“Leave it better than you found it”. The phrase originated with Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouting movement, who said, “Try and leave this world a little better than you found it” in his final message to Scouts. It has become ubuiqituous as we hear it in so many places, particularly in workplaces.
But how do we live this out in our lives as Christians and even more pointedly at church? I believe one of the key drivers is the lenses in which we look at and speak to others about our faith. Do we see and speak of the “Good News” of Christianity or “Bad News” religion. As a friend and theologian said years ago, “the church has a sin problem.” The problem is the church wants to talk more about sin and less about grace.
Grace is the more powerful of the two. Grace wins every time. Grace is THE life changing GOOD NEWS! Yet the evil one gets us to focus not on Our Fathers grace but on our what’s wrong with us, crippling us with shame and even worse, has us not focusing on ourselves but focusing on others sin. This is the bad news religion. This is what the world is always telling us, we’re not good enough because of this or that thing and there is always another thing.
This focus on bad news religion leaves us cut off from God and powerless to engage the one who saved us. Even in our churches, which should be the very refuges for all, bad news religion gets us to choose up sides on the smallest of things creating factions and cliques. It creates schism as John Wesley preached about it in his sermon “on Schism” (spoiler alert Wesley’s view of schism is not likely what you think it is.. https://wesley.nnu.edu/john-wesley/the-sermons-of-john-wesley-1872-edition/sermon-75-on-schism/ )
In this weeks sermon, we’ll be looking through these different sets of lenses of good news and bad news religion can even affect how we see the scriptures and can cause us to even misread the scriptures. We’ll be while looking a Luke 15.
As we come to giving Sunday, consider the good news as it relates to the vows we have taken as United Methodists:
Baptismal Vows:
(1) to confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior;
(2) to believe in the Christian faith as contained in the Old and New Testaments;
Professing Member Vows:
(3) To support The United Methodist Church;
4) To uphold the local congregation with one’s prayers, presence, gifts, service ,and witness.
Consider what the good news has meant to you. What value does it have in your life? What value proposition does the good news have for our hurting world now and in the future. What are we willing to invest in the good news to leave Douglasville better than we found it?