hopefully this hurts you more than it hurts me...

So, I love my job. I mean I get to spend time with some awesome students, play video games, go on trips and act like a 15 year old some times. But, something really has gotten my attention. This post may not be one that you want to read but it needs to be read. So, please keep your daggers and swords at ease for now.

My heart is troubled. Why? I think we expect to much from our students. We think that we truly understand what is happening in their lives. We think that giving them their space will make the relationship better. Saying all of this, I think that parents of students, and I say this with much love because I have none of my own, are deceived. What are you talking about Aaron? Well, yesterday during our second service, I heard that over 65% of Christians who have a Bible don't read it. Wow. Really? So, my mind automatically raced towards my area of ministry and I wonder how many students read the Bible? The numbers can't be good. Can they be better than 65% of adults?

So here is my dilemma. How do we fix this? How do we get our students interested in reading God's Word? My thoughts are, it starts at home but then I sound naive and judgmental. I know that the environments where students are at today are not healthy, but that is all the more reason to have them study God's Word right? I think that it starts with adults, not knowing how to read the Bible and then teaching their children. I think that we rely too much on the church to fix our children. Can it become more of a pit stop in the every day journey of our lives, instead of a day care? Last time I checked the home is the spiritual place of growth.

If you know me, please hear me when I say all of this, I am not calling out any of your children. But, maybe this is the moment where you can sit down with your children and truly ask them when the last time they read the Bible was? Stop reading my blog and go grab your students!!  All I know is that it is harder for me, as a pastor to teach students the Bible when they have no idea what it is and how to open it and these are students who have professed Christ! Well, Aaron that is your job. Uhm, no. I am just a small piece in the bigger picture of your students lives. I love being that small piece but if you are just counting on me to magically transform the lives of students, then we are all in trouble. That may hurt. I say it with love.

I take full responsibility of guiding them on how to get plugged-in to a small group and make sure that we give them the best opportunities to expand their walk with Christ, but this is not an everyday deal. I only have them twice a week. How many times do you have them?? There has to be help from the other side. Do we really want our students to know God? Then, let's push them to want to know Him. Don't just say you need to read the Bible, read it with them, Discuss, dialogue and for goodness sake pray for your students!!

My passion is to see students grow closer to God through the Word and living out their faith in Christ. I know that parents want the same thing too. Can we put down the remote, open the Bible, put our foot down, show them who Jesus is, pray for each other, view church as a refueling station in the long journey with Christ and then do it all over again?? I think that we can! I know we can! It will take some sacrifice but it should be a sacrifice that is worth taking! Here again, no name calling, just a piece of reality that breaks my heart....I hope that one day we can turn this ship around because right now as a universal church body, we have hit an iceberg people and students are drowning. Can that be today? I am praying for all parents and students of our church and churches in this nation. This is a critical issue and WE can do something about it!

Aaron

Don't get burned...

Ahhh.....coffee! Got to be one of the world's greatest things. For me, it's what wakes me up in the morning. funny thing about coffee is that it is hot and taste great. So, as I was chillin' this morning drinking my coffee in my Starbucks coffee mug/cup, I saw the warning label: "Careful, the beverage you're about to enjoy is extremely hot." So the thought that came to mind is, how many times do we disregard the message? How many times in life do we just jump right in without viewing the possible consequences for our actions? Even though it may taste good, look, feel good, but when it is all said and done, you get burned.

As I look at my relationship with God, I can see that sometimes I tend to do whatever I please, whenever I want to because "it my party and I'll cry if I want to" but in all reality I am setting myself up to be burned. I feel that many times the things that I choose to do or say or watch come from an innate desire to please myself, rather than please my Father. While I know that the contents of my actions are extremely dangerous or hot or unholy, I chose to do them anyways. Why is this? I think that I can relate to Paul when he talks about how he wants to do what is right but does wrong. No matter how hard he tries, he fails. He knows what the right thing to do is but something within him pushes him towards the dangerously, hot cup of coffee(insert your own device here). Could we chose to slow down and remember that sin is unholy and displeases God?

I think that many times we get caught up in the moment. In that moment we find ourselves making a choice on whether or not to make the right decisions. So basically we all have the opportunity to chose the right course of action but we would rather get burned instead. Have you ever had hot coffee spilled on you? It burns. It hurts. It is painful. But the effects of that burn, decision, can't leave immediately. The marks of our decisions sometimes last longer than we would like.

So anyways, I write some pretty random things sometimes and this is one of them. Hope it makes sense and you can take something away from it. In the mean time, let your coffee cool off of for a second before burning the mess out of your tongue and maybe the next time you drink a cup of joe, you might, just might remember the way we are supposed to act and treat others as you treat yourself to some arabica bean delight. Just sayin...

Aaron

I'm stealing this prayer and giving it to you...

"Ever since I first heard of your strong faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for Christians everywhere, I have never stopped thanking God for you. I pray for you constantly, asking God, the glorious Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to give you spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you might grow in your knowledge of God. I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the wonderful future he has promised to those he called. I want you to realize what a rich and glorious inheritance he has given to his people."


"I pray that you will begin to understand the incredible greatness of his power for us who believe him. This is the same mighty power that raised Christ from the dead and seated him in the place of honor at God's right and in the heavenly realms. Now he is far above any ruler or authority or anything else in this world or in the world to come. And God has put all things under the authority of Christ, and he gave him this authority for the benefit of the church. And the church is his body; it is filled by Christ, who fills everything everywhere with his presence."

My prayer for you, taken from Paul in Ephesians 1:15-23.


May the church remember that it finds it's place through Christ, not through man. Also, that the body of Christ should reflect his presence everywhere we set foot.


Aaron

Ants and Jesus...??

So, this is gonna be one of those weird posts but looking back at yesterday I had an encounter with some ants and it got me thinking about my relationship with Christ. You are probably wondering, how can you get something out of ants?

Well, here goes. As I woke up, our dog's food bowl was in the kitchen and to my surprise a long line of ants were coming from outside and found their precious way into our home. But what caught my eye was that there was a line leaving and a huge mass in the bowl feasting on the dog food and a massive line leaving. And so my mind started to wonder.....

This is what came about: cool example of how our relationship with God should be, in a three-fold kinda way.

1) God puts himself out there so that all of mankind can come and taste and see that He is good. Kinda like the dog bowl sitting by itself, available to whomever wants to partake of the dog food. God is always ready for us to come to Him, in fact God even pursues us, which would kinda be weird if the dog bowl would have started sliding on the floor but any who....

2) God is our source of food, not dog food, but the only place of nourishment and true fulfillment. He is the person we can approach and feast upon His Word to be filled with of grace and mercy. It's in His presence that we find life and direction. It's the place that leads us to true understanding about who we are and what we have been created to do.

3) God is not only to be sought after and fill our lives with challenges and direction, but He lives within us so that we may take the living Word, the food, the life, hope, ad love back to our social environments and share who He is to others searching for answers, love, forgiveness and true life.

So as the ants are marching to the bowl for food and leaving with what they can carry, it sparked something else. As I said a lot of the ants were coming to and fro from the dog bowl, but some of the ants were just huddled in the bowl, never leaving to return. This caught my eye because I feel that many times I act the same way when it comes to my faith. It's all about me and my relationship with God and I just throw in Matthew 28:19 whenever I can or feel like it.

So what I took away from this is that I am called to run after my Father, come and be filled with nourishment, but also to leave with a mission to take what truly gives me life back to the world, so that steps A and B can happen to those who need a Savior, which then will produce more ants! I told you this would be a weird post!




P.S. I killed the ants.

Aaron

I stand in awe...

It so awesome to get out of the way and let God move through you and through the lives of students. Over the past few weeks the Spirit has really taken hold of some of our students and they are telling their friends about the church and they are coming to hangout with us on Wednesday nights. Last night we ended our series on "unlikely" and I left a challenge to our students to do the "unlikely" thing when it comes to dealing with people who hurt us, cause us pain or just say something about our mommas. What I am referring to is that our natural tendency is to fight back or "an eye for an eye" when it comes to those we encounter on a daily basis. I challenged our students to "give love, not hate" and do the unlikely thing. Its really hard to do this when people spread lies about us, cut us off in traffic, etc. It's not impossible though. It will be interesting to hear some of their stories over the next few weeks and see how they have failed and succeeded in this area. But I leave you with a question: could you show love more than you show hate this week? even to your enemies? your neighbors? your teacher? your boss? Granted, they don't deserve forgiveness and love, but neither do we. Don't just love those who love you, don't hate those who hate you, love everyone with the same love that Christ shows us in the Bible. Go the extra mile if you have to, give the clothes of your back. Stop doing the normal likely reactions and do the unlikely reaction of love! Love covers a multitude of sins.

Try it.

Aaron

And then....

So, it's been awhile since I have posted on this thing. I guess I got the urge to do this today cause I saw my wife's blog page up on the computer. Looking back at my last post alot of things have changed. Let's see, God led us to La Vernia, TX to continue serving students, we moved away from family ( a whole day worth of traveling for Elisabeth's family), new community, new people, new staff, new everything but what is cool about this whole transition thing was that God had our backs. We didn't quite know what to understand, what it would look like, how we would feel, but all in all the move to Texas has been a blessing to both Elisabeth and I.

I will say that I am very grateful for the path that God has led us down. In fact, alot of people would say that they wish their lives could be different but I don't. Elisabeth and I have learned alot about each other, we have learned alot about God, our faith and a whole lot of patience. I will say this about the move out here to Texas; I don't think that God makes mistakes. I will leave it at that.

So here we are in a small town in Texas, in a church that is seeing people come to know Christ almost on every Sunday and it's great to see God's people live out their love for others and do the things necessary to give people the opportunity to encounter Jesus. Last Sunday we had 12 people accept Christ! God is good. God is moving and I want to be alongside of whatever He has planned for Grace Bible Church.

The students here at Grace have been hurt, they have been broken and need a leader that they can trust and build relationships with. I know that God has led us to Grace for this specific reason. It's my prayer that I would allow the Spirit to move through me, speak through me and draw students unto Christ not myself. For sometime now, I was trying to do soo much on my own that I wouldn't leave enough room for the Spirit to work. I quickly got away from the understanding that God draws men unto Himself and that we are vessels to be used in that process. Now, I am not saying that all I am going to do is sit around and pray all day and not prepare lessons. But my focus is on this key understanding: God will build his church, with or without me. So I need to let Him build His church and I need to be so close to Christ that I can be used in amazing ways to reach our to students and their families.

So, basically in my thinking, I am turning over a new leaf. I am not going to worry about the services and lessons and all that logistical stuff and focus more on the leading of the Spirit. God knows the hearts of men, he knows exactly what the students are dealing with and facing at school, home and etc. The question is do I trust Him?

God is up to some big things here at Grace and I am excited to be here serving alongside a family of devoted Christ-followers, a family that sacrifices, a family that loves. May we continue to pursue Christ out of love!

Aaron