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Sermon Details
- Pastor Name: Jonathan Cornell
- Date & Time: February 15, 2015 | 10:00am
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SERMON SERIES:
Turning Tables
Have you ever had an experience in your life, one that was pivotal to you life’s course? Was it a good or bad? Maybe it was when you first laid eyes upon that man or woman sitting next to you. Maybe it was a close call where you nearly had something really bad happen. For me, that moment happened on a river. I was a counselor at Camp Ojibway, leading a group of kids from Minneapolis who had never been outside the city, on an inner-tube trip down the St. Croix River.
While about 3 miles from where the bus was to pick us up, the weather turned. A thunderstorm rolled in and lightning began to flash. Floating in a river is not a good place to be when you’re surrounded by lightning. So we pulled all the kids off the river, only there wasn’t path on which for us to walk the remaining 3 miles. So there we were, 8 college students leading 60 screaming elementary school children through tall reeds, not really exactly sure if we were heading in the right direction.
Finally, we did reach the bus and got the children safely on and headed for camp. And as I sat there, I realized that this was a turning point in my life. It was there that I first felt God saying to me, This is what you will do: I want you to walk with people—sometimes even against their wills—into the river, into that chaotic and uncertain place where they must trust God, and lead them through to the place where they can look back and see Christ in the midst of it all.
I also realized that this was a wonderful metaphor for a life of following Christ. Walking hand in hand with people into the places of our deepest fear, our deepest shame, our most profound hope, where all we can do trust God. And it’s there, while everything around us remains fuzzy, that the power and presence of Jesus Christ becomes razor sharp. Sometimes we have to go to the river – or in the case of the passage today, the mountain – to understand and see God clearly.
Download the entire transcript here: Mark 8-9 Go to the Mountain
