It's hard to believe we are headlong into summer and graduation for our high school seniors has come and gone.  Speaking of things hard to believe, Ann and I both have our 30 year high school reunions to attend this summer---which by the way neither of us really want to revisit!  Can you say: That 70's Show?  Hey Dude, keep on truckin'....

It's funny, when I meet people who went to high school with Ann, they tell me she was pretty shy.  I didn't know her then, but I have found that very hard to accept.  From the time I met her on a volleyball court at college, she was vivacious and outgoing and confident.  I've asked her about this seeming contradiction.

She said she was a late bloomer and she felt a little self-conscious in a world that was so much about pop culture and which clique you were in.  But when she got to college, suddenly everything changed.  She told me, "For the first time in a long time, the playing field was level."

That's exactly the way God intended for it to be in His Family, in His Church--A level playing field where all that external junk the world judges people by just doesn't matter.  It's the kind of environment in which people can blossom and unleash all the beauty and giftedness God has planted in them.

In Galatians 3:26 and 28 the Word says, "You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus...There is neither Jew nor Greek (that's racial differences), slave nor free (that's class differences), male nor female (that's gender), for you are all one in Christ Jesus."  I wonder if your church feels like that kind of place, your youth group, your Christian group.  That's how it's SUPPOSED to feel.

The culture of money and power and fashion and social groupings is supposed to stop at the door of the Church of Jesus Christ.  I hope it does at yours.  None of that stuff matters to Jesus.  The world has its "power elite" and its "insiders and outsiders."  Don't let that cancer infect your church.  People need to come into a group of Christians and feel level ground--a warm, sincere welcome, no matter how they look, what they have or don't, or what their background.  Anything less is a shameful contradiction of everything Jesus is about--grace and unconditional love.  Remember, "Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart." (I Samuel 16:7)

A story has it that in a large, fashionable church, two people came down the aisle to give their lives to Christ--one was the governor of the state, the other a maid.  The pastor said it all when he said, "The ground is level at the cross."  And maybe only at the cross.  It may be that you have spent most of your life feeling like you were on the bottom-- the outsider.  Maybe even Christians have let Jesus down in how they've treated you.  But I want to invite you to come to the cross where Jesus, the Son of God though you were worth dying for.  He knows all about you--and He loves you.  And He's waiting to welcome you into His family and one day into His heaven, if you'll give yourself to Him today.

Still truckin'

Pastor Art