This August I’ll be preaching a series called “A Big Life.” I’ll be exploring the premise that the size of a life is determined not so much by how famous a person gets, but by how we deal with three crippling sins: Fear, selfishness, and pride. The idea is that each of these sins put very real walls between us and the life God designed us to live.
Fear puts a ceiling on how high we can grow by capping our dreams with pessimism and preventing us from taking faith risks.
Selfishness puts walls on how broad our life can venture beyond our own needs and desires by reducing life to two anemic letters: ME.
Pride puts a bedrock between us and how deep we can go with God and prevents us from depending on him fully for supernatural power that could help us transcend our own limitations.
What about you? How have your struggles with fear, selfishness, or pride kept your life from becoming all it could be?
Just today those three ideas (fear, selfishness, and pride) came up in my prayer. May you have divine wisdom to preach the truth about getting past them!
Fear is always a big deal, even to the smallest degree like killing spiders, (I dislike them intensely), I pray I am not selfish but we all are to some degree, and pride, wow not sure how to deal with that, for years my self esteem was so low when I got some I felt too full of pride which actually was probably healthy self esteem. Are they similar? not sure.
Ahh, just struggling with a similar passage in Corinthians!
“I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn’t fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way.”
How do we get this BIG life??
The word ‘fear’ is jumping out at me recently. Case in point: in two of the readings in the Anglican Lectionary this week, God tells his followers not to be afraid, so I’ve built our church’s worship music set around the theme of fear. … But fear is an elephant in so many rooms and a topic in so many Scripture readings that I could probably do this every week and get away with it. Anyway, I look forward to the August series. (Incidentally, iTunes hasn’t posted a new DCC post since Grace Already Won, as far as I can tell. Is there a new location for downloadable audio versions of your sermons online?)