THE MAIN THING IS TO KEEP THE MAIN THING... THE MAIN THING

A story was told about a church in Atlanta called Church of God Grill. When the owner was asked how the restaurant had been given such an unusual name, he said: “Well, we had a little mission down here, and we started selling chicken dinners after church on Sunday to help pay the bills. Well, people liked the chicken, and we did such a good business, that eventually we cut back on the church service. After a while we just closed down the church altogether and kept on serving the chicken dinners! We kept the name we started with, and that’s Church of God Grill.” Being a church wasn’t their main thing anymore. Being a restaurant was.

Two weeks ago, on the Feast of the Ascension, we heard Mark tell us the same message as Matthew does today. “Go and make disciples of all nations…” That is the Church’s mission. That is our mission. The easiest thing in the world is to lose sight of that mission. This command was the last command Jesus gave to the chosen disciples and to us, after His resurrection and just before He ascended to heaven.

The Message this week is a very simple one: We should always be aware of what our true mission is. As we may have heard before, the main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing. Remember the Mission and don’t get lost in the details.

Let’s discuss this as a family:

* How do you experience God’s love in your family?

* How do you share God’s love in your family?

* What are some things you can do together to stay focused on our mission as Christians: to love one another?

RECLAIM YOUR PASSION

Pentecost, for us, marks the end of the Easter season. Pentecost is also the birth of the church, the day on which the infant church began to expand and more fully become who Jesus intended for them to be - to adopt in their lives His Purpose and His Plan. 

The Gospel may sound familiar. We read it a few weeks ago, but we are reminded again of three things: First, Jesus offers us Peace—not just “well wishes,” but true peace that comes from following him. Second, he tells us to “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Again, not just another party favor, but a commissioning! Third, He entrusts to us, “Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them…” On that Pentecost Sunday, the apostles were down in the dumps. They felt their life, as they had come to know it with Jesus, was over. But then tongues of fire appeared and everything became clear. Their life was not ending, but just beginning. This man they followed for the past 3 years was no longer with them, but His message and His example was. The Holy Spirit, then, gave them the strength to carry on the mission. The Holy Spirit enabled them to reclaim their passion and to make the mission and message, plan and purpose of Jesus their purpose of life.

Pentecost is our day, too. How fortunate we Christians are! We feel the presence of the Holy Spirit as if we can see those tongues of fire hovering over our heads. So, The Message this week is it’s time for us to Reclaim our Passion with a fervent “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful!”

Let’s Discuss this as a Family:

* Why do you think Pentecost is referred to as the birthday of the Church? How did the Holy Spirit help to make that happen?

* On that Pentecost, the Spirit gave the apostles the “fire”, the passion, to go about and accomplish their mission of spreading the Gospel to the whole world. We all have received that same Spirit. How do we preach the gospel in our homes, our schools, our relationships, our workplaces?

* How do you see your life as a continuation of those early disciples? What fears do you have in accomplishing that role? Finally, where is our “fire”, our passion directed?

Go and Proclaim

For forty days after his Resurrection, Jesus appeared time after time to His disciples to assure them of two things: (1) he had truly risen from the dead and (2) they were to carry on the work that

he began during His public ministry.

Jesus’ ascension into heaven was both an end and a beginning for His disciples—the end of Jesus’ physical presence with them, but the beginning of his presence with them in a new way. Remember, He promised that He would be with them always to the end of time and part of that promise was to give them the power of His Holy Spirit, which we will see “fulfilled” next Sunday on the Feast of Pentecost. The disciples were not being abandoned.

When Jesus physically departed, Mark tells us His last words were, “Go into the world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.” Those words were meant for us as well because we have all been given this task to share—to proclaim the good news. We can rely on the power of the Spirit to accomplish our mission as well.

So the message today is clear: Jesus wants us to finish what He began. Our faith tells us that our task to proclaim the Gospel to every creature is something that we can do because Jesus’ presence is always with us. We can do it where we are; with those we meet, with those we work with, with those we go to school with, etc. Our call is to be a witness for Jesus in our lives—more by what we do than what we say.

You Have a Friend in Me

Throughout the New Testament, we hear Jesus speak over and over about love—232 times to be exact for all you trivia buffs. Other than references to Jesus and God, it’s the most repeated word in the New Testament. It pretty much tells us Jesus wanted us to remember its importance.

Today, Jesus tells us to keep His commandments and goes on further to reduce that to one phrase—love one another as I love you. If we did that, there would be no sin. There would be no violence in this world.

A little further on in John’s Gospel passage Jesus speaks to His disciples (and to us) and says, “I have called you friends…” We put a lot of emphasis on friendship. When we were children, and maybe more so today, it was devastating to us when a person told us we were no longer friends. We take joy in friendship. We grieve at the loss of friendship. Other than family, friends play the most important role in our lives.

So what is Jesus telling us today? He tells us He has chosen us as his friend. We didn’t choose Him as a friend but He chose us! WOW!! He then continues The Message from last week. It’s our responsibility to go out and bear fruit by loving one another.

More of You, Lord

We’ve heard this Gospel from John so often we may let it go right over our heads. However, there is such an important message here, we need to take a fresh look at it.

For a long time we may have incorrectly read that Jesus was the vine and we were the branches and if we didn’t bear fruit we would be cut off the vine and thrown into the fire to be burned. That’s like amputating our arm. That doesn’t make sense and that’s not what this Gospel is saying. If we no longer bear fruit the Gospel says we would be pruned so that we might begin to bear that fruit again. It also says, and this is the important part, that even if we were bearing fruit we need to be pruned as well. 

What in the world does that mean? Most gardeners know that in order to bear more fruit, even if the branches are producing, they need to be pruned back occasionally. Jesus is the vine—the strong and sturdy part of the plant. We need to stay connected and continue to grow through reconciliation and humility. Often our pruning usually occurs as a major event in our life—loss of a spouse, child, job, etc. Our pruning makes us more aware of how dependent we are on the vine. In other words, More of You, Lord and less of us. That’s the message for this week. Let’s remember how totally dependent we are on God and that staying closer to him enables us to bear much fruit.