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An Economy of Abundance

This week, for the first time since living in Penhold, we planted a garden. I mean, last year we did plant a little flowerbed with a few veggies in it, but we’ve never had a real garden space at this house until this year. Which has been has been bit disappointing to us – previously we’ve always had large gardens and we love fresh peas and corn and carrots and beans and all that. But landscaping is always a multi-year process (for us anyway) – everything takes time and we just hadn’t gotten to the point where we were ready for the garden. But finally, this year, having dug up our entire backyard anyway, we were finally ready to plant a garden.

So that’s what we did on Saturday and now we’re all pretty excited to watch those tiny little seeds sprout and grow and then ultimately produce a whole bunch of really good things to eat! 

And it’s always amazing to me how one little seed produces so much! For example, if you plant just one little bean seed, that little bean seed will grow and produce a plant with about 20 bean pods – and each of those pods hold about 6 beans – so that’s roughly 120 beans produced by planting one little bean seed. That’s a pretty good return on investment! You plant 1 and get 120 back!

Corn is even better. You plan one little kernel of corn and you get a plant with at least one (maybe even 2 or 3) corn cobs with each having between 500-1200 kernels each! That’s a really impressive return!

Tomatoes are even more amazing. In each average-sized tomato, there are between 150-300 seeds. That’s per tomato – and each tomato plant grows a lot of tomatoes! Now we probably wouldn’t get this with our short growing season, but in the commercial greenhouses, one tomato vine will grow about 200 tomatoes in a season. So even at 150 seeds per tomato, that’s 30,000 seeds all produced from one little tomato seed. Incredible.

And then, just as one final example, consider an apple seed. If you plant one single apple seed, you can grow a beautiful apple tree. That apple tree, once’s it’s fully mature, will produce on average (depending on the variety) about 500 apples each year. Each of those 500 apples will hold about 10 seeds – so that 5,000 seeds per year. Now perhaps that’s not as impressive as the 30,000 tomato seeds, but this apple tree will continue producing these apples year after year for at least 20 years or more. That means, that over the lifetime of that apple tree – from one little apple seed – will grow over 100,000 other apple seeds.

And I bring all this up because I think it’s a wonderful illustration of how the economy of God is an economy of abundance. And I’ll explain what I mean by that in just a minute, but first, let me back up and remind us all of what we’ve been talking about for the past several weeks.

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Listen

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve talked about all the blessings that God has poured out on us. And we’ve learned that God hasn’t just blessed us so that we can live a fun and fantastic life, but rather, God has blessed us so that we can be a blessing to others.

God wants us to pass along our blessings. He wants us to bless the socks off the people around us.

So we’ve been trying to learn – just exactly how do we do that? How do we bless our community?

To help us remember our lessons, we’ve been using the acronym BLESS. The B – as we learned last Sunday – stands for “Begin with prayer.” And it’s a pretty simple prayer – It goes like this “Here I am. Send me.”

And I’m curious to know… Did anyone take me up on my one-week challenge – where you begin each day with that prayer – volunteering to be used by God. Did anyone begin their days by asking God to setup some divine appointments for you that day?… And did God send people to cross your path so that you could bless them?

He did for me. It was actually pretty exciting to know that God set up a divine appointment for me to be a blessing to someone else. It was great. It was fun. I’m excited for God to do it again! And it all began with that little prayer “Here I am. Send me.”

Now today, we’re moving on to the L in our acronym BLESS – which stands for “Listen”. If we are going to be a blessing to the people around us – we have to learn to listen. And this morning, I’m going to show you how Jesus did that, how his disciples did that, and then finally, how you can do that too.

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Begin with Prayer

Listen to this Sermon!Last week we started off the new year by counting our blessings. And I dare say that each one of us was humbled by just how greatly God has blessed us. We talked about our physical blessings – 1/3 of the world is starving and we can’t even eat all of the food we have. 1/2 of the world lives on less than $2.33 per day – our minimum wage here in Alberta is $9.75 an hour! We truly are some of the wealthiest people in the world.

But that’s only our physical blessings. We are also relationally blessed – we have friends and family who love us dearly – that’s not the case for everyone in the world. We are blessed historically – To live in Alberta, Canada in 2013 is a blessing that billions of people do not enjoy! And of course, as Christians, we are also blessed spiritually. To know Christ – to have salvation, forgiveness, peace, joy, eternal life – Billions of people die never knowing any of that.

We are truly the most blessed people in the history of the world! And that begs the question “WHY?” Why has God blessed us so much?

That’s the question we looked at last week, and one of the key Scriptures that we found was Romans chapter 11 – verse 36.

“For everything comes from him and exists by his power and is intended for his glory. All glory to him forever! Amen.”
Romans 11:36

We came to the conclusion that God has blessed us in order to bring Himself glory. Remember our Spider-man line? “With great power comes great responsibility”

With such great blessings, we have a great responsibility to bring God great glory!

So how are we going to do that? How do we bring God great glory through all these great blessings that He has poured out on us? The answer is that we have been blessed so that we can be a blessing. God intends us to use our blessing to bless others for his glory. In other words, we have not been blessed just to be blessed – we have been blessed so that we can be a blessing to others.

And over the next five weeks we are going to be looking at exactly how to do that – not just with our physical blessings – but with our relational, historical, and spiritual blessings as well. How can we bring God glory by being a blessing to the people around us?

And again for you studious folk who like homework, I’m going to be using a lot material in these next five weeks from a couple of books. You might want to read them for yourself. One book is called “Discover Your Mission Now” – it’s a free ebook and you can find a link to it on our website – www.mirroralliancechurch.com. The other book is by Bruce Wilkinson called “You were born for this”. If you’re interested in reading this, I can certainly get you a copy.

To help us remember the lessons over these next few weeks, we’re using the acronym B.L.E.S.S.

Begin with prayer, Listen, Eat, Serve, and Story. And so today, we’re looking at lesson #1. B – Begin with prayer.

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God’s Blessing Strategy

 

Listen to this Sermon!Who here feels like you are extremely blessed? Do we even realize how incredibly blessed we are?

Why has God blessed us so much?

Think about this: The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well-fed, one-third is under-fed, and one-third is starving. Why has God blessed us so much? All of us had some sort of Christmas dinner, I’m sure. And I’m sure that most of us had left-overs. We can’t even eat all the food we have. Yet, millions starve to death every year. Why has God blessed us so much?

50% – thats half! – of the world population survives on less than $850 per year. That’s just $2.33 a day. Yet, if we accidentally dropped 2.33 worth of change into some deep snow, we might not even bother to try to dig it out. Its just a couple bucks.

Why has God blessed us with such an incredible amount of wealth? I found an interesting website called “globalrichlist.com” and if you go to that website, you can put in the amount of your annual income and it will tell you how you rank in wealth compared to the rest of the world. I don’t know how much all of you make in a year, but if you make just $20,000 per year, you’re in the top 12% of the world’s wealthiest people. (By the way, the poverty line in Alberta right now is $23,000) You could be considered to be “living in poverty in Alberta” and still be in the top 12% of the world’s wealthiest people. Why has God blessed us so much!?

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Dealing with Suffering

For the past few weeks we’ve been talking about living as aliens and if you’re just joining today for the first time – that might seem like a slightly odd sermon topic. But the reality is, as Christians, we ARE aliens. We are foreigners, strangers, short-term visitors on planet earth. We will spend maybe 60/80/100 years here and then woosh – we’re off to our eternal home – a place called Heaven. A place where there is no more pain, no more suffering, no more tears, and no more sorrow – Just life as God intended it.

But as you know, we’re not there yet. We are still in a place where there is pain, there is suffering, there are tears and there are sorrows. And as Christians we are not immune from all that.

There are no promises in the Bible that tell us that Christians will be free from pain and suffering. If anything, the Bible promises us the opposite – that there certainly will be pain and suffering for anyone who wishes to follow Christ. Jesus says in John 16:33…

 “Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows.” John 16:33

So how do we deal with that? How do we deal with pain and suffering, not just in the world in general, but in our own lives? Does God have a purpose for our pain (for our trials and sorrows) or is it just part of living in a sin-filled world? I mean, everyone experiences pain and suffering, but as Christians, as aliens in this world, how are we supposed to respond when we go through those dark, difficult times in life?

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