Dr. Bryan Loritts is the founder and president of The Kainos Movement, and the author of several books including his newest release, The Offensive Church.
Dr. Bryan Loritts is the founder and president of The Kainos Movement, and the author of several books including his newest release, The Offensive Church.
Friendships are difficult.
Sometimes it can seem as if friends are more work and pain than they're worth, with friendship challenges that we have to endure and struggle through. Life gets in the way of our well-intentioned efforts to connect. Conflicts and differences over serious issues divide us and make us think that we could never be close to a person ever again. In today's cancel culture, it's easy to give up on people and just walk away, leaving us all more isolated than before. How can we build real relationships that are life giving and pass the test of time?
Bryan Loritts mines one of the Bible's least-known books for insights into how friendships can flourish even in the midst of sin and brokenness. With careful exposition and insight, he unpacks how the apostle Paul helped Philemon and Onesimus reconcile a most unlikely relationship with truth, repentance, and grace. With God’s work and steadfast love, even the most painful relationships that have ruptured are not beyond the reach of forgiveness and reconciliation. Discover how friendships that are hard can be transformed into friendships that endure.
We are all on a journey. Jesus points to this in Matthew 7 where he says there are two paths, or two journey’s all of us are taking right now. One is the broad path, which Jesus says leads to destruction. The other is the narrow path, which Jesus says leads to life..the abundant life. The critical question we have to answer today is who is leading us? We are all being shepherded by someone or something right now.
If there’s a word which sums up our text this morning, it’s the word, disappointment. Here is Israel, having just escaped the clutches of Egypt at the hand of an amazing God. They’ve walked through the Red Sea, the bible says, on dry ground. I mean their Air Jeremiah’s (as Pastor JD referenced last week) never got dirty. And here they are in the middle of the wilderness, this strange place, and for the past 40 days, God and their leader Moses, is nowhere to be found. This is exactly what our text points to in verse one when it says, “when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain…”. This verse is dripping with disappointment. They are left wondering of Moses and God, where are you? Did you leave us here to die? They are disappointed.
