Naeane Church（Church in Me）

Sunday Message — The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost The Holy Spirit Turns the Burden of the Holidays Into a Place for the Gospel Text: 1 Corinthians 12:12–27 Today I want to preach on this: the Holy Spirit turns the burden of the holidays into a place for the gospel. This week we had a major holiday. People go back to the hometowns they've missed, see their parents, their relatives, their siblings. My own parents have passed away, and my siblings are all scattered, so I'm now in the position of the one who waits, not the one who visits. But whether I look back on the old days or on now, when we meet like this, the first hour or two is truly good. It's a joy — because we've met after months, after years, in some cases after decades. But after a little while, as we start trading this word and that, most of it is self-promotion. I did this, I did that. That's how the relatives talk. And parents, and the older folks, ask, how did things turn out for you? Did...

Sunday Message — The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost The Holy Spirit Turns Our Craving for Recognition Into the Mind of Christ Text: Philippians 2:1–11 Today I want to preach on this: the Holy Spirit turns our craving for recognition into the mind of Christ. Last week was the sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, and I preached about enemies — how, with people we've already made enemies of, and people we'll surely make enemies of yet, we resolve it in Christ, by the help of the Spirit. But when we say enemy, we're talking about a relationship between person and person. So today I want to look inside that enmity. In the end, making an enemy of someone comes from this: inside me there's a desire to be recognized, to be given glory — and when it isn't filled, an enemy-like feeling arises. And when it isn't filled, what forms in the heart is hurt, disappointment, a suffocating frustration. And then, to fill it, we reach for yet another method. So — that hurt...

  Sunday Message — The Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost The Holy Spirit Holds Me First, Before the One I Cannot Forgive Text: Ephesians 4:31–32 Today I want to preach on this: the Holy Spirit holds me first, before the one I cannot forgive. As the title says, the person I cannot forgive is really today's keyword. Living in this world, over the course of your life, you've met many people. So have I. And there is surely someone still unforgiven in your heart. When I live alone, there's no problem — but we have to live alongside people, and we have to see, every single day, even the ones we'd rather not see. And where is that? It may be the home, it may be the workplace, and it is also our church community. When I looked into it, I found that a person, almost inevitably, does not become enemies with someone far away. It's always with someone close that enmity arises. In the end it turns into a quarrel, into anger, and finally an enmity sets in that cannot be for...

 Sunday Message — The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost The Holy Spirit Changes the Way We See Our Family Text: 2 Corinthians 5:16–21 Today I want to preach on this: the Holy Spirit changes the way we see our family. This is the fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost. By your prayers and your help, our church has now stayed with the Holy Spirit as our subject, week after week, from the first Sunday after Pentecost all the way to the fifteenth. Now, strictly speaking I ought to preach text by text, but because I take the text as a backdrop and look at it from the angle of how the Holy Spirit works , I wander off the text quite a lot. Still, since we need to understand the Spirit as a whole, this is how I've been doing it. As I prepared this message, having spoken about the Spirit for fifteen weeks straight, I came to see the whole of it like this. Everything Jesus did while He was here in the body — in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — is exactly what He does in us as the Spirit. That...