Proverbs 3:9-17

Our guest speaker this Sunday was Franco Salvatori, an Everence stewardship consultant. Due to flight cancellations he couldn't be with us in person, so he shared his message via Zoom.

Consumerism is a unifying religion in America. It's the thing that makes you wish you just had more. But as Christ's followers we're called to worship only one God, and it's not consumption. It's easy to fill our lives with stuff, but still be empty.

The path toward an overflowing life is through wisdom and generosity. Honoring God with our first fruits is the practice of recognizing God's hand in providing the resources that we have.

God calls us to give of our first fruits not because God needs it, but because it actually changes us. It changes our hearts and helps us focus on the giver. As we practice that discipline it creates an attitude in us that Franco called wealth. If we've developed an action of giving and of generosity, because we are seeking wisdom and we're seeking God, then it's the exact opposite of consumerism. And Proverbs tells us that is the pathway to an overflowing life.

Ephesians 1: 15-23 Ephesians 3: 14-21

When you pray to God, what underlying assumptions about God do you bring to the interaction? Do you believe God to be: loving? trustworthy? concerned with your life? These assumptions, and honestly our biases, fundamentally shape how we pray, the nature of our prayer life, and a good portion of our spiritual journey as a whole. Susan Scott preached on the prayer that started in Ephesians 1, was interrupted, and finished in Ephesians 3. What can we learn from this prayer? God is knowable, worth knowing, and stands ready to impart the wisdom and most importantly, the hope that we need. This hope is not for riches or aggrandizement, but rather that God will do what they have promised to do and to aid us in our calling. This hope allows us to wait patiently for the things that God has promised that we do not yet have. Ultimately, this hope is that God will reconcile all things in heaven and earth through Jesus. Hope give us the ability to endure the feelings of helplessness and despair when the world around us seems dark and unredeemable: when all of our efforts to bring light and salt appear futile. Remember that God wastes none of the work that they call you to do and that is all a part of a plan of redemption that started even before Christ appeared.

Ephesians 1:15-23 & 3:14-21

Susan asked us what kind of assumptions we have about God. Our picture of God shapes how we pray just like our assumptions about other people shape those conversations. We're all afflicted with unconscious bias, which we know, but often don't recognize.

The lectionary readings in Ephesians brings us to a great prayer. The prayer, which begins in chapter 1, is interrupted by the author's enthusiastic theological reflections and picked up again in chapter 3. This is a prayer that is useful for any of us. And it's useful for us as a congregation at a time of transition as we're looking to see who God is going to bring us.

Even when you may not feel it, or feel like your prayers are being answered, know that God is utterly caught up in the details of our situation and cares for us more than we care for ourselves. You are precious to God, you are loved, and God is glad to hear from you.

A great help in surviving trying times is the knowledge, or even just the hope, that God is present to us and loves us. Knowing you are loved goes a long way in our ability to persevere.