From Sampler to Sower

I will admit: I love the Psalms.

OK, so maybe that isn’t so shocking of an admission.  It’s about as unexpected as a Miss America candidate announcing she is against poverty and for world peace.  But my love for the Psalms rises from deep inside of me.  I find them most helpful in guiding my prayer.  I love it when I open this centuries old document and find my voice in its pages, crying to God out of the depths.

One of my favorite moments in my devotions each week is when I open the Psalms to see what Psalm I will be living in for the next seven days.  Both of my favorite devotional guides, Job and Shawchucks A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants and Benson and Benson’s Disciplines for the Inner Life feature one Psalm per week.  It exciting to come each Monday morning and see what Psalm it will be this week, because it is always surprising to see the way God speaks into my life through that song.

Well, it usually is. (more…)

It’s been a bittersweet day today.

It’s Sunday, January 31 as I write this.  Unusual I know.  I don’t normally write on Sunday.  (Of course, I guess you could say lately, I don’t normally write.)

But I’ve got some time on my hands now.  I’m sitting in the food court at the mall while my son and a bunch of his friends watch To Save A Life with about 100 others from our church.  I went to the first showing with about 200 of my closest friends.  And as good as it was, I didn’t feel like sitting through a second round so soon.  So while he watches, I’m writing.

The movie is a big part of the sweetness of the day.  (I should probably be posting this in my “Why I Love My Church” series, but instead it’s here.)  We really felt like this movie was something God wanted to use to speak to our youth ministry and church.

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Weekend Teaching Series: Avatar

Message Title: Avatars and Incarnation

Sermon in a Sentence: We do not need to fear rejection when we approach God, because He chose us.

Text(s): Ephesians 1:3-14

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 3 out of 10, Again, a fairly straightforward message that was fun to preach.

Message Summary:

We began by watching the following clip.  (The embedded copy is from YouTube.  We got our clip from WingClips.com.)

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A busy schedule has kept me from updating my blog recently, but I’m working to get back into the swing of posting regularly.  I’m going to go back a couple of weeks with my reviews to include all three sermons from our Avatar series.

Weekend Teaching Series: Avatar

Message Title: Avatars and Incarnation

Sermon in a Sentence: Avatar provides hints and glimpses of the greatest story ever told, but Jesus Christ is the incarnation of God in whom we can trust.

Text(s): John 1:1-14

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 3 out of 10, A pretty straightforward night with an enjoyable theme.

Message Summary:

In January we launched a three week mini-series inspired by themes from the new blockbuster movie Avatar.  In week one of our series we examined the story of the movie as a whole and asked the question “What makes this movie so compelling?”

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Weekend Teaching Series: Heroes

Message Title: The Foolish Vow

Sermon in a Sentence: God is not honored when we treat him like the idols that surround us.

Text(s): Judges 10-11

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 3 out of 10, A straightforward night, with one of the tougher stories in the Bible.

Message Summary:

Heroes moved into its sixth week with the story of Jephthah. We’re working our way through the book of Judges with our students, and we’re into the homestretch now.  That’s a good thing, because if you know anything about Judges, you know things are getting bad, fast.

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I was recently asked to write a guest post for Tiger Bytes, a relatively new blog from my alma mater Olivet Nazarene University.  I chose to write about how the recent closure of Geocities and the archiving of many of the Geocities sites by the Internet Archive serve to illustrate the public and permanent nature of digital communications.

I think the principles are important ones for youth leaders to understand, and to pass on to students.  The impact of careless words “spoken” in the digital public can be severe and long lasting.  You can read the entire post here.  And while you’re at it check out the rest of Tiger Bytes, and if you like what you see, follow OlivetNazareneU on twitter too.

The Title Slide from Sunday's Message

This Sunday our church tried something different.  That in and of itself would be enough for me to love our church — we have no problem at all trying something new.  However, in the famous words of Ed Valenti, “But wait. There’s more!”

Pastor Phil Rogers spent all week telling people they did not want to be late for church this Sunday because something was in the works that has never happened at our church.  And we could tell something was different from the first moment we entered the sanctuary.  The customary greeters met us at the doors and handed us a packet of sermon notes that had been sealed, along with a stern warning not to open the folder until we were instructed to do so.

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Given my recent post about getting past PowerPoint I found this video not only entertaining, but a helpful criticism of PowerPoint “worst practices.”  It’s funny because it’s true.

(HT to Tim Sanders whose Tweet sent me to this video.  Told you I was a Sanders fanboy.)

At the risk of sounding like a complete Tim Sanders fanboy, I want to send you to his blog Sanders Says again.

Earlier this month I linked to an outline of a talk he gave about what it takes to lead your business out of the recession and suggested there might be some important implications for those of us in ministry.  This week, he’s is at it again, expanding on his thoughts about what it takes to find yourself on the leading edge of the recovery.

You really need to head over to Sanders Says to read the whole post for yourself.

But I’d like to reflect on some of his points from the perspective of ministry here.  (more…)

Weekend Teaching Series: You Decide

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 5 of 10, A fairly typical week for us.

Message Summary: Our You Decide series was in it’s fifth week Tuesday night.  That’s encouraging.  When we started asking students to send in questions they might have about the Bible, I wasn’t sure just how well it would go or how long it would last.  But questions are still coming in to our Poll Everywhere poll and now I’m beginning to wonder how many good quesitions we’re going to have to leave unanswered.

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