The Branches - First Sermon Series

Our first series of messages at The Branches Community Church is called "Stretched". (By the way Nathan Harris did an excellent job with the series image!)

We live in a culture that pushes us to the limits. Buy more, do more, accomplish more, conquer more and the result is, we are stretched thin. The push from this world is: bigger homes, nicer cars, better clothes, perfect bodies, perfect marriages, and perfect kids. And if we don’t have these things we pretend we do, or we push it to the limit to get them and we’ve lost the space in the middle. It's insane and it's killing marriages and families and people are hurting. Many people are living life at an unsustainable pace and it is not what God intended.

You need to have space between where you are and where you need to be. God invites us to do life differently... to have some margin and to begin to re-prioritize our lives around Him. Matthew 11:28-29

Imagine the practicality of reorienting your life around God and the things that are most important in life. What would it be like creating some space in your life? What would it be like showing up 5 or 10 minutes early to a meeting so you’re not stressed? Imagine having money left over at the end of the month. What if we had such a large space between us and temptation that the pull of doing wrong was significantly reduced? What if we had large reserves of emotional capacity to deal with the inevitable problems that come our way? Imagine having 3 or 4 nights a week, where you don't have anything at all on your schedule. What would it be like in our homes and in our church if we had extra time and extra money to invest and give to people in need around us? What would happen to you spiritually if you finally had space for significant time with God?