From Sampler to Sower

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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Weekend Teaching Series: Heroes

Message Title: The Judge Who Wasn’t

Sermon in a Sentence: Be careful which voices you allow to have influence in your life.

Text(s): Judges 8-9

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 6 out of 10, There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in tonight’s service.  The only difficulty was the normal and enjoyable task of exegeting a passage of scripture and learning to hear and speak its message to a new generation.

Message Summary:

Our Heroes series based on the book of Judges for Junior High continued this week.  However, for the first time in our  series we talked about someone whom the Bible never calls a judge.  Abimelech, son of Gideon, is sometimes listed among the judges of Israel, but he neither saved Israel from any threat, nor was he called by God to this task.  His tale is just the end of the story of the judge Gideon.

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Weekend Teaching Series: You Decide

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 10 of 10, For the same reasons as the Junior High service, this was a difficult night.  Fortunately, by the time the teaching time came around in the service, the Excedrin I’d been taking all day finally began to kick in.  I really did think, going into this service, that there was a chance I’d have to cut the teaching short.  But God is good.

Message Summary: We’re in the fourth week of our You Decide series in which we’ve been answering the questions students ask. As I’ve mentioned for the past three weeks, we’re using a  Poll Everywhere poll to collect the questions teens have and I’m choosing the best to answer at Water’s Edge.  This weeks top questions included “Who is Legion?” “What’s the difference between the Old and New Testament?” and “Will all dogs really go to heaven?”

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Weekend Teaching Series: Heroes

Message Title: The Cowardly Warrior

Sermon in a Sentence: Actually, I didn’t have one going in . . . but more on that later.

Text(s): Judges 6-7

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 12 out of 10,This was one of my toughest nights in youth ministry ever.  The game took a little extra prep, getting audio clips ready for “Name that Tune.”  That  alone would have made it a 7 out of 10.  But what knocked this one out of the park difficulty-wise was an incredible headache, intensified exponentially by our stage lights.  After struggling through the game and music, I had to go to house lights for the teaching time and even then the headache was so bad I couldn’t think straight.  We made it through the night, but I know my teaching was adversely affected.

Message Summary:

We’re in week four of our Heroes series for Junior High. We’re working our way through the Old Testament book of Judges, seeing what we can learn from the people God chose to change their world.  As always we started with a “where we left off” review.  I was impressed at how well my students remembered the heroes from the first three weeks of the series; they even remembered Othaniel, a guy who played only a minor part in week one of the series.

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Weekend Teaching Series: You Decide

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 5 of 10, By the time the Senior High service rolled around, most of the glitches were worked out of the system and everything went pretty smoothly.

Message Summary: This was week three for our You Decide series in which we’ve been answering the questions students ask.  We’ve set up a Poll Everywhere poll to collect the questions and I’m choosing the best to answer at Water’s Edge.

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Weekend Teaching Series: Heroes

Message Title: The Tent-Peg Killer

Sermon in a Sentence: Don’t let fear keep you from being the Hero God is looking for.

Text(s): Judges 4

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 7 out of 10, I guess the easy weeks had to come to an end.  This was a Murphy’s Law kind of Tuesday night.  Fortunately, with the exception of a slightly late start due to a guitar malfunction, I don’t think any of the chaos effected the service itself.

Message Summary:

We’re in week three of our Heroes series for Junior High. You’ll remember from last week this series is taking a look at the book of Judges. We started with a quick “Where we left off…” review which reminded students of the judges cycle (Rebellion, Retribution, Repentance, Redeemer, Rescue) and of the two judges of whom we spoke so far: Othaniel and Ehud.

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Weekend Teaching Series: You Decide

Text(s): Genesis 4, Romans 5

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 9 of 10, We’ve already talked about the ways we’re using polleverywhere.com to facilitate this series.  We also used it during our game time Tuesday night.  Unfortunately right in the middle of our game the service started returning 504 errors both to me who was using the web interface and to contestants trying to text in answers.  I’ve never had this problem with them before, and it was cleared up within 10 minutes, but obviously you need to have a back up plan if you use Poll Everywhere.

Message Summary: If you’ve been following our weekly updates, you know that our new Senior High teaching series, You Decide, focuses on soliciting and answering students questions.  We’ve set up a Poll Everywhere poll to collect the questions and I’m choosing the best to answer at Water’s Edge.

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Weekend Teaching Series: Heroes

Message Title: The Left-Handed Assassin

Sermon in a Sentence: God makes a habit of using the unlikely.

Text(s): Judges 3:7-30

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 1 out of 10, Two weeks in a row?  Yet it was easy.  This series is really falling together nicely, and added volunteer help is really helping carry the load.

Message Summary:

We’re in week two of our Heroes series for Junior High.  You’ll remember from last week this series is taking a look at the book of Judges.  After reminding students of the essential cycle of the book of Judges (Rebellion, Retribution, Repentance, Redeemer, Rescue) we took a look at the first two judges.

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Weekend Teaching Series: You Decide

Text(s): Genesis 4, Romans 5

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 7 of 10, Difficulty is up, just because there was so much different this week.  None of it was especially hard, in particular because of the great services available from polleverywhere.com (more on that tomorrow), but this week was far from typical.

Message Summary: Many of our typical subject lines (sermon title, message in a sentence, even text) don’t really apply to this series.  As I told our students last week, we’re trying something new.  With a series called You Decide we’re giving our students the opportunity to determine which way we go in our teaching.  We’ve challenged them to ask questions.  If there’s something they always wondered about the Bible, ask.  If there’s an issue they are facing for which they’d like a Biblical perspective, then ask.  If there’s something that their friends are going through and they want to know how they can help, just ask.

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Weekend Teaching Series: Heroes 

Message Title: A Vicious Cycle

Sermon in a Sentence: Don’t let complacency keep you from becoming the Hero God wants you to be.

Text(s): Joshua 23 – Judges 2

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 1 out of 10, Really, this was an extremely easy night: nothing difficult, a lesson that came together very well, and a great group of students to work with.  I don’t think I’ve ever ranked a Tuesday at 1 out of 10, but I can’t imagine an easier week.

Message Summary:

We’re starting a new series in the Shore, our weekly service for Junior Highers.  It’s been a while since I taught two different series to the two different groups, but different series means I can do a better job at targeting the different age groups.  The new series, Heroes, will be a series of character studies from the book of Judges.  And this week’s lesson was essentially an introduction to the book.

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