Please join the Preschool and Children’s department as we pray for God to awaken the hearts of the parents within our community and our church. Every minute of every day there is a battle raging for the hearts, minds and attitudes of each family member within our community and within our church. Please pray that as parents we start focusing on the eternal matters of life and not the temporary matters of the flesh. We need to come together as one body united in Christ. There is nothing more the Devil desires than to divide us by tempting us with selfish desires. We must stand firm and stand together against the Devil’s schemes!

A Few random thoughts for the day:

I have been working my way back through the New Testament lately and I ended up in my avid coffee drinking wife's favorite book of the Bible Hebrews.

Chapter 2 especially caught my attention today.  Verse one states "we must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away".  

In our ever growing A.D.D. world (squirrel) have we lost the capacity to pay careful attention or do we consciously decide not to pay careful attention to the spiritual warfare that takes place around us daily. We often times stick our heads in the sand and try to not make decisions based upon eternal matters.  We act as if matters of eternal consequent are secondary to temporal acts of the now.   I think we try our best not to pay careful attention because if we did we might not make the all the same choices and we might not be able to keep up with the Jones' as our flesh compels us to do.  

What are we to pay careful attention to?  The Bible compels us to pay careful attention to the message of the Gospel and Christ's redemptive work on the cross.  According to 2 Corinthians 5: 17 if you are saved in Christ then you are a new creation. the old is gone and the new has come.  We are to pay careful attention to how we represent Christ as new creations and to how we sacrificially love others.  We are to play close attention to weather or not we are producing the fruit of the Spirit through our actions and behaviors.     

As you look at your life have you paid careful attention?

The WORD

the Bible teaches us in 2 Timothy 3:16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness,

Have you had a chance to read David Jeremiah’s new book “I though I Would Never See the Day”?  It addresses the issue. 

We are living in an era of increasingly Biblical ignorant Christians.  We all too often rely on feeling or personal opinion about major issues.  I’ve been to several conferences where scripture seems to take a back seat to personal opinion or cultural theism.  I encourage all Christians to stand on the rock that is the Word of God and not to deviate!  We need to build a generation that understands and knows how to use scripture and that starts with us as leaders and parents.  Never make the assumption that your audience knows the implicit scripture.  Stand on the Rock of Scripture and proclaim it!

Hebrews 5:12 moving from milk to meat.   By our failure to engage children in the Word of God today we are raising a generation of increasingly Biblically ignorant adults in lieu of keeping kids entertained today.  Just take a quick look around, how many bloggers and children’s ministry leaders openly quote scripture as backings for their arguments?    

The Church

All too often unrealistic expectations are placed on those that work within the church.  The problem is we have mistakenly defined church as a noun.  Church should be a verb.  What does the Bible say about the roll of the church? As demonstrated in the Bible “church” is the collective activities of the Body of Christ.  As a group of believers we are instructed by Jesus Christ himself to go and make disciples.  That go is an action call to all believers.  The book of Acts gives a beautiful picture of how the church should operate.  With that picture of the church going and doing we can as a collective group accomplish all that God has called us to do.  The key is how do we relate that message to the Body of Christ as a whole and that is where the brick and mortar “church” comes into play.  The brick and mortar church is the vehicle we use for getting people trained and discipled for the mission of going. Most churches have now all but eliminated the time spent in the building and we seem to be growing an increasingly Biblical illiterate generation of believers.  We seem to have forgotten Hebrews 10:25 “not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near”
Let us not also forget about what Jesus himself says about the church in Matthew 16:18 And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.  Pretty strong words!  We most always rely on scripture for basis of all our arguments.

The Church

All too often unrealistic expectations are placed on those that work within the church.  The problem is we have mistakenly defined church as a noun.  Church should be a verb.  What does the Bible say about the roll of the church? As demonstrated in the Bible “church” is the collective activities of the Body of Christ.  As a group of believers we are instructed by Jesus Christ himself to go and make disciples.  That go is an action call to all believers.  The book of Acts gives a beautiful picture of how the church should operate.  With that picture of the church going and doing we can as a collective group accomplish all that God has called us to do.  The key is how do we relate that message to the Body of Christ as a whole and that is where the brick and mortar “church” comes into play.  The brick and mortar church is the vehicle we use for getting people trained and discipled for the mission of going. Most churches have now all but eliminated the time spent in the building and we seem to be growing an increasingly Biblical illiterate generation of believers.  We seem to have forgotten Hebrews 10:25 “not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near”
Let us not also forget about what Jesus himself says about the church in Matthew 16:18 And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.  Pretty strong words!  We most always rely on scripture for basis of all our arguments.