I'm Jacked Up

I've preached a lot of messages over the years and I try to keep myself from getting to excited about some or to down about others. One of the things I have come to realize is how little I have to do with the whole process. The harder I work on something doesn't really account for a more effective message (not that we shouldn't put time in our messages.) It's just that, God is the one who stirs the heart and so I try to teach each message the best I can knowing that some will be great and others will be duds...but the results are always up to Him.

All that said, for some reason I am really jacked up about tomorrows message....Just a general sense that someone is going to be touched by God and they will have a break through in their thought life...

Bittersweet Times

These next few days are bitter sweet for me as a Dad. We are packing up Chelsea and taking her off to college. Its an exciting time for her as she is moving on to new things, new experiences, new friends, and a new life. Truth be told, she needs it. We have really protected her and kept a lot of pain from coming her way. She needs to go off and do some things on her own. She needs to know what it's like to have no money and want to go shopping, to the mall, or to the movies. She needs to learn the consequences of staying up too late and then being too tired to take that test! She needs to learn that God will provide for her everything she needs and that her provision comes not from her parents as she has spent 18 years living out. Rather her provision comes from God.

It's tough for us to let her go. It would be really easy to get wrapped up in all the things that could potentially happen to her while she is out of our care. After all, there are some bad people out there! We could live a life of fear and try to talk her out of going. We could live a life of fear and do a lot of things but that just aint right. We'll miss her while she is away. We'll miss her smile and her sense of humor. We'll miss her clumsiness. We'll miss the way she calls Daddddddyyyy can you help me fix this thing. All that stuff we will surely miss. We'll miss her constant longing for Arizona Green Tea with Honey.

At the end of the day there are many things we could fear but the Bible says that "God has not given us a spirit of fear. But of power love and a sound mind." I didn't realize months ago when I started working on this weekends message that much of it was going to be for me. This weekend we are talking about living a life without fear!

God knows our struggles, he knows our insecurities, he knows our pain, and he knows our fears. It is so awesome that the creator of the universe set in motion a message that will help me overcome this weekend. I hope it does the same for you too!

Don't allow Satan to move you into living a life of fear. Life with freedom and victory in your life.

Week Two

We are in week two of our One Prayer series. Tomorrow will be a first for Real Life in that our Children's Pastor Ernie Sampson will be giving the message. Should be a good time :)

See ya'll there...(my best southern accent)

One Prayer 2009

Busy day today and a board meeting tonight. This afternoon we recorded our teaching message for this years One Prayer series. I had a lot of fun! It was actually just me and Brett at church recording the message. My One Prayer message is God is My Provider.

Brett is now in the process of cleaning the file up and adding the lower graphics for the bulletin points then we are all done but the uploading. We might make the message into DVD's for anyone who might want them :)

This weekend

This Sunday we are going to cover something in church that everyone of us with kids deals with and that is discipline. The simple fact is, all of us struggle with disciplining our kids on some level. From feeling guilty about punishment to feeling like we're being walked all over we've all been there. This weekend we're going to take a hard look at what the Bible says in terms of disciplining our kids.

Also, remember try and make it out to the lodge to hear the band and mingle with the people. It's going to be a good time :)

Tomorrow

Tomorrow is going to be a great day at Real Life. We are going to be talking about the principles of parenting. We're going to be covering the three T's......be there....you will be glad you did. Everyone of us with kids has something we can learn.

Parenthood

I could not be more excited about starting our new series Parenthood tomorrow. The fact is, most parents are winging it and they know it. Tomorrow we are going to start looking at what the Bible says about parenting. I promise this is going to be one of the most practice useful messages we have ever done at church. Everyone is going to walk away from the series with something to think about and talk about. Even if you don't have kids you are going to learn some great things about sending the right messages to those in your life.

Remember....Time change tonight....maybe we need a special door prize for the people who forget?

Message Prep & Lessons Learned

This as been a tough week for me in terms of message prep. Normally I plan and write messages weeks and sometimes even months ahead of time. I work with them and tweek them a little every week until it's the weekend they're going to be given. This weeks message has been different. I have tried to sit and write this message off and on for weeks and I'd get little bits of it and then nothing. Then, between yesterday and today it just kind of came.

Remember, sometimes you want your answer. You want it now. You are seeking and nothing happens. Whatever you do...don't give up. Keep coming back and seeking God for an answer. If you were thirsty in your physical body you would keep drinking water until you were no longer thirsty. Way too often in our spiritual lives we don't get our fill the first time and we stop looking to God for that fill and we start looking for other things to meet our needs. Maybe we sought prayer once and nothing happened so we quit. Maybe we talked to the pastor and he gave us a little advice and nothing happened so we stopped.

Here is the rub. Keep going back to the well until you are satisfied. Perhaps God is meeting your needs and growing you through the process. Sometimes there is something that God is going to teach you through your needs and through your thirst.

Whatever you do don't walk away until you are thirsty no more.

Myth-busters

Been working like crazy on the Mythbusters series over the last few weeks. It's going to be a great series. I ended up narrowing the list down to about 13 questions that I have answered. If you didn't get your question answered you can email me and I might be able to answer it either on my blog for everyone to see or email for just you to see, or, if you are really lucky, ask me after church and I will tell you what I think.

Course, you are going to have to wait until the series if over to see what questions I decided to actually answer!

It's time to chill....peace out!

Sunday Mornings

It's Sunday morning. I am getting up and ready to head off to church. This has been an interesting week to say the least, at least in terms of prepping for the messages. Generally, I write into a message what God has given me and I don't usually have any faces attached to the message. The messages are of course for someone but I really don't know who. Sometimes, as I realize after the fact it was even meant for me.

This week has been different. As I have prepped for the messages, really for this whole series, people and the stuff they are dealing with keep flashing across my mind. I am praying that each of us comes to church over the next month with a broken heart and each of us is ready to hear from God in a fresh new way. This series has the potential to be life changing if we'll allow it to be.

I believe people are going to experience freedom in a way they could have only dreamed of if they will allow themselves to embrace it.

This weekend

Spent this morning working on this weekends message. It was an awesome morning. The message is going to be an outpouring of some of the things God has been hitting me with over our vacation. We are going to be talking about taking some risks. For some of us it's taking a risk for the kingdom of God and for moving it forward. For some of us its taking a risk in restoring broken relationship. For some of us its taking a risk and opening ourselves up to live and love again. I am stoked. Can you tell?

Get your friends to church this weekend!

Worship is a Lifestyle

This weekend we'll close out our worship series with the message Worship is a Lifestyle. This whole series was a long time coming for me. I have really wanted to teach on it but was waiting for the green light from God in terms of timing. I hope and pray that for all of us that are Christ Followers we have learned that worship isn't just something we do when we go to church it's offering our entire lives up to God.

This weekend we are going to talk about what that looks like in terms of a lifestyle of worship. This is probably my favorite of all the messages. I just finished the last touches on it this morning and I am really pumped about it. I think this week is really going to hit home for some people and I always love it when God reveals himself to us and we respond with a changed life.


This weeks message has a theme that God has been bringing up over and over again for the last year in both my personal life and in my teaching at Real Life. That's the notion that God's blessing in our life follows our belief and obedience to him. We see that principle in scripture yet we sometimes have this idea that God will ignore it in our lives and he just won't. His blessing is contingent on our obedience to him. Living a lifestyle of worship is all about that obedience, done with a willing heart.

This Weekend @ RLCC

This weekend we are going to hit on a subject all of us will deal with today or someday. It's the notion of how do we worship God when life doesn't make sense. Our Story is going to be found in Genesis chapter 22 and it'll follow the story of Abraham offering Isaac up as an offering to God.

Be ready to have your world rocked a bit as we look at what your (and my) Isaac is!

This Weekend @ RLCC

This weekend we are going to talk about something that all of us have dealt with or will deal with at some point. We are going to talk about how do we worship when we are hurting. That's a different thing than worshiping when we just don't feel like it. That is a different topic altogether.

I am talking about how do we worship God when we have been abused, let down, and hurt by those who are supposed to love us? How can we worship God in the midst and the middle of our deepest pain? This weekend we'll begin to unwrap that package by looking at a story in the Bible. We are going to study the life of a man by the name of Job who had everything and lost it all, well all but one thing, a nagging wife. Yet in the middle of his pain Job worshiped God.

This weekend you can find out how Job's stuggles can help you learn to worship God in the middle of your struggles.

Lord, Make Us Dangerous!

This weekend we close out our One Prayer series. The message this week is going to come from Perry Noble. His One Prayer for the church is Lord, Make Us Dangerous. I love that prayer. If there is one thing the church as a whole generally is....it sure ain't dangerous. We can be religious, stuffy, boring, old fashioned, out of touch, unkind, uncaring, and unconcerned but, dangerous isn't a word we associate with the church (except of course the more kooky ones that play with snakes!)

We need to become more dangerous. We live in a world where we are playing it safe and doing the things that tickle our ears while the rest of the world is on the fast track to a place called Hell. We cannot allow that to happen. We need to step up to the plate and refuse to allow our personal preferences in worship, dress, history, and everything else churchy to get in the way of our reaching out to those in our sphere of influence.

There was a time in my life when I was very passionate about the way we did church. I was proud of our heritage and thought that others were missing out because we had something they didn't have. While part of me still thinks that they are missing out, I am not quite as proud about it. To be honest there isn't time to be proud about it and I'd rather not worry about what the already convinced are "missing out on.' I'd rather concern myself with working to reach people that are not yet convinced.

I pray along with Pastor Perry that we would indeed become a dangerous people. We would be willing to step up and step out. We'd be willing to cast aside our restraint and go after the one that got away. We'd forget about our preferences and concern ourselves with the preferences of those who do not yet know Christ because at the end of the day that is where he'll be. Reaching out to those people that no one else wants to reach.

One Prayer

I am really enjoying seeing the cool things that God is doing across the country with One Prayer. For me, this is something that I have personally prayed about over the last year. The notion that churches would begin the process of seeing themselves more as co laborers and less as competitors. One prayer is helping us do just that.



The hardest part of giving our One Prayer message last weekend was actually having just one One Prayer. I mean, really, did Craig expect we'd only have one? Not, really! Which is why we get to spend a whole month on it.



The next three messages we are going to partake in are ones that are from my heart just as much as if I'd been teaching them. In fact, I struggled about extending the series and adding one more but I decided four was enough and that God had already given me a clear picture about where we were going in July anyway. So, what's coming up? This weekend we are going to hear from Gary Lamb. He is the lead pastor at Revolution Church in Canto Ga. His message is called Lord, Make us Revolutionary. Next week, we'll here from pastor Steven Furtick. His One Prayer is called Lord, Make us Audacious. We'll close out the series with pastor Perry Noble. His One Prayer is Lord, Make us Dangerious.

I have already seen the messages and they are awesome. All I can say is get ready to have your spiritual world rocked.

Grow Up

This weekends message called Grow Up! is going to be liberating for some people and it's going to be a little convicting for some people. We are going to talk about what a spiritually mature person looks like. After all, why is it that some people can go to church for 30 years and still not be able to show any real fruit in their lives?

Here's the deal, if you've been in church any length of time you'll notice there are some people that are hearer's of the word. They love to dig deep in the Bible and they'll tell you about all the things they know about the word of God. They love deep home groups, deep messages, and love to soak it all in. They'll tell you that iron sharpens iron. In fact, if you try to get this group of people into a group that is primarily focused on building up relationships and caring for one another their likely to make an appointment to tell me we are wasting our time and that we are doing baby stuff. They'll tell you they need the meat of the word.

There are also the other type of people. The do'ers of the word. Those are the people that are busy serving God by serving his people. Do they enjoy deep Bible study? Sure, when they can fit it in between having meals with God's people, spending hours ministering to God's people, and raising up their families. This group of people will show up at the hospital when you are sick. They'll be at your house when your pluming goes bad, and they'll spend time at a coffee shop just listening to you when your struggling. Why do they do that? Because they have a desire to live out their faith.

Here is the rub. We are called to live out our faith. The Bible actually uses the term "Work out our salvation." Being a do'er of the word is what that is all about. In my book, we measure maturity by what we do in God's name and for God's people, not by what we know.

This weekend we'll find out some things that will help us measure how we are doing. Much of what we do is geared at those who are far from God. That's a good thing. This weekends message is geared at those who are a part of the church. It's not that this weekends message is going to be weird for them it's just that this one is geared towards the family.....consider yourself warned :)

New Message Topic

Every once and a while God hits you with something and it's so timely and needs to be said you drop what you had planned and you do it. Today God hit me with one of those things. It'll be coming in a few weeks. It's something we all need to hear and keep in mind.

That is all....Renner Out!

Good Stuff

Did some writing and finalizing the message for this weekend. I think this is honestly going to be one of the best and most practical messages I have given. This weekend we are talking about How to Stay In Love. I am going to lay out some really practical ways we can grow closer to our spouses and help make each marriage the best it can be.

This is going to be the least preachy message yet! Not that I am preachy ever!

Doing a little work @ work

Doing a little work today while my students were watching the movie Pearl Harbor. This June we are going to partner with a whole bunch of churches (as of right now there are over 200) all across the country for a month long series called "My Prayer." I sat down with no agenda and just said ok God, speak through me and began to write. I have to say whenever you do that some pretty good things come out. Our message for the series is going to be on church unity. The message is called Make us one church.

I am really excited about it. As I was writing I just got a little glimpse at how grieved God is when we allow our differences to divide us as a church. I don't want to give too much of it away or why bother coming right? It's going to be a great month. In fact, we just have some awesome things in general over the next 4 months.