Sunday, August 7, 2011

Seed planting versus Harvesting

Our youth group went to the Ichthus Festival a couple months ago. I can't tell you how much I enjoy this festival each year. I mean you can tell as each day goes by that week, I get more and more hyper until I was driving myself crazy about how random my thoughts were.
One of the biggest things at Ichthus is that everyone takes communion together on Saturday evening. There's, also, a speaker.
How can I put this? The speaker this year bothered me. He said that we all belong to one of four chairs. 1. Growing Christians. 4. Not Christians. 2. Lukewarm Christians that will be people who are spit out of God's mouth. 3. People who believe they are Christians, but aren't, they may have prayed a salvation prayer and believe they are saved but they aren't. This bothered me because I'm not comfortable telling someone who believes themselves to be a Christian they aren't. Help grow together, yes, but not that.
Today the lead pastor from the main campus preached. It answered so many of my thoughts. I am so a Methodist, the marketing campaign a few years ago was Open doors, Open hearts, Open minds. Meaning that we would not judge and meet people where they are. Exactly! He talked about how Jesus preached a parable about a man who planted good seed, but the enemy planted weeds at night. The man told his workers they shouldn't pull out the weeds because it would disturb the wheat. They were to tend to the field and help it grow, but then the harvesters would seperate the wheat from weeds. We are not the harvester, we are the tenders. It is God's job to judge.
This helped me to understand my issues. The speaker was to me saying that we needed to judge others and we aren't, we are to help them grow the best we can and let God sort it out in the end.
Lord, help me to remember that I'm not the judge, I'm just the worker. Amen.

Friday, August 5, 2011

Video blog with Koti's help

Thought I'd give another try to a video blog. Koti helped.