Monday, November 22, 2010

A Christian's Freedom

We have all struggled with that verse in 1 Corinthians, "Therefore, if food causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause my brother to stumble."

How do you wrestle with this verse? Go and read 1 Corinthians 8 and 10, maybe also Romans 14.

I don't want you to sermonize me. I want you to give me your honest struggles, i.e.:

Is it okay to watch R rated movies?

When and where is it safe to have an alcoholic drink?

Are these the type of questions you are asking? What kind of questions do you ask?

I would love to hear back from you on this!

Monday, November 1, 2010

Halloween

I know many believers have big problems with Halloween. I struggle with this too, because I am sympathetic to their arguements, but I also see that with enough grace and self-control you can use this pagan day to Christ's advantage.

So, I am not one to throw out Halloween completely. If I had my druthers, I would celebrate All Saints Day instead, knowing the hearts of great men of God from our past are much more to be celebrated than death and fear. But, because I live just a few feet from the gates of Hell, I and my church brothers and sisters must sound an alarm that will be heard.

Over this Halloween weekend our church hosted two events. Both were out in the public where lost people are and both were done with grace and love.

The first was a "Trunk R Treat" at an apartment complex. Seven cars of church members decorated their trunks in fun and creative ways. Those who lived in the apartments were notified the Thursday before that we would be out. We had a lot of people come. Alot of kids were all dressed up and got some extra candy and we got to tell these folks about our church and that we just wanted to bless them and open a door of ministry to them. We weren't trying to hide anything. This event came on the heels of a block party we had done at the same apratments during the summer. So, many of those folks knew us. The Church has got to go to the highways and biways and compel them to come in and sometimes continuously. Doing that will mean we must meet these people where they are. Were there ghosts and goblins dressed up as kids, and vice versa? Yes. But, that is where the church is to do its best ministry.

The second event took place at one of our members homes. We basically did a block party. This church member loves Halloween and has gotten a reputation for doing up a pretty cool lawn for scaring kids. Yes, he actually loves scaring them! I know he's a sinner saved by grace, get over it! So while, he was scaring kids and their parents (by the way our society loves to be scared, so we used that to our advantage), we set up a bounce house, snow cone machine, and coolers of FREE drinks for people to take in the neighbors yard (another soul we are trying to reach of a member). There were so many people out and about we went through all our ice, drinks, candy, and church invitations. People were shocked to learn it was all for FREE. We recieved many thanks and "this is cool" and we got to invite a ton of people to our worship service.

I know we can argue whether we were associating with evil. We could have holed up in our church building and hoped that the world would come to our harvest event, but we chose to join the sinners and publicans and eat with them just like Jesus would have done.

Ministry can be messy. But "their" souls are worth it, because His blood was worth it!