Seven Marks Church Messages

For most of us, the idea of stopping for 24 hours is uncomfortable. We spend our days on the go. We have become accustomed to living full but only sometimes fulfilling lives. If we stop for Sabbath, it will likely bring us face-to-face with two areas of our lives that make us uncomfortable: our identity and our idolatry.

What if the thing God is inviting you into this year is not more but less? If it sounds nice but impossible, attractive but unrealistic, that's fine. All we are asking for at this stage is an open mind as we spend the next several weeks talking about the often neglected and easily misunderstood practice from the way of Jesus, known as Sabbath.

Christmas brings us to the undeniable, reckless love of the Father, where He sent His one and only Son, not only to show us a way back home to the Father but to show us the Father and how to live as His children in light of His love.

We tend to place a lot of expectations on Christmas, but what do we do when this season of family, joy, and celebration doesn't quite meet our expectations? Navigating the reality of loving and living in the midst of messy family dynamics can be challenging. The good news is that God is with us in the mess.

Through Jesus' perfect life, death, and resurrection, we are all offered a way home into a relationship with God. We are promised an eternal home in heaven to live with God forever. As followers of Jesus, we know that this earth is not our ultimate home, but how are we supposed to live now, on this planet, in our temporary home in light of that knowledge? How do we live life with an eternal perspe...

Christmas marks the moment where we celebrate more than the birth of Jesus; we celebrate the way home. God's desire for every person on the planet is for them to see home, to experience what He intended from the very beginning, a relationship through faith, where you are at home with Him in the place where He is, made possible through the person and work of Jesus.

The purification and guilt offerings were primarily about addressing the violation of boundaries we don't use anymore, so what are we supposed to do with that? We may not have their boundaries, but many of us have boundaries when it comes to life with God. As followers of Jesus, we are called to be holy in all of life, at all times, because all of life is connected and it all counts.

At first glance, we may be tempted to think that the 'peace' offering refers to a sacrifice one makes in order to make peace. But the peace offering isn't a sacrifice designed to make peace. It is actually an offering to celebrate peace and is meant to be shared and enjoyed by the community.

One of the great ironies of living in the most advanced civilization in human history is that we have so much to be grateful for, yet we often struggle with entitlement and privilege. Fortunately, this is not a problem unique to us 21st Century westerners. This is a human problem. And it's a problem the grain offering, the second major offering of Leviticus, is intended to address.

On our own, we are not able to ascend the mountain. We are unable to live in the presence of God. The ascension offering was a daily ritual that symbolized the worshipers' self-sacrifice as the path to transformation, enabling them to come near to God.

Leviticus is foreign. It's a 19,000-word document written in ancient Hebrew about events that took place 3500 years ago. Over the next few weeks, we will get familiar with Leviticus, specifically the sacrificial system outlined in the first seven chapters. We hope that by shedding fresh light on parts of the Bible that generally confuse or scandalize us, we can gain the wisdom we need to be better...

Shame and guilt are two of the most powerful emotions a human being can experience. These emotions are normally the result of something bad we have done, are doing, or even the result of bad things that have been done to us. They make us feel unworthy, unlovable, and unredeemable. The gospel, however, says that your guilt and shame are the prerequisites for receiving God's love, grace, and forgive...

Contempt can be defined as an emotion, often stemming from pride, that leads us to disrespect another image bearer of God. It can be a problem for all of us daily. In Psalm 123, when the Psalmist fixes His eyes on God, he discovers a fresh perspective. He finds that the respect he feels toward God, His King, becomes the antidote for the disrespect he has felt for others.

Despair is the word we use to describe our feelings around hopelessness. As we've seen in each week of this series, the Psalms meet us where we need it most regarding negative emotions. The various writers of the Psalms were well acquainted with despair. A prayer like Psalm 88 provides us with the necessary guardrails to despair well before God–to appropriately take our worst moments and thoughts...

Envy is wanting what you think other people have because you think it will make you happy. Our constant striving–for more, for bigger, for better–betrays the fact that there is a deep longing in the soul of every human being that we do not know how to satisfy. In Psalm 73, the story of Asaph's struggle with envy was finally resolved when He got his heart and his eyes focused back on the God of the...

Fear is "that sense of uneasiness or uncertainty that we experience in the face of perceived danger." Fear meets us in countless ways, but not all in the same ways. Over and over again, the Psalms encourage us not to be fear-free, but to fear the Lord. People who fear the Lord above all are able to put all of their other fears in perspective.

Anger, in some form or another, is part of our lives. Some of us spend a lot of time angry at the world and others. Others of us spend most of our time being angry at ourselves. And some people have been so angry for so long that they aren't even sure what they are angry about anymore. In Scripture, there are examples of those who pursued what we call righteous anger. These people get angry like t...

Emotions are powerful. Our emotions profoundly impact the quality and condition of our lives and our relationships. Learning how to understand, process, and express our emotions is an important part of practicing the way of Jesus together. This is perhaps never more clearly revealed than in the book of Psalms. The gift of the Psalms is that they give us all language to process our emotions before...

Most of us would say that we love God and want to become more like Jesus. What we need, then, is to build structures of behavior for the moments when our love falters, when we are too busy, or when our lives unravel. We are all better followers of Jesus when we are committed to growing together.

Mark #4, that we practice at Seven Marks, is being in Biblical Community. In Acts 2, we read and see a beautiful picture of this: the "one another's" of scripture, dividing walls being broken down, and much more. But modern-day community seems so messy and ordinary. Yet, we would argue that an "ordinary" community can significantly impact your life.

Jesus ends the Beatitudes with, "Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. " The disciples faced persecution for following Jesus. They could have run from it, but they chose to embrace it. We can do the same thing by choosing allegiance to Jesus over the things of this world, giving Him all of the glory.

Jesus said, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God."  Being a peacemaker is being concerned more about living out the calling God has placed on your life as a child of God. To become peacemakers, we must first see the need for peace and where peace comes from. In other words, to give something away, we first have to possess it.

When you trust Jesus as your Lord and Savior and surrender your life to Him, He places a new heart inside you. He replaces your "heart of stone" with a "living heart," and who you are and what you do is fueled by the condition of your heart.

God demonstrates His mercy toward us while wronging Him and others, not holding it against us. Every day we have the opportunity to extend that same mercy to the world around us. When we walk around absorbed in ourselves, we dismiss the mercy God showed us. But when we adopt the lifestyle of our Savior, we won't be able to deny showing mercy to others.

Jesus said, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied." Jesus was aware that the people sitting in front of him then and us today are searching for the things that will satisfy our souls. We can not find it in power, possessions, or popularity. We find it when we are in right relationship with God and others.