Happy Thanksgiving!

During this season of the year, it can seem like Thanksgiving gets passed right on by and Christmas begins. Already there's a station on the radio playing just Christmas music. Black Friday is advertised as some huge deal of deals day. Sometimes it seems like the Friday after Thanksgiving receives more attention than the Holiday itself! Just makes me wonder why we have a difficult time to take time to truly be thankful for what God has given us.

There are so many things to be thankful for. So many people and circumstances and blessings. Let's take moment, a long moment and turn off the football game, the Macy's Parade, and sit down and tell God just how thankful we are. Truly.

Thank you, Father, for this opportunity. May we never forget that You are the source of all we have and all we are. We praise you. May this Thanksgiving day we celebrate be a moment of true thankfulness that's never taken for granted.

Wishing all of you a Happy Thanksgiving!

Crazy Love Book

Do you ever wonder what it'd be like to live life the way God intended? To see what it really means to clean house, fear and trust God for real, to leave everything and follow Him? And to know what it means to be loved by God?


Lately I've been reading a book by Francis Chan called "Crazy Love". I suggest you pick up a copy of this book. It has really challenged me to go deeper, to become the radical Christian God wants me to be and has designed me to become. It's very inexpensive, and if you have a digital book reader, you can download it from the amazon kindle market for a little over $5. At most book stores you can pick it up for around $10. It's worth it! But I warn you, after you read one chapter you won't be the same.

The Center

It sure has been a while since I've posted anything. Hope I can get into the habit of sharing more with you. Today marks a turning point for my life. For a long time I've wrestled with a certain passage in the Bible: Philippians 1:21a "For to me, to live is Christ..." That means life is Christ. Are you confused? How can life be Christ? 

Over this past weekend I went with the Meridian Point youth group to the Desperation Conference held at New Life Church. Needless to say, it was an incredible conference! God really did some awesome things there. It was humbling to see such a large group of teenagers cry out to God out of desperation to know Him more and in worship!

During one of the seminars, I went in to listen to Glen Packiam. God has truly blessed him with an ability to understand His Word. What I'm really thankful for is that he doesn't keep what God's revealing to him a secret. Anyway, he talked about Dagon and God from 1 Samuel 5. Take a moment to read this story. One of the things countries used to do when they went to war and plunder the cities was to take their enemies gods away so they could worship them too. The were collector's items and the more of them you had the better. Glen explained that Dagon was a god that symbolized success, or fame and wealth. What the people in didn't understand was that their god wasn't a god at all in comparison with the Lord. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if the Philistines realized that and started worshiping God because He beat up Dagon, proving that no other god compares to Him. Instead, they sent the ark back to Israel. 

Here's the deal. The very first commandment in the Ten Commandments states that you shall have no other gods before God. That doesn't mean we can have gods after Him. God can't be categorized like a baseball card, or rated on value. He doesn't want to be first in our lives, He wants to be the only One. Making Him first implies that there are other things after Him. 

Did you know that no where in Scripture is there a reference to having a spiritual life? Our lives becomes transformed and should change. We've divided our physical life from our spiritual life and we're all only one person. There is no separation. God wants to be the center of your life. God wants to be the Core of our very being, to affect everything we do...like a red shirt in a white load of laundry. He wants to bleed out into every area of our lives. He needs to infect us to affect what we do, say, think, look at, speak at, work, husband, wife, parent, live as a son or daughter, and everything. I'll admit that I've not been very good at this at all. And I imagine that most people haven't either. But now I understand that life is Christ. There is nothing else. There should be nothing else. I've also come to grips that if I have a second place I'm confining God to be only what I want Him to be instead of trusting Him because of who He is. 

Purpose with me to make Christ the center of our lives. Let's let Him be the one and only. Let's stop categorizing, containing, and rating God. He is all there is.

A New Ministry

We've started a new ministry at our church I'm really excited about. This new ministry is a way to help us worship every day. Too often we find ourselves simply reading God's Word without doing anything with it. God's Word should be revolutionary in our every day life! Worship is our response to Him.

Most Sundays are viewed as a time of "worship". And it seems that the primary meaning of the word pertains only to the Sunday morning gathering. But Romans 12:1-2 says that it involves more than that. It involves sacrifice on my part. I need to be a living sacrifice. Daily I need to offer my life as worship to Him. When I do that, my outlook on things should change, my response to situations change, my decisions change, and what God teaches me when I listen to Him does not and will not return void. My life changes. The way I'm living changes. My purpose of living changes.

This new ministry is called "Worship: Unrated". It's meant to get all of us thinking outside the box of Sunday morning worship to worshiping daily throughout the week with our lifestyle. It's like getting a movie but the Director's Cut, or the Unrated version, the kind of stuff the director wanted to originally put in the movie. God wants us to worship beyond Sunday morning. Check it out and sign up for a week and see what it's like! Leave me a comment!

Knowledge Gets In The Way

Have you ever come across those people who seem to know everything about everything? They always have an answer. Don't you just want to slap them?? Just kidding. However, "knowledge" can get in the way of relationship and enjoyment.

Read this.

So, my knowledge and understanding of God's Word can actually hinder people from growing in their relationship to God. It's like this; we know that the Bible is silent in some areas and speaks in others. Those "silent" areas, or gray areas, give room for personal interpretation. But what could be a liberty to me could even cause someone to sin! My knowledge of the Bible then becomes a hindrance to relationship with God instead of a freedom I can enjoy. A young Christian struggling to know what God desires or anyone who looks to me as a leader deserves an unquestionable example. I cannot allow my knowledge to ruin the enjoyment of pursuing Christ. If I do, I deserve to be slapped.

Plainly said, if what I "______" causes my brother to fall into sin, I will never "____________" again, so that I will not cause him to fall. You fill in the blank...

Leave me a comment!