Sunday April 20, 2008

Believe!

One of my favorite sports to watch on TV is professional Basket Ball. And if you know me a
little bit, you know that I am a Maverick’s fan.

The NBA season ended last Wednesday and the playoffs started yesterday and all the
mavericks fans hope for this year to be different from last year.

Last year the Mavericks won 67 games out of 82. A franchise record and I think the third
best record in NBA history.

They won first place and home court advantage. And they lost to the eight place, a so-so
team in the first round, becoming the first -first place to lose to an eight place in NBA history.

Golden State the eight place team I thought was in the right state on mind. All the fans were
wearing a yellow bright t-shirt with a big “I BELIEVE” on the front of it. And their chant was…
I Believe and indeed they believed, they truly believed that they were capable of winning that
series and they did it.
It was like they were getting a kick in their butts, the way the rebounded, the way the driblle
that ball. It was excited to watch even if that meant the death of our team. It was like a
special force had possessed them, they had that killer instint, the eye of the tiger like in the
Rocky movie. It was a force that came from down from their feet and got out them with such
a force that they couldn’t control it.
The power of believing. It seems that when we really, truly believe in something or in
somebody, extraordinary things can happen.

Today, Jesus is saying to us

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.”

What a beautiful statement, what a beautiful invitations. Our Lord is inviting us to believe in
God and also believe in him.

We are so accustomed to think that is enough to say I believe, but until we don’t get the kick
in our butt and go and do we still don’t have a true faith. Faith without works is death.

Jesus knows that the disciples are going to need all of their faith to be able to continue His
mission and unless….unless they made up their mind and start believing with all their hearts
with all their minds they had no chance of survival.

I can only imaging those disciples, feeling confused not to sure what to believe. But I can
assure you that they developed a passion to believe in Jesus a the Mesiah, they believe in
the promise of a new life in Christ to the point than even confronted by death they did not
stop believing.

More than two thousand years later we can testify that those disciples really took heart and
believed in the words and deeds of Jesus. They showed such a faith that through the
centuries we today still are being participates of the blessings given to them a long time ago.
The reason we are gathered today is because those disciples believed.
In Romans we find the following

If God is for us, what does it matter who is against us? (Romans 8:31).

Faith triumphs over fear. Faith can move mountains. Faith is believing in those thing that we
cannot see.

Jesus is offering us the way to the Father. Do we believe Jesus?

A lot of us live lives with no direction, we get up, go to work, go to lunch at noon, get back
home and next day we do it again. Some other spend our whole day just thinking about the
thing that we might do, or will do or could do and even the thing that we did.

We live empty lives. We know that we are alive because we breathe, because our eyes
open every morning to the sunlight.

But our spirits live in the darkness, we want to believe in the creator but we want more proof,
we want to see to believe.

Jesus says I am the way and we say No way.

Jesus says I am the truth but we cannot handle the truth.

Jesus says I am the life but we don’t have a life

But I say to you, .

Jesus is "the way." We will not get lost if we follow Jesus and believe in him with all our
hearts and all of our minds. Jesus calls us to live a life in discipleship, to care for the least
among us, to feed the poor, to love our neighbord like he loved us. Jesus want us to
continue his mission in this world to go and spread the good news.

–– He is "the truth." We will not be deceived if we follow Jesus. We can trust that Jesus will
be with us every step of our journey. We are called to see ourselves, at the foot of tha cross,
we are sinner with no hope for redention until we take that crosss and carry it with Christ. He
is the revelation of the Father and the fulfillment of a promise, forgiveness and acceptance
into God’s kidgdom out the grace. We are so quicl to codemn others but we got to
understand that the true is we are saved because God decide it to be mercufl and in his
grace we live again.

He is "the life."
Jesus becomes the life-giver. He will give us new life at our baptism, by the grace of the
Father we become His children. If we believe and allow Jesus to enter our lives, we will be
living a life with a purpose. It won’t be me, myself and I any more it will be you, Christ and I.

The church asks people to believe a whole host of doctrines, but at its heart the Christian
faith is belief in a person.
If we believe in Jesus, the rest of Christian doctrine hangs together nicely. If we do not
believe this, Christianity makes no sense whatsoever.
A couple of weeks ago I made the comment that we as Church need it to introduce some
kick boxing into our worship service.
Today I say to you, let’s allow the Holy Spirit to kick us in the butt. The ignite our faith and
Believe. Believe that Jesus is in us and because He live in us is no longer what I want but
the Father’s will.

My father is a mechanic, and his philosophy about cars is that you have to learn to drive
stick shift. Otherwise you don’t make it into his standars of knowing how to drive. So I did.
For all of you that know what it feels to drive a stick shift. There is nothing more exicted that
to go from 0 to 65 mph in seconds. And the car still on the first shift.

I hope that today you can go home with your spirit like a standar car. Ready to blow it to first
opportunity.

Believe Jesus is with you.

Amen