So... I like energy drinks. Is this so bad. I only drink them once in a while and I do not have a heart condition so, I figured i won't die. Also I drink water so this should balance out! Any way i thought all of you should know this!

Videoblog: Hosea - God's Relationship With Us Is Like a Marriage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJOhF_PAmXs

Hosea was asked by God to marry a prostitute!

What if you were asked to marry a prostitute? Every Friday night you would come home from work and you wouldn't know where she was. You would go to the city, to the streets, only to catch her getting out of some sleaze balls car or you would find her with some guy in a club. What if she told you she was pregnant, but you knew that the baby probably wasn't yours? This isn't some song or movie; this is the opening of the book of Hosea

God chooses to represent our relationship with Him, through the concept of marriage. God choose the deepest, most intimate relationship on planet earth to illustrate the closeness He has with His people. This idea flows from God like a wedding dress flows from the shoulders of a bride. It is beautiful and full. God loves us the way a husband loves his wife. There is no deeper way to express love for His people! With this however comes a God who actually cares what His people / bride does! God is a jealous husband and he does not tolerate His people going to other lovers or going to other gods!

What I find interesting is that God uses the marriage relationship to explain the relationship with Him, but also other relationships too. For instance we think of Jesus as our brother and as our friend. We think of God as our Father. We think of God as our master and king. The Holy Spirit is our teacher! Jesus even teaches that the way we treat our neighbors is the way we treat Him. So in a way we know God as a neighbor!

We cannot escape from a God who is completely relational. God wants to know us and us to know Him. He will not remain distant. He will not remain unknown or unknowable. So when we talk about God, from the book of Ezekiel, we see a distant mysterious God. But in Hosea, we see a God who wants us to love Him like we are married to Him. We see a God who gets crazy jealous over who we love and who we spend our time with. We see a God who loves us as a husband who has fallen head over heals in love for a woman who is less than faithful and less than worthy of a husbands love.

Then our gaze turns towards our end of the relationship and in every relationship we have toward God, in every metaphor we have spoiled something. We are enemies towards God, until we come to Jesus. As brothers we are like Cain, murdering Jesus! As friends we are like Judas or Peter, selling or being ashamed to talk about Christ! As children we are like the prodigal constantly turning away from our loving Father. As members of the Kingdom we are treasonous, betraying our King and living for the world. And as students we talk out in class and are always being sent to the principles office! As a wife to our king we have committed adultery!

I say all of this not to shame your or to proclaim who good I am but to admit and confess to you that I need my God to rescue me from my adulterous life. I need my God to come and take me away from those other lovers so much less wild. I need my God to buy me and keep me from every other god and distraction. I need to love God half as much as He has loved me. I have wept over this, because I am not as faithful to God as He has been to me!

I want to encourage us to stay faithful and true to our God!

Ezekiel + The Dry Bones

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOWguZP-yx4

     Ezekiel and the Dry Bones is an unbelievable story from the Bible. God brings dead, dry bones back to life. Putting together bone to bone than bringing on the flesh and the skin, then breathing His very breath into these dead bones.  One of the most paradoxical parts of this story is the lack closure!  What happened to the skeletons?  Did they go back to their respective families?  Did they go back to battle?  Did they live happily ever after?  When you ask these questions you can either doubt God and the legitimacy of this story or you can realize that God's miracle is not dead bones coming to life.  That is a no-brainer for God.  He did that already when He created us

      The miracle is that God does for our spiritual beings what He did for these skeletons! We are dead in our sin. We are powerless in our actions. We try for good, but we are continually bad. We are depraved. We are as dead in our spirits as those dry bones. We follow every distraction clicking along to the next page or signing up for the next big thing. We think half-heartedly about our souls and our spiritual condition and expect God to dispense Grace like a vending machine. But God doesn't want to just give us our whim and fancy; He wants to make us alive. He wants to breath the Holy Spirit into our very souls to revive our hearts and minds. He wants to take us who were dead and make us living to Him.  

     This is the miracle that isn't just for Israel, but for all people that God is calling!  And for those of us who are alive, this is an invitation to live that life out fully and to put aside the gods of distraction, and to worship God alone!

Videoblog - Ezekiel and the Glory of God

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHDR22MdPPs&feature=player_profilepage

alright...

So maybe i am jumping on the band wagon, or maybe I am original and creative all by myself (big spoiler - Any idea i've got I stole at least part of it from somebody else!) I want to do a Videoblog about the stuff I am preaching studying and teaching.

Here is why:

1. I have relevant content that needs to be shared. Its called the Bible! I study and read and pray each week to communicate for 30 minutes at youth group (I teach other times, but this is the main preaching time for me). This means that I have WAYYYYY more content than i can share in a sermon. So I need to get God's word out!
2. It pushes me to be communicating God's Word constantly. If you know me, at all you know that i am a bit of a procrastinator and i also get easily distracted! I am like a flying monkey with an energy drink watching Sponge Bob. Easily distracted, but constantly doing everything but the one thing i must do! So my hope is that by adding this extra layer of communication as a demand to communicate I might be able to push myself past procrastination!
3. Video Blogging is a new medium that needs to be saturated with the Gospel. I don't know if you have seen many video blogs, but they tend to be a random dude (dudet) sitting in front of a computer talking about God knows what!(Truly only God knows the sum total of the ramblings of man) Video blogs are generally not produced or scripted. They are often off the cuff and by and large they are actually not that great. However, they are about the most relevant thing happening on the internet today, because people literally bare their soul to the camera which just happens to be connect to billions of possible viewers. People on their Video blogs quite often are lost and don't know what they need. My hope is to preach the Gospel into this sphere using the same medium. Perhaps I will not have billions of followers, but that doesn't matter. I will keep preaching the Gospel and let it fill into every crack and crevice of our culture!
   
4. Internet access, bandwith, and video are ubiquitous. Sorry to bust out a word like that, but it simply means it these things are everywhere and that they are cheap. They are so cheap and everywhere that to not engage with them might even be a form of cultural laziness. I am not willing to let the weeds of our culture grow up around all our students and people and all of my friends and family. I will at least plant some Gospel seeds and see what will become of it. You don't quit gardening because there are weeds, you simply pull them out and plant something worth growing! In addition to this Youtube, blogging and editing my videos is completely free. The only cost is time and effort. I must engage. I must speak into this culture!
5. Internet video is persistent. What I mean by this is that it will still be around later. So every week I preach. This is good. But once I preach, what has been said and communicated might be forgotten and moved past. (I know that the Holy Spirit brings the Word to our hearts, and does the work of applying the Word) If I produce a video about the things I am preaching and teaching; I have left a sticky note or leftovers for someone else to find and engage in or re-engage in. This multiplies the effect of the Word (hopefully) and makes Truth more persistent throughout lives!
6. By Video Blogging I am engaging in a conversation. So the neat thing about putting this up on Youtube, facebook, Life In Vestaburg, and Twitter, is that I am starting a possible conversation that you can: learn from, disagree with, be encouraged by, share with your friends, rebuke, and add to. This is community building that is centered around truth! It is not the end all to building community or the only thing it takes to build a community, but hopefully it is a tool for this!

So enjoy and tune in. I will be attempting to do this every week. Some other ideas I have for video blogging include talking about books or even theology. If you have any ideas or whatever let me know!

p.s. Many of my ideas came from this video. It is very long, but worth watching in its entirety!

Gonna Be Start'in Somthing - no wait just the opposite!

I though that in honor of Michael Jackson's death, I would post an awesome video of me dancing!

I am not sure that this really honors his death, or his dancing, but I tried!

This picture was on a shirt that i owned! I truly liked this shirt, but like all things it had to go! So i thought I would scan it in and show y'all. I don't know why but is was always very mysterious to me.

Elizabeth is at wedding shower, and I am working on my camp lessons. Alathia is sleeping, but this wasn't true 20 minutes ago when she was screaming her head off!

Pray for us - the next couple of weeks are going to be pure crazy!

Next week - Going Home

Week after - Teaching @ The Springs (http://thespringscamp.com/)

Week after that - Teaching @ Linconln Lake (http://www.lincolnlake.com/)

Wonder Is Worship

As I was praying out in the field, my fingers grasped at some twigs and straw. I was transported to a place of wonder, for in my memory was a similar event. As a child I would build small huts and houses out of twigs. I would build them in between the fingers and toes of the roots of trees. This was something that I did by myself, and it brought wonder. Not wonder in my cleverness or my skill in building such things. But the wonder came in the totality of the activity and the mystery and greatness of what I saw and what could be done, but with the smallness of myself. The tree and the world were greater than me, but i got to partake in them. I was allowed to grasp and hold and this was truly wonderful. I on many occasions yielded to this beauty...

Children have a complete and natural tendency toward wonder. Part of it is that they have experienced so little, that when they do they are easily caught up in the rapture of wonder! Children also are much more humble. They are not afraid of getting dirty and being close to the ground. They can easily see that they are not kings or queens of the universe. They can easily see that they are small and dependent! This makes yielding easy! Children also have no systems for covering the truth. When a child lies it is so obvious. They do not know how to adequately explain away the beauty they see or rationalize the mystery that they feel. Thus it is, that children will yield to the wonder of a moment where adults blindly tread down everything in their path

So now I, as an adult seeking the face of God, I am surprised by childlike wonder. Wonder which I so often knew as a boy, but now seldom see. It pains me that I do know Wonder, and makes me question if I know God. For wonder concerns itself with indescribable beauty, not whys, hows, or right and wrong. It doesn't get wrapped up in how you should express yourself, why something is the way it is, or with any other judgement. Wonder is a simple response to God's hand in all things mysteriously beautiful! Wonder doesn't even need to know that God's hand was behind the beauty. Much of the time wonder never identifies God as the originator, but wonder doesn't need to do this in order to be wonderful! When you see something beautiful, whatever it may be, your mind simply yields to the moment. You do not worship what you see, you simply yield yourself to what is far greater and far more beautiful than you are anything you have seen. And in this yielding to indescribable beauty you are yielding to God. For it is God who made this beautiful beyond your comprehension. Behind every flaming sunset and silent, cathedral-like pine forest, and rushing water of many oceans, is God. God is not these things but He gave them. A pagan might follow these thoughts of wonder and try to worship the thing rather than the maker, but this is only a suppression of truth, a suppression of wonder! A scientist might fill his lab with wonders and mysteries unexplained, yet if he doesn't yield to their originator he is only pushing away the mysteries and suppressing the wonders and suppressing the knowledge of God! A church goer may wave hands and utter words in a mimicry of worship, but if they leave and never wonder and never yield, their hearts are cold and do not know the God that made all things wonderful and glorious.

Let us preach wonder. Let us display wonder in our services. Let us glory in the wonder of each other. Let us wonder in Christ. Let us be more characterized by wonder than law. Let us yield to Wonder. Let us yield to God...