We need God's Help

This week was just a reminder to our family that we NEED God's help. Mirciades spent a long week in Scranton at the new LaTolteca. He encountered a costly problem that is due to a dishonest contractor. My immediate reaction is to do everything I can to ruin this guy . I would hate for him to continue to rip off honest business people...it really seems unfair. Then I was reminded of a study I was doing this week on "heart issues". It reminded me that revenge belongs to the Lord and not to me. I was reminded that we all will answer to the Lord for our actions on this earth. God will make a way for us to restore this loss of time and money. I feel released from stewing over the situation, and content to just let Mirciades handle it with his boss as they do intend to atleast report him to the local police. Everyday is a lesson in grace and trust!

A New Perspective

Over the weekend at the Women’s Meeting, I found myself silently stewing that some guy (the beloved Mark Prater) was going to teach me and a bunch of other women about women’s ministry. I was appalled and sat there in silence (arms folded of course, you know me) as he went on about some of my favorite topics, like submission and duties in the home. Well, my dear friend who we’ll call “Joyce” just for the purposes of this story gently reminded me that someday Mark will stand before the Lord and be held accountable for the teaching given to us. That changed my perspective entirely! In fact, now I am very grateful and cannot wait to review the material again with a softened heart! Apparently, I missed this recent Sunday teaching, but at least someone I knew did not! Thanks “Joyce” (you know who you are!)

Author Invitations

Sorry for the multiple emails, but I realized yesterday that there was a much easier way to add you all as authors on the blog. You should have just received an email that invites you to be an author on our blog. All that means is that you will be able to write posts (once I explain how) and add comments to the blog.

All that you should need to do is to click the link in the email and then sign into Blogger with your existing Google Account (or create one if you do not have one) and presto, you will be made an author.

Let me know if you have any questions...

Thanks!
Bryan

Faith Comes From Hearing

So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.
~Romans 10:17

And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.
~Hebrews 11:6

I am fired up :) And I am aware of the fact that I am very tempted to break one of the ground rules of the blog that we are creating together - short posts and no doctrinal dissertations. At the very least, I am short circuiting the introduction posts (I will come back to them) to send an encouragement that I want us all to hear.

As I shared at Community Group two weeks ago, God has been putting his word on my heart. We talked about how we see God through his word in at least three primary contexts - the preached word, our private devotions and study of his word, and our fellowship together over his word.

Since that meeting, God has helped me to seek him in his word, to believe that he is there and that he will reward me as I seek him. I have not had long quiet times. I have not even had all that particularly moving quiet times. At least once I went back to bed instead of continuing my quiet time because my head was so sleepy that his word was a silent brick wall. Yet, on a more consistent basis than normal, I have resolved that I will not walk out the door of my house without reading at least a small passage of scripture and asking God to reveal himself to me.

Since that meeting, I have had grace to interact with the Sunday messages differently as well. I have been able to listen more attentively and to take hold of, grapple with, and understand, and see God in the things that we have been taught.

Since that meeting, I have had many conversations with friends over the word. Some of the conversations have been encouragement and fellowship over commonalities, others have been disagreement, at times venturing into conflict, wrestling over differences. At least twice they have gone on into the realm of 1-2 o'clock in the morning. All have been filled with scripture. All, even those of disagreement, have been filled with genuine love for one another.

Why am I sharing this with you? Because I feel more alive and bursting with faith than I have in a very long time. I have experienced the reality (and pray that I continue to do so) that faith truly does come from hearing the word of God. I feel powerfully that it is empty foolishness to gain the whole world if it means that you forfeit your soul because I would not trade the inner life that I feel today for anything that this world has to offer.

There are so many things that we can be tempted to give our time to. As a recent example, in one sense I thank God that the Eagles lost on Sunday (sorry) because even though I love football and love the Eagles, I know that the more that they win, the more time I am tempted to devote to that sport. It is not enjoying football that is the issue, but rather doing so in a way that steals time from things that are more important. Football will never bring me the life that I feel right now, even if the Eagles were to have a perfect, undefeated season and actually win the Super Bowl for once. This is just one example of an area where I can struggle to give proper place to fellowship with God through his word in the three contexts that I mentioned above.

So, with already way too long a post, I encourage/exhort/plead with you (and ask you to do the same for me because I will probably be struggling with this again next week), seek God in his word and believe that he is a rewarder of those that seek him. Resolve that you will read his word, even for 1 minute, every day and ask him to reveal himself to you. Go to church (and community group) and participate - be nourished by the word as our pastors feed the flock that God has given them. And in our fellowship together, let's not content ourselves simply with idle chatter on sports, the weather, current projects, or anything else in such a way that holds no distinction from the conversations of the world. Rather let's press beyond that to encourage one another all the more as the day of Christ draws near, for faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.

Bryan

Questions - Part I: Overview

Ok, so here is the first post as promised. Over the next week or two, I just want to quickly try to answer some of the questions that Cherylee mentioned in her email. You know, the who, what, when, where, why standards... I think that I will actually do a series of posts so that I can keep them reasonably short, both to help you to be able to read them, and to help me not to obsess and spend WAY too much time on any one post. Bear with me on the practicalities. I realize that we are all coming from different places of experience in regards to technology. Hopefully I will be able to clearly communicate my vision behind doing a Community Group blog, and at the same time provide some basic info that will help to bring us all up to speed on what a blog is for and how to make it work.

As I am doing this first series of posts, one of my goals will be to help every person in the Community Group create an ID that you can use to create a post, or to comment on other's posts. Some of you may already have one and be very familiar with this whole blogging thing. If so, could you just sign in and create a comment on this post to let me know? It will help me to get a feel for how much detail to provide on the basics.

As a side note, some of you may have an ID that you created for the Compass blog (or the Labriola's blog, or any other blog who's addres is xxxxxxxx.blogspot.com). If you do, that one will work fine here too. Just let me know what it is with a comment if you know how, or with an email if not.

For the rest of us, here is a link that you can use to create an account. You don't need to worry about what to do with the account yet, just follow the instructions to create one. Once you do, if you could either log in and leave a comment or shoot me an email to tell me your username, that would be great. If you get confused and have trouble creating an account, just let me know I can give you a call to walk you through it.

https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount

Looking forward to seeing you all here! :)

Bryan