Churches in Southlake

“as youth sports have started to take over Sundays and Wednesdays, right Mhmm. That it becomes a, if my kids don't have sports, then we'll go to church. Mhmm. Rather than church is the normal, sometimes we miss the gathering, but that is that that's not a normal thing. Yeah. Back to the image that Sheldon used, it's what's at the center of that of that wheel, so to speak. Yep. Right? So sports can be a spoke out from that wheel just like vacation or school or work or but what's at the center?”

“The author of Hebrews says Abraham heads out to a place he has no idea into an uncertain future that God was calling him into. And he goes not with fear, but with hope. Looking forward to where God was gonna take him. Man, that's the kind of person I wanna be. Not someone who immediately jumps to to the worst case scenario and thinks I'm getting fired because my bosses want to chat. But someone who looks forward to what God has for me. I want that kind of faith.”

“to just to close our time, we should probably end this pretty quick here. I want the people listening to feel encouraged that we serve a god who cares for us, and he has given us gifts that are for our good that if we're not careful, we can neglect them for lesser things. And I think that's what we're talking about when we talk about the gathering in the local body of Christ, a gift that's meant to bless us, a gift that we are meant to also be a blessing to others, and we can easily neglect that gift for something that is lesser, like kids sports. Yeah. Once again, it doesn't mean that you can never have your kids plan a Sunday. But if it is the primary and you only are at the gathering if something else isn't going on, you're you're you're choosing a lesser good, and that actually isn't to your benefit. Yeah. He loves you, and he's given you the local church. And that's the the Piper quote. God will never ask you to sacrifice a greater thing for a lesser thing.”

“Include your kids in this decision. No. That's what I was gonna say. Were you? That's great. Yeah. And I don't mean let them decide. Right. No. Yeah. What I mean is include them in the discussions Loop them in. Yeah. Loop them in. That's good. So that they know what you're thinking through. And, like, hey. If it's my son, Liam, we're considering this this basketball league. The problem is your coach said that, like, every other weekend, you have games on Sundays. I don't think this is gonna work for us. This is why we really value the gathering. This what we're called to do.”

“okay. If we're in the midst of sports right now, just taking the last six months or last twelve months, what has the what have those rhythms revealed about our worship and our witness? And so what is our priority as it relates to worship? What what is sports revealed? We're in the middle of them. Okay. So what what's it showing Mhmm. About ourselves? And then, okay, what does it show about our are we engaging Mhmm. Those unsaved families that are also playing sports? Are we having meaningful intentional conversations, or are we just sitting in a part of the stand so, hey, we don't have to interact with anybody? Because sports reveals those things not only in our kids, but also us.”

“as youth sports have started to take over Sundays and Wednesdays, right Mhmm. That it becomes a, if my kids don't have sports, then we'll go to church. Mhmm. Rather than church is the normal, sometimes we miss the gathering, but that is that that's not a normal thing. Yeah. Back to the image that Sheldon used, it's what's at the center of that of that wheel, so to speak. Yep. Right? So sports can be a spoke out from that wheel just like vacation or school or work or but what's at the center?”

“Life is full of transitions and new places and new adventures and uncertain destinations. But the message of our scripture is that instead of us inventing futures for ourselves and imagining all these scenarios where things don't work out, we should just sit still and trust the engineer. We should try to cultivate a little bit of trust. And we do that by reflecting on our past. And we do that by being grateful in our present. And we do that by looking forward to our future.”

“So we need to hear. We need to do what Abraham did and look forward to the good that is ahead. Not trying to control everything and figure it all out because we can't. Here's the kind of scary truth for us. The future is unknown, not just for Abraham, for all of us. But you know what? It's not unknown to God. And so so often, whatever he's calling us to up ahead, it's so much better than whatever we would have planned for ourselves.”

“See, every week I would do this research and I would study these people, and I realized that none of them knew what their future held. Like Francis didn't know if he'd starve. And Susanna Wesley didn't know if she'd be arrested. And Rosa Parks didn't know if she'd ever make it out of that jail. None of them could control the future. But you know what? They all knew who reigned over it.”