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Ministries / Connect with us LifeGroups Kidsrock Highrock Spiritual Guides Soultraining Open Door Immigration Prayer Ministry
Connect with us
LifeGroups
Kidsrock
Highrock Spiritual Guides
Soultraining
Open Door Immigration
Prayer Ministry
Calendar /
about us / Staff Directions Highrock at a Glance Vision and Values History Our Churches Our Extended Family
Staff
Directions
Highrock at a Glance
Vision and Values
History
Our Churches
Our Extended Family
Giving /
Loving Jesus, Serving Salem, Celebrating Life
Proclaiming the Word of Life
Feel free to listen to our sermons directly from the website below.
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Click on File, then "Subscribe to Podcast" and paste the following link in the box that appears: http://www.highrocknorthshore.org/sermonpodcasts?format=rss
This verse isn’t just about Jesus and me. It’s also about Jesus and we. We are supposed to experience the same kind of love in our life with Christ that Jesus experiences with the Father. That’s amazing. But we don’t know what God’s love looks like, feels like, should be like. So we’re given each other - branches all around us, weaving around us, to reflect God’s love for us.
And if we choose to just take and consume and be fed, but never offer to feed others — we’ll just end up rotting on that vine and never fulfill the purposes we were cultivated for.
When Jesus says he is the “True Vine,” he is saying that he is and will do all that Israel and the rest of humanity could never be and could never do for itself. Jesus is doing for us what we could never do for ourselves. Jesus is saying, “I’ve got this,” which means you and I do not have to “got this.”
The trouble is...it’s not always clear in our culture what form that victimhood will take. We know we’re supposed to be suffering for Jesus. But for the most part, we’ve had it pretty good. So a lot of American Christians have started to look for ways that we’re being oppressed, that our values are being co-opted, that the world is out to get us. We’re supposed to be persecuted. So we imagine we are.
Hungering for righteousness means having this insatiable ache to see things made right, in all places, for all people. It means having a desire so deep, so intense, that life isn’t possible without it.
Blessed are the people who pursue wholeness, completeness. Blessed are the people who make space for the gathering together of things that are meant to be whole, but aren’t yet. And that’s all things. Because all things - our relationships, our communities, our ecosystems, our selves and our minds and our ways of thinking about ourselves - they were all meant to be whole, to be sound, to be healthy and safe.
But what if the world doesn’t have to revolve around power, greed, violence and retribution? What if the world is actually designed to function in a completely different way? What if there is another way of looking at the world, a proverbial Earthrise, that provides the perspective to see that power, greed, violence and retribution are actually part of the decaying and corrupt Upside Down?
To put it succinctly: To be meek is not to disavow power or fail to use it or to be powerless — instead, it is to be both in control and mighty on behalf of the other.
But, for many of us, it’s our Winter seasons that seem to last the longest - if not in duration, then in intensity. Our Winters are those seasons characterized by darkness. They’re times of forced inactivity and isolation. Our winters are when our circumstances, relationships, and emotions are lifeless, or at least appear to be.
Jesus has inaugurated the Downside Up kingdom into our Upside down world, flipping the standards of self-sufficiency to relying on God, overturning our tendencies from being self-reliant to relying on God in all things, and returning reality from independence to dependence on God.
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We are a church that seeks to honor God and celebrate our salvation by cultivating a loving Christian community through which people are transformed individually and collectively into the Body of Christ by connecting with God Personally, with God's People, and with God's Purposes.
Original artwork from Highrock Artists
@highrockNS
Highrock Happenings: Sept. 22 - Not in a LifeGroup yet? Here's the scoop! - https://t.co/ssGR7ftqb0 Sep 20, 2019, 1:55 PM
Host an International Student for Dinner! - https://t.co/m4qMWtgrTX https://t.co/4jwkBBjNcv Sep 19, 2019, 9:59 AM
mailing address and offices located at 57 Wharf Street, Suite 3A, Salem MA 01970
781.502.8553