Popcorn Festival Day 1 Wrap-Up

This past week has been a blur trying to get things done for the Popcorn Festival outreach out church does.  We provide a Baby Comfort Area for parents to change diapers and nurse if needed.  There’s no other place in the festival to do this, so it’s a great help to people and gives us the chance to talk to many people and share our faith with them.  It has allowed our church to become an asset to our community instead of a liability.

Today I served for a little while and many others from our church were there all day.  Two big conversations happened in that time with people on the sidewalk outside of our space:

Dean works the lemonade stand in front of our area.  I introduced myself to him early in my time there, but later he came back to me and asked me what the million dollar bill was I was holding (a tract we’re using).  I had the opportunity to ask him the “million dollar question”: where will you spend eternity?  Dean was from China and recently moved to America, so we talked a little about how he said China has no belief and that he doesn’t believe in anything.  I was able to share the plan of salvation with him, although he didn’t really respond to it much.  He thanked me for talking with him and went back to his work.

Ryan was a 9th grader who was sharing a lot of how he is learning in school that all religions view Jesus the same. He, a lady from our church, and I had a long conversation about who Jesus is, homosexuality, the Bible, the church, and lots more.

I hope this event is a reminder for our church people that people are willing to talk about matters of faith, and many times they’ll even listen.  Our responsibility as Christians is to tell We’ll hope there are great conversations in the next two days!

There are a few pictures of our space up at the church’s FaceBook page.

 

 

Update to How I’ll Use This Blog- Your Thoughts?

If you’ve kept up with my blog for a while, you’ll know that I used to post “Monday Morning Rewinds” every Monday, which summarized and allowed for discussion of my sermons from Sundays.  I stopped doing that a while ago, and I added an update note on this post of How I’ll This Blog.  You might want to read that, and I’m asking for your suggestions:

1. Can you think of anything/way that would facilitate sermon discussion here?  You’ll see in my update that I’m looking to do that more efficiently.
2. Are there other ways you would appreciate this blog to be used?  This to write about, share, etc.?  I want to serve my church and others in the best ways I can.

If you have suggestions, please leave comments.  Thanks for reading!

Have You Any Room?

Note:  This is the manuscript from the sermon I preached this past Sunday, Dec. 19, at Central Baptist Church.
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Henry Ford said:

A weakness of all human beings is trying to do too many things at once. That scatters effort and destroys direction. It makes for haste, and haste makes waste. So we do things all the wrong ways possible before we come to the right one. Then we think it is the best way because it works, and it was the only way left that we could see. Every now and then I wake up in the morning headed toward that finality, with a dozen things I want to do. I know I can’t do them all at once.”

When asked what he did about that, Ford replied, “I go out and trot around the house. While I’m running off the excess energy that wants to do too much, my mind clears and I see what can be done and should be done first.”   (Bits & Pieces, September 19, 1991, p. 18.)

This is an easy time of year to try and do too many things at once.  When our minds become overcrowded, our priorities are distorted.

The Consequences of Stepping Outside of God’s Will

I preached from Jonah 1:3 yesterday.  In examining that verse, I discovered 2 consequences of stepping outside of God’s will:

1) We could rob ourselves of blessings from God.  As Jonah was determined to flee from the Lord, I can’t help but think of how much time he wasted in running from God.  All that time could have been spent serving the Lord and receiving the blessing that comes from that activity.  But he missed that.  I’ve heard many people tell me how they’ve wasted so many years living in their sin when they could have been following God.  But we’re good at spending time on what doesn’t matter much, and not spending time on what God would have us do. When we do that, we’re robbing ourselves of blessings.

God’s Will in 2 Categories?

I have not written any recaps of my last two sermons, but I want to make some notes from my messages available for the encouragement of any who read them.  My first sermon from the current Jonah series was titled “What Is God’s Will For My Life?”

In the first sermon, I present an idea that helps me think about God’s will–I categorize it to a general will and more specific directions or will from God.

You can see some of my notes here (pdf file).

You can listen to the sermon here.

God Rejoices Over Us!

I finished up my sermon series through Zephaniah yesterday, which focused on Zeph. 3:14-20.  Have you read Zeph. 3:17 before?

The LORD your God is in your midst,
a mighty one who will save;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
he will quiet you by his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing.

Have you ever thought about what that would look like?

I picture it like a father wrapping his little son up in his arms, singing over him while just smiling and laughing.  And there’s nothing more than love that makes the Father want to do it.  Just the fact that the son is in the father’s arms is enough to make Him rejoice over Him!

Recap of the Popcorn Festival Outreach

I realized that I haven’t posted anything recapping the weekend our church served at the Baby Comfort Area of the Marion Popcorn Festival. Last week was so busy making final preparations and then serving, and this week and the next couple are full of more exciting opportunities for our church to reach out to people in our community through Back to Church Weekend and the Awakening 2010 events.  I just didn’t do this yet!

Overall, I consider the Baby Comfort Area and our efforts at the festival a success!  We have areas to improve on for doing it again, but it was a great first run with chances to learn from mistakes and improve it.

Here’s the recap:

Repentance Requires Fear and Correction

The title of this post was the main point of yesterday’s sermon, as I continued to preach out of Zephaniah.  I focused on the text of Zeph. 2:4-3:8, which could easily be a passage people look at and decide they don’t care much about!  It contains a lot of names of nations and some references that might not make sense initially.

Instead of getting into the specifics of the judgment pronounced on each nation, I encouraged our people to look at the overall theme of those judgments:

God is the God of all nations and people.  All will stand before Him in judgment one day. Up to this point, Zephaniah has only dealt with the people of Judah, but now shifts that focus on to the nations surrounding Judah.  Some could think that God will only judge those who are considered to be His (like the people of Judah), but the Bible teaches that all nations and people, whether considered His or not, will come under his judgment.

There’s a dangerous ideology today called