From Sampler to Sower

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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