The Lifeboat - Teach Me to Row - Audio
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Look, I'm Tom, I'm this lead pastor here at coast and we are so glad you're with us. We are getting near the ends of our series, The Lifeboat. The Lifeboat is kind of a way of just thinking about who we are and what we're doing here. We've been imagining that in the before times, before we, it's not necessarily in church, but when things, before we really had questions and fears and concerns, whatever that was, when life was just kind of on autopilot, we've been calling out the cruise ship. That's when, whatever thoughts we had, we weren't too concerned about stuff. We just kind of went along to get along, and thanks, man, and it wasn't like we had to worry too much. All the answers, all the questions seemed answered, but then something happened and that is different for all of us, but something happened where the cruise ship, the life that we were just on autopilot, that life sank out from under us. And so for some of us, that could be stuff as crazy as jail. For some of us, it's stuff that we did, for some of us, it's stuff that was done to us. You know, it's not, it's different for every person. Every story and every person here has a different story. And so, whatever it was, we found ourselves drowning, we found ourselves being dragged down by the patterns of life that we are in, the beliefs that we had. We just life stopped making sense, and we were falling apart in one way or the other. And at that time, the reason you are here today is that somehow Jesus got ahold of you. He dipped his arm in the waters, and he pulled you out. He pulled you out from the sinking cruise ship. That thing was done, and he pulled you into the lifeboat. And that's the church. That's where we are. That's what we're doing. We're in a lifeboat together. And over the course of this series, we talked about what it looks like to get pulled out. We've talked about the first thing that you've got to do when you get in the lifeboat. You've got to dry off. The icy waters, the wind, the chill, your old life is just clinging on, so you've got to get out of that. And then you've got to get fed. You have to start learning a new way of doing life, because the lifeboat operates in an upside-down way. We talked about Jesus teaching, especially in the Sermon on the Mount. But really, any of his teaching, it's like that's not cruise ship life. This is a completely different way of operating. And then last week, we said once you've got a taste for that, you started to think that way and not the way that you've been thinking, you've got to learn to row. The lifeboat needs rowers. And rowing, as we talked about, can be anything that strengthens the lifeboat and the crew. It could be anything that helps us complete our mission, which is finding more people who are drowning. That's what rowing is. Rowing should not get put into a little box of certain things that some special people do and you don't. We're going to talk about that, especially today, because there's a big misconception that what church is about is the people who can sing or play an instrument or speak or who know a bunch of stuff.
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Coast Bible Church, PastorTom Bennett, San Juan Capistrano, CA, www.coastbible.org