YONDER BREAKS

 I love Seacoast church, and the more I've gone there and followed them, the more good things I see. I came across this sermon series about money, The Elephant in the Room. Here's the first sermon in the series by Josh Walters. This one didn't really blow me away, but the rest of the series picks up: If you get the chance, read those verses on the Zacchaeus link and the Rich Guy links below (they're short). Ray Vander Laan has a really great sermon on Zacchaeus that is somewhere here . Unfortunately, I don't know which one (so you'll have to listen to all of them!), but if you scan my old posts you may find it, should you have the time. I highlighted a statement below: "when Jesus is Lord, God is your provider." If you really take hold of that, imagine the ramifications...no matter what happens in your life, you'll be okay because God is taking care of you. Jesus tells us this in Matthew 6:25-34 . In 1 Kings , the first lesson God teaches El...

I was working on some notes for the Moving In sermon by Joseph Barkley, and accidentally deleted all of it...oh well, you can listen here: http://www.churchinhollywood.com/media.php?pageID=15 It's based on Deuteronomy 6:4-12: 4  Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5  Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6  These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. 7  Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8  Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9  Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates. 10  When the Lord your God brings you into the land he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give you—a land with large, flourishing cities you did not build, 11  houses filled with all kinds of ...

 NOTE: This is an old post, but I have some free time, so I'm catching up. My cell phone split in half this weekend... This is the best phone I ever had. It was simple, durable (this isn't the phone that split in half) and had an excellent reggae version of Silent Night as my ringtone. The only downside to this phone was that it didn't have a camera, but that's what cameras are for I guess. So as I look for a new phone, I find myself wishing I could go back to the simpler days of my little LG pictured above. But these days every phone is "smart," and we are being pushed into buying these smart phones and their expensive data plans. After a year of using my sister's old phone (she's always a step ahead of me with this stuff), I ended up with a Samsung Stratosphere II, and it was actually cheaper to buy a smart phone with all its data than to keep up my old fashioned ways. I often find myself in this predicament -- how much do I let techn...

 As the title suggests, here is the rest of my thoughts on Age and Expectations, established in a prior post and initiated by viewing this video: So, back to the original point about the video: should we be concerned about where we are in life compared to others? Romans 12:2 says, " Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will." I wrote a blog post about that verse earlier. God made us to do something. Society didn't make us to do anything, but expects something from us. So who do we please - people or God? Something about all of this doesn't sit well with me though. Maybe it's important to gauge our life's progress by others - isn't that a standard of maturity? If all my friends have awesome jobs and houses and families, and I'm still living with my parents and delivering pizzas, is that ...

This is a really powerful video: It really shows the consciousness of our society and what we're most concerned about: being normal, particularly when it comes to milestones we "should have" hit by our age (or with those we may have hit prematurely when it comes to "10-17 and pregnant"). Our society really associates age with milestones, and that's understandable. I often think to my parents who, by my age, had a house and two kids. My dad still works for the same company he did when he was my age and had way more responsibility than I have now. I often compare myself to him and wonder why things are different... To be fair it was the late-80's/ early-90's and things were much better economically, and the culture varied socially. Plus, Home Improvement was on television, which makes everything better. But you can't help but make those comparisons and tests that, by such-and-such age I need to have experienced such-and-such. And accordin...