From Sampler to Sower

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: 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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