chavez park off Tennyson Street. I sat down and looked around at what was happening at the park and was overwhelmed with gratitude to God for what I saw. I watched a group of dads playing basketball with their sons. I saw a group of women- some married, some mothers, some single- sitting in a circle talking about their various lives. I watched a couple of guys from our group talking to a few couples across the park who don’t know our church. There was good food (particularly the corn casserole and brats), good drinks, and a lot of people talking about life, the Gospel, and otherwise simply enjoying the gifts of God in a beautiful sunset, good food, and new-found friends. 5 years ago we didn’t have any of this. We had the hope that God would begin to build a community of worshippers and disciples who would love one another and love their city. We talked a lot about eating and praying together, hoping that a consistent celebration of the gospel, from the Scriptures, would begin to shape a certain kind of community life. This is why we are here. If anything stands out to me from the first 2 chapters of Acts, it is this: the preaching of the gospel led to the mass conversion and baptism of a ton of people- and then it led those same people to take on a whole new way of life- together. We’ve banked everything on that simple idea- preach the gospel, sing the gospel, celebrate the gospel and then do life together-counseling, encouraging, calling out one another in love. We think the Bible teaches that this will change everything.

I would encourage all of us to reinvest in the relationships God has surrounded us with here at Park. If you haven’t yet found a Gospel Community, find one, start showing up, start contributing, and start eating. If you lead a Gospel Community, keep this big idea ever in front: We believe the crazy idea that the Gospel really does change everything. It creates real friendships, real hope, real transformation. It convicts us of Sin, and declares to us a love and a mercy that is astounding. We also believe the crazy idea that an evening spent in a living room talking about God and His work in our work, our families, our relationships is the place where the very real presence of God’s Spirit is at work, through His word. We want to see Jesus change everything and it is here, as the Spirit works in the various gatherings of the church, that we are made new.

I look forward to starting 1 Corinthians with you this weekend. We’ll look more specifically at what the Spirit does in giving life, power and a mission to the church.

Happy Tuesday. I’ve spent the day working on my sermons for Good Friday and Easter. I’ve been overwhelmed with hope and longing this afternoon and so I started praying and wanted to invite you to pray with me over the next few days. This weekend we are expecting to see potentially hundreds of people come to our worship services who do not know God. Friends and neighbors who will come to church on Good Friday or Easter but won’t come any other time of the year. People who you’ve been praying for and sharing your life with could be there this weekend. I long to see God move to save the lost and awaken us to His kindness and mercy and gracious power.

My prayer this afternoon has been to plead with God that we would see a flood of people who will receive the Gospel and believe in Jesus. My hope is that God would, in his kindness, move in power to save our friends and neighbors and even strangers. Please spend some time praying this week that God might cause salvation flood our times together this weekend. Pray that the gospel will be preached with clarity. Pray that God’s people would celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus. Pray that those who do not believe would come by the hundreds to hear and believe and be born again.

Pray with us. We’ll gather tomorrow morning for prayer at the church building at 6:30am. We’ll sing, confess our sins, be reminded of the gospel and pray for this coming weekend.

There are two relatively new resources that I wanted to make all of us aware of:

Francis & Edith Schaeffer were the founders of L’Abri. L’Abri started as a home in Switzerland where artists, writers, philosophers and students gathered to discuss the growth and transformation of culture and its relationship to a Christian Worldview. Francis Schaeffer wrote a number of books (How Shall We Then Live, A Christian Manifesto, among many others) which are amazingly helpful as we try to think clearly about culture, Scripture, and how to represent the gospel in our world. L’Abri has made available a ton of his lectures from L’Abri here:

L’Abri Ideas Library.

John Piper, J.I. Packer and Timothy Keller have all named Martyn Lloyd-Jones to be the greatest preacher of the last century. He was the pastor of the Westminster Chapel in London. Recently the Lloyd-Jones Trust has made a large collection of his sermons available for free online. Enjoy:

Martyn Lloyd-Jones Trust