- Good news, bad news kind of day.
- The bad news is I thought my sermon was one of my worst ever.
- I just never got into a good flow.
- Usually when I’m not really feeling a message, God takes over and it all seems to click.
- Not today though.
- However, just because I wasn’t feeling it doesn’t mean that God didn’t still use it.
- Had a few people tell me this was one of their favorite messages they’ve ever heard me do.
- And now for the good news…
- 4 more professions of faith today!
- Like last week i find this slightly amusing since today’s message was on how to verbally share your faith with other people.
- Ironic huh? Taught on how to share your faith and 4 people realized that they first need to have faith.
- You can listen to the message here if you’re interested.
- As a reminder…practice the Bridge Illustration (can be downloaded at the above link under the documents section) and don’t forget to email me your 3 minute testimony so I can review it and make suggestions.
- As for the rest of the day, it was kind of weird as well.
- Normally we have 40-43 people serve on a Sunday to make everything happen.
- Today so many people were gone because of the holiday that we only had about half of that number.
- Considering half of those are in the band or tech area, it made for a very short staff.
- However, everyone stepped up and did what they could where they could and we didn’t seem to skip a beat.
- Love my team! What an awesome group of servants.
- Surprisingly, attendance was actually really good today even with a lot of our regulars away.
- That’s a good sign that perhaps we’re going to get some good momentum going.
- The rest of the day was pretty much as normal…
- Set-up and tear-down both went quickly and smoothly.
- The band as always did a great job.
- It was great to have George and Rebecca Spangler with us today.
- George is the current pastor at the Camp Hill Church of God and will be planting Turning Point Church next fall.
- We’ll be sharing with you in the coming months ways that we can partner with George to help him as he starts from scratch just like we did in the fall of 2010.
- One of our core values is that, “It takes all types of churches to reach all types of people”. We’re honored to be able to help another church here in the local area reach the 425000 that currently don’t have a relationship with Jesus.
- Next week we wrap-up the “Just Walk Across the Room” series by looking at having a personal vision for your life that includes being an eternal difference maker.
Inside Today’s Experience
- Another great day.
- Had another person start a relationship with Jesus today.
- The amazing thing about that is we’re currently doing a series on how to share your faith.
- Amazing how God can speak to people’s hearts even in messages that aren’t necessarily evangelistic in nature.
- In fact, a big misconception of churches like ours is that we must only preach seeker friendly, evangelistic messages every week in order to have as many professions of faith as we do.
- The truth is in now a little over 1 year of existence, I’ve only done 1 message that was strictly the Gospel message and geared for a response at the end.
- Every other week messages are about growing in your faith.
- In other words, I assume that everyone will want to be a follower of Jesus so here’s what it means to follow Him more closely.
- Now of course I present this in such a way that it does make sense to non-followers, but for the most part we tackle some pretty serious discipleship stuff.
- At the end then I usually say something to the effect of, “Ok now the first step to applying today’s message is starting a relationship with Jesus if you don’t already have one”…then I present how to do that.
- Ok didn’t mean to start this with my philosophy of preaching but there it is.
- In any case, nothing out of the ordinary today with set-up.
- Had fun at our team meeting today giving a quiz on our core values.
- During it I said, “We say there are 2 things which we say are not optional, what are they”?
- One of the teens said, “Clothes”?
- Haha…gotta love those teens!
- All in all people did pretty good at least knowing the gist of each value.
- Huge difference though between intellectually knowing these things and living them out.
- Making great progress though!
- Very funny yet potentially embarrassing thing happened to Lisa today in the lobby.
- I went out and her and Meghan were laughing so hard they were in tears.
- I’ll let Lisa decide whether to fess up to what happened.
- Band as always did a great job.
- So interesting watching Jeff use a bow on his electric guitar for the one song.
- I continued the “Just Walk Across the Room” series by talking about the 3 D’s we all need to do to help people who are far from God.
- They are…Develop friendships, Discover their story and Discern appropriate next steps.
- You can listen to the full message here.
- As I mentioned in the message, over 300 names were written on the walls last week.
- I prayed for each one by name before today’s Experience.
- As I mentioned in the message, 3 things happened as I did it.
- First, the reality that these are real people that we know that are bound for hell unless we do something about it.
- Second, that reaching 90% of them is not enough.
- As I said, “That’s 30 people…anyone want to volunteer any of your people for hell?”
- Last thought was actually a feeling of righteous anger that so many people waste their lives on things that don’t really count for eternity while real people, like on these boards, die and enter into a Christ-less eternity.
- Whether you attend Exponential or not, let me ask you a question…What are you investing your life, time and resources in? Is that going to last for eternity?
- If not, then stop wasting this one and only life on things that don’t really matter.
- Ok shifting gears somewhat…one of the best things about Facebook’s new list feature is I can get pretty instant feedback on the Experience.
- Came across this earlier from a 1st time guest of ours…”Had a great morning with family and friends at a new church. Cried the first 3 songs. Praise God! Got my love for Christ back this morning”.
- Awesome…that’s why I love what I do!
- Next week we’ll look at how to verbally share your faith with 2 simple short stories you can tell.
- In the meantime…have a Happy Thanksgiving!
Inside Today’s Experience
- Wow what an awesome day.
- We have such a great team that sacrifices each week to make sure people have a meaningful Experience with God.
- Today was one of those days where everything fell right into place, despite some out of the ordinary things we were doing.
- Set-up went smooth and I know the band was having fun covering the Proclaimers, “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)”.
- Bill was pulling off a pretty good Scottish accent…and having fun figuring out what “havering” means.
- Turns out it is nonsensical babbling.
- Guess that explains the one chorus.
- As a reminder, we do current secular songs and classic pop songs like this one in the hopes that a new association will be made in your mind.
- Instead of it just being a catchy tune my hope is that from now on you will think of the principles we’re learning in the “Just Walk Across the Room” series.
- Today’s main point was that the single greatest gift you can give someone else is the gift of Jesus.
- We talked about getting out of our Circles of Comfort and into the Zone of the Unknown….but only as the Spirit prompts us.
- I even shared a humorous example of how TV evangelists do their jobs so well sometimes that it intimidates us into thinking we could never do what they do.
- You can listen to all of today’s message here.
- I also showed a video of this summer’s baptisms, which pretty much sums up why we do what we do.
- The biggest highlight though was everyone getting an opportunity to write 5 names on the “Just Walk Across the Room” stage props of the people they are trying to lead to Jesus.
- The logistics of getting each 6X4 foot prop from the stage to the upper walkways and then getting everyone through the line in a timely manner was a massive undertaking but so worth it.
- Last week we talked about the 425000 people in our area who don’t currently know Jesus.
- Now we know about 1000 of their names.
- I will be personally praying for each one and there’s just something powerful about having those names written down and now visible throughout the rest of the series.
- If nothing else it will be a great visual reminder that our work is far from done and each of us has a personal stake in all of this.
- It was great to have Gayle’s parents and other friends from Chambersburg with us today.
- We had lunch with all of them down at Duke’s and caught up.
- Best line of the day came from Gayle’s dad who leads the Traditional service at Chambersburg. “I kept hearing my daughter singing and thinking, ‘A beautiful voice and all that talent wasted on music like this'”.
- Haha…just a reminder of one of our core values…”It takes all types of churches to reach all types of people”.
- Next week we’ll talk about 3 things to do once you walk across the room.
- Can’t wait to share with you how easy and non-threatening sharing your faith can be.
Inside Today’s Experience
- I like to think of myself as someone who depends on God’s Spirit, but today I didn’t have an option but.
- Last night just before midnight as I was looking over my notes for today’s message, I heard Lisa yell for me to come to the basement right away.
- Our bedroom is down there and unfortunately water was seeping up through the carpeting.
- We did what we could to make sure nothing was damaged and finally went to bed around 1am.
- The problem was it wasn’t to bed since our new house has two offices for us but no spare bed room.
- So I ended up on the sofa and she ended up on the love seat in my office.
- Of course I couldn’t’ sleep well for various reasons and only ended up with 2 hours sleep.
- How I ended up functioning properly is beyond me.
- How this turned out to be my favorite worship Experience since we launched 6 months ago has to do with the Holy Spirit and the awesome team that we’ve assembled.
- We were doing a lot things differently today so our warm-up time went super long, so big thanks to Chad for filling in at the last minute to lead the team meeting and prayer time. By the way their basement flooded last night as well…ughhh.
- The band as always did an awesome job leading worship.
- After the greeting time we took a brief moment to prayer for the Fox family.
- Their son JT passed away this past week at the age of 32. He was 1 of the 71 people who have made a profession of faith since we launched in October.
- Just goes to show we never know how much time we have on this earth and why evangelism is so important.
- Today was the wrap-up to our “Winning” series where we’ve been learning how to take filter pop culture through God’s Word so it helps us bridge the gap between God and the people in our culture.
- Here’s a video showing how some are applying last week’s message.
- After having looked at a popular movie and TV show the past two weeks, today we did a song that has been near the top of the rock charts for nearly 7 months now…”Waiting on the End” by Linkin Park.
- It was cool having our drummer Steve do some of the vocals…reminded me of how Phil Collins used to sing and play drums at the same time.
- I used this song as a jump off to the thing that is most valuable to God…people.
- The key thought was…”Everybody that I have ever laid my eyes on is somebody for whom Jesus died”.
- It of course helped to reinforce one of our core values at ExponentialChurch.tv….”Lost people matter to God and therefore they must matter to me”.
- I can’t describe it but I knew something special was happening even as I was sharing the message…you’ll just have to listen for yourself.
- The band came right out of my message with one of my favorite songs…”Tears of the Saints”.
- This went right into communion and then back into everyone singing along to the bridge and chorus of “Tears of the Saints”.
- I was a mess by this point and was somewhat relived when I got back on stage to see that most of the crowd was a mess as well.
- God showed up big time and spoke to our hearts about how important people are and the urgency for reaching as many people as possible as quickly as possible.
- To be honest I wasn’t sure how to transition at that point to offering so I just stood there like a deer in headlights for awhile and then had the people applaud for all that God has done and is yet to do.
- During the announcement time I then announced not only what we’re doing next week for Easter (a message called, “Marked”…which I think will be at least as powerful as today) but also our next series starting May 1st.
- It’s called iLife and as a part of the series we’re giving away 4 FREE iPads!
- We had 2500 invite cards/tickets made up that look like iPads and our people can give them away to as many people as they want.
- It was awesome seeing people walking out of the theater with huge stacks in their hands.
- After the awesome Experience today I dreaded coming home.
- Thanks to Larry and Melissa Evans for letting me borrow their shop vac.
- I vacuumed for 6 hours this afternoon…not fun but necessary.
- Hopefully now I can enjoy a relaxing evening and get some much needed sleep.
- This week I’ve got two funerals to attend (including an out of town one), I’ve got to wrap up last minute details for Easter and prepare for the following Sunday as well since I leave early next week for Florida.
- It sounds like an impossible week but as God proved today if I’ll rely on Him, He’ll give me all the strength I need.
What Are You Excited About?
I was just at a conference where I saw a few guys excitedly showing and telling others about their IPAD’s. No doubt their excitement will lead to others going out and buying one. The same phenomenon happened when the Wii first came out or when people found out that Sonic was going to open a store in our area…when you’re excited about something you tell other people about it. In fact, you don’t even think about it…it’s just so exciting that it comes out of you…you can’t help it…YOU’RE EXCITED!
So as I was driving home from Harrisburg today I got to thinking…”Why is it that so few people ever share with others about their relationship with Jesus?” My conclusion…they’re not all that excited about Him. Listen, if you go see a movie and it’s awesome, you’re going to tell others about it. Some people will go see it, others won’t. Do you care? No. You just shared your excitement and wanted to offer to them the same joy you received from it. Well guess what…that makes you a movie evangelist. In fact, I’ll go as far to say that we are all evangelists about something…tv shows, bands, ice cream flavors, brand of jeans, the list goes on and on. Again what you’re excited about, you tell others about…that’s evangelism. So why do so many Christians say, “Oh I could never share my faith, I don’t have a gift of evangelism”? My conclusion is that they’re more excited about all kinds of other stuff more so than what Jesus has done for them. So my question is…”What are you excited about”?