I just left the first session of the Passion Atlanta Regional.  Chris Tomlin and David Crowder led the session in worship and Louie Giglio preached.  Louie’s message really stuck me.  He talked about how we have be taught that Christianity is all about us.  It is about what we can get and how God can bless us and make our lives better.  Louie then goes on to talk about our short lives being a small flame that is to spread the glory of Jesus Christ and the gospel to the watching world.  The message ended with a story of a female student in Florida through the eyes of her journal with regard to her interactions with her “fruit cake” Christian roommate.  The journals go on to tell about how in the moment of a deep hurt in this girl’s life God used her roommate to share the gospel with her.  This was a very practical and real picture of how we as Christians should seek to live out the gospel to a watching world.  This also challenged me in that I am not intentional to share Jesus Christ with the people in my world who do not know Him.  I am challenged and encouraged to see what God is going to do in and through the rest of this weekend. 

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to hang out with Benny Proffitt, the founder and national director of First Priority which is the organization that has and continues to help define who I am and where God desires to use me in ministry.  It was a great time of encouragement and challenge.  One thing that he said was that “Duty is our responsibility, and results are God’s responsibility.”   It is our role to be faithful to where God has us and where He has given us to serve.  We should not get caught up in how many people show up from week to week or what results we see here and now. Our focus should be on being faithful and doing our best with who God has given us to minister too.  I want to be found faithful to what God has called me to do and to be.  I want to receive a “Well done” from my King when I stand before Him and give account for how I spent my life, time, and gifts.  Lord, make me into a man of you who gives his all for Your glory and fame alone!

This morning, I went to the second week of our Tuesday morning prayer times at the Church at Brook Hills.  As a congregation under the leadership of Dr. David Platt, we have adopted a mission of global evangelism.  Everything that we seek to do as a church is intended to bring glory to God and to lead the nations of the world to worship God.  Over the past few weeks, we have been looking at despiration and seeking after God both personally and as a congregation.  This morning was a step further in this direction.  It was such a blessing to gather together with others in seeking God both to increase a passion for Him in us personally but also to spur us on to display His holiness and great glory to the nations.  As Dr. Platt so often says, our prayer is “God, give us the nations in a way that only you can get the glory!”  I am excited to see what God can do in and through a congregation of people who will seek his face and glory in order to reach those who do not know the name of Jesus!  My prayer is that God would open each one of our eyes to see what He desires to do in the nations through His bride - the church.  I want to be a part in what God is doing for His glory and fame alone!

This post is from January 2007: 

There is something indescribable about being together with thousands of people for the purpose of worshipping and praising God.  This was what God really showed me through Passion 07 this year.  I have been reflecting on Passion over the last week and the worship just really came back to my mind.  Francis Chan, one of the speakers at Passion and senior pastor at a church in Simi Valley, California, said that he had prayed that God would bring a whole stadium of people together in order to worship and give glory and praise to God alone.  He had this thought while watching the LA Lakers play a game several years ago.  He noted how sad it was that people were so excited over something so pointless as some people trying to put a ball in a net.  This really stuck with me over the last week.  When we come to worship, we get lost in the greatness and grace of God.  In the time of worship as we gathered in that courtyard between the Georgia Dome and Phillips Arena (see picture above), the things that we so frequently allow to cause divisions in the body of Christ faded away.  It did not matter what area of the country you were from, whether you were a Democrat or a Republican, what denomination you represented, or even whether you call yourself a Calvinist or Armenianist.  All of these things faded into the background as we worship our Savior.  I think that this is going to be what heaven will be like.  All of our differences fading into the background because nothing else will matter but being lost in the glory and grace of Jesus our King!

This post was written in the fall of 2006: 

This Saturday, I was blessed with the opportunity to go see my favorite football team play.  I always love going into a massive stadium full of people.  The passion and energy in that place just amazes me.  You cannot come to a game and sit in the stands and not be drawn into the action.  The people that surround you go from being random people that you have never seen before to your best friends in less than four hours.  You are all gathered together for a common cause – to cheer your team on to victory.  The unity in that place so strong that you rejoice together and mourn together.  Unfortunately Saturday was a day of mourning together for me and the rest of the Alabama fans that filled that stadium.  As I was walking down the strip through the heart of campus after the game, I could just feel the sadness and shock.  There were no parties because there was nothing to celebrate.  Then I began to think about church which I attended the next day.  Where is that passion in our churches?  We come together on Saturday and seem to get the essence of worship and community.  In that stadium there was a strong passionate desire to rejoice and celebrate out team.  We were proud to be wearing crimson.  Are we as Christians proud to be wearing the name of Christ each day?  We easily get upset at out team playing poorly.  Why do we not get upset when we live lives full of sin that reflect poorly on the Jesus that we represent?  We understand worship, but for some reason, it seems easier for us to worship on Saturday in the stadium than on Sunday in the sanctuary.  The community that was built in the stadium is the community that we see built in a church that is focused on the mission, message, and glory of Christ.  We see in Acts where “they devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer” (Acts 2: 42).  God has really been bringing me back constantly to this model of fellowship and the early church.  In order for this to begin to happen, we need to be willing to bring the Saturday passion for our football team into a Sunday morning passion for God!

This weekend a local talk show host who is a very outspoken Christian, Rick Burgess, and his family experienced something that no one ever wants to have to go through - the loss of a child.  Rick, who is one half of the award-winning Rick and Bubba Show, lost his two year old son, Bronner, in a swimming pool accident in the backyard of his home.  When the accident happened, Rick was out of state in Gatlinburg preaching at a youth conference.  Rick and his family have allowed the Holy Spirit to work in and through them and are following God’s leading to take this tragedy and turn it into an opportunity to proclaim the greatness and grace of Jesus Christ.  It has been frequently said that it is easy to be a follower of Christ when everything is going well, but a Christians faith shines forth the brightest in the midst of indescribable pain and suffering to be able to stand up and say that Jesus is worth it all and He is the only one who completely satisfies.  I want to leave you with three video clips from the heart of a father sharing at his son’s memorial service that the Holy Spirit is using to do just that:

A Father’s Heart: Part 1
A Father’s Heart: Part 2
A Father’s Heart: Part 3

The strength of Jesus Christ is perfect when all our strength is gone.  He will provide the words when there are none.  Keep the Burgess family in your thoughts and prayers in the coming weeks.

This post was written in the spring of 2007:

A few days ago, I was listening to one of my friends share with a group of high school students at Hoover High School’s First Priority.  He was sharing about Satan being the ruler of this world which is something that I have heard spoken upon millions of times over the course of my life growing up in church and a Christian school.  This time, however, he had a new perspective that I had never thought of before.  He was talking about Satan using culture to get our focus off of God.  He said that media tells us who to worship, what image we should shape ourselves into, and how we should live.  I had never thought of worship in this way before.  We constantly worship people, images, clothes, music, friends, and the list goes on.  We worship anything that we put before God on the throne of our hearts and lives.  All of our sin tends to flow from misplaced worship.  When we take Christ off of the throne of our hearts and lives and replace Him with something else that we deem more of a priority that is when we begin to fall back into sin.  When the Word and my relationship with Jesus take a backburner to something else, that in when I am falling into sin.  When pleasing God, worshiping God, and serving God are my focus, I am in tune with the Holy Spirit and His daily leading of my life.  When I drift away from that as I so often do that is when I am going to live a life that does not reflect Christ.  I am reflecting what is on the throne of my life whether that be my ego, my friends, my desires, or my Savior.  It is a daily decision to follow Christ.  The question is: Who will I worship today?

In i am not but i know I AM, Louie Giglio presents a great book about the sufficiency of Christ and our insufficiency.  He bases his entire book off of Moses’s encounter with God in the burning bush.  Giglio uses this illustration to go on to discuss us living in light of God’s glory and greatness.  He discusses that God has a story that is going on according to His divine plan and that we can go along with that story and further promote God’s greatness or we can focus on our own stories in order to gain glory for ourselves.  Those readers who are familiar with the Passion movement, a college ministry focused on the glory and greatness of God founded by Giglio, will see familiar themes in this book.  He goes on to discuss how we can serve in God’s kingdom for His glory and fame.  The highlight of this book for me is when Giglio describes the name that God gives Moses to tell Pharaoh when he would be asked who has sent him.  The name that was given is I AM.  He uses this to talk about God’s sufficiency in the midst of our failure and insufficiency.  He goes on to talk about the greatness of God.  He discusses how Jesus coming to earth was in order that He could be perfect and live a perfect life on our behalf.  This book continues on focusing on the sufficiency and greatness of God.  This is a great word study book on I AM and is also a great encouragement to any Christian who sees themselves as a failure.  Giglio, in this book, brings together the greatness and grace of God in a book that is encouraging and empowering.

There has been a recurrent theme that the Holy Spirit keeps bringing to my mind and heart.  It is this idea of the fact that we, as Christians, are called to reflect the glory and holiness of Christ in and through out lives so that people around us can see the beauty of the Savior in and through our life.  The theme that keeps coming up regarding this is things that create dust on our life mirror reflecting the glorious image of Christ to the world around us.  This theme has come up in a book that I was reading about becoming holy and set apart for God.  This book talks about how we allow dirt to get into our minds and hearts whether that dirt comes from things that we expose ourselves to on TV, in movies, or online.  These are things that fill our mind and distort our view of morality and the world around us.  We subtly begin to believe that if something is seen as acceptable to people around us or people on TV that it is therefore acceptable to God.  This theme was brought up again on Sunday when I went to hear one of my favorite preachers, Dr. Calvin Miller, speak at a church.  He was talking about Sodom and Gomorrah and the sinfulness and wickedness of those cities and then compared them to our culture.  He talked about how lightly we view sin in the world around us and how our standards begin to become more and more lax with regard to what media we expose our minds and hearts to.  This was really convicting in light of everything else that God has been teaching me on this topic.  Then I turned on my iPod today to get my daily dose of preaching podcasts, Francis Chan was preaching on when we desire sin more than God.  He looked at the picture in the book of Jeremiah of the people leaving God, the Fountain of Living Water, to turn to their own cisterns that do not hold water.  He went on to talk about fixing our gaze on Christ and how Satan likes to wave hooks of temptation in front of us, but we must keep our eyes fixed on Jesus.  I know so often in my life, I get my gaze off of Christ and bite one of Satan’s hooks.  Then this theme came up again, I was listening to another podcast from a church who has been dealing with unfaithfulness and sin in a former pastors life that had just been made public.  The current pastor was preaching on how we deal with sin in church leadership.  He came back to this theme of being accountable to others and that we are called to reflect the glorious image of Christ.  God, make me someone who presents a untarnished picture of Your glory and holiness to a watching world.  Through the power of the Holy Spirit, dust away all of the dust that I have allowed to collect on my reflection of you.

This post was written in February 2007 after the Colts won the Superbowl.

“To the Glory of God Alone!”- this is a Latin phrase that became one of the cries of the church through the ages.  It is often seen engraved in churches and seen in writings of the church fathers.  This is something that we, however, easily forget.  We seem to cry out to God when our lives are not going well, and we want his help.  We so often forget to praise Him and give Him thanks for the awesome things that He has done in our lives.  This picture (above) amazes me every time I look at it.  Tony Dungy, the Colts Head Coach, has a reputation of being a man of character and a follower of Jesus Christ both on and off the football field that is encouraging to all believers in Christ.  He maintained that character through both the good times and bad with a grace and Christ-likeness about him that has had a great impact on anyone who knows his story.  He lost his son to suicide a few years back and through that time of tremendous sorrow and trail remained strong and a strong influence for Christ.  He trusted in God amidst the struggle.  That is when people look at us as Christians the most.  It is easy to believe in Christ when you are being blessed and everything is right in the world.  It is hard, however, to trust God when you feel like your world is being ripped apart around you.  Tony was being watched by an entire world of sports fans, and he handled his pain and grief holding His Savior’s hand.  This was encouraging and made a huge impact on people who were watching.  Now that everything is grand in Tony’s world, being the first African American coach to lead a team to a Super Bowl victory, he does not forget to praise the God who not only held his hand in the hard times but raises his hand to celebrate the victory that He has provided.  And so as Tony and his players bow a knee in the locker room, they remember “Soli deo gloria!”