With all the snow, we got together with a few friends that lived near by and could get out of their driveway and went sledding!

We had a wonderful youth retreat last week with our guest speaker, Steve Burchett.  He clearly taught about the greatness of Christ.  Continue to pray for the 100 teens that were present and how they respond to “The Great One”.  The 3 sermons are now available on our church website for free.

Today we head off for the 39th Annual EBC Winter Youth Retreat!  This year’s speaker is a friendfrom college and seminary, Steve Burchett.    Many who read this blog either are at Edgewood or used to attend this youth retreat and know how God has used in in our lives and the lives of our friends.  Please pray for Steve as he preaches God’s Word to our teenagers.  Here is how his church has been praying for him:

 “Father, we know that you have given Steve a certain amount of natural ability in speaking, but if that is all that he has when he preaches to those teens in Indiana, he will fail miserably. He needs your presence; he needs your Spirit to accompany him and come powerfully behind the truth that he proclaims.” Amen.

Abraham Lincoln

Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?

Over the last two Sunday nights I have been preaching on “putting on” love and “pursuing” love based upon 1 Corinthians 13 and 14.  I had a friend point me in the direction of  a “Daily Love Dare” at www.familylife.com  It seems to be something based on a book, Love Dare, and the movie Fireproof.   Admittedly, I have never read the book or watched the movie, (I have heard good feedback and read good reviews about the storyline of the movie) I don’t even know much about the familylife website.

All that said, the first days challenge for the Daily Love Dare got me thinking about what we have been looking at on Sunday evenings.  So, here is the challenge:

Love Dare – Day 1

Resolve to say nothing negative about your spouse today.
Ephesians 4:2

First, try it with your spouse or family and see if you have developed negative, unloving, unkind, ungentle habits.  Now take that dare and apply it to the church body:

Resolve to say nothing negative about your church next Lord’s day.

It will be interesting to find out how many negative things you actually say to and about others in just one day, and that day is the one day when you are supposed to be focused the most on being in one Spirit and in harmony.  Come on, I double dog dare you!

Having strong role models in life can be very helpful.  My dad often set people in front of me to help push me, motivate me, and be a role model to me.  I appreciate at that now more than I did then.  I can remember the newspaper cut outs of Steve Alford and his shooting form.  There was even a photo of a guy guarding Alford in high school focused only on his stomach that was to be my model for defense.  To my regret I never really panned out as an Indiana high school basketball player, but the fundamentals are there.  I can remember the recording the Jack Nicklaus winning the 1986 Masters.  I believe that is what started my love for golf.  I also have a book by RC Sproul, “Holiness”,  with an article about Danny Wuerffel and his faith and his love for faithful teachers of God’s Word.

The athletics never really worked out too well for me, but the love of them stuck.  However, more importantly the love of Christ and the other examples Dad set before me like Jim Elliot, CH Spurgeon, Lloyd-Jones, RC Sproul, John MacArther, Sinclair Ferguson, Eric Alexander, Alistair Begg, and many others have stuck and many now surround me on my bookshelf and MP-3 player as I type.

In light of the BCS Championship tonight, it appears there is another role model that may be helpful to set before young people today, Tim Tebow!  Regardless of how you feel about the Florida Gators, I think he has followed well in the footsteps of his role model, Danny Wuerffel, and continues to be bold in his testimony of his love for Christ and sharing Christ with others.

Here is an ESPN article on him (ht:tc)  In a day where sports are full of those who want to proclaim they are not role models and others who simply want to be gangsta role models, take the opportunity to set someone out there for young people who realizes there is something bigger than self and something bigger than sports .  Let them see someone who motivates the soul as well as their athletic desires.

Here is his Heisman Video too:

I, like many, have struggled with family worship. Sometimes you wonder what you really accomplished. Other times you think you have accomplished a lot, only to later realize that you have completely shot over your children’s heads. Satan can use this to discourage and cause us to give up. I found a post by Dr. Jim Hamilton to be a great encouragement.

Family worship doesn’t have to be complicated, and it doesn’t take someone with a seminary degree to pull it off. In the morning at the breakfast table we work on a memory verse together. In the evenings right before we put the boys in bed we read a passage or two from the Bible, say the Apostles’ Creed, sometimes sing a hymn, then we pray and put them in bed. That’s it. That’s family worship.