Good News, Bad News

Two items on the agenda for today.  First, I am so pumped about the New Year's service tonight that we are leading worship for.  It should be awesome.  Our practice yesterday went very well and the rest of the band is pretty excited as well.  God is doing amazing things in our lives.  That is the good news; however, there is bad news and it comes two-fold.  First, my daughter just threw up all over her mom and so now my daughter is sick.  I hate it when my kids are sick because when they are that little it hits them so much harder than it does adults.  I feel bad for little Mikayla, but she couldn't be in better hands than her moms.  Natalie is so amazing with our kids.  She is a phenomenal mom.  The second part of the bad news is that I was all geared up to work from Panera Bread today.  I had my Mac out and plugged in, my programs all set up to start designing some new visitor cards for our church when all of the sudden the FREE WI-Fi at Panera didn't work.  Not even a little.  Couldn't do anything on the internet.  It was terrible, but it all worked out because now I'm at my other favorite place to work, Paradise Bakery.  If you don't have the fortune of having a Paradise Bakery, then you are missing out.  The soup is not as good as Panera, but the atmosphere is tons better.  Well that is it for today's portion of this.  If you get a chance pray for God's anointing on tonight's service and that all walls would be torn down.  We want God to have his way more than anything.  God bless and have a great New Year.

New Year's Eve

Well, Christmas was fun but hectic.  Started with breakfast with the family and presents, then stopped by Jimmy Mulry's house  to say what's up.  After that we drove to Ohio to see the in-laws and spend some time with them.  Got back into town Saturday night and then had a busy day on Sunday.  Now stuff is starting to slow down some, and I am so excited about New Year's Eve.  My worship band, Facedown, is playing at a youth rally and we are looking forward to it.  It should be a real good time.  We are also excited because we going to be playing our newest original song.  We have worked hard on it and it should be a lot of fun.  I know that God will do good stuff in that service as He always does.  Well, happy New Years to everyone and have a great night.  God bless!

Scrooge

So here we are and Christmas will be here in just two days.  I love Christmas and many things that come with it.  I love the feeling of Christmas, the food, the friends and family, and of course the remembrance of Jesus' birth.  I would say that I am a relatively positive person when it comes to Christmas; however, I have been given the label "Scrooge" because I am not a fan of Christmas music.  I do not like it at all, not even a little bit.  I come from a background of being a drummer; therefore, I prefer my music have a distinct beat.  Don't get me wrong, Christmas music has a beat, it's just a very boring one.  I love hip-hop, rock, worship, and various other types of music.  I just have a problem with any music that doesn't have a groove to it of some sort.  This doesn't limit itself to just Christmas music.  I also dislike opera, many forms of Southern Gospel, blue grass, George Jones and Michael Buble'.  No one gets on me for not liking those, but because I don't like the sound of Christmas music people feel the need to call me a scrooge.  People can't seem to separate the fact that just because I don't like Christmas music doesn't mean that I don't like Christmas.  You have to admit that Christmas music is boring many times and I don't appreciate the fact that the radio stations play only that for 6 weeks prior to Christmas.  Even Christmas music lovers would tire of that consistency.  Well I am done being on my soapbox.  Just for the record, I am not a scrooge and I wish everyone a wonderful Christmas.  

The Modern Church

This past Sunday, our church had a special speaker by the name of Tony Sutherland. He is one of the worship pastors at Free Chapel in the Atlanta area with Jentzen Franklin. His message was amazing. He had a lot of good stuff to say that challanged me personally. One of the things that spoke to me the most was what he said about the mission of the church. In today's times it is very popular to have a "modern church". What is a modern church? A church with loud music? A church that serves Starbucks? Who cares if you serve Starbucks. Starbucks makes its own product better than you do and the atmosphere is better too. The modern church thrives on being a church with young people and the latest everything. If a church prides itself on having a congregation filled with 20 & 30 year olds what happens when those 20 & 30's become 50? They will no longer fit in and will be looked at as non-relevant. The fact is that the modern church is nowhere in Scripture; however, another type of church is. In the book of Joel we read that in the last days, sons and daughters will prophecy and old men will have visions... The last days church has a place for everyone. God is calling the elderly and mature to have visions and the children to prophecy. This is the will of God and any church that excludes any age group is acting outside of that. It is imperative that we run our churches as a place that makes children, youth, young adults and seniors a vital part of the ministry of the church.

Day Off

So I love my day off. Usually I get to spend the day with my kids; however, they are in Ohio with my in-laws. I miss them alot, but I am going to enjoy the day to myself. I have Facedown rehearsal tonight. We are gearing up for a worship night on New Year's Eve at a descent size church here in Indy. There should be around 400 teens or more there. We are pretty excited. We are going to be singing our original, "Crying Out For Mercy" for the first time. We have put a lot of work into it to make it sound good and we are excited about doing it that night. We also have a youth service that we are playing for in a couple of weeks. It's the Grand Opening of their Youth Facility. We will be leading worship for it and my lead pastor will be preaching it. It should be an awesome time.

Crying Out For Mercy

Have you ever felt like you are never good enough or that you won't ever be what you should in Christ?  I feel like that all of the time.  As I read my Bible I realize that God doesn't love me for my potential, but He loves me because of me.  This is not a cop-out to say that I don't have to try, it's more like an encouraging word to let me know that I will never walk away from God's love.  As encouraging as that is I still have to choose to follow Him everyday of my life.  God has been putting a message on my heart and it is the message of mercy.  He has been putting some key Psalms in my heart and they all have the message of mercy; however, not the message that I typically think of.  It's not the message that says He is merciful, it is the message that says that I have to ask for His mercy so that I can be free.  We often like to think of the God of love, mercy and grace (which He is all of those), but we hate to think of the God of the Old Testament who demolished cities and people for their evil, wickedness and sin.  The truth is that I have to ask for God's mercy and grace in my life every day so that I can be in His will.  I hope that I never forget that and that I choose to follow my God all of my life.  

Relevant Worship

In the world of worship, there are people crying out for relevant worship.  First, let me ask, what does that mean?  Many times I hear people follow up this statement with, "you have to be singing songs of this generation."  I couldn't agree more.  I don't think we should use yesterday's tools to fix today's problems; however, let's not call this relevant.  If all we do is change how new our worship music is then we have only become recent.  Relevance is more than just being recent.  When leading people to God's heart through worship, we have to do more than just sing new songs.  In John 4 Jesus tells a Samaritan woman that "...true worshippers worship God in Spirit and truth."  The truth part is living a lifestyle of worship and the Spirit part is connecting with God on a much deeper level than just repeating words on a screen.  It's easy for us to go through the motions of singing, clapping and even worshipping; however, it's not always heart-felt.  Relevant worship is worship that takes the individual to a place where they can let their walls down and worship God for who He is.  Sometimes this is accomplished by new music and sometimes a hymn.  You have to know your audience and you have to know what connects.  Once you have decided that then it's time to sing songs that allow our spirits, our deep emotional parts, to connect with the heart of our Creator.