The Expulsive Power of a New Affection

1 John 2:12-17 · 2024-07-07 · Jason Wolin · Mission Matters

1 John 2:12-17 · Mission. The Expulsive Power of a New Affection — sermon from Cypress Bible Church on BibleSlides.

The Expulsive Power of a New Affection Download discussion questions (PDF) Slideshow for this message can be viewed HERE Introduction We will return to the book of Mark very soon, but today we focus again on our mission statement. This is a very important thing for us to all get in our heads. This is not supposed to be word art. It’s not supposed to be a pretty document that we look at and file away. This needs to be front and center in our minds. We need clarity as to what we are doing here as a church. A mission statement of course is not unique to a church. All organizations need mission statements to focus energy and create unity. For example, here’s apple’s mission statement. I was listening to a video clip from 1998 and Steve Jobs was talking about the importance clear back then of letting the user experience drive the technology not the technology drive the user experience. And that was a revolutionary way of thinking in the 1990s. And over the years, that laser focused on user experience and innovation really gave them success. If you compare them to a lot of other technology companies, they’ve done a really good job of that. They knew where they were going and they worked hard at it. I assure you that this mission statement determined hiring decisions, budget decisions, time management decisions, priority decisions. It’s their north star. Well, the same is true in the church. We need a way to evaluate our activity. Was that a good event or bad? Is this ministry helpful or not? Is this money, money well spent or poorly spent? All of our activity needs to be constrained so that it aligns with a strong magnetic north. Why do we do what we do the way we do it? Why do we even exist as a church? We need a mission. The difference, we don’t make it up. God has given it to us in his Word. Of course we have to do the work of distilling it down into a sentence, but the content is HIS. Here’s our attempt. Last week we gave a high level overview of what that means. Here’s a one minute summary. We are born into this world hardwired as happiness seeking machines. We are born into this world unfulfilled and we make sense of the world through the lens of this organizing algorithm: find something you think will satisfy you and pursue it. All our activity in one way or another is in submission to this end. This is the motivation of all men everywhere without exception. It’s central to all philosophies that have ever been written, it’s the assumption behind every ethics conference that has ever been held and it’s THE QUESTION in the great conversation that has been echoing down the hallways of history is this, “What is the good life?” How can I truly experience fulfillment? As it turns there’s only one way. Just like our physical thirst cannot be satisfied by c…

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