Worship Service on Sunday, June 23, 2025
All right. Well, thank you, Vicky. And it’s great to be with you, Church. And I’m here with my lovely wife, Kay. And I was a pastor in Malibu Presbyterian Church for nearly 20 years. Kay and I are now discerning our next call and very excited to be with you today. I’m also here with my awesome cousin, Leona. So it’s great to be here.
I have some slides. I’m going to try to see if this works. I haven’t used Can you see that? I just kind of find it’s helpful. I want to show a lot of my summer vacation pictures. And I have to say this, if you fall asleep, so if you fall asleep before I finish speaking don’t worry I’ll catch up with you. I have not been to Gardnerville before but it is a lovely town and great to be with you and meet some of you a little bit beforehand. I grew up skiing here in Tahoe. How many of you are skiers? You like to ski?
All right. Well, I grew up skiing. We’d come up with my family from Southern California and we’d drive on up and we’d stay with my cousin Leona. She’s a little bit older than I am. And so I would get hand-me-downs from Leona. And so that was my ski equipment from Leona.
And we were skiing. But we went skiing. Do you remember this kind of skis where you had to – it was a cable that wrapped around the boot? Yeah, put the thing over and we had the leather ski boots. You remember the leather ski boots? You tie them up and they were just, you know, there’s no insulation in those boots, right?
I mean just leather and it just, you know, sewed onto the rubber soles. Then you’d wear, you know, put on a couple of thick socks, you know, to kind of keep your feet warm. Well, so that’s how I skied most of my time. Actually all the way up until high school.
I was skiing in those up until high school because the ski equipment stopped flowing down my way from Leona. At some point, they would just stop flowing down to me. And I think it was right at the time when the buckle boots came in. And Leona wasn’t passing those on down.
She was kind of holding them. She’s like, I’ve got these. They’re good now. And I think I was getting them also from Owen at some point.
I was getting handed down from Owen. So I was still skiing in those boots. And I remember there was one time when my family was skiing in – we’re skiing in Mammoth and I was skiing with my dad and it was the last run of the day my dad and I said, “Hey let’s go let’s go up, and you know we got a chance for one more last run and and we’re skiing in those old ski boots.
And I have to say this too, when I was skiing in Mammoth, there was one time where I walked into the warming hut too. And when I would do that, before I’d go in, I’d pack snow on my boots so that no one would see that I was still on skis. I was a teenager, I was a freshman in high school, I’m packing on snow. And I remember walking in the warming hut and seeing my boots and skis on the wall. So anyway, so it’s the last run of the day with my dad and he says to me “I’m skiing, I think it’s chairlift three or chairlift five.
It’s a really, it’s a nice, really long, steep kind of run. And there’s a section right underneath the chairlifts where there is some powder. And my dad, and my dad’s a big guy. He’s bigger than I am, taller than I am. I didn’t get the height that he had. He was bigger than I am. And my dad wore green. He was all green with a white hat.
That’s, I mean, if you can imagine the jolly green jacket, that was my dad. And so he skis on down and you know so he’s skiing from groomed snow into powder heavy powder deep powder And you can imagine, so my dad’s just gaining speed up, and I’m just watching him. And he just goes as fast as he could, hits the powder. Now, you know what happens when you hit powder?
He just sank and he launched. He launched about 15 feet in the air and just did a somersault and was flipping around. And I was like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe that’s my dad. So I decided I’m going to go ahead and go into the ski lift line because it’s almost closing.
I want to get one last run. And I think my dad’s going to catch up to me. And so I see my dad struggling. He’s waist deep.
He’s trying to find his skis. He’s wearing his skis and his pole. He’s trying to find all this clothing and gear. So I ended up getting up. I get on the chairlift. And I’m with this guy in the chairlift, and he says to me, where he wiped out was right near the chairlift. And the guy says to me, can you believe what that guy just did? I didn’t say, yeah, that’s my dad.
I didn’t tell him that. So I go on up, and I’m waiting for a while. I’m like, OK, why is my dad not catching up to me? And then I decided, well, I’ve got to ski down.
I don’t know what happened to him. So I ski on down, and then I see my dad walking with his ski boots, or with his skis, walking down the hill. And I ski up to him and I said, Dad, why aren’t you skiing down the hill? He says, “I can’t. The soles of my boots are still on the skis!”
That’s my skiing experience, but I actually love to ski. So from there I’ve gone skiing all over California, Colorado, Utah. Skied in Vermont. Still wants to talk to me. Yeah, skied over the Alps. I love to ski, so it’s one of my great passions.
Well, I don’t want to talk to you about skiing. I do want to talk to you about what scripture that we have for you today that I want to reaffirm to you. And that is from Matthew Chapter 5. And here it is. I hope you can see that. Yeah.
Okay. Jesus says to his people, to his disciples, that “you are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a pole. Instead, they put it on the stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.”
Friends, I want to affirm to you that you are the light of the world. Can you knuckle-bump the person next to you and just say, hey, you are the light of the world?
You are the light of the world. You are the light of the world. Isn’t that, that’s an incredible statement that Jesus makes to his disciples. He doesn’t say that to, you know, the camels. He doesn’t say that to the donkeys. No one else has that title of being the light of the world. Only we do. It’s a significant calling. That’s an incredible calling. It’s an amazing calling.
I don’t know how you feel when I say to you, you are the light of the world. You might go, um, I’m not exactly sure about that. Are you sure? You know, it’s me. Have you seen who we are? I don’t know. I don’t necessarily always feel like I am the light of the world. Sometimes this is how I feel when I hear, you know, someone says, Greg, you’re the light of the world. I feel like this. I feel like this donkey. Have you seen that donkey? I mean, it’s overloaded and burdened as like, how can I be the light of the world? There’s no way that’s me. And you might say, there’s no way that’s us. As a church, how can we be the light of the world? Might say that I am not enough and I’ll never be enough. I don’t have what it takes to be the light of the world. You know, it’s overwhelming. It’s too much for me. I don’t know if I can handle it.
One of the things that I have done so recently, as I mentioned, I was a pastor for nearly 20 years in Malibu. And I honorably retired, perfect timing just before COVID hit. And I wanted to spend more time with my family. And one of the things that I enjoyed was actually going around to different churches. Because I had grown up, I didn’t say this, but my dad was a pastor. So I grew up really in a couple churches my whole life. where I went to my dad’s churches and then I was a pastor.
So those are four churches basically that I went to my whole entire life. So for the past few years, I’ve enjoyed going to different churches and kind of seeing what’s happening out there. And to be honest, you know, as I visit the churches, I have often left feeling more exhausted, more weighted down like the donkey.
I mean, I kind of feel like when I sometimes and I’m not talking about this church. I felt more weighted down in like, oh, so much more for me to do. And I went to this one where I live in Southern California. It’s a mega church, one of those really big mega churches. And the pastor was talking, it was pro tips for prayer. Now I’m not against prayer by any means. I think prayer is a great thing. But as pro tips on prayer, and I was kind of thinking as the pastor was starting that, okay, I’ve got this. I’m a pastor. I’m a pro-prayer. I mean, when I go to places, you know, if I’m at an occasion, you know, people will ask me to pray. I’m the pro-prayer, right?
And I’ve preached many sermons on prayer before. So that’s something, you know, I feel like, yeah, I’ve got this. So pro-tips on prayer. And as he was going on and on, and on.
I went from pro to NCAA division one, two, three. I sailed past junior varsity and I ended up in peewee league. I mean, I was with the preschoolers and I was like, oh my gosh, this is, you know, wow. How, I mean, he was talking, you know, about how, you know, raise your level of prayer And I’m for that, but the irony, what he was talking about is that we all need to find a block to pray at least one hour at a time.
And I have no problem with finding blocks for one hour at a time. But the irony of it is that his passage was from Matthew Chapter 6. In Matthew chapter 6, if you know about that, Jesus says to his disciples, they say, hey, teach us to pray. And Jesus says, you don’t have to pray like the pagans, because they think their many words are the, you know, that find favor with God, and it’s because of your many words, or your right words, or, you know, you might say the right things.
And Jesus says, don’t worry, your Father knows what you need, even before you ask. The irony is that when Jesus teaches to pray, he teaches it with a sense of grace, not a sense of, you know, a laborious act. And it was so ironic that he took a passage that was about God’s grace in prayer, and he turned it into an act of works. And that’s kind of what happens, I think, in a lot of Christianity today.
What concerns me, frankly, is that we lost a sense of grace. And often when we go to church, we feel overloaded and overwhelmed and it is kind of like this. It’s like, this is what, you know, church is about. We come to church to get pumped up, you know, and just, you know, bolt up and get all these muscles so that I can go out and be the light of the world.
You know, how to, how to get really strong and pro tips for weightlifting. But friends, I want to tell you that Christianity is not primarily an ethical way of living. Christianity is 99.9999999% of what God has done for us, not what we do for God. 99.9% it is mostly God and it’s not us. It’s not what we do. Sometimes we get that backwards. Let me share how that works. Let’s take a quick run through biblical history.
Here’s one example. This is from Zachariah. This is Zerubbabel. This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel. I’m just going to say Z. This is the word of the Lord to Z, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit”, says the Lord Almighty. And then he says, “Who dares despise the day of small things? Since the seven eyes of the Lord that reigns throughout the earth will rejoice when they see the plumb line in the hand of Zerubbabel, Z”.
Zerubbabel. What a name. So here’s the scene. So Zerubbabel is the governor of Judea, and he feels called to rebuild the temple. And others had tried to rebuild the temple. This is after they’d been taken away in captivity. Now they’ve returned back. And others had tried to rebuild the temple and there’s opposition and others saying, oh, how could you do that?
You don’t, you know, who are you to rebuild the temple and so on and so forth. And Zerubbabel says, you know, he’s getting called by God and God says, you can do this and it’s not going to be because of you, but it’s because of me. And then he encourages Zerubbabel, don’t, don’t give in to those who say, “who are you to do this”? Don’t listen to the opposition.
And then, you know, who dares? Who dares despise the day of small things? We might as a church feel like, well, “We’re just a small church. Who am I?”
But when we think that way, when I think that way, I’m missing the point. It’s not about me. It’s not about me bulking up. But it’s about me being connected to the power of God and being encouraged by Him to do the small things. And what Zerubbabel is doing is he’s starting the plumb line. He’s going to start to, you know, get things going. And that’s where it starts. It starts with a small thing. Here’s how it works in biblical history.
You remember Gideon? The story of Gideon? I love that story. It’s one of my favorites. So Gideon is, he’s threshing wheat in a wine press. Not out in the open air where you kind of throw up the wheat and the chaff blows away and the kernels fall down.
He’s doing it in a wine press because he’s afraid that the Midianites would see him and would come and take his grain. So he’s really afraid. The angel of the Lord meets him in the winepress and says, “Oh mighty warrior, oh mighty”. And Gideon says like, “Who me? Are you kidding? Do you know who I am?” And Gideon says to him, he says, you know, “I’m from the tribe of Manasseh. We are the weakest tribe of all the 12 tribes. We are the weakest. You must have gone to the wrong, the wrong guy if you’ve come to me”. And Gideon then says, “And I am the weakest of my family. We’re not only the weakest tribe, but I’m the weakest of my family. Who, what are you doing coming to me?” And you know, he does these series of things. He tests God, you know, is this really, you know, you and he does, he does find out that God is really calling him. And so when he gets the chance, when he’s going to go against the Midianites, God tells him, I want you to assemble an army, you know, because you’re going to go, there’s a swarm of Midianites that are coming to attack, you know, Israel.
He assembles an army against 22,000 soldiers to be on his side. And God says to Gideon, Gideon, we have a problem here. And Gideon says, I know we have a problem. We are outnumbered. They have an army that’s like the locusts, Gideon says. They have an army that’s like the locusts. Too many to count. And we are under-resourced. They have so many camels. We can’t even count the camels. We don’t have any camels. We are outmanned and out-resourced.
And God says, “Nope, that’s not the problem. You actually have too many. Tell those that are afraid to go home and 12,000 then leave”. And Gideon, I mean, you can imagine, you know, Gideon then being afraid. Well, I just had 22,000, now I have 10,000. Gideon goes back to the Lord. God, we’ve got a problem. I just lost more than half my congregation. They all left. They were all afraid. And God says, yeah, you’re right. You’re still too big. You need to cut your numbers down. And he cuts them down to 300. And that is with that. And then God tells him, here’s what I want you to do. You’re going to carry a trumpet. You’re going to carry a jar and a torch in the jar. And when I give you the command, we’re going to go up and we’re going to encircle the camp of the Mighty Knights. 300, you know, and then when I give the toot the horn, you’re all going to toot the horn as well.
And we’re going to break the jars and light our torches. And I can imagine someone says to Gideon, I think that there’s the, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Mishnah. It’s a Jewish commentary. There really were 345, but there were 45, it says, that said, we’ve never done it that way before. That’s not how you fight a war. You don’t fight a war with a trumpet, a jar, and a torch. So those 45, they left, and it was only 300, you know. I’m just kidding, that wasn’t in the mission.
It sounded really good. Anyway, so 300 and they go up, they blow the trumpet, they break the jars, and they light the torch, and what it causes is panic in the camp. And then they start, the Midianites start, and the Dead of Night start fighting each other, and Israel is saved. With that – crazy, who does a trumpet and a torch and a jar as a battle plan? I mean, that’s how God works.
Here’s another one. I love this. Jonathan is armor-bearer. Real quick, talk about this. The Philistines now are coming after Israel, and Jonathan the armor-bearer says, hey, and the army is as numerous as the sands on the seashore. I mean, if you’ve been to the seashore, you’ve seen how much sand. I mean, so much. And there’s like 30,000 chariots also. The Philistines have an army as vast as the sands on the seashore, 30,000 chariots. Saul, who was the king at that time, doesn’t know what to do. He is petrified when he sees the army advancing around them.
Jonathan says to his armor-bearer, they have two swords in Israel’s army. And Jonathan says to his armor-bearer, he says, let’s go circumcise some uncircumcised Philistines. That’s what he says, kind of. That’s supposed to be funny. But he says, “Hey, let’s go. We’re going to go up and we’re going to attack them”. And he says, “God can save by many or by few”. That’s what he says, his armor bearer. And his armor bearer says, “Whatever you have in mind, I’m with you wholeheartedly”. So Jonathan’s armor bearer goes up and shortly, they defeat 20. Have you ever taken 20 grains of sand out of the seashore? Does that make a difference? You know, 20
years, looking at it, you go, that’s nothing. But what happens? That, whatever Jonathan’s armor bearer did, it caused a panic in the camp of the Philistines. God also caused an earthquake. And then what happens again? They start fighting each other and Israel is saved. Because two guys with one sword go up and a panic ensues and God causes an earthquake. That’s how God works.
Here’s another example. The angel’s announcement, right? The angels come to the shepherds and they say to you, you know, the Messiah is born and you know, the Messiah is the liberator. You know, they’ve been living under Roman oppression.
They’re waiting for the Messiah. The Messiah is here and you might think, oh great, he’s on, you know, he’s on Mount Zion and he’s got some tanks and he’s ready to throw out the occupiers. What’s the announcement? And he’s, and it’s a baby wrapped in diapers. You know, he’s like, oh, come on. We want the takes. We want art. We want to blow him away. Let’s just free him up. And no, it’s a baby.
Oh, here’s another one. Jesus feeds 5,000. You know, there’s these disciples. See that and they say, “You know, hey, Jesus, Jesus, tell the crowds to go away. There’s too many of them. We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the money to pay for them, the food, just send them away.”
Jesus says, well, what do you have? Well, we have five fish, two loaves. Jesus said, “That’s enough. That’s all I need. Bring it to me”. They bring it to him. He breaks the bread, breaks the fish, feeds the 5,000. That’s how it works.
How about this – one cup of cold water? Jesus says when you offer a cup of cold water in my name to someone, you’ve done it unto me. Jesus does not say when you have served in the jungles of Africa for 10 years, you’ve done it unto me. He doesn’t say after you’ve been a junior high Sunday school teacher for five years. He doesn’t say all that. It’s very simple. If you give a cup of water in my name, if you clothe those… I mean, it’s just the simple things. How about this one? “Wherever two or three are gathered, I am there with you”. He doesn’t… Jesus does not say, “When you have a gathering of 5,000, I’ll show up. But if it’s less than that, I’m not gonna waste my time.” Say you gotta have a mass and then I’ll show up and be present with you wherever two or three are gathered I am there with you. Do you catch the power of that? Two or three are gathered and I am with you.
Do you realize that Christ’s presence is with us now because we are gathered in his name and that’s how God works. He works in the small things. This is what Jesus says. These words of promise to us.
Jesus says, his master replied to them, “well done, good and faithful servants. You have been faithful with a few things. I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness.” It doesn’t say, because you have converted 1,000 people, you can now enter into your father’s house.
It’s not because you have raised whatever amount of money. You have been faithful with a few things. Your faithfulness in a few things. And God says, I will reward you. I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness.
And how about this one? This will be the last one. When Jesus talks about his way of life, he says it this way. “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am gentle and humble in heart and you will find rest for your souls for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” There’s something wrong with us or me If we leave church feeling more burdened, my focus wasn’t right then. I was focusing on ‘me’ rather than on ‘we’. Hey, God, what are we going to do? What should we do? There’s a ‘we’, not a ‘me’ in Christian ethics. Now, I want to say this, because you may have heard it said, and I’m not, Vicki, I’m not talking to you.
But you may have heard someone say, “God will never give you more than you can handle”. You ever heard that? Some people say that’s what they’re saying. I want to tell you that is pure BS. That is pure BS, and I would rather say another word, but I mean, it’s not true. God always gives you more than you can handle. Life is always more than you can handle. The last I checked, the death rate was 100%. Life is more than you can handle. And, you know, some people say, well, you know, Christianity is your crutch. Well, of course, what’s your crutch, you know? Jesus says, take my yoke upon me and learn from me.
That’s what we need to do. So let me close by asking this one question. What is one thing the still small voice of God is leading you to do next?
The small thing, what’s the one small thing that God is leading you to do next? And then go out and do it by the power of God.
All right. Well, let’s pray. Let’s pray. And I’m going to just take a moment on this with your eyes closed just to reflect and just to think and just to listen to this little small voice of God.
God, speak to us now. Lord, I thank you for my brothers and sisters in Christ here this morning. Thank you for the honor of being here today. Lord, I just pray that you would give us the courage to do the small things that you are calling us to do. Take away our fear, knowing that you are a great and a good God. Help us, Lord, to learn from you, to follow after you, to be with you both now and forevermore. Amen.
