Wednesday Night Oct 26th

This Wednesday night we will be transforming our youth wing into a laser tag arena. 

Come play from 5:30pm - 6:30pm before the revival meeting!

Revival is Happening!

     Yesterday was the start to our Revival meetings here at FBC Fairborn. I always thought it a little odd when you "schedule" a time of revival for the church. There is nothing that we can do to usher in God's work unless we are coming humbly to Him and plead with Him to move in our midst. That is exactly what our congregation has been doing. Our church has been in a spirit of prayer and has been expectantly waiting to see God move in a powerful way over these few days of revival meetings. God is answering our prayer!

     I am so thankful for Pastor Ron and his leadership of our church! He preached many powerful messages over the past month helping our congregation to be ready for this time. We have had many bible study groups meeting and readying their hearts for God's work. There has been so much prayer going on behind the scenes and we are now starting to see the fruit of it.

     Last night Joe Veal (From You Turn Ministries) spoke with our group of 18 youth. Joe brought a simple gospel message and God used it in a mighty way. We had several of our youth come to Christ! Keep them in prayer as we follow up with them in the coming days.

     Please do not miss out on what God wants to do in your life this week! Join us Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday for Revival meetings starting at 6:30pm. 

Feed the Team, Oct 20 2011

Our feed the team event went incredibly well! That was, of course, thanks to all of the volunteers who helped set up, cook, and bake deserts! The Skyhawks had a great time and we received many comments about how we went "all out" for them. 

The one thing I was a little concerned about was if we would have enough brisket for all of them. Praise God we did! The entire team came through the food line twice and we feed all of our volunteers. We even had a little left over!  

The Seniors loved the water bottles and I saw many of them put to good use at the Friday night football game against Lebanon. 

A huge thank you goes out to the amazing congregation at FBC Fairborn for helping make this event possible!

Senior Gifts for Feed the Team

Our Feed the Team for the Fairborn Skyhawks is coming up soon! I just received the senior gifts in the mail today. Super cool. I am so happy at how they turned out! Discountmugs.com is the way to go!

Our Skyhawks are 5-2 right now! Only 3 more games to go!

Medical Mission Team in Benin, West Africa

I am going to start updating you on my parents ministry in Benin, West Africa. They have been full time missionaries with the International Missions Board for over 20 years. Below is a recent email from them. Please keep them and the medical team in prayer!

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Dear Prayer Partners,

The team arrived yesterday morning at 4:00 a.m. They and all of their luggage arrived at the same time!! Praise God! After sleeping, shopping, pill cutting and bagging yesterday, we jumped into the work like a level 5 hurricane! We treated 200 prisoners. On the prison grounds the government had built a chapel (cement floor, tin roof), and we were asked to set up the medical clinic there. Six hundred inmates are crowded into several cramped buildings butting up to and around the chapel. The small open area is dirt, the living conditions appear to be village level. We did not enter the sleeping quarters, but one guard explained that the inmates sleep on thin straw mats on the floor. If an inmate does not have someone on the outside taking care of him (food and clothes), his living situation is horrible. The prison only offers one meal a day of rice, beans or African “pate.” One inmate, with emotion, spoke to me of the abandoned prisoners.

A team of Christian brothers and sisters from the local area worked diligently alongside our volunteers. Each group brought in was evangelized twice, and one of the pastors laid hands on and prayed over each individual. They will continue to minister to the prisoners. Pray for them!

The prisoners were orderly, polite and thankful, as well as were the prison directors and guards. Sixty of the 600 are women. One came in with a 5 month old baby. Some had been incarcerated for years, some for only several days. There were those with huge abscesses as well as those with broken limbs having disjointedly healed.

Of all the prisoners I talked to while writing down their symptoms, only one asked me for something. A leg. He’d been shot by the police, in the head (where shrapnel from the bullet is lodged) and in the lower leg. In the hospital he lost his leg up to his thigh.

Each of the volunteers worked non-stop from the moment we arrived, until we packed up. It was very hot. Lunch consisted of a granola bar and water. Yet they served these inmates as if they were their sisters and brothers. Pray for Matt, Dr. Mark and Audre, Mark T., Eric, Rick, Richard (who lost his mom just days before leaving the States for this trip), Cindy, Missy, Lori and Leslie. Jack, who came with the team, is visiting an orphanage in village quite distant from where we are doing medical work.

Yours in Christ, Barbara and Jeff

"Ignite" Forward Motion, Session 3 10-12-11

Bottom Line: Celebrate the steps you take in your relationship with God, and celebrate the steps others take as well.

Inward Focus
*1 Samuel 17:33-37

The battle between David and Goliath is a classic story in the Bible. Giant threatens army and throws down a challenge. No one will fight him. Shepherd boy enters the scene and says, “I’ll take him on.” Boy goes out armed only with stones and a sling. Giant mocks him. David brings giant down. Giant gets head cut off and no longer mocks anyone.

When we hear that story, it sounds like David had to make a pretty huge leap of faith. Yet, for David, it was really just another step.  When trying to convince King Saul that he should take on Goliath, David said: “I have been taking care of my father’s sheep . . . When a lion or a bear comes to steal a lamb from the flock, I go after it with a club and take the lamb from its mouth. If the animal turns on me, I catch it by the jaw and club it to death. I have done this to both lions and bears, and I’ll do it again to this pagan Philistine, too, for he has defied the armies of the living God! The Lord who saved me from the claws of the lion and the bear will save me from this Philistine!” (1 Samuel 17:34-37 NLT).  

God had guided David before, and David knew God would walk him through this step as well. He knew how to celebrate every step with God. And the God who helped him kill the lions and bears would help him kill the giant. God was preparing David through those steps along the way, long before David knew what the next step would require.

            Tonight we are focusing on celebrating every step that we take to get closer to God. Why do you think that would be a positive thing to do?

Because we tend to be a people that regularly points out flaws, but hardly recognizes our spiritual advances.

            Because we have an enemy that would rather have us living defeated Christian lives, than victorious ones that honor Christ and are celebrated.

            Let’s look at it this way; have you ever done something of which you were really proud? You get excited and hope that someone will notice. But what happens if someone not only ignores it, but they point out one of your failures. What happens to your excitement? It gets deflated like a popped balloon.

            I think sometimes we view God in that way. Instead of thinking that He will be excited about our steps toward Him, we think He focuses more on the areas we still mess up. Don’t you feel like that sometimes? I do. I have to be constantly reminded that God doesn’t hold a grudge. 

*Psalm 103:6–13

⁶  The Lord works righteousness

and justice for all who are oppressed.

⁷     He made known his ways to Moses,

his acts to the people of Israel.

⁸     The Lord is merciful and gracious,

slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

⁹     He will not always chide,

nor will he keep his anger forever.

¹⁰    He does not deal with us according to our sins,

nor repay us according to our iniquities.

¹¹    For as high as the heavens are above the earth,

so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;

¹²    as far as the east is from the west,

so far does he remove our transgressions from us.

¹³    As a father shows compassion to his children,

so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.

            When you come to God with a repentant heart, does He still hold whatever you had done against you? Is that true forgiveness? No! He wants to celebrate the fact that you are back in His arms again. God does not take our accomplishments and shove them to the side because of our shortcomings.

            If God wants to celebrate your steps of faith towards Him, why don’t we? Why do we focus on the negative? Because that is exactly where Satan wants us to be.

            Do you measure yourself by what others think or by what God thinks? Last Wednesday I handed out your letters that you wrote a year ago. Did you focus on what you actually had accomplished over the past year, or what you failed to do? I’ll admit it. There was one area that I wanted to be doing better, but I have not made too much progress. While there are others I feel I have seen some fruit. What should I do? Feel bad about the little or no movement in one area? Or celebrate that I have made some changes to move towards God in a few different areas?

            We need to gain a new perspective on our lives and how God views us. How different would your life be if you focused on celebrating your steps towards God than on your failures to do so?

Outward Focus

What if we not only celebrated the steps in our own lives, but in the lives of those around us? What if we acknowledged every movement, every step towards God made by the people we encounter? It would certainly change the way we view accountability. We wouldn’t be so concerned with pointing out other people’s failures. Instead we would be more concerned about pointing out those times when he or she steps forward--no matter how small that step is.

Do you think that people would be different if we really did celebrate with them on accomplishments rather than tear them down because of our own pride?

Celebrating other people’s accomplishments doesn’t always come naturally. How do we begin taking steps to do so?

Have you noticed that we tend to see others offenses before we see their accomplishments? Let me put it to you this way; what if a pregnant high school girl came in to the youth wing on a Wednesday night? Would you see her sin before you saw that she was here looking for God? If we point out her sin and don’t celebrate her taking steps towards God, how will that affect her?

What other situations like this have you seen or heard about?

What if we quit looking at our lives and our faith as an accomplishment, and start looking at the actual journey and relationship that brought us to where we are? What if we quit seeing the steps we have yet to take, and start celebrating the ones we have already taken?

*2 Co 13:11 ¹¹ Finally, brothers, rejoice. Aim for restoration, comfort one another, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you.

Truth

Where you think you should be in your relationship with God--or where others think you should be--could be completely different from where God thinks you should be. Writer Dallas Willard says that we expect to go out and perform like Michael Jordan as Christians, always acting as Jesus did. But when we watch Jordan play, we forget that his game is the result of years of practice. To become like Jesus, we have to understand that every step we take is part of that “becoming” more like Him. You see, nothing is ever random with God. Every step, every success, every failure--every one of those shapes who you are, how you view the world and how you function in that world.

Maybe you know more about David’s story. Maybe you know that after he became king, he slept with another man’s wife, got her pregnant and had her husband murdered to cover it up. David took some pretty huge steps in the wrong direction. But the incredible thing about David was that even when David took a step away from God, he knew that he could still step back. Psalm 51 is David’s plea for God’s forgiveness. David cried out to God and he realized that the distance he felt between himself and God was not because God had rejected him, but because he had stepped away from God.

It’s not just the “right” steps we take towards God that are worth celebrating. Every one of us will step away from God at some point. But that step back to Him is worth celebrating too. And just like David, when we do step back, we find that although we may have stepped away from God, He never steps away from us. Yeah, that’s worth celebrating.

God heard David’s pleas. Not only that; the Bible says that God forgave David.

As great as that is, it’s hard to believe God is that gracious. He is. But for some of us, it’s even harder to extend that celebration to those around us.

What if we quit looking at our lives and our faith as an accomplishment, and start looking at the actual journey and relationship that brought us to where we are? What if we quit seeing the steps we have yet to take, and start celebrating the ones we have already taken?

There are people around you who are taking steps, and you’re oblivious. There’s someone in our youth group, your neighborhood, your family, who is taking steps toward God, but you don’t notice because they are not the steps you expect. They don’t worship the same way you do. They don’t know as much about the Bible or attend as many youth group functions as you and your friends. But they may be taking steps toward God--steps that may not meet your standards, but steps that God is using to grow them.

What if we let up on those people? What if we celebrate their small steps? What would that do to their next step? Would they be more likely to take it? You bet they would.

And what about you? What if you set aside your expectations of what your relationship with God should look like and let it be what He wants it to be? What if you not only saw the small step or steps He asks you to take every day, but you also took them--and when you did, you realized just how huge those small steps were?

You see, all of our steps are different. What steps do you need to start celebrating?

Application:

            Is there someone that you need to give some slack? Do you just need to start viewing yourself the way that God sees you? Take some time and pray about what God wants you to do because of hearing this.

            Let’s celebrate together that God doesn’t hold grudges, but that He loves us right where we are right now.

Ignite 10-5-11

*John 16:12–15 ¹² “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. ¹³ When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. ¹⁴ He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. ¹⁵ All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

            How many of you know how to drive? Most of you probably don’t know how to do it yet. You may think you know everything that there is to know about it, but until you actually get behind the wheel of a car, you only have theories.

My Dad is a pretty intense driving instructor. We would be out on the road and he would be pointing out all sorts of things that I was missing. Not necessarily in a harsh way, but in an urgent manner that was meant to get my attention.

After all, when you are driving you have your life and the lives of everyone in the car on your shoulders. If you decide not to pay attention, you could be the reason that someone gets hurt.

            The things that my Dad would call my attention to were not always life threatening. “Your turn signal is still blinking. This guy is about to cut you off. You just cut that guy off… Stay in your lane…”

            The point is that it takes a while for you to learn the ins and outs of driving. That is why they require that you have so many hours of time behind the wheel with someone overseeing before you get your license.

            I tell you what, the first time you are out driving by yourself can be intense. You suddenly are aware that your Mom/Dad/driving instructor is not there to point things out to you. You are on your own. My brain went into overdrive as I tried to make sure that I was paying attention to every possible little thing.

            Driving is not the only thing that has a learning curve. What are some other examples?

            It takes time to get to where you want to be. Many of us want to be different than we are. Sometimes we just don’t know how to get there. So we look around us and wonder, “How did he get such a great physique? How did she lose 20 pounds? How does he have so much money? How does she seem to win at everything?”

What about spiritually? How do you do the things you think a Christian should do? How do you read the Bible? How do you pray when you have a hard time focusing on anything for more than five minutes? How do you become like Jesus Christ when you feel so far from that ideal? How do you get from where you are to where you want to be?

It seems a little overwhelming, doesn’t it? Does Jesus really expect you to be leaps ahead of where you are? Not exactly. Do you remember when you first learned to swim? Can you imagine if instead of spending a few summers in those floatie armbands and going to swimming lessons in the shallow end, your parents just dropped you off at the pool and told you to swim? You might know your end goal, but you wouldn’t know where to begin.

With all the things we feel like we should do or be, sometimes it seems like when we read Jesus’ words, He has given us the end goal without telling us how to get there. For example, we can all agree that it would be nice to live at peace with all people, but what is the first step in getting there? Jesus’ instructions may seem like huge leaps, but they all begin with one small step. Sometimes, if we are really honest, we just don’t know how to even begin. We don’t know what they first step looks like.  

The good news is that we don’t have to have all the answers. The Bible says when we decide to accept Jesus’ free gift of salvation, when we acknowledge that we are sinful and need a Savior, and that Jesus is that Savior, the Holy Spirit moves into our lives. Just like I needed an instructor to help me recognize the steps I need to take so I can drive, God has given us a spiritual instructor. The Spirit teaches us how to live our lives in a step-by-step process, so that we can reach the goals God has set for us.

Jesus said: “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). When Jesus was talking to His disciples about the Spirit, He was talking to them after the resurrection. They knew that they had a message to tell the world, and I’m sure they had no idea how they were going to do it.  But Jesus told them the first step--listen to the guide. Listen to the Holy Spirit that will come and guide you.

The Holy Spirit is the helper who lives inside each follower of Christ. The Holy Spirit leads us into the truth of who we are. He leads us into the truth of who God is. He leads into the truth of our sinfulness. He leads into the truth of who we can become. The Holy Spirit is the One who helps us take steps to become more like Jesus. With the Holy Spirit, Jesus doesn’t say to us, “Sink or swim.” Instead He says, “You’re valuable. You’re mine. You don’t have to live this life alone. I’m with you.”

Jesus knew that when He asked His followers to love their enemies, He was asking for really big steps. He knew that trying to do it all on our own would be like leaping across the Grand Canyon. Leaping on your own, well, the end result isn’t going to be very pretty. That’s why He sent an instructor. And the Holy Spirit isn’t just a tool or a guide; He is part of God the Father and Son. God lives inside us. 

Sounds nice, doesn’t it? But nothing is ever mere words with Jesus. He brings words to life. The Holy Spirit doesn’t just help us; He is at work to transform us. In the Old Testament, God described Himself to Moses as “the LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin” (Exodus 34:6-7). And those traits show up in the ways the Holy Spirit interacts with us. We read a Bible verse, hear someone teaching, read a book or just see something within ourselves that surprises us, and it makes us realize that there is an area of our lives that is quite ugly--some area where we’re miles away from God, some part of our lives where we’re not aligned with Him. Then we have a choice. We can take a step to change--to act or think in a way that is more like Jesus, or we can just stay ugly on the inside.

But here’s the part most of us don’t quite get. This process happens for the entire remainder of our lives. It’s why people use words like journey or walk to talk about their relationship with God--because we never arrive at perfection while we walk this earth. There’s never a point where we have it all together. You could solve the problem you have now, the thing you don’t like about yourself or some action you want to change, but there will be another one behind it. And another one behind that. That’s how messed up we all are.

It’s why when you meet someone who has been passionately following Christ for most of his or her life, that person doesn’t seem arrogant or unapproachable because they have achieved some great spiritual level of holiness. Those individuals understand just how gracious and merciful God is because they have seen time and time again how huge their sin is, and how amazing God’s forgiveness and love are as well.

You may expect your life to look very different when you are thirty than it does today, but you won’t become that different person by making leaps. Jesus knows it takes steps for you to arrive at that point you desire--and He wants you to go to that point and beyond. And every step will look different. Sometimes you’ll move forward quickly; other times you’ll feel like you’re in slow motion. And then there will be times when you are simply standing still waiting to move. God knows where you need to go, and where He’s leading you personally may look different from those around you. Every step gives you the strength and faith to take the next one. You can look back and see that the God who brought you this far can continue to lead you forward.

Right now you have to ask yourself two fundamental questions. One--are you willing to take the step forward? And two--what type of step are you willing to take? If you step letting the Spirit guide you, then you will be transformed more into God’s image.   

Take a step forward today. God doesn’t expect perfection. He doesn’t expect you to instantly arrive at some point that would require a huge leap. You may not have the kind of relationship with God that others have, but your relationship with Him is personal and real, a relationship that grows step by step.

The October Torch is Available Online

Check out our "Torch" tab and download the latest copy of the "Torch". Or pick one up in the youth wing this Wednesday night!

Courageous Review

     As you know we recently sponsored a showing of the movie "Courageous". In the past I honestly could not watch a Christian movie and take it seriously. They often seemed corny and their humor was, well, laughable. That may seem a bit harsh, but for a person who loves movies and wants to see the Christian movie business grow, I was often disheartened with what I encountered. 

     The movie "Fireproof" was a pleasant surprise, but "Courageous" took things to a whole new level. This really sets the standard for Christian movies. It was an incredible film that not only had humor that I genuinely enjoyed, but drama that would make any grown man cry, and a few action scenes that literally had me on the edge of my seat.

     In the middle of the movie there is an amazing gospel presentation. It doesn't come across cheesy or overbearing, but is simple, to the point, and effective. I was so impressed!

     The call of the movie is for men to stand up and start taking charge of their families in a Biblical way. It simply asks us the question, "Why be a good father, when you can be a great father?". Men, married or single, are called by God to be leaders in their families, communities, and churches. As the lead character says, "So where are you men of courage?"

     I would encourage everyone to go see this movie. It would be great for a guys night, or something to take a non-christian friend to see. Let's not only stand up to be Godly men, but let's utilize this movie to reach the lost for Christ!
     In my book this movie gets an A+, 10 out of 10, 2 thumbs up, or however you want to say it.

Suprise Theme Night Oct 5

This Wednesday night from 6:00-9:00pm. This theme night is a surprise so you will have to show up to find out what the theme is. There will be food provided! We meet from 6:00-9:00pm on theme nights so please plan accordingly. 

We would love to see you all there this week!