The Tricycle Church

Well, welcome, Antioch family and friends. And it is 2014. So, Happy New Year. Here we go. And as always, we as a leadership team are committed to, "God what are you saying for the year? What is your word to us and then how do we live that out? How do we respond?" Actually, that is a good way to live life personally as well. "Lord, what are you saying?" and respond to it.

Well, we know some things that God is saying for sure - that this is going to be a season of fresh encounters with Him. He's inviting us in to give Him a little more space, a little more room to bring us in to those deeper places in Him. Second thing, which actually correlates to it is that, it's to be a season of strengthening our family. That would be personal lives, that would be our church family, and our personal families -- that God is wanting us to go deeper, so that he can take us wider. Key scripture for this year is Ephesians 3:20 and 21, "Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we could ask or think, according to his power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church, and in Christ Jesus, to all generations, forever and ever, amen." That's a good word, by the way. God wants to do above and beyond all that we could ask or think in 2014 - obviously corporately, but also for you personally. You can take that corporate word and apply it to your own life.

Well, this morning I'm going to lay a little groundwork for where we're going, and what God's speaking to us, but tonight is all the good stuff. Ya, I'm not going to tell you any of the good stuff except tonight and that's hopefully a primer to get everybody to come be a part of it. God's been speaking some incredible things to us. And we're going to be talking about that tonight at 5 o'clock. There will be children's ministry available. We're going to have some fun. We're going to talk about where God has taken us and where he's taking us in the future, and so please, I encourage you to be a part of that this evening, 5 -- I'd say probably 6:30 is going to be as late as it goes. It could go a little shorter than that.

All right, well, let me bring you into this morning, as we lay the groundwork, let me take you back to 1968. Not many of y'all in this room can go back that far. But, 1968, I was four years old. And as you could imagine -- hey, was that a good, bad, I don't know what that "wow" was about. So 1968, I was four years old, and I was an active kid, as you could imagine. And so, of course, anything that I could climb or move or run around with -- the only fear I had though, was of two-wheeled bicycles. Two-wheelers -- those were a little intimidating. At least, maybe they didn't have them back in those days, they didn't have them at our house --they didn't have training wheels. And I was five years younger than my next sibling up, and so Mom and Dad must have forgotten that we did have a tricycle up there in the attic. And so they pulled out the trike. And so this tricycle, though was not -- this wasn't one of those little, red things. This was a big trike. This was a four year old man's trike. And I, I loved that thing. I mean I can still in my mind's eye just see me riding down the driveway as fast as I could. You felt so stable and ready to go, but you felt big because it was a bigger trike, not a small one. Well, actually, my parents one Easter, that Easter, right after I'd gotten the trike and was trying it out, they decided to get out the old 8mm camera after Easter Sunday and catch me doing my thing down the driveway. I want to take you into it right now.

I still got it. I can still ride the trike. I can still ride the big trike. That girl sticking her tongue out -- that was my sister, by the way. I had to grow up with that, all the time. She could hula hoop all day long, if you noticed that. So the trike! I mean, I'm looking for a comeback for the trike. This is a good deal right here, and you know, there are so many different things I love about the trike, but the main deal is that it's stable. It's stable but you can also move forward.