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All posts for the month August, 2009
- I’m sitting at my cousin’s house in Phoenix
- Tomorrow I fly to Pennsylvania to visit family
- Katie and the kids are already there
- I’m really excited to see family and old friends this week
- Should be fun because the last time I saw many of these people, I was 70 pounds heavier
- Tonight was one of those nights that I love what I do
- Love the first night of a new series
- Love it
- Really excited about preaching through the Sermon on the Mount this fall
- I think it is right where our church is
- Everything flowed tonight
- The videos, songs, the next steps and how they worked together
- Love it when plans come together
- I love talking vision and mission
- I could do that every week
- If you missed tonight, you can listen to it here
- God showed up in a huge way tonight
- Every week, I am reminded about how dedicated our church and volunteers are
- We would not exist without them
- I got so choked up when we showed the baptism video tonight
- I’ve seen it several times, but seeing it again gets me everytime
- Here is one of the videos we showed tonight during my talk
- This shows how not to invite someone to church, but also how easy it is to invite someone to “come and see”
- This sums up tonight
- You DO NOT want to miss next week
- It will be one of those nights
- Had a lot of people ask about the shirts all the leaders had on, we’re looking into getting more made so more people can wear them around Tucson
- We kicked off our partnership class this week
- Really excited to see how this impacts our church
- Our creative team this week finalized a lot of creative elements for our next series, which is going to be great
- Don’t forget, if you twitter about Revolution Church use the hashtag #tucsonrevolution
- I have my next lead pastor coaching network this week
- Really excited about talking with Nelson Searcy about assimilation and first impressions
- Are you spreading the word about www.iwantanewmarriage.org?
- Perry Noble nailed it on The spiritual warfare that pastors/leaders and their families often experience. This is right on.
- Tim Stevens on how to handle when you grow and when you don’t grow as a church. Interestingly, both can be dangerous in their own ways.
- Dan & Chip Heath on Why your gut is more ethical than your brain.
- Rick White on Addressing questions regarding gender roles. This is a great article that articulates clearly the complementarian view that I hold to.
- Ed Stetzer & George Barna on A church’s size and its theology. Fascinating that the larger the church, the more conservative they tend to be.
In his book The Mission of God, Chris Wright shows that the Bible story is “all about mission” – God’s mission to save a people for himself through Jesus Christ. Jesus is the focus of the story, but his identity has missionary implications (Luke 24:45 – 48). This radical, God-centered perspective, Wright suggests, “turns inside out and upside down some of the common ways in which we are accustomed to think about the Christian life…It constantly forces us to open our eyes to the big picture, rather than shelter in the cosy narcissism of our own small worlds.”
- We ask, “Where does God into the story of my life?,” when the real question is, “Where does my little life fit into this great story of God’s mission?”
- We want to be driven by a purpose that has been tailored just right for our own individual lives, when we should be seeing the purpose of all life, including our own, wrapped up in the great mission of God for the whole creation.
- We talk about “applying the Bible to our lives.” What would it mean to apply our lives to the Bible instead, assuming the Bible to be the reality – the real story – to which we are called to conform ourselves?
- We wrestle with “making the gospel relevant to the world.” But in this story, God is about the business of transforming the world to fit the shape of the gospel.
- We argue about what can legitimately be included in the mission that God expects from the church, when we should ask what kind of church God wants for the whole range of his mission.
- I may wonder what kind of mission God has for me, when I should be asking what kind of me God wants for his mission.
-Taken from Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community by Tim Chester & Steve Timmis, p. 35
Saturday we start a brand new series No Perfect People Allowed that I am so excited about!
This fall we are going through the Sermon on the Mount found in Matthew 5 – 7 and we are breaking it up into 4 smaller series and this is the first one.
This series will be all about what we are for as Revolution Church, the vision of our church, our goals, where we are going and how we are planning to get there.
This is going to be a great way to kick off the fall.
In case you’re curious about what comes after this series, check out www.iwantanewmarriage.org.
I’m a huge NFL fan and have never done this, so I thought this would be the year that I would lay out who will win each division (and get the wild cards) and get to the Super Bowl and win the whole thing.
AFC Division Winners:
- Patriots
- Steelers
- Colts
- Chargers
AFC Wild Cards:
- Ravens
- Texans
NFC Division Winners:
- Eagles
- Packers
- Seahawks
- Falcons
NFC Wild cards:
- Saints
- Cowboys
AFC Championship: Patriots vs. Steelers
NFC Championship: Eagles vs. Seahawks
Super Bowl match – up: Patriots vs. Eagles
Super Bowl Winner: Patriots
As much as it pains me to say it, I think this will be Tom Brady’s year.
What’s your pick?
We just finished our summer small group semester (go here to read about how we do small groups at Revolution) and it was a great discussion.
Our group read through the book God, Marriage and Family by Andreas Kostenberger.
The book covers a wide range of topics: the role of husbands and wives, where our culture is when it comes to marriage and relationships, divorce, parenting, being single, homosexuality, birth control, abortion and church leadership.
It is by far the most thorough book I’ve come across in terms of what the Bible has to say about marriage and the family.
The basis of the book starts with this: Once God is removed as the initiator of the institution of marriage and the family, the door is opened to a plethora of human understandings of these terms and concepts, and, in the spirit of the postmodernism, no one definition has the right to claim greater legitimacy than any others.
What stuck out to me was a fresh reminder of my role as a husband (you can read more about that here) and Katie’s role as a wife (you can read more about that here and here).
I think one of the main reasons couples tend to be unhappy, unfulfilled and marriages end is because no one knows what a husband/man is or what a wife/woman is. The Bible is very clear on these roles and yet, the church seems to stay quiet on this front because of fear of offending someone. When presented clearly and actually applied the way God laid them out, it is actually a beautiful thing.
This fall at Revolution we will be diving head first into this topic in our series www.iwantanewmarriage.org.
I would say that Kostenberger’s book is worth reading, it is thick, but definitely worth checking out. A shorter, easier to read version was just released by John Piper called This Momentary Marriage: A Parable of Permanence.
