Lifegroup

Every other Tuesday I have the honor and the privilege to lead a lifegroup for young people. This group is made up of 8 fascinating people! Every other week we meet up and read the Bible, Pray, talk about life, eat food, laugh and grow as individuals.

One of the perks of my job is that i spend my time with people, a lot of time and I realised that my jobs success doesn't rely on how much money i can make. It relies on whether i am helping, supporting, loving and leading people well. What i have learnt by leading this lifegroup is that unlike normal business's i can never tick off my goals, as people we will always need support, love and help throughout the whole of lives.

I have seen this group of young people grow so much over the last year or so and I have to say I am so impressed by the people they are growing up to be. They have such a passion to learn more about Jesus and grow as Christian that it makes me want to learn and grow myself. They are so supportive of each other and when we meet together they are quick to share encouraging words and build each other up. Finally I love the fact that this group are so much fun! fun is so important in life and tonight for the last hour we told funny and humiliating stories of our lives and we didn't stop laughing.... I don't know about you but i want people in my life that make me laugh!

If i could say one thing to this lifegroup it would be...Love!
Simple i know but it is the answer.
Love God - Build a relationship with him, follow his teachings and take hold of his promises
Love Yourself - You are a creation of the God, you are unique and you have a purpose of this earth
Love Everyone else - You pass the love on because that is the only way to change the world and when you pass it on it grows even more inside of you.

Mind-Blowing

The distance between the Earth and the Sun is 93,000,000 miles. This is mind-blowing stuff, I use the term mind-blowing because are minds/imagination/brain can't truly comprehend this level of greatness or magnitude so to help this information blow your mind let me put it like this. If you travel at 70mph it would take you 1,328,571 hours to reach the sun which equates to 55,357 days or 152 years! Kaboooom! (That's the noise of your mind blowing)

The sun is the closest star to Earth the next star in line is a star called "Proxima Centauri" the distance to PC is about 4.3 light years, did your mind just blow?... Nah mine neither, 4.3 light years means nothing to me, let me put it like this. If you grab a piece of paper and the thickness of that paper represents the 93,000,000 miles between earth and sun then you would need to stack up enough paper to reach 22 meters high to represent the distance between the Earth and PC! Kaboom!

The furthest star we know about is called GJ 682, this star is about 16.3 light years away from the earth. Your stack of paper would need to reach 88 meters high to represent that distance! I will let you do the math to figure out how many miles that will be.

In the Bible it says that God can measure the universe with the size of his hand! How big must God be?! Kaboooooooom!

10 weeks - 1000 youth

On the 16th of April we started are second term of LIFE, that was 10 weeks ago, since then we have seen 1000 different young people walk through the Kerith doors on a Friday night. Numbers aren't everything but it is the best way to measure your fruit and when we really think about it, it is more then a number it represents people, 1000 people in fact. 1000 people who have now had an experience of Church, 1000 people who have heard the gospel, 1000 people who have seen miracles and 1000 people who have had a chance to get right with God.

This is simply incredible and I have never seen anything like it before in my life, I am so excited to be part of this move of God, to be part of such an incredible team that just wants to help this generation reach it's full potential and I am so excited because God is making my dream, and the dream of others, a reality.

"Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen"

This verse is a promise! this verse is from God and God always fulfills his promises.

One Liners

Here some one liners that have inspired me at some point in my life. Some of them are from preaches i have heard, some are from close friends, some are from my own mind and some are from Jesus. If there is any that you like and would like me to write a separate blog post on then please just comment and I will do my best to write one. Here we go! Hope you enjoy!

Live for an audience of one.
Private victory leads to public victory.
If your Bible is in tatters your life wont be.
Power without purity is frustrating but purity without power is inexcusable.
The devil is out of date its time for the gospel.
If you don't know what your calling from God is, serve someone who knows theirs.
If you kneel before God you can stand up before anyone.
Lets stop reading the bible and start experiencing it.
Live your life and God will give you a wife!
Love is spelt TIME
Faith is spelt RISK
You know your mind has been renewed when the impossible seems logical.

Anatidaephobia

Anatidaephobia is the fear that somewhere, somehow, a duck is watching you! It is a real phobia and is slowly becoming a global crisis. 198,807 facebook users suffer with this phobia and it is slowly spreading throughout the whole world. There is a facebook group dedicated to helping the sufferers of this horrific phobia, on the page you can hear stories and eye witness testimony's of how ducks are slowly taking over the world and how they are becoming a real danger to our national security.

This fear is real in my life and all started when I was aged 5 and my family decided to go on a nice walk through Dinton Pastures. My loving father gave me the job of bread carrier and I was excited to be given such responsibility at such a young age. I was excited that I would be a part of helping young ducklings grow into healthy strong ducks. I approached the waters edge and throw large amounts of bread into the water hoping that the ducks would see me as a generous giver, after a few minutes of feeding a beautiful range of birds I tied up my bag with the remaining bread still inside and turn around expecting to see my family standing there smiling at the amazing job I had done, I was surprised to find a family of ducks instead. I told the ducks that I had finished my bread giving for that section of the lake and if they wanted some they would have to go further up the lake but they refused to listen and began quacking uncontrollable at me! the force at which they quacked horrified me to my very core the ducks began to circle me and some started attacking my bread bag. I began to fear for my very life "GO AWAY" I yelled at the top of my lungs but this only made things worse as they began to jab me with their rock solid beaks, the jabs forced me to take step after step backwards until I took a step and realised that there was no longer any floor underneath my feet instead their was just water! I began to fall, I throw my arms around in the air hoping to restore some balance which would keep me on the ground and just as gave up hope and accepted my fate of getting wet my heroic father grab my arm and pulled me to safety. My father pick me up and carried me back towards the rest of the family and as my head lay on his shoulder my eyes full of tears I heard a loud and final "QUACK" which let me know that this war was not over in fact it had only just begun!.

Since then I have had some dramatic encounters with ducks. One was at my school where a group of them gathered outside the art block waiting for me to finish my lesson they stood there with pure anger in their eyes, their wings were flapping as they tried to show me how manly they are, luckily they were stopped when a group of older kids throw cans at them and chased them out of school. Another time was when a suicide duck threw itself at me when I was having a peaceful picnic with my friends in the park. This unprovoked attack was ended when a friend of mine throw an American football at the suicide duck which then ran away like a little girl duckling!

This war is serious and so far we have been winning the battles but I fear that the ducks are building a mass army which will some day be unleashed upon the unsuspecting world. Be scared and be prepared!

Bringing Worship to LIFE

Worship = The basic meaning of the word for 'worship' is to express, by words or by bowing down, profound and submissive respect or adoration.
LIFE = A Friday night youth event at Kerith Community Church where 300+ young people gather to have a laugh, meet some friends and whether they like it or not, hear about Jesus.

I want to bring these two things together. I want the young people to have such a burning desire to worship this Jesus they hear so much about. The question comes up though, How do we get to that place?

On Friday we made a fantastic start! We had a worship band play at LIFE and invited young people to worship God however we didn't really start here, to be honest we started all the way back in September. You see in September we decided as a team to always preach about Jesus every week at LIFE no matter what and this is where it all started because we can't expect people to worship God if they know nothing about him so in September we began to introduce people to Jesus.

We have been doing all we can to introduce people to Jesus for the past 7 months and on the 30th of April we gave everyone an opportunity to worship God. The band was made up of young people between the ages of 15-21 and they poured their heart into the worship, they were passionate, professional, inspiring, talented, bold, creative and they allowed the Holy Spirit to flow through them like the river Thames flows through London!

Because of the bands hard work and the grace of God I witnessed about 100 young people worshipping God that night. You might think this is a failure because there is 300 people at the event and only 100 were worshipping but I want to remind you that these are young people, the world would tell us that on a Friday night young people would be on the streets getting drunk and causing trouble, however last Friday I witnessed 100 of those young people decided they are going to worship God instead!

Flame On!

In the Fantastic Four there is a superhero called Jonny Storm (The Human Torch) who has the ability cover his body with fire and because of the energy and power that this results in Jonny then has the ability to fly, the ability to throw fireballs in any direction and he can also harness enough power to go supernova and basically blow up whatever he likes. The really interesting thing about this power is that he can turn it on and off he doesn't have to be on fire the whole time. If Jonny did walk around on fire the whole time then he would set fire to things and burn loads of people which would make him an awful superhero.

In my first mentoring session with Sola Osunoiki, Sola challenged me on a similar problem to that of Human Torch, when to turn the fire on and off, Sola challenged me to turn the fire off sometimes (Spiritual fire not real fire). My response to this is was " are you joking you should always be on fire for God" Sola then continued for the next three hours to show me why this was a good idea, I still didn't get it! Afterwards i drove home and thought about this the whole way home i couldn't understand why you wouldn't want to constantly be on fire for God! Over the next few weeks i prayed and read my Bible trying to hear God's thoughts on the matter and a couple of weeks later I found 1 Corinthians 9:22 which reads

"To the weak I become weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some"

This struck me! but i still wasn't convinced. God then proceeded to up the game. I went on a training course the week after and I received two prophecies from two different friends of mine (they had no idea what had happened to me in the weeks before) here they are, almost exactly as they said it.

I see you on fire (lol), from head to toe and you are going round making everyone else on fire however sometimes you keep trying to set the same person on fire and actually you begin to put them out. This picture means that you are on fire for God and you are gifted at inspiring others to do the same, however if you keep applying pressure you begin to put the fire out.

I saw you as a lion and you are a really powerful and strong however some people were afraid to approach you. God is saying that sometimes you need to be as approachable as a lamb but as powerful as a lion.

After this I learnt my lesson and it is the best lesson i have ever learnt. Like the Human Torch I need to learn when it is most effective for me say Flame On!