Citizens Of The Kingdom | From Residents to Citizens and Neighbours | Pastor Preston | October 30

Lake Ridge Community Church Podcast

Join us on a journey from residents, to citizens and neighbours! See you Sunday!

[00:00:03.310] - Speaker 1

Hi there. My name is Preston Pouteaux. Welcome to the Lake Ridge Community Church Podcast. This is where we share some of our messages from Sunday mornings. So we're glad you're here to listen. We'd love for you to join us in person. We meet on Sunday mornings at 10:30 a.m. At our lady of Wisdom school here in Chestermere. At our core, we're a community of people, so we gather on Sundays, but we also do a lot in the week together. We are people learning to follow Jesus and love our city. So to learn more, visit lakeridgecommunity.com. Hope to check in and visit with you soon. Take care. Thanks for listening.

[00:00:50.250] - Speaker 2

We have time for our community. I think we're going to. Sometimes we come together and share a common language, common ideas. It just puts fuel in us for us to think about what this next season looks like. And so we've been planning this and so we were really looking forward to having everybody come out for that. Also, thank you for your gifts. We have this new little like, touchscreen machine at the back and it's working. So technology. Yay. It seems to be fine. So we are going to keep testing that. So if you test it and you find that it's good, let us know. If you find it isn't good, let us know. We have a few more weeks to just see if this is going to be working for us. Kelly is much better at doing bonfires than I am. Every time we go camping, I do them a whole man thing, right? I got this, right? I don't know if you've been there, guys, but you look at the pile of wood, you look at your box of matches, you look at your cardboard and you're like, I'm going to do the primal thing here, right?

[00:01:52.410] - Speaker 2

I'm going to make fire, right? Anybody been there? And then something really tragic happens. At least it happens for me. I make smoke. Just copious amounts of smoke. I think that I'm about to spark something up. I have everything I need in front of me. All the tools are there and everybody stand back. Children, stand back. You are about to see dad do something amazing and this is what it is. Eventually Kelly in her love for me, waits till the children are gone, waits till I'm covered with smoke and I'm dosing my eyes in the corner. And then she comes up and she does what I couldn't do. She builds a proper fire, right? There's a way of building things. I just pack it all in, right? Hahahaha. Right? I'm going to put all the fuel as packed as I can because I'm going to make a roaring fire and I don't understand something about it. But to build a fire, you don't just throw it all in together. You have to nurture something. I love this poem here. I'm going to read it for us. It goes like this fire. What makes a fire burn is space between the logs.

[00:03:01.710] - Speaker 2

A breathing space. Too much of a good thing, too many logs packed in too tight, condos the flames almost as surely as a pail of water wood. So building fires requires attention to the space in between as much as to the wood. When we're able to build open spaces in the same way we have learned the pile and the logs, then we can come to see how it is fuel and the absence of fuel together that makes fire possible. We only need to lay a log lightly from time to time. A fire grows simply because the space is there with openings in which the flame that knows just how it wants to burn can find its way. There's something beautiful about that. It is the law, yes, but it's a space in between. And so when we build something, we got to pay attention to it and we got to build it in such a way that there's room for something to grow. Clark Pinnack, he wrote about the Holy Spirit extensively, and he called the Holy Spirit the flame of love that grows in between us. And as we build something, we must leave space for the Holy Spirit.

[00:04:16.730] - Speaker 2

To do what the Holy Spirit is doing, that takes time, it takes patience, and it takes maybe a little bit of tender skill that my wife has that I sometimes don't. And sometimes if we take our time with something and we build it properly, we know what we're doing. We can build something that will create a bright, hot flame. We create room for God's spirit to work. I think that's what we've been doing here over this past year at Lake Ridge is we've been creating space for God's spirit. To build Lake Ridge, we want to sometimes pile everything on, but sometimes we got to let the wind blow through. We've been experiencing that. This is a homily, so it's very short. I'm just going to end with the scripture. I want you to see how a bunch of the themes we've been talking about comes through in this Ephesians passage. I think it's glorious. It says this he made peace between Jews and Gentiles between last week we talked about Romans twelve and all these various people that came together, right? It was a complex mix of humans with all sorts of ambitions and so on, but they had one thing in common that was Jesus and the work of the Holy Spirit in them.

[00:05:26.130] - Speaker 2

So he made peace between Jews and Gentiles by creating in Himself one new people from two groups welcome to Lake Ridge. Together as one body. Christ reconciled both groups to God by means of his death on a cross, and our hostility towards each other was put to death. He brought this good news of peace to you Gentiles, who were far away from Him, and peace to the Jews who were near. Now all of us can come to the Father through the same Holy Spirit because of what Christ has done for us. This is good news. So now you Gentiles are no longer strangers and foreigners. I love it. From residents to citizens and neighbours. We are no longer just residents, but we are now citizens along with all of God's holy people. We are home. This is home. This is where we can grow. You are members of God's family. Together. You are his house built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. And the cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself. We are carefully joined together in Him. I love that. Carefully joined together, right? We're making room for everybody to be here. We're making room for the Holy Spirit to move between us, giving air, giving space, so that everybody here can come alight in the Holy Spirit.

[00:06:57.290] - Speaker 2

That's the goal, right? We are carefully joined together in Him becoming a holy temple for the Lord. Through Him, you Gentiles were also being made part of this dwelling where God lives by His Spirit. Friends, today we're going to have a meeting with our leadership team. And I'd like to invite I think Andrea is going to be leading us. So Andrea, feel free to come on up. We're going to learn and we're going to take a look at what the leadership team is going to talk a great deal about what's been going on this past year, where we're going. I hope that between all of the pieces that you would get a sense of God's spirit movie, that you would have eyes to see that God is building something very meaningful here, and that our faithful attending to what God has been doing is turning in to, I think, a beautiful community of people who are lighting a flame and becoming the light of Jesus in this city. Amen. Amen. So let's put on our Jesus eyes and ears to see. And that's a very short little thing that you're going to be talking you.