Listening

Have you ever realized how much noise is in our lives? if you have children or work a stressful job, maybe you are a student sitting in class, or listening to the radio in your car to drown out the noise of traffic, we are surrounded by it. The noise can be defining to us. The world sends all of this noise to distract us from the one sound that we need to hear more than anything, the sound of the father directing us to him on our journey. There is a reason we are told to "Be still and know that I am God" he wants us to take the time to sit in silence and dwell upon the glory of his name. When was the last time you sat and listened in your prayer time, we are always laying out our concerns and wants to the father but do we take time to listen to him as well. i want to challenge you all to take time to listen to God and follow where he is leading you. It may be on an adventure to better your physical or mental health, it may be to help and serve others more, it might be to reestablish your relationship with your spouse to make it renewed again, there are so many things that God is telling us daily but we don't give him the time and listen. Lets listen more and drown out the useless noise in our lives to see what GREATNESS God has in store for us.

RUN Ghavinn RUN....

For most of you, you may not have known me when I was younger, but I came from a very athletic family. Most of us still like to engage in athletic endeavors and push ourselves. While I was attending Pepperdine University I learned that running wasn't an awful agonizing exercise that is only intended to help you perform better in sports, but it could be an amazing stress reliever as well. So I took up running and it started slow but by the end of the year I was running close to 45 miles a week. The crazy thing about that is no one was yelling at me to get out there and run, I actually enjoyed it. My junior year however I blew my knee out, and I couldn't do what I once loved. Sure I would go out and jog a bit but instead of feeling free and soaking up the sun and the breeze, all I could think about was the pain shooting up my leg. Now about 9 years later with my knee probably worse then ever (according to my doctors), I decided to run again. It started off with a 3-mile walk jog with my daughter in the stroller, and now I am back to running three days a week 7 miles at a time. When I am out there I feel the same joy and release I did before. I get to think about all the amazing blessings God has given me. For the longest I told myself that I couldn't do it anymore I couldn't push myself because of my physical limitations , but what I know now is that I just had to adjust it. 

    Have you felt this way about your faith also, you found out that prayer, reading your bible, serving others, weren't something that just helped you to be a better Christian it was actually something that made you a Christian. You felt the joy of God within you and you loved it and you did it often, but then something happened. For me in my running it was a blown out knee, maybe in your faith it was a loss of a loved one, or a shaky marriage or you just got older, maybe someone at church hurt your feelings, whatever it is you stopped. From time to time you went out there and gave it a go but you didn't enjoy it like you used to instead you just felt the pain lingering. Today I want to challenge you, challenge you like I have been challenging myself, get back out there on the track, you don't have to run at the same pace you used to just get out there and run. Pretty soon all of the emotions comeback your joy gets reinstated and you become filled with that same grace and love that comes only from Christ. 

     My last run I went on was yesterday, I decided to take my two young ones with me and I would run while pushing them in their stroller. This was a difficult run and my goal was 7 miles, I knew that having them with me I probably wouldn't make it that far before they pooped out on me. However I was presently surprised at not only how good they were but they were my biggest inspiration, to see them smile and enjoy it reminded me of why I like to run. The same is with our faith the youthfulness of others can inspire us to remember why we love serving Christ and enjoy being in his presence. So today get back on the track and fin your way back into the joy of Christ, it may hurt at first but once you get back into it you will remember that the pain in temporary the joy is forever!

Join The Party

I have never noticed someone who was a watching a bunch of people have a great time and said to themselves, "eh, who likes to have fun anymore."People don't want to look at a good time and not join.  As Christians every time we get together as believers it should be a time of celebration and rejoicing because our lord and savior came and freed us from the bondage of sin. Isn't that a glorious thought that our sin not in part but the whole is nailed to the cross and we bear them no more, Praise the Lord! ok so i took that last sentence from a song but we should feel this way, and when we do people that have yet to know Christ see the party and will want to join. Isn't that our mission, to bring people to christ? we should set out to be happier to each other, more encouraging to one another, and most important start showing love to one another because as it says in 1 peter love one another because love covers a multitude of sins. lets start living more fully what we preach about so that others will see how amazing it is to be followers of christ.

FAMILY MOVIE NIGHT FRIDAY @ 630pm

Nothing is Impossible for God (Growing pains)

As a minister I have found that the idea of growth brings concerns, but why? The best example of this would be as a young skinny 12 year old i went through a summer where I grew 7 inches, you hear it right 7 INCHES! In one summer I became the most clumsy lanky and awkward kid, my joints all hurt and it took me a while to get used to and fill into my new size. Growing hurt but soon, I would fill into my body and there were great benefits of being big. I understand that many people enjoy feeling comfortable,especially when it comes to their roles in church or as an employee, or even as a parent or spouse; however in our efforts to stay comfortable we can become complacent. It is easy for us to see something in front of us that seemingly is too daunting for us to overcome, however today I want you to understand that there is nothing too big for God. This can be on many levels, as a Church thinking we can't grow because its too hard or too much work is an example of not having faith in God to work within us. As individuals, coming up with excuses of why we are not good enough to allow God to use you, or why you are not worthy of God's love and forgiveness, can keep you from reaching the relational and  . Ezekiel preached to dry bones and brought new life to his people by allowing God to use him for His glory, Ezekiel had faith in what God was calling him to do and he did it. Where are you at? Are you allowing past failures to keep you away from the future and present successes? Are you allowing the idea of future issues or stressors keep you from even trying to reach your potential? Watch this video clip from the movie "Facing the Giants" I hope that it helps you to be motivated to push harder to give your all and that you may see the Glory God has set for you and that nothing is impossible for God, especially if you give him everything. 

 

Missional Church VS Maintenance Church

I read this in someones blog and i thought it was pretty good, so for all my pastor friends out there check this out or just people in general. Now being the minister at Elk Grove Church of Christ I am striving to get our congregation to think more about how we can reach our community so that more people may know and understand the love that only comes from God.


Missional Church VS Maintenance Chuch


1. In measuring its effectiveness, the maintenance congregation asks, “How many visitors have we attracted?” The missional congregation asks, “How many members have we sent?”

2. When contemplating some form of change, the maintenance congregation says, “If this proves upsetting to any of our members, we won’t do it.” The missional congregation says, “If this will help us bless and touch someone outside of our faith community, we will take the risk and do it.”

3. When thinking about change, the majority of members in a maintenance congregation ask, “How will this affect me?” The majority of members in the missional congregation ask, “Will this help align our activities around the missio dei — the mission of God?”

4. When thinking of its vision for ministry, the maintenance congregation says, “We have to be faithful to our past.” The missional congregation says, “We have to be faithful to our future.”

5. The pastor in the maintenance congregation says to the newcomer, “I’d like to introduce you to some of our members.” In the missional congregation the members say, “We’d like to introduce you to our pastor.”

6. When confronted with a legitimate pastoral concern, the pastor in the maintenance congregation asks, “How can I meet this need?” The pastor in the missional congregation asks, “How can we meet this need?”

7. The maintenance congregation seeks to avoid conflict at any cost (but rarely succeeds). The missional congregation understands that conflict is the price of progress, and is willing to pay the price. It understands that it cannot take everyone with it. This causes some grief, but it does not keep it from doing what needs to be done.

8. The leadership style in the maintenance congregation is primarily managerial, where leaders try to keep everything in order and running smoothly. The leadership style in a missional congregation is primarily transformational, casting a vision of what can be, and marching off the map in order to bring the vision into reality.

9. The maintenance congregation is concerned with their congregation, its organizations and structure, its constitutions and committees. The missional congregation is concerned with the culture, with understanding how secular people think and what makes them tick. It tries to determine their needs and their points of accessibility to the Gospel.

10. When thinking about growth, the maintenance congregations asks, “How many Christians, who aren’t currently members, live within a twenty-minute drive of this church?” The missional congregation asks, “How many unreached people groups live within a twenty-minute drive of this church?”

11. The maintenance congregation looks at the community and asks, “How can we get these people to come to our church?” The missional congregation asks, “How can we go and be engaged with these people?”

12. The maintenance congregation thinks about how to save their congregation. The missional congregation thinks about how to plant new missional communities to extend the Kingdom of God.

Heart of Jesus

Could you imagine if God took over heart for one day how your life would be? Think about it what if God took you where you are at, same body, same job, same family, same life, the only thing that changes is that he is now in control of your heart. What do you think would be different? Would your family think you are different? How about your boss? What about your enemies would they see something different in you? Would you still freak out and stress in traffic situations or when someone cuts you off? God wants to have your heart he wants to lead your life, if you were a car he wants to be the engine that runs you, if you were a computer he would be the hardware and software that makes you function. Basically God wants to be more in your life than someone you talk to on Sundays and Wednesdays. If you are going to call yourself a Christian (which means Christ like) then we need to be striving daily to emulate Him.  If your life would be drastically different if God were in control of your heart maybe that means you haven’t let him truly into your heart yet. In order for God to take the reigns in your life you have to let them go. Max Lucado in his book “Like Jesus” stated “God loves you where you are but he refuses to leave you that way.” God loves us where we are at but he wants so much more out of us he wants us to be like his son. Hear me out on this I know that Jesus is perfect and we are far from that but he did leave us a pretty great example on how to live our lives, and the good news is he had it written into a book so we could read about it. So I guess the first step into living a life more geared like Christ would be to start reading his word more, start praying more, start building a relationship with him more. When I was a boy I wanted desperately to be a famous soccer player, my favorite player back then was a US national team player named Alexi Lalas, part of it was because he had red hair and he was a defender, I too had red hair and I loved playing defense. So what I did was I grew my hair out like him I studied his moves and started to copy him, I started to play like he played. There are many people out there with similar stories Kobe Bryant studied many superstar basketball players like Michael Jordan and copied him to the point his highlights on Sportcenter looked identical to MJ’s. What if we took this same approach to being like Christ? What if we studied the bible examined his life and started to emulate it? Wouldn’t we be better people? Better at our jobs? Better at raising our children? We would have a life that was filled with love and forgiveness. Lets start to take on Jesus and maybe we will start to shed some of the world's ugliness and start sharing the beauty that is Jesus Christ!