Gifts and Givers (2 of 4)
Series: Love Has Come
Craig Smith
Genesis 22:1-14
I. Introduction
Welcome back to Mission Hills. Whether you're joining us in the big room at Littleton, or at the Mill venue in Littleton or at Mission Hills Dove Valley or at Mission Hills online, I'm glad you're here for week number two of our Christmas series. In case you missed last week, let me just catch you up a little. Last week we looked at the story of Cain and Abel and saw there the beginning of the Christmas story in two brothers who chose to take very different approaches to the problem of dealing with the mess of sin. One brother, Cain, chose to try to deal with it on his own...and ended up making it worse. The other brother, Abel, chose to trust that God loved us too much to leave us languishing in the mess of sin...so Abel trusted that love was coming to the rescue.
And on the surface, Abel's choice sounds pretty easy, right? In fact, the idea of trusting God to fix what we cannot might even sound too easy. It might even sound like a kind of spiritualized version of giving up, of becoming passive. I think a lot of people think of faith that way, don't they? Faith is for the weak.
But if that's what having faith in God sounds like, then you need to understand that you're not really operating out of a biblical understanding of faith or trust. The reality is that faith is not for the faint heart. The fact is that trusting God is not passive...it is, in fact, very hard work. I think there are at least two reasons for that:
1. Trusting is un-natural to sinful people. If we're going to be honest with each other, I think that most of us would admit that trusting others is hard. And I think we tend to assume that the main reason for that is because we've been let down before. In other words, our struggle to trust others is really their fault. But the older I get, the more convinced I am that the main reason we struggle to trust others is something inside of us. ...
Series: Love Has Come
Craig Smith
Genesis 22:1-14
I. Introduction
Welcome back to Mission Hills. Whether you're joining us in the big room at Littleton, or at the Mill venue in Littleton or at Mission Hills Dove Valley or at Mission Hills online, I'm glad you're here for week number two of our Christmas series. In case you missed last week, let me just catch you up a little. Last week we looked at the story of Cain and Abel and saw there the beginning of the Christmas story in two brothers who chose to take very different approaches to the problem of dealing with the mess of sin. One brother, Cain, chose to try to deal with it on his own...and ended up making it worse. The other brother, Abel, chose to trust that God loved us too much to leave us languishing in the mess of sin...so Abel trusted that love was coming to the rescue.
And on the surface, Abel's choice sounds pretty easy, right? In fact, the idea of trusting God to fix what we cannot might even sound too easy. It might even sound like a kind of spiritualized version of giving up, of becoming passive. I think a lot of people think of faith that way, don't they? Faith is for the weak.
But if that's what having faith in God sounds like, then you need to understand that you're not really operating out of a biblical understanding of faith or trust. The reality is that faith is not for the faint heart. The fact is that trusting God is not passive...it is, in fact, very hard work. I think there are at least two reasons for that:
1. Trusting is un-natural to sinful people. If we're going to be honest with each other, I think that most of us would admit that trusting others is hard. And I think we tend to assume that the main reason for that is because we've been let down before. In other words, our struggle to trust others is really their fault. But the older I get, the more convinced I am that the main reason we struggle to trust others is something inside of us. ...
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