One thing I'm thinking about. About where the congregation is at.

We have been preaching repentance for 5 months now, since we started the Psalms of repentence in December. Perhaps more than that. Do we know about the Second Great Awakening? That when that preacher preached repentance for four years straight nothing happened. Nothing visible. But then BOOM!

We have been preaching it also in terms of reverance for God. But do we know what that means? Do we think this building is a time to be reverant for what's in here, and then there's the rest of the week of what's out there? Dallas Willard brings up this idea of "reality" a lot especially in The Divine Conspiracy. He says, "We are talking about reality." And we are. We have reverance for the God whom our shared confession is that He created everything in love, everything that we see!, and that He is truly with us, truly working in these rooms and through all creation, that He still speaks today, that He is moving hearts. We want His kingdom and His rule and reign, we want that to be evident wherever we go, we want it around us, we want it to change everything, we know that the presence of God truly never leaves us unchanged. So we humbly ask that He be with us (check! that's our reality. but what do we mean when we say that? we want a thinning of the veil, we want an apocolypse, we want an increased, felt nearness, we want reverence to that blessing...). We humbly ask that he transform our hearts so that we want what He wants. We want to want what is near to His heart, and to hate and to keep away what is far from His heart... that is our own willful sin, our unforgiveness, our refusal to forgive, our unwillingness to obey the merciful and mighty Jesus Christ, the unfailing, compassionate love of God, our distortions of the gospel, our making God in our image for self-serving apetites, our apathy to the vulnerable, the poor, the freezing, the people not immediately around us when we look around, our spiritual indifference when faced with the discomfort of sharing the mystery of Jesus Christ, what's going to be stronger: our fear, our concerns, our robust thinking around why we wouldn't share the gospel with someone, or the power and righteousness revealed in the gospel itself?

That is a jumbled mess haha. That is not very clear. But there's some stream of consciousness thinking around stuff! Some stuff that I can make more clear. I see at least 2 threads here that I may mention in the sermon: (1) that repentance is good because, when preached, it can be directly correlated to a harvest of righteousness and a work of God that no man could take credit for, and (2) that reverance for God is about the reality that continues going on whether we're in a church building, or a desk, or a hike, or changing a diaper, or anywhere.