From Sampler to Sower

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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Mythbusters: Water's Edge

Weekend Teaching Series: Mythbusters: Water’s Edge

Message Title: Myth #4: All You Gotta Do is Believe

Sermon in a Sentence: Biblical faith moves from mental assent, to trust, to obedience, and ultimately to an experience of God’s grace.

Text(s): Genesis 15:6; John 3:36, 6:29; Acts 8;Romans 5:1; 2 Corinthians 1:22; Ephesians 2:8-9

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 6 of 10 Yeah, we did another custom video (see below) but that’s nothing new.  The only “new” thing was having to convert a Quicktime video clip from wingclips.com so it would play in EasyWorship.  (We use Super for video conversions. I thoroughly recommend it.  I do not, however, necessarily recommend EasyWorship.  It has some real plusses, but also some significant drawbacks.)

Message Summary:

The message this week focused on what exactly the Bible means by “Faith.”

We started off talking about the “power of positive thinking.”  Showed a quick video clip from the movie Paul Blart: Mall Cop from wingclips.com.  If you haven’t checked them out yet, I’d strongly recommend it.  They have a detailed and current index of movie clips.  What is more, you can get the clips directly from them, including clips from movies that are in theaters right now, like Mall Cop.  Seeing a clip from an “In Theaters” movie instantly got students attention.  Next time it might not, but for the first time we’ve used Wingclips, it was an instant attention getter.

The clip we showed featured Paul Blart (Kevin James) explaining that “the mind is the only weapon that doesn’t need a holster.”

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Mythbusters: Water's Edge

Weekend Teaching Series: Mythbusters: Water’s Edge

Message Title: Myth #3: It’s to late for me to go home now

Sermon in a Sentence: You are God’s child, and there will always be a place at home for you.

Text(s): Matthew 12:31-32; Luke 15:11-24

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 6 of 10; Again, about the only difficult thing was producing another episode of our Mythbusters spoof videos.

Message Summary:

This week I decided to offer something even better than a summary.  If you’re interested, I’ve posted the full audio of the sermon in our Senior High Service.

Of course, if you’d rather read a summary, here it is.

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Last week was a crazy week.  Didn’t get much done by the way of blogging unfortunately.  But I didn’t forget you all . . .

Here it is, the Week in Review for our second night in the Mythbuster’s series.

Mythbusters: Water's Edge

Weekend Teaching Series: Mythbusters

Message Title: Myth Two: God Doesn’t Speak to People Any More

Sermon in a Sentence: If we want to hear God’s voice, we need to stop reading the Bible and start eating it.

Text(s): Deuteronomy 11:18; Joshua 1:8;1 Samuel 3; Psalm 1:2; 2 Timothy 2:15; James 1:22; Revelation 10:9

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 7 of 10, now that our set is set, this service was fairly easy.  The only real challenge was making yet another episode of Mythbusters: Water’s Edge

Message Summary: We started with the story of the calling of Samuel, a young man dedicated to God by his mother Hannah, who grew up in the Tabernacle serving God and the High Priest Eli.  Late one night the Bible tells us that Samuel heard a voice calling his name.  He got up, went to the side of the aging Eli the priest, as he probably did fairly often, and asked “What is it you want?”  Eli tells Samuel that he did not call him, and sends him back to bed.

The Bible tells us this happens three times before the High Priest realizes what’s going on.  Finally it dawns on the old priest that God is calling the boy.

Now we can understand why young Samuel might be confused.  What doesn’t make sense is Eli’s response.  How can the High Priest of Israel fail to recognize the voice of God?

I suspect it’s because Eli fell for our second myth: God doesn’t speak to people any more.

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The coming of Epiphany also marks the beginning of second semester for our school students.  And it marks the end of Christmas break and the return of our weekly youth services.  So, here it is, our first Week in Review of 2009.

Mythbusters: Water's Edge

Weekly Teaching Series: Mythbusters: Water’s Edge

Message Title: Myth #1: It’s the motions that matter

Sermon in a Sentence: It’s time to stop going through the motions of Christianity and begin seeking God as our first priority and greatest desire.

Text(s): Deuteronomy 4:29, 1 Samuel 13, 2 Chronicles 15, Matthew 5:6, 7:7-8

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 10 of 10; This was a lot of fun, but a lot of work.  Christmas Break was blessing and curse.  Gave us some extra time to get our Christmas set down and the Mythbusters set up, but vacation also ate up some of that extra time.  Also, a we launched a series of in-house Mythbusters episodes which added a lot to the complexity.

Mythbusters Set, for more info and higher res, click on picture.

Message Summary: This message in a nutshell was the tale of two kings, Saul (of Israel) and Asa (of Judah).  Saul became king of Israel during a time of war and unrest.  He was anointed by the prophet Samuel who gave him some pretty clear instructions: “Go to Gilgal and wait.  In seven days I will come and we will offer sacrifices.  But don’t do anything until I come and tell you what to do.”  Saul obeyed – gathering the armies of Israel to do battle with the Philistines.

When they arrived they were shocked and awed by the enemy facing them – 3,000 chariots, 6,000 charioteers and more soldiers than they could count.  The soldiers of Israel are scared, but Saul tells them “Just wait, Samuel’s coming.”

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Write Them On My Heart

Weekend Teaching Series: Write them On My Heart (A series on the 10 Commandments)

Message Title: Word Ten: No Coveting What Belongs to Another

Sermon in a Sentence: In a world filled with greedy actions motivated by self-interest, God calls his people to serve others from a heart of love.

Text(s): Genesis 2:9, 3:6; Deuteronomy 5:21, Psalm 19:9-10, 68:19, Song of Songs 2:3, Romans 7:7-8

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 6 of 10, Pretty straightfoward service, only video was a pre-service countdown.  The only hard part was doing Chrsitmas songs for worship because we don’t play those a lot.  (That and the sleet storm that kept more than half our crowd away.)

Message Summary:

We wrapped up our 10 Commandments series with a review of the commandments so far.

We noted:

• They aren’t really commandments — with the exception of #5, none are in the imperative case and the Bible calls them the 10 “Words” or “decalogue”.
• They aren’t commandments because commandments are essentially options.  Rules provide ultimatums – either do this or if not, the consequence will be . . .  – and then leave the choice to obey with the hearer.
• The 10 Words are statements of fact.  They are not optional.  If we are God’s people, this is how we will live.  God does not say “Don’t murder or else. . . “  He simply states “You will not murder.”
• The first “half” (1-4) deal with our relationship with God the second half (5-9) deal with our relationship with others.
• And while the common approach to the Ten Words is to reduce them to a list of rules to hang on the wall and force others to abide by them, God actually desires to write these qualities on our heart, making us into the type of people he describes.

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This last Sunday our youth choir, under the excellent direction of our Children’s Minister Pastor Jill presented Geron Davis’ Christmas musical The Cradle that Rocked the World (from Brentwood Benson publishers).  It was an incredible service and I had the privilege of  preaching the message as part of the presentation.  (That’s why it’s so short — I hardly ever am this timely.)

In keeping with the musical, the theme was “This baby changes everything.”   And it is basically a retelling of the story of Simeon in Luke 2 .  (I had originally hoped to include the story of Anna, but time did not permit.)

Below’s my first attempt with Vimeo video.  Obviously I did not have the right deinterlace setting on in Handbrake when I converted it from our service DVD.  Oh well, live and learn, right?

The Story of Simeon from Bradley Buhro on Vimeo.

Whoo-hoo!  According to the comments, Josh Griffin of morethandodgeball.com and Saddleback Church has been to the site and checked out the weekly reviews.  That matters to me because Josh was the inspiration for this series of posts.  Now, if more of you youth pastors out there would start posting weekly reviews I’d really be happy.  Post one on your blog, and post the link in the comments so we can check it out.

Weekend Teaching Series: Write them On My Heart (A series on the 10 Commandments)

Message Title: Word Nine: No False Testimony

Sermon in a Sentence: The ninth word prohibits using our words to hurt others through dishonesty, fraud, gossip, complaints or bullying.

Text(s): Deuteronomy 5:20; 1 Kings 21; James 3:6; Ephesians 4:29

Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 9 out of 10, couple of videos, couple of new songs (at least that we don’t play on a regular basis) and an attempt at using Twitter to help reinforce the message meant this was anything but the same old, same old for our staff.

Message Summary:

We began by looking at the story of Naboth’s vineyard from 1 Kings 21.  Long story short, when Queen Jezebel found her husband whining because Naboth refused to sell his vineyard, she arranged for two false witnesses to testify against Naboth.  Naboth is stoned for a crime he didn’t commit.  Ahab seizes his property.  And Elijah confronts the wicked king, pronouncing God’s judgment on the crime of false testimony, underscoring how seriously He takes the ninth commandment.

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