Shelbyville Community Church

Sometimes when a couple files for divorce, they do on the grounds of something called “irreconcilable differences.” The idea is that no one, in particular, is at fault in the marriage, but there are fundamental compatibility issues that will prevent that marriage from being successful. Make no mistake, behind every divorce is a series of refusals on the part of at least one spouse to forgive.

We all enter into marriage with hopes, dreams, and desires. The only way to keep them from becoming expectations is to decide that your spouse doesn’t owe you. As long as you think your spouse owes you, your marriage is transactional. It’s all about relational debt & keeping score. That destroys intimacy. It destroys love.

Simply put, Christian marriage is meant to be a submission competition. It is meant to be a race to the back of the line. Every single day. Healthy marriages aren’t built on keeping score, but instead on serving and loving one another by putting our partner's needs above our own.

This week we’ll note that when it comes to any relationship, we each bring a box, an invisible box of hopes, dreams, and desires that we carry into that relationship. This is usually healthy and normal. But what happens when those desires become demands?

The things that we speak aren’t so much a word problem but rather a heart problem. Jesus calls us to look beyond the symptoms of our words in order to focus on the source that causes our words to dishonor him.

The words we speak to our family members during this quarantine will stick. They will stay stuck in our relationships, whether it be with a spouse, a son, or a daughter. The good news is that you can make your words work FOR you and your family during a quarantine.

We will stay centered on God’s Word by holding the Bible above us as our authority as we help everyone understand and apply it.

The Christian life isn’t just difficult to live. It’s impossible to live. The Christian life is a supernatural life, which means you can’t live it alone. We must live the Christian life out of the power & guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Worry is what happens when you meditate on your problems. Anxiety is what happens when you meditate on the things that threaten peace. Worship is what happens when you meditate on God and enter into His presence and the residue of His glory. As God gets bigger in worship, our worries and anxiety get smaller and lose their hold on us.

“When you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” (Matthew 6:6).

In this value, we are saying that we will be a church that will serve with a reckless generosity that only makes sense in light of the generosity of God’s grace.

Spiritual growth is a partnership between us and God where He brings all the resources and I intentionally tap into and live out of those resources. It’s the difference between “Training” and “Trying.”

A disciple is a student, apprentice, or pupil. Because Jesus was known as a Rabbi (teacher), He had disciples. It was the goal of every disciple to become like their teacher. To become a disciple, we must accept Jesus as our teacher. We must believe that He is right, not just about heaven, but about everything.

The vision of Shelbyville Community Church is to be a disciple-making church that brings hope and healing to our community.

From the Trinity to the 10 commandments, to the fruit of the spirit, over and over again we see the importance of relationships throughout God’s story. Our prayer is that Jesus will use relational environments at SCC to set the stage for the Holy Spirit to do some of his best work in our lives.

Jesus has not given us a mission that we can accomplish alone or in our own strength. It takes a disciple to make another disciple, as programs alone will never be enough. It’s so vital that we each become people that radically love and lead like Jesus.

Everyone you know and love desperately needs Jesus. Even those you dislike and avoid have a deep need for your Savior. But for a variety of reasons, it’s possible to go through life blind and distracted from that need. This is one of the reasons everyone needs to be plugged into a church that reminds us often how vital it is to bring the people in our lives to Jesus.

Paul states that when we put our faith in Christ we become a new creation. He goes further in the book of Colossians by saying that Christ is in us, that we are in him, and that we are hidden with him in God. Far too many of us identify as sinners saved by grace. Paul challenges this thinking by saying you're a new creation! The old has passed the new has come.

Most of your friends think the message of Christianity is ‘Be good! Here’s the bar, now measure up to it.” They couldn’t be more wrong. The message of the Christian faith isn’t that we have done anything, but that we believe that someone ELSE has. This is what separates Christianity from every other world religion.

You reap what you sow. This is a spiritual law that is as real and measurable as the law of gravity. If we sow to the spiritual nature, we will reap the good fruit that comes from that nature. But if we sow to the flesh we will reap the whirlwind that comes from that nature.

It’s easy for us to compare ourselves to others in order to feel like we measure up. We feel the need to justify our weaknesses or to make ourselves appear to have it all together when we’re actually a train wreck inside. But when we’re willing to see ourselves as God sees us, that all starts to change. The need to compare ourselves to others in order to find our worth begins to fade, and we find...

The holidays typically mean time with family. And family has a way of driving us nuts in ways that no one else can. It’s so easy to look at everyone else and judge how they act, what they say, and what they believe. Jesus gives us a good reminder to worry about the plank in our own eye before looking at the speck of dust in someone else’s eyes.

Burdens aren’t something that we’re called to carry alone. In the life of the Church, burdens aren’t so much a “you” or a “me” thing as they are an “us” thing. In fact, when we follow the Holy Spirit’s lead & bear each other’s burdens, those are some of the times where God is most honored.

When it comes to people, God is in the restoration business. It’s what He does. It’s who He is, and He invites us into that work. We are commanded in the name of love to “restore” one another.

Like an apple tree, we can't produce fruit unless we have outside help. Trees need good soil, water, and sunlight. Christians produce fruit because of the spirit, not their own efforts. In Galatians 5:16-26, Paul tells us to walk by the spirit, look at the obvious, and remember the good news.