"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
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Friday, September 10, 2010
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
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
Thursday, September 9, 2010
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
Try it.
Aaron
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