Family Revival 101

So in the morning we are heading off to Leavenworth for the weekend! We are staying at "The River Spot." We look forward to getting away from all the craziness of this world. No computers, no cellphones, just the wife, child, and myself. Families that pray & grow together, stay together. Sometimes when I find myself weak, I look to the Lord to refresh me and my family. One of my favorite scriptures is Isaiah 40:31 (NASB).

Yet those who wait for the LORD
Will gain new strength;
They will mount up with wings like eagles,
They will run and not get tired,
They will walk and not become weary.

I find comfort in my God. I so thankful for Jesus going to the cross and dying for the sins of those who believe! Salvation is only possible in Jesus! For those that are for God, who can be against them? That gives me the drive to keep pressing in! Not to back down!

So, please pray for our safety while away! Pray for us as a family that we would truly connect with God in a deeper way. That we will trust God more each day we live. That we as a family would become dependant upon His strength, His wisdom, His understanding! That we would lay down the desires of our flesh, and pursue the desires of His Kingdom! I'm ready for a family revival!

Always remember, you are loved!

Recommended Read - So, You want to be like Christ? - Charles R. Swindoll

I must say out of all the books that I have read so far (outside the Bible), this book has truly changed me for the better! God put this book in my life just at the right time. My desire is to be more like Christ, and less like this world. I long to reflect and see what true change this book brings into my life. I know this, I have already started to see real fruit coming out of my life from the pages of this book. Being a Christian I understand what Jesus demands of me. Being a true follower of Christ is hard, but also a very joyful experience. Walking with Christ is a delight to my heart, a comfort this world will never bring me. I agree with the book, He patiently waits for you to sacrifice yourself in small amounts, one decision at a time, one day at a time, so that you might enjoy an ever-increasing intimacy with Him. And this deepening intimacy with Him will inevitable make you more like Christ.

I wanted to also share a portion of the book with you that truly spoke to my heart. It comes from page 152.

If you truly are a believer in Jesus Christ, you have the Spirit of God dwelling within you. Yet believers also have an old nature - a habitual, sinful way of thinking - that Paul called "the flesh." Let me put it straight. The flesh is a self-serving, nonbelieving, godless mind-set that live by animal instinct. Its nature stance is facing away from God. Its innate priority is self-preservation. The lens through which the flesh sees the world is "eat or be eaten." It's the pattern of living that you inherited when you were born, that the world taught you as you matured. To make matters worse, it comes as natural to you as breathing. The Holy Spirit notwithstanding, the flesh remains within us, never improving, always ready to be satisfied.

So are you satisfying your flesh with the life you are living, or are you satisfying God? Living your life as a sacrifice to God as we are called to do in Romans 12:1-2? Lets be real for a minute, who do you serve?

But all in all, this is a book that I would HIGHLY recommend to anyone that desires to truly be like Christ! No pretenders allowed in this book. Through this book, God is moving in my life like never before. Its like the first time God's word came into my life....Sharp like a double edge knife...cutting right down to the point of conviction.

Rightly | Dividing aims to move believers beyond personal Bible reading to Bible study. There are many useful Bible reading plans, and for that matter, much excellent material is available from good Bible teachers. But this seminar hopes to train people how to understand and depend on the Book, not only on teachers of the Book.

Sean Higgins will be teaching this seminar on Saturday, October 11 at Grace Bible Church. It will include over six hours of teaching, covering topics like how to prepare for study, basic principles (hermeneutics) for Bible study, how to find the point of a paragraph, and recommended tools.

Anyone in the area is welcome to attend. If you’re interested, jump over to the Rightly | Dividing website for more details and online registration.

Also included:
continental breakfast and catered lunch
a book on Bible study
other gifts

2 Timothy 2:15 (NASB)
Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth.

Demand #3

Started reading "What Jesus Demands from the World" by John Piper before I go to bed. He writes 50 demands in the book. So for the next 50 nights the wife and I are reading it together to learn what Jesus demands from us. I'm looking forward to see how this book helps us grow together with the Lord! Tonight I want to share part of demand #3. Throughout the book I will touch on some from time to time. Keep pressing Church!

You refuse to come to me that you may have life. - John 5:40

"You Refuse To Come To Me That You May Have Life"
Why don't people come to Jesus? At one level the answer is because they "refuse to come." In other words, people do not want to come. Some call this the choice of free will. Jesus would probably say it is the choice of a will enslaved to sin. "Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin" (John 8:34). Jesus would say that people do not come to him because they are enslaved to their supreme preference for other things. "The light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light...everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light" (John 3:19-20).

How then has anyone ever come, since we are all enslaved to sin and spiritually dead (see Demand #1)? Jesus' answer was that God, in his great mercy, overcomes are resistance and draws us: "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him" (John 6:44). "No one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father" (John 6:65). God grants the gift of new birth and repentance, which opens the eyes of the spiritually blind to the truth and beauty of Jesus. When this happens, all suicidal objections fall. We are finally free. And, finally free from slavery, we come.*

*What Jesus Demands from the World, by John Piper (pg.46,47)

The 9 Marks Overview

Taken from the website www.9marks.org. As I grow in the Lord, my convictions of Church weigh heavy on my heart. My hope is one day to serve God's Church as an elder. Love this website, and thought I would share. Keep pressing, keep praying!

The Mission of 9Marks
We believe the local church is the focal point of God's plan for displaying his glory to the nations. Our vision is simple: Churches that reflect the character of God. Our mission is to cultivate and encourage churches characterized by these nine marks:

1. Expositional Preaching
This is preaching which expounds what Scripture says in a particular passage, carefully explaining its meaning and applying it to the congregation. It is a commitment to hearing God’s Word and to recovering the centrality of it in our worship.

2. Biblical Theology
Paul charges Titus to "teach what is in accord with sound doctrine” (Titus 2:1). Our concern should be not only with how we are taught, but with what we are taught. Biblical theology is a commitment to know the God of the Bible as He has revealed Himself in Scripture.

3. Biblical Understanding of the Good News
The gospel is the heart of Christianity. But the good news is not that God wants to meet people's felt needs or help them develop a healthier self-image. We have sinfully rebelled against our Creator and Judge. Yet He has graciously sent His Son to die the death we deserved for our sin, and He has credited Christ's acquittal to those who repent of their sins and believe in Jesus' death and resurrection. That is the good news.

4. Biblical Understanding of Conversion
The spiritual change each person needs is so radical, so near the root of us, that only God can do it. We need God to convert us. Conversion need not be an emotionally heated experience, but it must evidence itself in godly fruit if it is to be what the Bible regards as a true conversion.

5. Biblical Understanding of Evangelism
How someone shares the gospel is closely related to how he understands the gospel. To present it as an additive that gives non-Christians something they naturally want (i.e. joy or peace) is to present a half-truth, which elicits false conversions. The whole truth is that our deepest need is spiritual life, and that new life only comes by repenting of our sins and believing in Jesus. We present the gospel openly, and leave the converting to God.

6. Biblical Understanding of Membership
Membership should reflect a living commitment to a local church in attendance, giving, prayer and service; otherwise it is meaningless, worthless, and even dangerous. We should not allow people to keep their membership in our churches for sentimental reasons or lack of attention. To be a member is knowingly to be traveling together as aliens and strangers in this world as we head to our heavenly home.

7. Biblical Church Discipline
Church discipline gives parameters to church membership. The idea seems negative to people today – “didn’t our Lord forbid judging?” But if we cannot say how a Christian should not live, how can we say how he or she should live? Each local church actually has a biblical responsibility to judge the life and teaching of its leaders, and even of its members, particularly insofar as either could compromise the church’s witness to the gospel.

8. Promotion of Christian Discipleship and Growth
A pervasive concern with church growth exists today – not simply with growing numbers, but with growing members. Though many Christians measure other things, the only certain observable sign of growth is a life of increasing holiness, rooted in Christian self-denial. These concepts are nearly extinct in the modern church. Recovering true discipleship for today would build the church and promote a clearer witness to the world.

9. Biblical Understanding of Leadership
What eighteenth-century Baptists and Presbyterians often agreed upon was that there should be a plurality of elders in each local church. This plurality of elders is not only biblical, but practical — it has the immense benefit of rounding out the pastor’s gifts to ensure the proper shepherding of God’s church.

In identifying and promoting these nine marks, we are not intending to lay down an exhaustive or authoritative list. There are other significant marks of healthy churches, like prayer and fellowship. We want to pursue those ourselves as well, and we want you to pursue them with us. But these nine are the ones we think are most neglected in most local churches today, with the most damaging ramifications. Join us in cultivating churches that reflect the character of God.

Hard to Believe

What's wrong with making unbelievers feel comfortable in Church?

On the surface, it makes sense. The Christian's mandate is to make disciples, so why not make church more attractive to unbelievers? Spice up the presentation. Tone down the preaching. Tell everyone that Jesus will meet their felt needs.

But is making unbelievers comfortable truly the way to make disciples? Does promising the lost that Jesus can fix their lives bring them any closer to salvation or are we selling them a synthetic gospel that cannot save? For the sake of bigger congregations, are churches today diluting or even neglecting the gospel?

John MacArthur answers those questions and more in Hard to Believe. In this series you'll learn:
- Why is making unbelievers feel comfortable in church so dangerous?
- What gives the gospel its power and why are so many of today's churches failing to tap into it?
- What did God truly promise to those who embrace the gospel?
- What did Jesus mean when He said "follow Me?"

Jesus "did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped."

Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus,
who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped,but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.
Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus EVERY KNEE WILL BOW, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

-Philippians 2:5-11 (NASB)

Jesus "did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped." Through Jesus deserved all the respect, all the worship, all the adoration, all the fear due Him as God, He let it all go. He released His grip on all of it.

Further, "He emptied Himself." While retaining every aspect of His deity, Jesus relinquished the independent use of His divine attributes during His earthly sojourn. Before the Son became a flesh-and-blood man, He had absolute autonomy as God, being coequal, coeternal, and coexistent with the Father. When He became a man, He voluntarily gave up the independent use of His divine attributes; and while on earth, He submitted to the Father. He waited on the Father for His will, for His timing. He followed the Father's guidance as to where He would go and what He would do and what He would say and when He would do those things. He relinquished the voluntary use of His divine prerogatives. He gave up what was rightfully His for the sake of others -- including you and me.*

*So, You want to be like Christ? By Charles R. Swindoll (Pg.89)