Andrew Fountain - Belonging and Rejection

1. Belonging and Rejection

• What does it mean to have a sense of “abandonment”?
  
  • I don’t belong
  • There is nobody like me
  • I am different
  • I don’t fit
  • I don’t have anywhere that is really “home”
  • I am rejected and abandoned
  • There is nobody to take care of me if everything goes bad
• David wrote in Psalm 41
  
  7. All who hate me whisper insults about me to one another; they plan ways to harm me.
  9. Even my close friend whom I trusted, he who shared meals with me, has turned against me.
• Isaiah 53:3
  He was despised and rejected by men;
  a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
  one from whom people hid their faces
  he was despised, and we valued him as nothing.

2. A New Community

• John 17:9-24 —probably the most amazing prayer in the whole of the Bible
• Promise of the Holy Spirit in John 14:16-23
• John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos
• New “body” Ephesians 4:1-7
• A very powerful image of how this works: 1 Corinthians 12:4-27

3. Receiving this

1. You need to belong to Jesus to have his Spirit
2. It is by faith in Jesus’ words that we enter into this

Updated on 2009-07-19 (r.25) by Andrew Fountain