I recently learned something that is earth shattering to me and partly because it aligns up with my experience here IRL. Not that your life experiences are supposed to dictate what the Gospels are trying to say but you can’t ignore that part wholly and it is possible for both to align. In other words it is possible for your experiences to confirm what you are reading, no ?

St. Michael’s Church, Cluj-Napoca Romania

NT Write is a pretty smart guy, his words are thick and hard to chew on at least for me but if you will work at him there are amazing gems in his understanding of the Gospels. So in reading or shall I actually say in swinging the wood chopping ax at the massive pile of wood he has laid down (Note I am talking about work here)… He used the phrase over and over: Load Bearing. This is kind of what I picture, big columns with ceiling engineering that carry the great weight of great structures for decades if not hundreds of years…

So his point was that in the gospels the load bearing message was family, unity, togetherness, standing up for each other as Christians, children of one Father, sisters and brothers as we move through this earthly experience called life.  The earth shattering part is the idea of load bearing and then this being the main load bearing idea, can it really be that simple ?????

It’s not the first time I have heard this kind of idea in fact it’s also a load bearing, core idea of my church what is so fascinating to me is that it is in fact not only load bearing but maybe the primary load bearing pillar. I could go on and on but NT Wright says it much better than I can and this is not my point anyway, it’s a load bearing part of my point.

So my church made some changes recently to their church service schedule. They dropped the Saturday night service, opened a new service on Thursday night. Leisha and I decided to make some changes in our attendance schedule and our place of worship from the Denton Campus to the Flower Mound Campus, we now go-to Thursday night. This was done for many many reasons and this morning as I wake up early… ahh very early (3:30 am) I am finding myself having the opportunity to begin to prepare my heart early in my day for my part of our Thursday night “church, family” experience. That is my point, I get to do this. Prepare early and spend all day preparing, spend all day in anticipation, spend all day praying and thinking about the worship that will occur, the message that will be presented, the friends I will see, the person Leisha and I might get to pray for post service, the experience of Leisha and I “Doing Church” together.

I would like to comment here on what spurred on these thoughts. After I arrived at my desk (I work from home) this early AM, not wanting to really work yet I have all day to do so, I opened up my bible study software and went to a course on Genesis I am working on. I opened some notes I had entered a few weeks ago and in the notes was the definition of Doxology. In that set of notes was a link to this.

I played it and everything else you just read took off from there. That is the purest essence of Bible study and is such an important part of preparing for Church, preparing to play your part in church… I hope you get the many other points hear without me saying them other than one last point, there is Freedom untold in this kind of lifestyle, at least my experience tells me this.