Live By God

When I began putting this post together I didn’t have a whole lot to say. To be quite frank, I still don’t. But I wanted to share with you the verses that I have been reading over and over all week, that have been echoing through my head and my heart and have been probably the biggest encouragement to my current predicament than anything I’ve come across thus far. Before I even give you a glimpse of them however I want you to know that I read practically every english translation that YouVersion had them in…after doing that I chose the translation that I use for my daily reading, the New Living Translation or NLT. Anyway, rather than go on about this or that I’d like you to just read these verses and let them speak to your heart, challenge you and encourage you.

Living by the Spirit’s Power

“15 So be careful how you live. Don’t live like fools, but like those who are wise.16 Make the most of every opportunity in these evil days.17 Don’t act thoughtlessly, but understand what the Lord wants you to do.18 Don’t be drunk with wine, because that will ruin your life. Instead, be filled with the Holy Spirit,19 singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves, and making music to the Lord in your hearts.20 And give thanks for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Thursday Check Up

Just trying to get myself into a place where I do a mid week checkup on what’s going down with you guys, so here we go! 🙂

– Almost finished with the Media Procast website. Been working on it constantly since last week and learned more about web design this week than in my life… I kinda like it!

– Put in TONS of applications around town last week and the beginning of this week but with no call backs yet, God is sovereign and He’s got a bigger plan then I can see right now.

– Got to meet up with someone that gave me contacts in an industry that could launch Media Procast WAY out of the atmosphere. All I can say now is FULL VIDEO, we’ll be working through it over the next couple of weeks. 🙂

– Toying with pulling my blog over to our servers on MP but haven’t decided yet… might give me some growth ability I don’t have now… we’ll see.

– Since last monday I’ve talked to leaders in churches and church plants in FL, OH, CA, MI, NY, and the infamous Los who’s getting ready for Chitown. Love hearing what God’s doing!

– Never spent so much time seeking God’s will in 1 week. He’s blowing my mind with it!

– Praying for Haiti and all the people that have been affected. So much to say but I’ll leave it at this… This is our chance as Christians to reach out to the people of Haiti like never before, PLEASE don’t let Christian bickering get in between God and those who need Him right now!

Anyway, that’s it for the moment, I’m sure I’ve missed some things that I wanted to put up but we’ll get to those soon! Just remember… Love God and Love People!

Christmas Eve

First, I want to take this opportunity to just wish you guys a very Merry Christmas! As I sit here this morning I can’t help but listen to this song and think in wonder, how much God must have loved us. Anyway, give it a listen. I’m sure most of you have heard it before, but this time really listen to the lyrics. Let them soak in, and this Christmas just let the heaviness of the moment come into your soul as you think of all that He has done for us.

Satisfaction in God

I had a close friend recently that asked me whether or not I thought we could ever be truly satisfied in God. His question was concerning a constant feeling of inadequacy in the knowledge of the Bible and a feeling of needing to learn more, pray more, and cry out to God more. The back story is because of people we’ve both been exposed to in our lives that have expressed this total discontentment in their own knowledge of the bible or time they spend on their knees. But it got me thinking…what does it mean to be “satisfied in Christ”?

Does it mean that we spend hours upon hours reading the Word? Does it mean that we spend hours upon hours on our knees in prayer crying out to God? Maybe it means that we spend every waking moment serving somewhere and pour all we have into a ministry without asking anything in return. I think different people have different ways they try to attain satisfaction in Christ but until we become content with our own journey I don’t know that we’ll ever get there… Matthew 5:16 says “Even so let your light shine before men; that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.” Our job is to glorify God and magnify HIM! John Piper talks about this in his book Don’t Waste Your Life when he says “He is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” This makes me believe that what we should be is totally satisfied in God. Not to become complacent but to become content in HIS glory and HIS might and HIS power.

Complacency causes us to become apathetic to our own personal and spiritual growth which is a dangerous tool that the devil uses to cause us to slowly slip further away from where we should be. Although we should become satisfied in Christ, that by no means that we should ever stop stretching and reaching to bring ourselves into an ever-closer walk with Him. As Brennan Manning said in The Ragamuffin Gospel “My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.” We must reach the point in our life where we are so engulfed by His grace that we are able to walk in satisfaction with Him and allow Him to guide our path. In the words of Julian of Norwich “The greatest honour we can give Almighty God is to live gladly because of the knowledge of his love”. I love this statement because I think it engulfs the very essence of living in satisfaction of the grace and mercy that God has given us. By living in satisfaction with the grace he has given us we are truly bringing glory to His name and to what he has done both for us and through us.

Wow…This makes me think…

So I recently read an article about a student from Brown U. That took a semester at LU to find out what it was all about. This is the trailer to the book that he wrote. I am definitely getting a copy of this. Check the trailer.

Thoughts and Prayers…

So for those of you who don’t read facebook this is a note that I just posted on facebook last night, but I felt as though I’d go ahead and throw it on here as well. Enjoy!

Just some thoughts and prayers that have been running through my head today…

• I pray that I will be able to in some way help bring The Church and Ministries together. We all have the same vision and goal, to reach people for Christ, so why do we separate ourselves so much?
• I want to be able to see Fredericksburg ignite in revival. There is so much pain through out our town that we haven’t even touched. I believe that we are on the verge of life change for our entire area.
• I want to be financially secure, to a point where I can utilize my giftings for the betterment of HIS kingdom whether paid or not.
• I want to not only marry my best friend but to be able to raise a family and all that it entails. I love kids they remind me to stay young…
• I don’t ever want to be complacent in my current situation. I want to strive to better myself and my family in every way possible.
• I want to lead. I want to be able to use my gifts in whatever ways possible to help lead people to greater faith in Christ.
• I want to teach, not only do I want to lead I want to help train people to utilize their gifts for Gods glory in whatever they do. Ministry isn’t about just going out and doing evangelism, sometimes the best thing we can do is create environments for people to experience God’s glory.
• I don’t want to be constrained to my current position. I want to be fluid, where my leadership far out reaches my technical know how. I may get in the door because of my technical know how but I want to stay there because of how I lead.
• I want to be able to reach anyone in the world. I don’t want to be constrained by ethnographic, sociographic, or geographic barriers. I want to be able to make anything possible.
• I want to be HIS tool. I don’t want to do God’s work, I want to open myself up so that he can do his work THROUGH me.

So here I am…

So the past couple of weeks have been CRAZY! Lot’s been going on, between 2 of my close friends getting married (to each other), meetings in Lynchburg, moving a church, running sound, oh and lights, oh and doing some stage direction at church, my Bible study, staff meetings, Aflac enrollments, and everything else that consumes my life I haven’t had much time to sit down and write this…or think for that matter. So here I am…trying to give you at least a glimpse of where my life is… It’s crazy. But I love it. First of all at Aflac I just had a record breaking week for myself. It was busy but it was good. With church I can’t even tell you how much I love the people I work with. They’re amazing. What we pull off on a week to week basis can only be described as a God thing. The amount of time our unpaid staff puts into our programing during the week is incredible and I’m utterly amazed every week at what we somehow pull off.

As for life away from work…Sometimes I wonder what that is… I will say that I really feel that in the past few months I have really connected to some amazing friends in this area, and for that I couldn’t be happier. Each of them fill different places in my life and it’s amazing to see some of the relationships that have sprung from seemingly no where. I don’t say it enough to them but they are my life. I’m sure some of them are reading this now, and to you guys, I love you. In the course of my life I’ve had friends in a lot of different areas in the world and I’m happy to say that I still keep in touch with a good number of them, but it’s the ones here, now, that really make life special. Friends aren’t people we spend moments with, friends are who make the moments we live so worth it. I look forward to every chance I get to meet new people…experience new friends. It’s something that I love about my life.

Just this past weekend I had my good friend Pat Howell come into town to play drums at my church‘s Chancellor campus, and while he was here we got to go down to Richmond to a buddy of his birthday party. Talk about awesome. Walk into a room with about 10 people I had never met (party hadn’t started yet…) and within seconds I felt like I had known these people for years. To be honest I don’t know how many, if any of the people were “Christians” but I do know that Christian or not they were nice loving people. I was talking to one guy about working at my church and the different jobs I do there and he couldn’t believe that churches used lighting, or video, or anything other than maybe a tiny bit of sound. How suprised would he be to set foot in our church on a Sunday morning?

This is a random post, I know. But just with everything going on it made me think…Even with how busy we all are what if we took just a moment and met someone. Struck up a conversation with that guy that works across the hall… Took the time to talk to that cashier at the grocery store… Even went so far as to ask the guy at the end of the bar how his life’s going… How many more people would we be reaching? How many lives would we be able to change for the better? Just a moment. That’s all it takes…Make it happen.

From the dude in the 3rd row with his arms crossed…

So I just read this excellent blog that Los, or for those not quite aquainted with him, Carlos Whittaker, the man, the myth the legend wrote recently. I suggest everyone check it out here. It’s a letter from someone that’s been out of the Church for some time and is looking at their church service down at Buckhead Church from fresh eyes. Pretty interesting…

Lifepoint Campus Look 5-18-08

Parkside Campus:

So can I just begin by saying what an outstanding team we’ve built here. Every week I’m amazed by the commitment of our tech staff to constantly take themselves to the next level. And please don’t think I’m trying to say they’re any better than any other section of our church…but they are… Anything can happen and they leap into action to take care of business. This week we had an awesome week of worship featuring Clocks by Coldplay as our performance song and a set that was, to say the least, astounding. Clocks abounded around the stage as well as over 60 balloons with cards of everyone that was baptized a couple of weeks ago. So all in all an awesome service with awesome worship, awesome preaching, and just plain awesome elements! Great Job Guys!!!

Downtown Campus:

This campus also went pretty well. We had a pretty good worship set, however we had some glitches in the sound portion of things. These are just things we’re constantly attempting to work out on a week to week basis being in the kind of setup we’re currently in. Soon we’ll be building our own rig at which point we’ll be getting rid of a lot of the problems we have on a week to week basis. However, I must say the band is constantly improving and we’re beginning to put together a tech staff that’ll be good to build on. All in all, decent Sunday, and we’re constantly working on it. Great Job Guys!!!

Drive Conference: An Experience Beyond Church

[this was partially typed on the ride back from Drive Conference, and partially typed more recently so please excuse the somewhat random nature the post takes on…]

When people think of Church conferences most people think of a bunch of 40 or 50 year old pastors sitting around singing hymns, and planning different ways to do missions, youth functions, or any other number of activities that pastors might take on at any point in time. What people don’t see is 2500 pastors, tech directors, team leaders, worship leaders, among numerous other staff positions in churches spending 3 days learning and developing totally revolutionary ideas for how to reach the people in their communities, but that is exactly what I’m on the way home from as I write this. By day, I am a benefits consultant for a fortune 200 company, but by life I spend my time reaching those that are far from God.
Drive Conference is a Church development conference that North Point Ministries hosts that allows churches to take an inside look at how they function and how in the past decade they’ve grown to include 3 campuses that are beyond belief. Many churches in today’s culture would kill to have just one campus as nice as that of any one of these. Buckhead Church features an amazing array of ministries hosted in a very urban part of Atlanta, including some of the best facilities I’ve ever seen for children’s ministries. North Point has not 1 but 2 of the nicest auditoriums I’ve set foot in. Browns Bridge was, in my opinion, the nicest campus, boasting 40 acres of land, a top of the line sound and lighting system in a beautifully done facility that is just perfect for any kind of setting.
But these facilities weren’t what we came to see. We came to learn, and study what allows North Point Ministries to reach so many people with such tenacity for God. Not necessarily to see what they do exactly as how they do it. Not to change everything we do but to see how we can better ourselves to reach people who are far from God. Once thing Andy Stanley said that will stick out in my head forever is “To reach people no one is reaching you have to do things no one is doing.” and this statement is so true.
As a church in our community Lifepoint has already done things here that no one has seen done. Such as our egg drop where we had nearly 10,000 people show up, or our spontaneous baptism recently where 61 people were baptized. These are the things that affect our ministry. We are not afraid to do things that some people think are crazy for a Church to do. But maybe that’s where we succeed… Maybe the key to reaching people who are far from Christ is to getting their attention in any way possible then showing them God’s love and plan for their lives. What would happen if a growing church body were to reach out to a community with all the energy they had and made it their sole passion to reach people who are far from Christ… I think we’re finding that out now…