Pastor: Paula Hemann
Scripture
1st Reading Jeremiah 3: 7-14
2nd Reading: Ephesians 1:3-14
John 1: 1-18
Paula’s Message: What Do You Believe? Jan. 5th, 2025
Today in Jeremiah the people are informed that they will be restored from exile because the Lord loves them and just as he Loves us. His Love is an everlasting Love and he will never withdraw his kindness from us.
God’s Love is Loyal so that Nothing I Mean Nothing can separate You and I From the Love of God!
God does not want to destroy but to disciple and correct us. The only way he could solve this was to write his laws in our hearts so that God was no longer outside of us but inside of us.
This way he creates in us an Internal Reality.
I am convinced that this can be the best year of your life if you will simply accept one principle: WHAT YOU BELIEVE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN WHAT YOU HAVE OR WHO YOU ARE.
If you Can accept this I want to hear an Amen!
The most important matter in your life is not what is happening to you, but what is happening in you.
The story is told about a man on a train crew who was accidentally locked in a refrigerator box car. The rest of the crew did not notice that he was missing and went home for the night.
When the man realized that he was locked in the box car, he began banging on the door until his fists were bloody.
He shouted for help until he was so hoarse that he was nearly speechless.
"I'll freeze to death before anybody finds me," he thought to himself.
Panic seized his mind. In the box car he found a piece of a knife and painfully he began carving a message onto the wooden floor: "It's so cold, my body is getting numb...If I could just go to sleep...these may be my last words."
The next morning the man's body was discovered inside the locked refrigerator box car.
Every physical sign indicated that the man had frozen to death.
Only one thing puzzled the investigators.
The refrigerator unit on the box car was inoperative--it did not work.
The temperature inside the car did not fall below 55 degrees.
It was not the outer cold but an inner conviction that killed this poor man.
What you believe is more important than what you have or who you are.
Many people today are living in Exile. We as God’s people are called to ask All to Return from Exile, return from what you are believing in and come Home to God!
With that said, it’s interesting to see who God says explicitly will return from exile, that faithful remnant that will rejoice and “sing with joy for Jacob.” Is NOT the strong, the well-connected, the powerful that Jeremiah notes will return to the promised land.
No, rather it is the “blind and the lame, expectant mothers and women in labor.” In other words, God continues to make his name known not through the strong, but through the weak.
Those of us who recognize that we don’t have it all together and we must rely on God to provide and protect us.
For what is a home if not a place of sanctuary, a place of comfort and stability?
Exile demonstrates just how fragile, shaky and weak our lives can be, many times we will be torn from our homes and driven to places that are unknown, with unknown gods and cultures, a new world that we must attempt to navigate effectively in with No familiar streets and homes and, above all, NO temple, where they would go to experience God’s active presence in and among them.
All of these things have been taken from them.
And yet, there is hope that God is leading them home, “besides streams of water” to a “level path where they will not stumble.”
What you believe reveals where you are on your Faith Journey. If your living what you believe and you believe in Jesus Christ your Lord and Savior than you know that God has So Many Blessings in store for you! Let’s Talk about them today, because you see they are in our Ephesians reading:
Now before I get started I want you to know that I understand you may be going through something, Yet I ask you, in the Misdst of what you are going through Paul tells you this:
1. Praise God because because he is blessing you with every Spiritual Blessing, Because he chose you to be here in the world right here and right now.
2. You have been a part of God’s Family from the Beginning as he adopted you to be holy and blameless in his sight.
3. He freely gives grace so that we have redemption through his blood, knowing we are forgiven, so we can Live According to the riches of God’s Grace given to us with his wisdom and understanding. This way you and I can understand him so he is not mysterious to us, but bring t our lives fulfillment so that there is unity here in heaven and on earth.
4. So that as we work out everything in his will, we have Hope in Christ, that his truth and salvation are Meant so we do his will and receive salvation because we believe we are Marked in With a Sealed Promise that we inherit Eternal Life with Him!
5. You see we have Jesus Written and stamped all over us -This is not some new revelation that we or the Ephesian People are to be receiving – it is something that We Have Already been given- Right Here – Right Now!
God is always Up Close and Personal and we know this because In the beginning was God’s Intimate Fellowship with us through his Son Jesus Christ. Jesus is the “Revealing” or revelations of God!
The Light was initially revealed with John the Baptist. It was this true light that gave light to everyone coming into this world!
Do You Believe this? Because this tells us that we are asked to believe. Because if you don’t then maybe you haven’t received Him.
The truth is it is only when you Receive that You Can Believe.
WHAT YOU BELIEVE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN WHAT YOU HAVE OR WHO YOU ARE.
Today you and I are asked to Receive Jesus into our Lives. Because you and I are his Shepherd and God and his Sheep are in a Unique Relationship
This language in John compares God to a shepherd, the one who will “watch over his flock like a shepherd.”
The metaphor of God leading his people like a shepherd leading his flock is a well-known analogy of God’s care for his people.
And while it may sound like a lovely, heartwarming metaphor, there is more to it than we might expect.
Listen to these words from religious leader James Merritt:
• You won’t find a dumber animal than sheep. Dogs and cats can be trained, but you’ll never go to a circus and buy a ticket to see a trained sheep.
• They have poor eyesight.
• They have no common sense. Left to their own devices, they’ll walk into a stream and drown.
• Sheep are prone even to walk off a cliff and plummet to their death.
• We are different from sheep in at least one way: we worry.
• Sheep are too dumb even to worry that they can’t take care of themselves.[2]
• So sheep aren’t the smartest of animals, but there’s even more to the shepherd/sheep metaphor.
o Ken Bailey points out in his excellent book The Good Shepherd: A Thousand-Year Journey from Psalm 23 to the New Testament, a sheep has no natural defenses. No claws, no sharp teeth, nothing to keep any predator from killing them, they can only be saved by the shepherd.
o And therein lies the great lesson of the prophets: our only true defense is in the God of Abraham and Isaac, the one who brought them up out of Egypt.
The one who parted the Red Sea and brought the twelve tribes up to the promised land.
When we forget that, everything will be off. But this metaphor of God as shepherd says something else.
As a shepherd leads his sheep to quiet waters, so God leads the remnants of Israel and You and I back to home in Jesus Christ. This is where all will experience the fruits of returning home.
The Sheep Follow the Shepherd’s Call
During the riots in Palestine in the middle thirties a village near Haifa was condemned to collective punishment by having its sheep and cattle sequestered or taken and isolated by the Government.
The inhabitants however were permitted to redeem their sheep at a fixed price.
Among them was an orphan shepherd boy, whose six or eight sheep and goats were all he had in the world for life and work.
Somehow he obtained the money for their redemption. He went to the big enclosure where the animals were penned, offering his money to the British sergeant in charge.
The N.C.O. told him he was welcome to the requisite number of animals, but ridiculed the idea that he could possibly pick out his “little flock” from among the confiscated thousands.
The little shepherd thought differently, because he knew better; and giving his own “call”, for he had his nai (shepherd’s pipe) with him, “his own” separated from the rest of the animals and trotted out after him. “I am the Good Shepherd and know my sheep—and am known by mine.” What Do You Believe? It Matters- Because…WHAT YOU BELIEVE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN WHAT YOU HAVE OR WHO YOU ARE. Give Me Jesus, Amen
