Knowing God

It is a rare occasion that I find myself discouraged with life, however, over the last couple of weeks I have suffered with some problems that are weighing very heavily on myself right now. I believe most of it is the usual problems that a person suffers with: money, bills, and the contentness of one’s location. Nonetheless, theses things have especially burdened me over the last three weeks. Like many other Christians in the same boat, I can only hold on. Yet, in these times I have always turned to Psalm 42 where the writer seems to really understand what I am going through.

Why are you in despair, O my soul? And why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him, for the help of His presence.

(Psalm 42:5)

I am constantly disturbed as to why my soul has lost its joy. Why am I in despair? Why do I not have joy in my heart? Why am I disturbed with the feelings inside of me? At points, I seriously wonder where God is in my life. Which is why I must agree with the psalmist as he says, “Hope in God.” Believers must find their dependency in the one who is the shepherd of their life. We must place our faith in the One who can save us. Finally the importance of your speech in these times is so important. We have to assure ourselves that we will be able to praise God again. Though it might seem impossible now, and thought it hurts to actually praise God, our joy will return to us. We will praise him, and we will receive his presence once again.
I hope this is encouragement to those who might be sharing the same kind of spiritual depression that I am experiencing now.

A close friend of mine let me in on a very informative lecture by a lady named Phillis Tickle. I would advise as many Christians who read this blog to take the time to take some time and watch this. I assure you that it will impact your view of Christianity.

So, we are now two weeks into the beginning stages of ONE SIX EIGHT. You have heard a great deal of discussion about it over the last couple of posts. However, I would now like to take the time to say that the ministry has taken off and is already getting a ton of great feed back in the community. We began the launch of our small college ministry in a cool little restaurant in Gadsden called the Flipside Café. It’s an awesome coffee and sandwich place with a really good environment to have a chill discussion about God.
We are currently studying the Gospel of John. I chose to study this book because of John’s emphatic language of love and unity. John is a simple, yet deep writer who is establishing a very black and white doctrine for the church. He does this especially in his epistles as he is constantly reiterating the point that if you do certain things outside of the faith you are not apart of the community of light bearers. But in the Gospel he is writing in order to affirm Christ’s Messianic role in the world of bringing about community to His body. We are studying it because it is a good book in order to establish the foundation of our own ministry. We desire to see the Word of God put into action so that we bring glory to the name of God. I would encourage all ministers to delve into the simplistic, yet profound writings of John, and allow it to unfold in all or your ministries.

Flipside Cafe in Gadsden, Alabama

Hello again! This is the last part of the One Six Eight series, and I hope that those who have read this will join our campaign to reach the world through our age group. Here is what our ministry and mission is all about.

Who are we?
We are a body of believers who are united by the love of God, which was revealed through Jesus Christ, and empowered by the Holy Spirit to glorify God in our lives. We specifically attempt to reach out to young men and women who are between the ages of eighteen and thirty in order that God make His name great in the lives of those individuals who are beginning their journey in life. Through our worship, proclamation of the Word of God, and our response to what God has ordained us to do in the world, it is our desire to make the name of God known amongst ourselves, in our community, and throughout the world.

The Experience:
It is our desire to create an environment for believers that encourages them to interact with their faith. At One Six Eight, our hope is to magnify God through creative, spontaneous, structured, and sacramental worship, through the proclamation of the Word of God, and through our response to the instructions that we are given through the Word of God. Our corporate gatherings consist of meaningful worship, which uplifts the character of a Triunal God. The Scriptures are presented to our gatherings in order reveal the liberating power of God. Finally, we believe that a response to the revelation of the word is extremely important, in that we hope that we may inspire believers to apply the Word of God to their lives. This response is an opportunity to respond to the exhortation that the Scriptures give to believers.

In the previous post I began to present the ministry of ONE SIX EIGHT, and discuss it’s mission. This week I would like to continue to present the heart of ONE SIX EIGHT, and the reason it is important for college and career ministries to exist.

Perhaps one of the most influential stages in a person’s life takes place when one moves from their teenage years into their early adulthood. It is here that one will begin to adjust their lives for the future. Almost everything that happens over these years plays a crucial part in how one will face the future. Many people go to college in order to prepare themselves for the future, some people begin full time jobs, and many young adults get married and even have children during these years. Hence, these years are extremely important for people because these years shape a person into what they will become in the future.
It is for this reason alone, that churches should play a crucial role in the lives of this age group. Christendom should impact the lives of young adults in such a way in order to equip them to carry the love of God into their future experiences, to live a life that proclaims the redeeming power of Christ, and to develop a heart that is sensitive to the direction of the Holy Spirit. People who are entering or experiencing young adulthood should be able to gather together as a community of saints who, together, embrace the power of God in their lives. This age group should be a pivotal target of the church, in order that the church pave their own future success in the world (which is to make the name of God famous), and to prepare young men and women to incorporate God in all of their decisions, trials, and tests that the future will present to them.
The Barna Research Group states that there is a 66% drop in church attendance for 18 to 29 year olds. In 2007, research on what 18-29 year olds thought about Christians was compiled in the book, unChristian. The table below describes what secular culture thinks of Christianity:

This has not been an important demographic to reach out to in many churches. In the Church of God (Cleveland, TN) denomination, the typical age groups attracted are children to teenagers, and middle age to elderly people. There has been a neglect of those who are young adults. The structure of most of our churches centers around fun-filled youth gatherings (typically with no real life or spiritual application), and especially seen in the corporate gatherings, a focus to reach older adults through traditional worship and pulpit preaching. Though these strategies have proved successful in reaching their targeted audiences, the disturbing fact that stands out in the Pentecostal tradition is that most teenagers leave their youth group, and typically disappear from their church in order to pursue something better, or fall out of the faith completely because our churches equipped them with a frail gospel that is usually not solidly grounded in the scriptures or in Christian tradition and doctrine. Thus, we suffer with an obvious age gap between youth ministries, and older Christians who have good teaching over the years.
It is for this reason that I been burdened with a mission to reach those who are in the developing stages of young adulthood. One Six Eight, is a ministry designed to reach those who are entering and experiencing young adulthood, and equip them with Biblical teachings and principles that will guide them in their futures. One Six Eight is designed to be a corporate gathering of individual who share common struggles of being young adults, and unite them under the liberating power of God. It is our desire to impact the lives of these individuals through corporate worship and practice, through biblical proclamation, and through opportunities to apply their faith to their daily lives.

As most of you know I am a college pastor at the Cathedral of Praise in Gadsden, Alabama. I have not launched the ministry yet but over the next few weeks I would like to share with you the heart of the ministry that God is doing here. The name of the ministry is called ONE SIX EIGHT. Now, I know what you are thinking. If you’re like a lot of my friends you will probably make fun of the fact that it is a number just like 722. You’re probably thinking that this is an attempt to mirror what everybody else is doing. However, before you are too critical I feel like you should know that this ministry has every desire to be distinct in its mission. Also, it’s not being planted in a mega church, or already been started by someone and I am just taking over where they left off. This is something new in this area for college and career age people, and it is designed to apply the meaning of its name to the area in which it will be launched. ONE SIX EIGHT has meaning behind its name, and its meaning mirrors the heart of those who desire to be apart of it.

The Ark of the Covenant, which was the symbol of the glory of God, had been absent from the tabernacle for twenty years. Hence, King David sought to bring the Ark back into Jerusalem. It took three months for David to get the Ark back into Jerusalem, however when the Ark finally entered Jerusalem, there was great joy amongst the people of God. It was for this reason that David wrote a psalm of thanksgiving. Our ministry is rooted in the deep theological meaning of I Chronicles 1:6-8. “Oh give thanks to the LORD, call upon His name, make known His deeds among the peoples.” (I Chronicles 16:8, NRSV) It is the hope of our ministry to enter into the presence of God with thanksgiving, to call on and commune with our God through the grace of Jesus Christ, and to make the name of God famous through the guidance and power of the Holy Spirit.

Over the past few months I have been experiencing situations in my life that have given me a greater understanding of God, the role that God has for my life, and the role that God has for His disciples in general. The understanding that I am referring to is the realization that God calls His followers to a lifestyle of uncomfortable living. I have come to this conclusion after experiencing several years of ongoing struggles in my life that involved trying to find the direction in which God was trying to lead me. Now, through God’s providence, I have moved to a place where I really don’t know anybody very well, where I am a long way away from my family and dear friends, and where I am struggling to make ends meet. As I have often wondered why God would place me in this location, at this time in my life, I have come to a very simple, and sometimes redundant conclusion that everything is in God’s will, and there is a reason for why I am at the place that I am now. The reason, I believe, has something to do with the fact that God has called His disciples to do, to go, and to experience uncomfortable things. Throughout the Bible, you will rarely come across men and women who served God comfortably. True men and women of God were ostracized from their homes, their families, and their people. They were persecuted, excommunicated, exiled, and abused for their service to God. Unfortunately, our western cultivated Christianity has eased the suffering of serving Christ. We are responsible for mutilating the beauty of sacrifice and suffering. We are responsible for attaching worldly pleasures with comfortability rather than defining comfortability in terms of pleasing God with our service. Perhaps true Christians are defined by a comfortability beyond worldly comprehension. Perhaps, true Christians are fixed so intently on following Christ that worldly comfortability is irrelevant. This is the divine understanding that I have acquired over the last few years. I have learned that God is sufficient to meet my needs and though following him might be uncomfortable by worldly standards, it is actually the most pleasure-filled experience that life has to offer.

It is a common stage of life amongst those who are my age, and those exiting college to begin to make commitments that will last them the rest of their lives. One such commitment is marriage. This is perhaps the most important decision that men and women have to make. However, this decision is often taken too lightly. After observing several of my friends get married over the last few years, I have discovered divine truth, not only within the commitments in marriage, but within the commitment to Jesus Christ. I have noticed how marriage mirrors the beauty of God’s love towards humanity as he offers himself completely to us. All that he asks in return is our commitment to him. The commitment that we make is beautiful in itself because it shows our complete dependency on Him, and the lack in our lives without Him. Perhaps the beauty of marriage is not the commitment that one couple makes with one another, rather, it is one of the most beautiful sacraments that two people can make, which mirrors the beauty of God’s love and God’s will in our lives. Perhaps marriage is simply a grand and life-long parable which describes the most intimate love that God has for Humanity.

The most important thing that one can say in his or her life is that they embraced the experiences that God has placed before them in their lives. Let me clarify that the experiences that I am talking about are those that shape a person’s future, and their character. Over the past few years the Lord has provided me with some incredible experiences. I have traveled to the other side of the globe, spent a lot of time evangelizing, I have met some wonderful people who have invested into my future, and I have explored the areas in my personal life that I would have normally kept shut. All of these sorts of things have served in making me the person I am today.
However, there are bad experiences that I have taken part in as well. I have experienced the loss of loved ones, I have had friends get angry at me and never speak to me again, I have suffered the loss of close and personal relationships in my life, and I have even had family fail me as well as me fail them. Yet, these experiences played no less of an important role in my life. I can honestly say that God revealed His character to me in powerful ways through these bad experiences, and I wouldn’t trade them for better experiences. Even experiences that I have gone through as a result of bad decisions have proved to be life-shaping experiences. The reason why I say these things is in order to state this fact. The greatest image of God’s character can be found in His ability to take the bad decisions we make, and use them in order to accomplish his glorified will. Even when we make mistakes, and experience bad things through those mistakes or decisions, God uses the experience in order to help us navigate towards the ultimate destination in which he is taking us. Just as God used the rebellion of Pharaoh, in the Exodus, to accomplish God’s will of liberating God’s people, the same concept can be applied when trying to understand how such a perfect and holy God can use our failures in order to accomplish the will that He has in our lives. In so many words, God doesn’t depend on our good and bad decisions. He uses the experiences that we have as a means to an end, which is His will. Thus, God is greater than our failures and shows himself as such by taking the good and bad experiences in our lives and shaping them into a creature that can one day stand before him as a redeemed son or daughter of God.

I would like to take some time and talk about some of the people who have changed my life over the last four years, and how they have helped to shape me into the person I am today. Of course family is always a big deal in most people’s lives, I am no acceptation to the importance that family plays in one’s life. My family is responsible for shaping the attitude that I have to succeed and to press on through the hardest times.

However, my friends have played the biggest roles in my life over the last four years that I have been in college. When I began college I was extremely shy, and very quiet. I spent most of my first semester of college leaning on the security of the girl that I had left back home. Most of my nights did not tolerate the fun and enjoyment that most people share in college. It consisted of long nights on the phone, and conversations that literally put me to sleep half the time. However, this was the first time I had left home for any length of time, and so I was trying to hang on to as much of home as I could. Yet, after my parents saw the hundreds of hours that I was spending on the phone every night they decided to take executive action and limit my time on the phone to 15 minutes a night. It was then, when I was forced outside of my little home town world on the phone and into the life of college. I remember the night I was so bored, I hadn’t made a lot of friends, so I walked out my door in Hughes Hall 3rd floor, only to run into Matt Redfern who was a guy living two doors down from me. He and I hit it off right off the bat. That night we decided to watch Smallville in the third floor lounge of Hughes Hall. However, our adventure that night would not be captivated by television for, during a commercial break Matt and I decided to barricade ourselves in the 3rd floor lounge so that nobody could get in, and then begin to throw what ever crap we could get our hands on at the windows and people who were below us. That night we defended ourselves bravely in the lounge, however, our barricade was soon compromised, and Matt and I was punished by everyone below us who had effected by our mischief. By the end of the night all of us had become close friends, and that semester we would all be a brotherhood. Raiding nearby dorms, pulling pranks, eating together in the dining hall, and turning all the showers on full heat in order to create a steam room all became apart of the functions done as our brotherhood.

Yet, the time spent in Hughes only prepared me to step out of my comfortability in order to meet the people that really shaped my life in the next three years. My story is not a short one, and my life has not been shaped by a few close friends whom I considered my brothers. My Hughes hall brothers were responsible for developing the fun spirit that I have developed over the years, and the ability to love life and all of it’s good times and bad times. However, others are responsible for furthering the character that I developed within the Hughes brotherhood. Now I would like to take time and recognize the people who have impacted me the most over the last few years.

Let me first say that I am a minister and have always had a heart to do what God has called me to do, which is to preach the word of God to as many people who can hear it. Yet, I owe everything that I am and will be in my ministry to people like my friends Micah Massey and Justin Walker. Micah is an amazing worship leader and has an ability to have fun in whatever he does, enjoy life to it’s fullest, and love God with all His heart. Micah is very spiritual, and I have often referred to Him as my college mother. He is never slow to tell me when I am going over the edge, or getting off track with things in my life. As a theologian, Micah brings both of our “old school” pentecostal heritages to our discussions about God and to the practice of our beliefs. Justin is equally an awesome guy and very intelligent. Justin is responsible for trying to keep me disciplined in my studies. I will always remember the nights that we stayed up studying all night for our theology exams, and how Justin kept me accountable to my time of studying. I will always cherish my time with these guys, and always remember what I learned by watching their lives.

Also, I could not talk about the most influential people in my life without talking mentioning the girl who stole my heart in college; Jill Singerman. Though I have not told her the half of things, Jill is responsible for a great deal of my sanity. I went through a really bad period in my life that would take a really long time to explain. Nonetheless, I met one of the greatest female personalities in my life. Jill is a warm, inviting, and a fun loving person. Jill has a really unique ability to take one’s mind off of their problems, at least that’s what she did for me. When I was going through a period of Hell in my life, Jill was the person I went to in order to forget about my problems. I will never forget how she impacted my life, and how God used her to calm much of the chaos in my life.

Two of the best relationships I developed in college was with two guys who are twin brothers; Tyler and Dylan Yosick. The Yosick twins are the craziest, energetic, exciting guys I ever have ever hung out with. I have known Tyler longer than Dylan, and our friendship has been very close over the years, but over the last semester of college Dylan has been every bit as much of a burst of fun and excitement as Tyler. The Yosicks are responsible for every bad deed that I do. Of course bad in this sense conveys no real evil, however, if I were to get in trouble Tyler and Dylan would be real close.

The last person I want to give credit to is probably my best friend at Lee University. I could never say enough good things about Eric Brown. He is one of those guys that will always stand out in one’s mind. Eric has no boundaries to his passion and dreams. If anyone has cultivated my desire to do great things and change the world it is Eric Brown. He constantly challenges me to be better, to dream bigger, and to never limit passion. Eric is also a tremendous servant. He would do almost anything for me, or for anyone. Here’s some of the things he has actually told me he would do for me, much of which has been accomplished; create a website, create a blog, design a business card, organize any church function I have, take a bullet for me, jump in front of a moving car, and always be there for me with whatever I need. In all seriousness, Eric Brown is the greatest friend a guy could ask for, and he has my fullest admiration. Eric is now successfully employed by Gabe Lyons (author of UnChristian, and founder of fermi project), and Eric’s drive and ambition will launch him into incredible things in the future. He is getting married in a month to one of the hottest, and one of the coolest girl at Lee University, Katie Black. Katie is one of my best friends as well, and hopefully will be a sister in law one day whenever her older sister Emily figures out that I am her soul mate. Nonetheless, all of this is apart of the mounds of evidence that I have that Eric strives for perfection in every aspect of His life. I wish both He and Katie all of the success in the world.

The people mentioned have shaped my life most over my years in college, but there are so many more that have helped to develop my life; PJ Simmons who is one of my closest friends and who is the most disciplined guy in the world, Ross Hagan, Katie Black, Lindsay Cutshall, Michael Cantu, Danny Leimann who is my best friend since kindergarten, Adrienne Hart who is one of my closest and best girlfriends, Taylor Jones, Clark Cambell, Chris Garmon and so many more who have been there for me during the best and worst of times. I am indebted to their friendship, and I will always remember the impact that they have make in my life. I owe my character, my ministry, and my future success to these people who have been my family for the last four years. I love all of you guys and I thank God that He has placed you in my life to serve a profound purpose for my future. May God bless all of you richly.