Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart. Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art. Thou my best thought, by day or by night. Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light.

I thought I would take a moment and catch you up on where the Session is in the work they have been doing on creating a descriptive for the identity of CCPC. They have been going through a process of discernment, prayer, and sharing on who we are as a church for a while now. Our series on the purple church was, and still is, part of this discussion.

The fact of the matter is that we are not the same church we used to be. A church will often realize this numerous times throughout its life. Churches change because churches are organic entities. Biblically speaking, one would describe the church as alive, which is why people like Paul use the image of a body to describe the church. We are the body of Christ, not the Christ in the tomb, but the resurrected Christ alive in the world. Throughout life, how the church defines itself will therefore change. We are in a time like that.

At the end of 2018, the Session completed what might be called the “organic” part of the process where we provided input to help clarify Canyon Creek’s identity. Now a smaller group from the Session is taking all of that “data”, is also seeking additional input from individual members, and is seeking God’s guidance in returning to the Session with a recommendation for what we hope will become a defining statement of this church that will help carry us through this next season of life together. It is a daunting, exciting, humbling, deeply spiritual thing they are doing.

My thought to you is to be praying for this part of the work. Join me in asking God to continue being the vision of this church. “Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart.”

“Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” (John 2:10)

This is a quote from the wedding at Cana, the story we talked about on Sunday. Going to the wedding was, for John at least, the first stop Jesus made as he began his ministry. In the story, the mother of Jesus (John never says Mary) did her “mom” thing and got Jesus to do something about the fact that they had run out of wine. Jesus conceded by turning water into wine. As John tells it, no one knew where this new wine had come from, hence the comment from the steward. The only ones who knew were the servants and the disciples. The story ends by stating that the disciples believed in him.

On Sunday, we talked about how Jesus brought new life to this party, a sign of the new life he ultimately brings to us. Another way to listen to the story, though, is to focus on the wine itself, with the steward’s comment serving as a foreshadowing of the cross. The good wine being served when we think the party is over points us to Jesus giving us his very best on the cross when we think his life is over.

It may help to tell you that the amount of wine Jesus made was way more than the people could possibly consume. They had already drunk plenty of wine, and now they have more than they could finish. We have already been living life, but on the cross and through the empty tomb, Jesus offers us more life than we could ever live. It is God’s absolute best, abundant grace that can never be fully consumed and will always fill us to overflowing. Not everyone knows this, but we do. In Jesus Christ, God saves his very best for last. Like the disciples in the story, may we find ourselves believing too.