After eight years of living and working in the Greater Nashville Church, we have moved back to Texas. However, this time, not to Dallas, where we lived for seven years, not San Antonio,where we helped plant the church but all the way south to the Rio Grande Valley, where our son, Matt and his wife Adriana, lead the church.This was definitely not our plan (although it was more like a long-term retirement dream), but God moves in his own ways. It was totally, as someone in Nashville stated: “A God thing”.
When fellow disciple, friend and Diane’s employer, Dr. Jerry Legreid, ended his medical practice in Tennessee and took a job with Mayo Clinics in Minnesota, Diane began searching for job in an ear, nose and throat clinic as a nurse practitioner. So while on a trip to visit the grandkids and our daughter-in-law, while Matt and I were both out of the country, Diane interviewed in the Valley. To our surprise she was offered a great job, paid moving costs and the promise of time off in the summers to be able to spend more time together working with the churches in the Andean Group in South America.
2009 has been a great year of spiritual growth and teaching
for the Greater Nashville Church. We began this year's journey by sitting at
the feet of Jesus and learning about the kingdom of God.Then, we sat at the feet of Peter and learn
about how different it is to live as a citizen of God's kingdom.
This year, we will help each other put these things into practice.We have chosen Matthew 6:25-34 as our focus
scripture for 2010.From this scripture,
we are pulling out three main themes.
1)Faith.We live in a society that frets and worries about many things.Yet, Jesus tells us that we should not worry
about our clothing, or food or shelter.If we do, He says that we have "little faith".We want this year to be a year that our faith
grows more than ever before.This year, let's
learn to be content with what God has given us.Let's use our faith as motivation to take challenging steps of spiritual
growth as we never have before.
2)Kingdom Priorities. Jesus tells us to
seek the kingdom first.There can only
be one "first" in our lives. The center of our lives must be God's Kingdom.All of our other endeavors must yield to it
and revolve around it.This year, let's
decide to order our lives around the kingdom
of God, rather than
fitting the Kingdom into our already busy lives.
3)Kingdom Righteousness.Jesus also says to seek God's
righteousness.This not only refers to
the righteousness that is credited to us by God's grace, but also the righteous
lives we live in response to that grace.The letters of Paul and others continually call the disciples to leave
their former ways of life and pursue righteous living.This year, let us throw off the sins that
continually entangle us and live righteous lives.Let us also seek righteous relationships.
These three themes will be woven though all our teaching and
preaching during 2010.If we focus on
them and apply them to our lives, there is no limit to how God will bless us as
individuals and as a church.
August 22, 2010