A Tidbit of Fun

Now I realize that this is massively late, but I figured I could let you all hear the teaching that I was able to give back in April. It is basically a summary of my story and how my pastor, Berk, pursued me and built into me. I think a few people may have enjoyed it, and I know that I had a blast giving the talk! Anyway, here it is:

http://www.graceatstate.org/media/3739/2013-04-14.mp3

Psalm 119

I just wanted to share with you a really neat exercise that we did on Tuesday morning for doctrine training. Usually, the guest pastor for the week goes through a teaching of one of the Great Commission Churches CORE values (found here) and some doctrine of some type. This week, the value was "Commitment to God and His Word" and the doctrine was...well... God. Haha

So, for the doctrine time, we all spent 25 minutes creating a word picture (example here

to the right) for God and each word we used was to have a verse related to it e.g. Holy (1 Peter 1:16) or Righteous (Psalm 11:7) or Father (Ephesians 4:6). Well, that was fun and we then had to defend one of our choices of words when Andrew Roberts (the guest pastor this week from Jacksonville, FL) "attacked" it from the world's standpoint. It was a neat exercise that I would encourage you to do as well to just find in scripture what describes God.

However, the real work was the core value training on God's word beforehand. Well, Andrew is not a traditional teacher in a sense that he sat us down and walked us through some written talk that he had prepared beforehand (as you might ascertain from the God doctrine exercise). Instead, Andrew had us pair up and read through Psalm 119. It's the longest psalm and I believe all but 1-2 verses are about God's word. So we paired up and just went out for about 50 minutes reading and praying through the psalm. Well, we were supposed to get through the whole thing and then afterwards talk with our partner about what stuck out before we got back into our whole staff/intern group and discussed it. Turns out that only one pair got through the entire psalm. Haha, it was an amazing time of letting God's word teach itself. I think I learned more about God's word from reading and praying through that psalm then I ever have before from any teaching.

With all that said, I think it would be one of the best experiences in your life if you just took an hour or so one day, maybe grab a brother or sister (where available) and walk, read, and pray through Psalm 119 together. The way Andrew and I did it (yes I got to pray with the ballin pastor) is one of us read one of the sections and then prayed about it, and if the other person wanted to pray about it too they did. If not, they just went right into reading the next section and then prayed about it. We just kept rotating and the whole time we were in fellowship with each other and God through the Holy Spirit. No breaks, just straight going hard in the paint! Haha, so yes. 

Do this! 

Get to know God's word! 

Be filled with His Spirit and enjoy this free doctrine lesson brought to you by JESUS!

Apology Update

I would first like to apologize that I have not been faithful to my word of at least one post every two weeks. A small reason would be that I haven't had time, but the truthful statement would be that I simply haven't made time. For this, I am sorry. However, with that said, prayerfully I will be posting a few blogs here shortly with a couple updates from St. Pete. Here's the first from yesterday:

In St. Pete not even a week and we already have some connections. My brother Mike and I had a fun time playing toss with a few little kids who introduced us to their grandmother Joyce who seemed interested in hearing more about Jesus, so we're going back to speak to her soon.

Today the interns and some of us staff went to the best place to get free Wi-Fi... Chick-Fil-A. Haha, and we met this young manager named Derik who is going to participate in a gap-year program after high school to strengthen his faith before going to college. It was really neat to get connected with him, and to top things off a stranger bought us all cookies because they overheard that we were on mission here in St. Pete. I thought the day was great by then, which it was, but it got better.

Morning Prayer at 7:00 every morning

This evening, we were able to be encouraged by Ray Vaughn (the champion for Christ in Columbia, SC) in some T4T training. I think the people not so familiar with it were able to catch the vision that God put upon the leaders' hearts. It was really encouraging to be paired up with a campus minister on USF-SP's campus, David. He seemed really excited and encouraged to be laboring alongside us for the summer outreach program. Another encouraging sight was to see my pal Andi who we met last summer come back and get reconnected to be able to do some outreach with us this summer. He went so far as to pretty much put aside all his work until August.

So needless to say, I'm excited about what this summer holds for us here in St. Pete and I pray that I'll be able to make the effort to keep everyone updated.

Encouraging verse of the day: John 21:25 NASB

Staff/Intern "team-building" exercise

And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books that would be written.

I find that John always ends his books with a bang of some sort. Haha