So I'm preaching tonight, and in true procrastinator fashion, I have only just now got my outline together. That might not be so bad, except for one thing: I just figured out what the text and title would be at lunch.
Now I'm literally sitting in an MYF meeting (we're watching "Facing the Giants") and working on tonight's worship service. I settled on the story that I like to call the "rooftop friends" story from Luke 5:17-26. As Ben and I were talking about the story, I figured something out. This story is less about what Jesus did (I know, the Pharisees would beg to differ) than about the friends' radical love...they literally tore up the roof to get a friend in need past the crowds who just wanted to get close to Jesus, because Jesus had something that paralyzed man desperately needed. How many of us have friends that would go so far for us? How many of us would go so far for another? Yet I think that's precisely what we are called to do for our friends, to take the risk of looking foolish to share Christ with them. And if all our friends know Christ, I think we're called to make new friends--not to blindly proselytize, but because we know they need what Christ has, and what we have in Christ. And so we form relationships that will bring them into fellowship with us, and through us Christ, until they are ready to claim Christ as their own.
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