The Bethany Bullet - Week of January 29, 2017

Our Renaissance logo captures the reality that for us, we who have been crucified with Christ, the cross is our root and our fruit!

If the cross is not our root, our source of identity and our reason for being, the very foundation for our association with one another, we are a pointless assembly. Oh sure, we’d still gather, but our base would not be set on the eternal, absolutely true, constant, as certain as the sun rising in the east each morn and the traffic on the 405 freeway crawling north and south each eve. Yes, the cross is our root!

Colossians 2:13-14  “When you were dead in your sins, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave you all your sins…taking away all that was against you and stood opposed to you by nailing it to the cross.

If the cross is not our fruit, the beauty we bring into the world and wonder that blossoms through our being we have missed the point of our assembling. Oh sure, some “good” would still result in our collective output but it would not be a bloom of grace, a harvest of righteousness nor yield eternity.

2 Corinthians 5:15 & 18-20 “He died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again…God reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: we reconciled to God.”

The Renaissance Logo seeks to capture these two truths: the cross is our root and our fruit.  Renaissance means rebirth and renewal; and while our campus will experience some much needed rebirth and renewal in this campaign, it is us, individually and collectively that we pray experience the greatest renaissance! That renaissance takes place as we are renewed or restored or returned to the fullness of the beauty and certainty that the cross, which is our root and our fruit, bears in us and through us.

-Pastor Kevin Kritzer