Sunday Sermon Notes - 5.06.07

Matthew 6:11 - Give us today our daily bread. (TNIV)

We wrap up our four part series, Get Connected: Making room for who God brings into your life, with a look at how we spend our day as key to getting connected. If you are going to change how you spend your week, you need to consider how you spend your days. Getting refrigerator rights takes time, so how do you make the difficult changes in a daily schedule and weekly patterns so that you can hang out and do life with who God has brought to you?

Prayer.

It seems too trite, yet one has to consider: if God has brought people into my life - for His glory and my joy - then he will help me figure out how to change my schedule/habits so that we can connect and enjoy refrigerator rights. If you are like me, you love the idea of refrigerator rights, but cannot fathom how it is going to happen with your current pace of life. But God knows. And the only way to get what God knows into my head/heart is to ask him, listen to what he says, wrestle with it and accept it.

So I pray what Jesus prayed, Father, I'm ready to receive whatever bread you think I need for what you have assigned for me today. That is maybe a more accurate translation of the above mentioned prayer. Though the word "give" is an imperative, a command to God, it is rooted in a request based on trust and obedience. We read in John 6 how Jesus repeatedly reminds people that he only does what he sees God doing. Jesus says that he is willing to help us do what we see him doing. He is bread for us to consume, that we might be like him (you are what you eat) and that we might have the nourshiment to follow him.

So you have no idea who to have refrigerator rights with? Talk to God about it, listen/look to see who he has brought to you.
So you have no idea when to have them over? Talk to God about it and look/let him open up your schedule.

God is in the details, and God cares about the details, and God will instruct those who seek to live out their schedule wisely, will provide for those who seek to stock their refrigerator generously, will direct the steps of those willing to love their neighbor like Jesus has loved us. We were made for friendships, we need refrigerator rights; the Gospel is a Eucharist we pour out, but feasting with fellow-believers in the name of Jesus is one of the ways we get filled back up. You won't have any gospel to pour out if you never let God pour back into you through koinonia.

Get Connected, Get your Daily Bread!