God's Desire!

For Sunday January 14, 2024:

2 Peter 3:9b NLT: “The Lord is being patient for your sake. He does not want anyone to be destroyed, but wants everyone to repent.”

As a child, I attended my parent’s church, which displayed a painting that depicted a very tall God standing above a miserable sinner on his knees. God was pointing down toward the fires of hell, inasmuch as saying, “Get down there! That’s where you belong!” Nothing could be further from the truth!

Mankind has been trying to figure out God and religion for thousands of years. Many still get a lot of it wrong! In the back of our minds, we have the Hebrew/Jewish model, whereby we were given God’s laws, God’s commandments, and a pass/fail system for seeing heaven from the inside. That system ignored mankind’s propensity to fall off the straight and narrow path. It ignored repentance, our ability to come to the realization that sinning is wrong and our desire to set things right with the Lord. It ignored teshuvah, “repent and return.” In that old system, mankind was set up for failure, not success!

But let’s not forget God’s desire, that all would repent and return and that none would be lost. This principle is so important that I’m going to go out on a limb and call it the prime directive! It’s the foundation of the New Covenant, the New Deal. It’s about kindness, forgiveness and loving your neighbor. Our God is a God of do-overs, of keep trying until you get it right! He sent Jesus to teach us about this new plan for salvation.

Consequently, churches of the New Covenant will look different. Rather than containing only pious, holier-than-thou souls, a New Covenant church will be filled with reformed sinners, those with changed minds, changed hearts and changed lives – those who have repented and returned.

That’s what a church should look like nowadays! There’s plenty of room to accommodate even more penitent sinners!

Pastor Norton Lawellin

Jesus in the City Fellowship

Return To the Flock!

For Wednesday, October 25, 2023:

Psalm 80:3 TLB: “Turn us again to yourself, O God. Look down on us in joy and love; only then shall we be saved.”

I’ve used this analogy before. When day turns into night, we say the sun set. And when morning comes, we say the sun is rising. In fact the sun is stationary; it is the rotation of our planet that causes day and night. If it’s dark, it’s because we turned away from the sun.

Similarly, God doesn’t turn away from his people. But the Bible contains many examples of people turning away from God. It’s not that they stopped believing; but God had lost his priority in their lives. It happened so often that in the Hebrew language there’s a word for it: “teshuvah,” often spelled different ways. A Rabbi once told me, “I could write it in Hebrew, but in English I don’t know!” It means to turn, to turn a different way, or to re-turn, to turn back so that you can once again face the Lord head-on. In a way, it’s an analogy telling us to give God the priority in our pecking order that he deserves.

So we shouldn’t pray, “God come back to us.” Instead we should pray, “God, turn us back to you!”

God is right where he’s always been!

Pastor Norton Lawellin

Jesus in the City Fellowship

Psalms 66 - Repent First, Then Return

October 17, 2016 Monday Message:

“If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.” Psalms 66:18 NIV

“God has no wish that anyone should be destroyed. He wishes that all should come to repent.” from 2 Peter 3:9 JBP

The Hebrew language uses the word “teshuvah,” which literally means “to turn or to re-turn.” In religious teaching, it means to repent and return – to turn away from our sins, and return to the Lord.

This has been the message described over and over in the Bible, ever since Adam and Eve succumbed to temptation in the Garden of Eden. And God’s desire is still the same for us today – He wants everybody to repent and return.

The Bible describes a sinner as someone far from God. When that person repents and returns, they move closer to God. They were blind, but now they see – their eyes have been opened. They were living in darkness, but have turned toward the light.

It would be easier to “return” if we didn’t have to first “repent,” but it doesn’t work that way. We can’t drag our old sin with us into the presence of God. Psalm 66 teaches us, “If I had cherished sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.” So we need to do life God’s way.

Norton Lawellin

Jesus in the City Fellowship (JICF) meets at the Akina Church, 3249 30^th Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55406, 10:30am. This Sunday, Oct. 23, 2016, Pastor Pilla opens up 1 Corinthians Ch. 4. We welcome guests from Metro Hope Ministries – lunch following the service.