In 2009, Gustavo Dudamel, at age 28, became the youngest person ever to be named the Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He’s also the music director of the Gutenberg Symphony and the Simon Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela.

Coming out of the Venezuelan music system that engages children from impoverished areas, he had burst on the classical music scene as “a conducting animal.” While rehearsing the renowned Vienna Philharmonic as a guest conductor, he challenged them at one point to “play with more blood.” He told the musicians that blood should be splashing on their faces as they attacked the piece.

Incredibly talented and hard-working, there is one word that describes him best: passionate.

He is passionate for music.

But he is more passionate for people.

His passion changes everyone around him.

Passionate is not a word we often associate with God. God’s too dignified, too holy, too preoccupied with correct beliefs and proper behavior.

Well, to understand what I will be teaching this Sunday at the Gathering Church, you’ll need to know how passionate God is.

Passionate for what?

For you.

In 1 John 2:28-3:10, God’s passion is unmistakable. And the impact of that passion is unmistakable. People live well, like children of God, like people who will stand with Jesus one day.

This Sunday – Loved: The Way to Know Ourselves.

The soul being so precious, and salvation being so glorious, it is the highest point of prudence to make preparations for another world. Thomas Watson, 1666

I was tired and more than empty from the busy demands of life and ministry when I discovered in a bookstore this volume written by a seventeenth-century English Puritan.

Perhaps it was the different language, but I was instantly both pierced and freed by a moment of clarity.

My life is incredibly valuable. God made it that way. What God has done through Jesus Christ to restore life is amazing. The only sensible thing is to devote my life to things that will last forever in the life that God gives us.

A transcendent sense of eternity . . . immediately renewing. Immediately focusing me on what matters most.

But why is that sense of meaning so elusive? So easily lost?

This Sunday at the Gathering Church I continue a study of 1 John, a letter that teaches how to know and experience life with God now and forever. 1 John 2:12-27 gives a great picture of what that life is like, but it also clearly identifies what makes God seem unreal to us.

Bottom line: to truly know and experience God means always swimming upstream. Currents in this world will take us away from God.

For instance, the current of achievement produces anything but serenity and trust in God’s presence and purpose.

What other currents, do you think, may be taking people away from God?

Obedience.

What impressions, thoughts or feelings does that word prompt in you?

Are you instantly inspired? Are your passions suddenly elevated to a higher level of devotion?

I wish mine were.

Instead I tend to think of restriction, control, of having to do something that you would prefer not to do. Obligation. Conformity instead of free expression. The school to which you take your dog so you can manage it better.

Perhaps I’m the only one who distorts such an essential spiritual concept.

At the Gathering Church I’m doing a message series, Included: Participating in the Life of God. It is based on 1 John, a letter written fifty to sixty years after Jesus’ resurrection. Its purpose is to help people be sure about what it means to experience God’s life.

And guess what?

After honesty, obedience is the next factor that describes how God works in our lives.

The outcome is anything but controlled, restricted people gritting their teeth to live up to some impossible standards.

See for yourself in 1 John 2:3-11.

Am I the only one who doesn’t have an immediately positive reaction to the concept of obedience?

What’s your reaction?

I wonder if there’s going to be a video, Secret Service Gone Wild.

It’s big news this week about how the Secret Service advance team for the President, along with some military folks, spent their advance time with prostitutes in Cartagena, Columbia.

A church home page should probably be above mentioning something so sordid, but it leads to a confession.

My own.

I wasn’t shocked.

I don’t think that I’m particularly negative or cynical. What concerns me is that I’ve grown accustomed to a dark world, where apparently “good people” do some really bad things.

At the Gathering Church this Sunday we are on the front end of a new study in 1 John. This letter uses the simplest language to draw contrast between the things that help people experience God and the things that destroy us.

Light – Darkness

Truth – Lies

Love – Hate

Of God – Of The Devil

I have to admit, I’ve never been much of a fan of 1 John, except for a few select verses that we all love. (Gee, my second confession in this post.) Its style is repetitive, like a NASCAR race, round and round. But as I study it, the power of this letter comes out.

For instance, it challenges us to understand what authentic experience with God really looks like. John explains why there are Christians who aren’t really Christians at all.

What is life with God really like? This series, Included: Participating in the Life of God, will help us know the reality of God.

This week – Light: The Way of Honesty, 1 John 1:5-2:2.

It was the most amazing feeling.

I don’t think that any of us ever forgets it.

The first time we ride a bike without training wheels.

Maybe it was the combination of mild terror and desperate pedaling.

For me it was the transformation.

No one running behind me, holding onto the seat. No rattling training wheels slowing me down.

To this day when I ride a bike the first minutes are like magic again and I can’t believe I’m getting to do it.

The new ease and freedom of something previously unknown becoming absolutely familiar. It’s great.

This Sunday I begin a new message series at the Gathering Church: Included: Participating in God’s Life. 1 John is going to be the guide.

As I prepare I have realized that in many ways I’m still using training wheels when it comes to God. That realization comes from a hint that there is a bike-riding potential with God that is greater than we imagine.

John, in this letter, makes it clear that Christ coming to this world was so that people might be included in God’s life, that people might experience the life and joy that God has, that God enjoys with His Son, that the first followers experienced and now want to share.

It’s easy to reduce the Christian life to believing the right things and behaving the right way, having the right social views. Those things are training wheels. They don’t represent bike-riding at all. No wonder the Christian life sometimes looks so irrelevant or unattractive. It’s way too narrow and controlling.

Not enough bike-riders having a blast experiencing God’s life.

This Sunday begins with 1 John 1:1-4.

Every Easter it occurs to me:

How strange it is that we have this big celebration about someone who lived over two thousand years ago in a culture totally alien to us.

That people still today claim to be his followers.

That people still today claim that this person changed their life.

How is it that anyone is still talking about Jesus?

The tomb was empty.

“He is risen.”

What’s the most compelling evidence that it was true?

The change in the lives of the followers of Jesus and those who would believe their message.

This Sunday the Gathering Church will have a great celebration of the resurrection life of Jesus Christ. It’s a life we not only celebrate, but a life we experience.

Invite someone to share the celebration with you.

They will be glad you did.

Oh, yeah. The kids will have an Easter Egg Hung. 1,000 eggs. So, bring a bunch of kids.

What would you do?

If you won the New York Mega Bucks Lottery this weekend. It’s up to $540 million and the frenzy to buy tickets is one of the lead stories of the day.

Imagining what you would do with all that money could identify some of your strongest dreams. What would most change about you? Would anything change about the world in which you live?

Or maybe you don’t win the lottery but you’re the highest earning hedge fund manager in the country. You know how much you made last year?

$3.9 billion.

That’s not what your company earned, that’s what your personal income was. Your company earned more than Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay combined.

What would be your best goal?

This Sunday begins the week leading up to Easter, Holy Week. Christians celebrate Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem. After three years of preparation Jesus arrives for the Passover Feast as the big story.

He’s got Jerusalem right where he wants it. Even stages his entry to match the highest expectations the Jews could have.

In John 12:12-26 Jesus clarifies his ‘dream’.

What will he do when he has it all?

What’s his best goal?

His answer teaches us what is essential about a best goal.

Welcome to Holy Week this Sunday.

“You seem especially grateful for what I did for you today,” said my wife when I came home.

She had helped me get my car inspected. It was way overdue and afterwards required going to the DMV to get the registration. And she did that.

Who’s not grateful when someone goes to the DMV for you?

It wasn’t hard.

Have you ever noticed how gratefulness makes us better people? (I wish my gratefulness wasn’t a surprise to my wife.)

This Sunday from Romans 11:33-12:2 I get to teach about how we best respond to what God has done for us. Completing the First Things First message series about worshipping God I come to the passage that describes the essence of worship.

Hint: It changes us in the best ways.

How is it that the change people can experience can actually match how great is the cause of that change?

This Sunday.

“Would you like God to be for you?”

It was a simple question I asked at the end of a sermon a number of years ago.

And it troubled Peter the next week. He had just started attending the church. In his mid-fifties he had never had any use for church or a belief in God, but a co-worker whom he respected had invited him.

He made an appointment with me and when I welcomed him to my office I noticed that he looked as comfortable as someone needing a root canal.

If there really was a God was there also a way to truly know that God was for us?

Answering that question, Peter suspected could change maybe everything he thought about life.

This Sunday at the Gathering Church I get to teach from one of the most powerful passages in the Bible, Romans 8:29-39. Continuing the First Things First message series about centering our lives in an authentic worship of God I get to face a particular challenge. How can we really love and honor God when things aren’t going so well.

Without doubt we are at our best when we can get a sense of God’s perspective on what’s happening to us.

This Sunday God’s perspective shows up huge.

And I can’t wait to tell you about it.