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Sitting around last night before bed, I decided to check out what a few of the churches that I follow from a distance (via the internet) did for Easter. I ended up settling down on my couch, and watching the Easter message from Elevation Church in Charlotte, North Carolina.

This church has an incredible story, and an unbelievable leader in Steven Furtick.

I post this link to his Easter message with a couple of basic headlines.

1.) The dude can flat out preach. Like old school preach, but it’s awesome.

2.) As one who enjoys “preaching” myself, this gets me fired up… I was ready preach to the masses from my couch at midnight last night as I watched this!

3.) What an awesome telling of the Easter story. The Gospel is the most compelling truth on this planet, when communicated with passion, it’s a unstoppable force.

Check it out here: http://www.elevationchurch.org/mediaPlayer.php?sermon=168

The Bible tells us to love our neighbor.

This story begs the question: Do you even know your neighbor?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,511929,00.html

You know a story rattled me if it woke me out of a five month blogging slumber.

Well, today is a very special day for our country… for our world even. Special because today we will swear in for the first time a President that is not a caucasian male… yes. Special because there are over 2 million people gathered in D.C. to witness this history… yes. Special for many reasons.

In my opinion though, today is special because it’s just like all of the other inauguration days in our country’s history. What a wonderful country we live in that we have such peaceful and graceful transitions of leadership. For at least this one day, many many people put aside their political stance and celebrate how wonderful and enduring our country is.

I’d like to take a moment to say hello to one man, and goodbye to another.

Hello President Obama. I don’t know much about you yet. I know that you are a very gifted speaker, and you appear to have a stoic presence in front of the camera. I know you are very appealing to my generation, and that you have created an intense interest in American politics for many who were disinterested before. I look forward to getting to know you. I will be praying for you and the tough decisions you will need to make. I hope in four or eight years we have great things to say and write about you. I hope the Change you have advertised will be a beautiful thing that will further embed our nation with the values, morals, and upstanding character that has made it such a great nation all along.

Goodbye President Bush. Eight years ago I was 16 years old and was not too concerned about the political process. Nine months into your presidency, everything about my world, our world, our country changed. From this day forward when I think back on your Presidency, I will forever remember the image of you standing on the rubble of the World Trade Center… I will remember you throwing out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium…. I will remember you standing tall and making tough decisions that you knew would not be popular with many people. I applaud your determination to lead for eight difficult years. You had the weight of the world on your shoulders, and although you were not always graceful in speech (sorry, had to), you were always graceful in character and stature. I wish you well as you leave The White House. I am happy for you that your time in office is over… you deserve retirement… you deserve to relax on your ranch in Crawford… you deserve to sit back and watch someone else take the heat for once. Thank you for your service. Enjoy the grandkids.

I saw this idea somewhere, but I can’t remember where. So while not giving credit, I’m actually not taking any either.

I’ll be honest. I have a hard time with New Year Resolutions. In terms of my personality, I’m a starter. I like to create things, start new things, and dream about things that don’t yet exist. So naturally I have a hard time following through with things. The more complicated things are, the less likely I am to follow through with them. I get bored, and move on to create something new. I think that’s why I have such a hard time with resolutions.

So when I read about one word resolutions, I knew that it was something I’d be likely to follow through with.

With that said, here are my three one word resolutions. I’d love to hear yours. Please share in the comments section.

Learn
Healthy
Give

I’m writing this on my iPhone as I lie (lay?) in bed after a wonderful Christmas day.

The day started with my wonderful wife waking me up in eagerness to give me the gift she bought for me. She was so excited because on the past she has failed to surprise me, either due to lack of a lying gift, or poor gift hiding skills. Nonetheless, this year I was clueless, and after opening I was wonderfully delighted. She got me a remote control… A Logitech Harmony 550 Advanced Remote Control. To some yes, just a remote control. To me though, it’s so much more. It’s my entire theatre system controlled with one slick device. It’s my other 4 remotes tucked away in a drawer forever. It’s a pure awesome man toy, and I love it! Oh yea, and Sadie (dog toys) and Jen (book, shoes) opened their presents to, but mine was so much cooler.

From there we headed to my mom & dad’s house for the giant extended family Christmas luncheon. At 2:00 there were 35 people in the house. It was crazy… and awesome! I love my family, even the crazy ones. It’s great to see everyone in the same house enjoying a great meal, and wonderful memories. It’s a crazy couple of hours that I look forward to each year. I especially enjoyed the part where I forced several family members to watch a slideshow of photos on dad’s HDTV from our Journey to Guatemala this summer. I love retelling those stories and spreading the message of compassion! I also noticed that little cousins are growing like weeds, and turning into “cool” teenagers with cell phones & iPods… I wonder if they still think I’m cool?

Eventually the house cleared out, and there were only a couple of us left. Dad and I wanted a “snack”, so mom reheated the Christmas Eve breakfast, made fresh biscuits & cinnamon rolls, all in about 10 minutes… at 7:00 at night. My mom is pretty much amazing!!

After eating & cleaning up, Jen & I headed home. We stopped at Wal-Greens to grab something, and saw quite an eclectic group of people. Interesting folks shopping at Wal-Greens at 8 pm on Christmas Day!

That brought me home where I used my new remote to turn on the: TV, Cable, & Receiver (all with one button!!), in order to watch Lebron & the Cavs squeak out a win against the Wizards.

Now I lie (or lay?… I really have no idea) in bed feeling thankful, lucky, and wishing I could do it all again!

What did your Christmas look like? (Also, is it lie or lay?)

Yep… I bought some new shoes. Ten pairs of shoes actually. I have no idea what they look like. I doubt they’d actually fit my feet. But that’s all okay… they aren’t for me. They are for a child somewhere that I will never meet. I bought 10 pairs of shoes for $25… quite a bargain if you ask me.

You too can buy some shoes. Here’s what you do. Just go over to the website for Souls4Soles and buy some shoes. It’s super easy to do, and instantly makes you a part of something bigger. If 720 more pairs of shoes are donated before December 14th, a donor will kick in an additional 500 shoes. Not to mention you can win all kinds of cool stuff like: an Amy Grant signed guitar (yea, not that cool, but come on…), a trip to Mexico (very cool), a keychain (spend $10), or some soothing foot cream (spend $25).

Go buy shoes! Oh, and if you need some motivation… watch this video… it’s the most motivational video ever created!

I gave birth to a sermon this past Sunday morning. I realize if there are any ladies that read my blog, you may be offended, and tempted to write me flaming comments about how I “Don’t even begin to understand…” and you’re right, I don’t. It’s probably a bad analogy, but the only one I can think of.

The short story is that God has been doing some remodeling of my heart the past few months. It’s pretty easy to trace the starting point back to my trip to Guatemala with Journey Church in August. That was the beginning. Another key landmark on this journey has been the reading of Francis Chan’s book Crazy Love. It rattled me to my core… I still haven’t dealt with all of the ramifications from this book. More recently, I came across the Advent Conspiracy video which I’ve posted on this blog twice in the past couple of weeks. I was inspired by the words, imagery, and music. I was shaken by the keynote statistic that Americans spend $450 Billion Dollars on Christmas each year, and it would only take $10 Billion Dollars to provide clean drinking water to all of earth inhabitants. The lack of clean drinking water is the #1 killer of human life in our world today. I actually planned to use this statistic as one of the primary illustrations of my talk on Sunday, and completely forgot about it. When I realized that Monday afternoon, I wished I had a time machine so I could go back and share it.

So basically, God has been working on me in this area of poverty, wealth, America vs. the world, rich & poor, and my place in all of that. This past Sunday I had the opportunity to give birth to some of what I’m wrestling with, and what God is teaching me. If you were not

 at Journey Church on Sunday, I encourage you to listen to this talk. Not because it’s me, but because the Message God is sharing with me, and wants to share with you is so important. It could change everything…

Click here to visit the CincyJourney media page and listen to the talk. You’ll find it as the uppermost link in the list of talks. You can also search for “Journey Church West Chester” in iTunes and subscribe to our podcast.

I normally wouldn’t announce in advance when I’m preaching for Tom at Journey Church. It’s actually our “policy” to not announce the weekend speaker in advance. I can’t help myself today though. I trust that this blog probably won’t be picked up by the Associated Press, and be on the front page in any local markets.

I’m really excited about sharing with Journey Church on Sunday. We’ll be wrapping up our current series entitled: Make Change. It’s always fun to be the “closer” for a series (hey look, two baseball analogies in one post in November… when do pitchers and catchers report?). I feel like God wants to do something special in and through our community in 2009… I’m praying that this Sunday can serve as a launch-pad towards 2009.

I leave you by saying…. if you haven’t watched this video, you seriously need to.

“Don’t Be That Couch” Closing Session

- Around the church, programming begins as an answer to a question, over time it becomes part of the organizations culture. The problem with this is that as culture changes, many of the questions remain the same, but the answers don’t. The tendency is to institutionalize our answers. If we institutionalize an answer, the day will come when it is no longer a valid answer.

- We must continue (or begin) to be more committed to our mission than to our programming or our model. Over time, sustaining the model can become the unrealized mission. Over time, the model can work against the mission.

- In the for-profit world, any product that does not have a significant market/buyers will be taken off the shelf in rapid fashion. Yet in the Church we have spent (and continue to spend) enormous amounts of time & money on programs & products that have no meaningful market.

- “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what would he/she do? Why shouldn’t we walk out the door, come back in, and do it ourselves?” – Andy Grove (Only the paranoid survive)

- We can not afford to fall in love with dirty old couches. The message & mission is too important to allow something to block it.

‘Creating Personal Spiritual Momentum’

- “The way I was doing the work of God was destroying the work of God in me.” – Bill Hybels (via Craig)

- The single greatest thing you can do to create momentum in your church or ministry is to bring about spiritual momentum in your personal life.

- I will do TODAY what I can do TODAY, to enable me to do TOMORROW what I can’t do TODAY!

- Four things to do today:
1) Do something to defeat your dark side (your sinful self).
2) Create artificial ministry deadlines.
3) Delegate what someone else can do.
4) Do something only you can do.

- (On delegation) You can have high control and low growth, OR you can have low control and high growth.

- Pastors who don’t take time off do so for two reasons: Pride & Poor Leadership.

- If you come to these events, and see these big churches, and think that all of this success comes from anything other that a deep burden born in the heart of a leader to see people enter into relationship with Jesus, then you are severly missing the point. (WOW)

*Craig knocked it out of the park on this talk. He closed by saying: “If you have put the success of the ministry above your relationship with God, and/or your family, then you need to repent today.”*