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| 04.24.06 |
Sometimes a Million Miles Away is Just Around the Corner: Kim and I have been here almost 3 and a half years now, and I have to tell you, I LOVE North Carolina. It has so far been everything that it promises it’ll be, and more. When we were deciding where we wanted to move and start ministry, we got excited about North Carolina because of everything the state offers. For the first 2 years that we were here – we NEVER went to any of these places. Although we were living right around the corner from them, it still seemed like they were a million miles away – because we never took the time to pursue all that North Carolina had to offer. We never took the time to truly live in the moment. Do you ever feel this way with your faith, and your relationship with God? Here we are, living in the south, in one of the most regliousized parts of the world, yet sometimes God feels like he’s a million miles away.I know that I do. I wonder, though, if we often feel like He’s a million miles away because we are just not willing to admit that in reality, he’s right around the corner? |
Music: "Ready to Run " by Karl Ruch |
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| 04.17.06 |
Senior Night |
Movie Clip: Seniors 06 |
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| 03.27.06 |
Community: We're going to look at a story of true friendship and community in the Bible and when we’re done tonight I hope that we can see three key things:
1) Friends can sometimes be both a real convenience and a real pain
2) We need our friends and the community around us much moreso than we think
3) If we are to ultimately grow closer to Jesus, we need to be friends and to be that friend for others.
Sometimes we need community and friends to carry us when we just can’t do so ourselves. And sometimes we need to be those friends who will carry those around us.
Scripture: Mark 2:1-12 |
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| 03.20.06 |
Talking with God : How often if you’re honest with yourself – do we feel like Bruce? We are looking all around for God but just can’t find him. Looking for signs we expect to be there. Don’t know how to see or hear what God is saying to us – even though he’s right there all along, just trying to get through to us?
Tonight I want to take three primary challenges as to why we might want to regularly communicate with God.
1. Prayer gives us direction
2. Prayer gives us peace of mind
3. Prayer can influence God’s heart and mind |
Movie Clip: "Bruce Almighty " - Bruce challenges a God he doesn't believe will show up for him. |
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| 03.03.06 |
Share the Hope: I’m sure all of us have many faces and many names that come to mind of people that aren’t engaging faith. People who either don’t know God at all or, more commonly, who have put their faith on the back burner for a couple years of college, because they don’t think that faith and Greek life can co-exist. Well, we know that it can, and guess what, our friends can know that to – if we tell them! But how can we do that? The New Testament, and especially the four gospels give us some very clear pictures of Christ’s lifestyle on earth. He didn’t hang out with the cool and comfortable crowd, he didn’t stray from situations that were sketchy or were uncomfortable – Jesus got in on the action wherever it was. Jesus hung out with regular folks....Jesus just spends time with people and lives his life well, and folks respond to that. In his book The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader, John Maxwell, a great business writer who has a strong faith in Christ, writes, “People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.”
Scripture: 2 Corinthians 5:20; Romans 1:14-15; Philemon 6
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Music: "Walk Tall" by John Mellencamp |
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| 02.13.06 |
The Fundamentals: Tonight we’re going to look at what some of that discipline looks like in general, and hopefully have some time for you to think about what it looks like in your life. So just this morning I woke up to a pattern that has become all-to-familiar for me over the last few weeks. I got out of bed, got ready to start the day, and promptly hit the laptop to see what was going on with the world. A couple of hours later I realized that I had engaged my day without first engaging God. Here I am, about to give a talk tonight to you guys about the discipline of training our hearts so they are inline with God, and I totally forgot to show up and practice the fundamentals myself. Now today, luckily, I stopped what I was doing, closed the computer and spent some good time in the Word with God. I realigned my moral and work compass for the day and just in the act of showing up before God, let him know that His will was more important for my life than what I thought was important. How often does this scenario happen to those of us in this room?
Scripture: James 1:22-23 |
Movie Clip: "Hoosiers" - Coach puts the team through a grueling practice that is based on fundamentals. |
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| 02.07.06 |
Walk On: Most people in this room have heard the names Thomas Jefferson, Mohatma Ghandi and Confucious before, right? We know them all as great leaders, thinkers and leaders of revolutions. Each of them had very interesting and intriguing thoughts and philosophies on life, faith and living. And each of them, in many ways, was wrong....
Now I’m not saying we should throw out the rules, principles and laws, because they are certainly there for a reason and do indeed serve as a reference and a moral check, if you will. But how many of us have become so paralyzed by the legalisms of religion, that we can never even begin to move forward in faith? Sometimes when we start on our journey of faith and sometimes when we are re-starting or continuing our journey – we simply need to take the step to walk with God.
Scripture: Matthew 4:18-22; 11:1-19; 19:16-22 |
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| 01.30.06 |
Experiencing God: Sometimes life gets tough, and we just want to ‘never come back.’ We want to check out, disengage, move on to something else. If you’re like me, you even feel this way in your journey of faith sometimes. For some of us we feel that way every day, as we wake up and 10 minutes later we have already stumbled. For others this feeling hits only every once in a while, but when it does, it’s challenging to deal with.
Scripture: John 10:10, Mark 12:32-34 |
Movie Clip: "Billy Madison" - Billy hates the 3rd grade and is never coming back.
"On Fire" (lowrez-for modems, etc.)
Music: On Fire by Switchfoot
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| 12.05.05 |
Have Yourself a Merry Christmas: All semester we have been looking at what it means to be ALIVE! But to be "fully alive," we must first look to the life-specifically the birth-of the one who allows us to be Alive! This was a very special Christmas Greek IMPACT! |
Movie Clip: GI Christmas '05 Video
GI Christmas '05 Video (low rez - for modems, etc.)
"Christmas Song" by Dave Matthews Band |
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| 11.28.05 |
The Prodigal: Who is God in relation to us? Who are we in relation to God? To answer these questions we look not only to the Prodigal Son, but also to the Older Son and the Father in this famous passage. Which character are you? Why? What will it take for you to move to a place like the father is in as he welcomes his son back into the fold? |
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| 11.14.05 |
Is the Cross Enough (pt2)?: I don’t believe that the cross is enough for us to truly live. We often end up feeling guilty because we are constantly coming back for the same things. And sometime, maybe next week, maybe 20 years down the road, we stand a real danger of just chucking the faith all together.
But thankfully the story does not end there. There is something more, something much greater. After three days, Christ rose from the tomb he was buried in and was resurrected. And THAT’S where we find life. That’s where we find freedom. A dead person does us no good. A dead God, especially does us no good. A risen God, however, can offer so much more.
Scripture: Romans 6:4-11,
Ephesians 2:4-5,
John 10:10,
Ezekiel 36:26,
Luke 6:44-45, 8:15
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Movie Clip: "Worlds Apart" slideshow movie by Dave Shepley
Music: "Worlds Apart" by Jars of Clay |
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| 11.07.05 |
Is the Cross Enough (pt1)?:
One of the greatest traps in Christianity is the notion that the heart is wicked.
How can we be ALIVE if our hearts are wicked? Scripture tells us our hearts have been transformed when we accept Christ. But we don’t often live that way, do we? We try to follow the rules, laws and disciplines, but they don’t mean a thing unless we live as transformed people. So we end up getting fed up with the legalism and the ‘expectations’ of faith...
Scripture: Romans 12:2, Galatians 5, Romans 12
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Music: "Manner & Means" by Caedmon's Call
Quotes: GI Purpose Statement, GI Vision, 'Not Christianity' , by John Eldredge |
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| 10.25.05 |
The Heart is Central: Why do we so often rely on our head to dictate our lives when we know that our heart yearns for something else? Why do we rely on reason, emotion and motive while denying the deepest desires of our heart? Is it insecurity, fear, lack of knowledge? Why are facts not enough when making decisons?
Scripture: Deuteronomy 6:5, 1 Samuel 16:7, Proverbs 3:5, Matthew 15:8
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Movie Clip: "The Passion of the Christ" - Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane facing a decison of whether to follow his heart or his head. |
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| 10.17.05 |
You Have a Role: God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary things. Mr. Anderson, a boring accountant became Neo. David, basically a Mr. Bo Peep, rose up to defeat the greatest warrior of all-time. He defeated Goliath with unmatched confidence. Why don't we have the same confidence in our life situations. Why do we approach life with an "Eeyore faith - I suppose I can do it; Oh well, I guess I messed up, etc." If David had that attitude he would have been toast.
Scripture: 1 Samuel 17 |
Movie Clip: "The Matrix" - Mr. Anderson realizes he is truly Neo in a Subway station action scene.
Music: "Something Beautiful" by Jars of Clay
Quote: Courage, by Nelson Mandela
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| 10.10.05 |
There Is More Here than Meets the Eye: We are part of a larger story - God's Epic. By thinking only in terms of ourselves and what we can see we are missing out on a large part of what makes us Alive! in Jesus. The facts just aren't enough to compel us to live. A historical account of Pearl Harbor's bombing or the Titanic sinking doesn't captivate the mind like the movies "Pearl Harbor" and "Titanic" can. If we only pay attention to what is seen, we miss what Jesus is trying to do in our lives, like Cleopas and his buddy did on the road to Damascus when Jesus was with them all along.
Scripture: Luke 24:13-35 |
Movie Clip: Preview of the upcoming film "Narnia"
Music: "Fix You" by ColdPlay |
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| 10.07.05 |
Special Guest Speaker: Tim Conder - Pastor Chapel Hill BIble Church/Emmaus Way. UNC/Delta Upsilon alum '82
See Tim's bio |
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| 09.26.05 |
Alert and Oriented Times Zero: It seems like we spend much of our lives drifting around, feeling dazed and confused. Sometimes it's because of what we did last night or last week, other times it's laziness and sometimes we're just up to our ears in busyiness and do so much that we just can't see the trees through the forest. The same is true of our spiritual lives. We find ourselves drifting in our faith and think that either we're blowing it or God is holding out on us. But he has a great plan, a plan that allows us to be Alive!
Scripture: John 10:10, Luke 4:18 |
Movie Clip: "The Perfect Storm" - John falls from the helicopter in the midst of the Perfect Storm trying to rescue a ship lost at see. As he hits the water at maximum impact he is alert and oriented times zero. |
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| 9.19.05 |
The Glory of God is YOU fully Alive: This phrase, adapted from a quote by St. Iraneaus in the early 100's is perhaps the most important thing you will hear all semester. God is glorified when we are satisfied - what a concept! Jesus tells us in John 10:10 that he has 'come so that you may have life and have it to the full.' Why don't we live this way then? Why don't we live in the freedom that we are ALIVE! in Christ? Will we be people this semester who take pill like Neo did and engage the adventure, or will we be people who are satisfied with mediocrity - with life as it always has been?
Scripture: John 10:10, Luke 4:18 |
Movie Clip: "The Matrix " - Morpheus is offering the truth - nothing more. Neo has a choice of which pill to take. One will lead to a life of adventure and a battle to win, the other will lead to life as it always has been.
Quote: See the St. Iraneus quote and the reason it is our vision on Monday Nights this semester. |
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