Tag Archives: Sunday

Posted on

Making Room for What Matters | Take Strategic Breaks in Your Day

by

book

On Sunday, I finished our Breathing Room series at Revolution by looking at how to find breathing room between work, life and everything that has to get done. This week, I want to share 6 simple ways I’ve done that and you can to. I’m going to share one each day so you have time to process them and hopefully put some things into practice.

The first one we looked at was how to get a good night sleep. 

The second one: Take a break every 90 minutes. 

I came across this idea in the book The Power of Full Engagement. The point the authors tried to make is that 90 minutes is the length that your body and brain can handle anything. Once you go past 90 minutes, you are less engaged, less alert and ultimately, less useful at whatever you are doing.

So, take a break every 90 minutes.

Immediately, you are thinking, I can’t do that.

You already do this. You scroll through social media, go to the bathroom, stand and talk to someone at work. The amount of time we waste in our day is unbelievable.

The problem is: we aren’t proactive about taking breaks well. We don’t plan them.

Does this always work? Not always.

Here are some ways to do this:

  1. Plan your day and think through when you’ll take breaks.
  2. Don’t lead a meeting longer than 90 minutes.
  3. Check your email at lunch and before you leave work. This one thing will make an enormous impact.
  4. If you sit at a desk, get up and walk around every 90 minutes. We do this with our kids during homeschooling as well (they run around our culdesac every 90 minutes).

Tomorrow we’ll look at how to create margin when it comes to electronics.

[Image]

Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted on

When Pastoring is Hard (And 3 Ways to Survive)

by

pastoring

Every job is hard. Teaching in a school. Working in a bank. Being a cashier at In n Out. Driving a trash truck is hard.

Pastoring is hard.

Some things that make pastoring hard make other jobs hard and some things are unique to pastoring.

Here are some things that make pastoring hard:

  • When someone stabs you in the back.
  • Counseling someone and then watching them do the exact opposite and wreck their lives.
  • Having a staff member lie to you.
  • Encountering Christians and leaders who are not kingdom minded.
  • When someone stop giving, stops serving, stops buying in to the vision.
  • When expectations for you, your spouse and your kids are unattainable.
  • When giving goes down and you need to make hard choices.
  • When you make a hard choice people don’t understand and criticize.
  • You spend 20 hours on a sermon only to get an email Sunday afternoon with all the things someone didn’t like about it.
  • You spend 20 hours on a sermon and it flops.
  • You baptize someone who falls back into old patterns.
  • Celebrating the victory over addiction with someone only to get a text the next day telling you they fell back into it.
  • When you take someone through church discipline and they relationship remains broken.
  • Watching a couple go through a divorce.
  • Satan showing up at your house.
  • Spiritual attacks on your wife and kids.
  • When someone talks about you (the pastor) to your wife or child.
  • When someone talks about your wife behind her back.
  • When someone you’ve poured into as a developing leader says, “I’m leaving and taking people with me (behind your back).”
  • When people ask why you aren’t supporting the ministry or person they think you should support and get angry about it.
  • Watching a person in your church listen or read someone who is preaching lies and false doctrine.

In those moments, here are some ways to move forward and handle it:

  1. This moment won’t last forever. Go to bed and wake up because tomorrow is a new day. Will some of these issues still be unresolved tomorrow? Sure. But at least you will be rested and thinking more clearly. They won’t last forever. Some of the moments that have been the hardest for me, several weeks or months later are no longer on my radar.
  2. Leadership is hard, get over it. If leadership wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. You were called to it. You signed up for it. It is hard, but that is what make leadership so glorious and amazing.
  3. You answer to Jesus. Yes, you have accountability and structures. Yes, you answer to an elder team, but ultimately, you answer to Jesus. He’s the one who called you, the Holy Spirit empowers you. You answer to them. This doesn’t mean you get high and mighty, it just means you remember where you ultimately end up, standing in front of Jesus.
Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted on

Theology Doesn’t Have to be Boring

by

theology

I’ve heard a lot of sermons that are just dry and boring. In fact, I’ve preached sermons that are dry and boring.

What makes a sermon dry and boring?

When a pastor preaches everything he has read, making his sermon more of a commentary book report. Or, when he takes all the theology in the passage and has a debate about it, not making it personal or matter.

Does every theology matter to everyday life?

Yes.

The sovereignty of God affects our view of pain and good times. The love of God affects how we view ourselves, our sin and God.

This past Sunday I preached on the resurrection. It is easy if you are a Christian to take this doctrine for granted. You’ve heard Easter sermons. You’ve read the gospels. But think for a minute, someone rose from the dead. Think how insane that sounds.

But, as I read books on the resurrection, they focused simply on the debate surrounding the resurrection. This is helpful and good. The problem, especially in the reformed circles I run in, is that most sermons simply stop at the debate or information about the resurrection.

The resurrection matters more than just a debate. 

Without the resurrection, there is no hope for us. There is no freedom from sin and death. There is no hope after death. There is no hope for freedom from addiction and pain. There is no hope that one day the world will be made right.

You cannot simply teach the truth of a doctrine, you must show how that truth impacts your daily life so that your church sees the beauty of that doctrine. 

Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted on

Balance is a Pipedream

by

balance

As the holidays get closer, schedules get busier. There are parties to attend, pageants to go to, rehearsals for Christmas shows, tree lightings, decorations to buy and hang, presents to buy and wrap, food to prepare and all the while, still keeping up with everything else you do.

December 26th will roll around and most people will want to fall over in a heap of exhaustion, but there’s no time. We have to return clothes that don’t fit, clothes that are ugly, buy things that are on sale and get Christmas cards and decorations for next year because they are on sale for 80% off.

Over the next several weeks, people will quietly vent about all that they are doing and will do to friends and family, they will make resolutions in January about slowing down, eating better, working less, checking Facebook and email less, and signing their kids up for less activities. Only to find in February that they can’t wait for summer to hit so they can take a week off and sit around.

But we all know how summer goes.

In these conversations about pace, tiredness, doing too much, working too much, sleeping too little, an interesting work and concept comes up.

Balance.

Whenever someone says they are tired or doing too much, a friend with good intentions will respond, “You need to get balance in your life.” We talk about work life balance. Balancing schedules, checkbooks, planners, and activities.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, balance is a pipedream.

The next time someone tells you that you need to have more balance in your life, ask him or her what that means or looks like. You’ll get blank stares.

No one seems to know.

Yet, everyone is going for it.

Here’s a better way to think about life, work, kids, money, sleep, food and anything else you try to get balance in.

Every time you say yes to something you say no to something else.

Think about it like this. Whenever you say yes to staying up too late watching TV and eating ice cream you say no to a good night sleep, more sleep and a trimmer waist line.

Whenever you say yes to sign your child up for everyone team and activity you can throw at them, you say no to a sustainable pace, family dinners and overall health.

Whenever you say yes to work late you may say yes to a promotion and more money, but you also say no to family time, relaxing, time with friends and unwinding with a good book.

When you say yes to going into debt, you say no to peace in your life and bank account.

When you say yes to that extra piece of pie over the holidays, you say no to health.

Remember, balance is a pipe dream.

Are all these examples wrong? Not at all. You should eat some good dessert over the holidays. You should sign your kids up for fun things. You should buy nice things you can afford and bless others with nice presents. All of those are great things.

Take a minute though and remember last December, last January and February. What did you feel? Exhaustion, a longing for a break and rest that never came.

Now, the question isn’t should I do these things, it is more about, and what do you want to say yes to and say no to. Because, every time you say yes to something, you say no to something else. Every time.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted on

One Way to Make Church Memorable

by

worship

Every pastor when they write a sermon and preach it want people to remember it. Most people though forget most of what is said in a sermon. This is why it is important to have one point instead of five.

You can use visuals, video clips, readings, stories and a host of other things to make your sermon and church memorable.

One thing that we do at Revolution that helps to make church memorable is to line up the songs with the sermon. 

This seems like second nature to us, but I am amazed at how many worship leaders and preachers are not on the same page. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a worship service and the worship leader introduces a song by giving a 2 minute sermon that has nothing to do with the sermon and the point of the day.

A lot of times people will debate if preaching is the reason the church gathers on a Sunday or is it worship. I would say it’s both. If you don’t have both, you’ve failed to do something very important as the gathered church.

At Revolution, we use worship music to set up the sermon and then for the sermon to set up the response time and communion.

To make your church memorable, you have to do a few things:

  1. Decide to connect the dots for people. People come to church with their brains all over the place. They often rushed to get out the door, had a fight on the way to church, a screaming child. They are tired and stressed from the week. They fall into the chair at church exhausted and wanting to catch their breath. They need help connecting the dots. Talk about how songs connect to a sermon. In recent weeks at the end of my sermon I’ve talked about why we are doing a song that we are doing. You don’t always have to do this. But decide that you will do the work of working with your pastor or worship leader to connect the dots for your people.
  2. Plan ahead. If you want to do anything great or creative or connecting the music with the sermon, you have to plan ahead. You can’t decide on Wednesday what you will preach on this Sunday. Does the Holy Spirit change things? Yes. Two weeks ago I rewrote my sermon at 11pm on Saturday night. That isn’t a pattern for me. We plan about 15 months in advance to that the person leading worship can spend time in the passage and let the verses speak to them as they prepare a set list.
  3. Have a worship leader that cares deeply about theology. Thankfully this is becoming more and more important. In the past, being a worship leader meant you could play guitar and sing. The bar has been raised in churches, which is a good thing. Your worship leader does not have to have an M.Div. in theology, but they need to know theology, care about doctrine and be able to discern if worship songs are doctrinally correct. Some of the most popular worship songs today are theologically incorrect. And never miss this pastor: your church will often learn more about God from the songs they sing than from listening to your sermon. 
  4. Listen to the worship set while you prep your sermon. After talking through my sermon with Paul or the worship leader on Monday morning, when I get the final list, I will make a playlist for my iPod and listen to it in the car, while I am prepping my sermon or taking a run. I want the words to get into my head and my heart. This helps me connect the verses I’m preaching on to the songs we are singing, which helps to make church more memorable to someone when they leave the service.
Enhanced by Zemanta
Posted on

5 Lessons I Learned from Church Planting

by

church planting

Church planting can be hard, exhilarating, fun and painful all at the same time. When the church I started turned 5, I wrote 5 things I had learned. I hope they help you, wherever you are in your church planting journey.

  1. Your energy (spiritual, emotional, physical, relational)  is the most important thing you can give your church and only you can control it. This may seem obvious and all of these will, but this one is crucial. Church planters tend to be driven, entrepreneurial, take the hill kind of leaders. They are also usually young which means they think they have endless amounts of energy. They eat like college freshmen and often sleep like them. The reality is, that is not sustainable. While planting is a busy season, filled with meetings, getting stuff done, making phone calls, rallying a core group, raising funds, you have to hit the pause button. No one can make you sleep. No one can make you spend time with Jesus. No one can make you exercise or eat well. No one can make sure you have friends and not just church planting friends, but real friends. If you miss this, the extent of the damage can be huge. Most guys who fail in ministry and sin will tell you that it goes back to not managing one of these areas. In 2011, I did not manage my energy well and I hit a wall. It slowed our church down, demoralized our leaders, hurt my family and it took a year to recover as a church. You as the leader set the tone. The first question I ask my leaders when I coach them is to tell me how they are doing in these 4 areas.
  2. Your family has to come first, they need to know it and so does your church. Every pastor says their wife and kids are more important than their job. We say things like, “My church can get another pastor, but my kids have one dad, my wife has one husband.” This is so prevalent that 2 recent books on pastoring: The Church Planting Wife and The Pastor’s Family actually excuse the husband’s sin in this area and say things like, “Being a pastors wife means I share my husband at night and he misses dinner or time with me.” While this happens, but when this is the pattern, it is sin. One of the things I heard Eugene Peterson say was he started to call everything he did an appointment. If someone asked him to meet and he already had a date planned with his wife, an activity with his kids, he said he had an appointment. No one questions your appointments. Talk about this from up front. In your sermons, lift up your wife and kids, don’t make them sermon illustrations of what not to do. Talk about how you date and pursue your wife, talk about spending time with your kids. You are the model to men of what it means to be a man, a father and a husband.
  3. Who you surround yourself with will determine your effectiveness. This is simple leadership, but the leaders you choose will determine the health and future of your church. This means you must know who you are, your gift mix, what you can and can’t do, what you do that brings the most glory to God. Then, you must look for leaders who complement this. If you are a strong visionary and can see the future, you must find someone who can think in steps and how to get somewhere who can see the map, not just the destination. If you love to shepherd people and want to make sure no one falls through the cracks, you’ll need a leader to remind you that sometimes people need hard gospel truth and not coddling. I read when I started Revolution that your first hire is the most important. This is so true. If you miss on your first hire, you may not make it because your church is so fragile. Don’t rush this. If someone isn’t working out, don’t wait around. Move quickly, help them find a new role, new responsibility. If they don’t like up with your vision and DNA, have the tough conversation. Everyone you start with will not finish with you and it is naive to think otherwise.
  4. Think twice your size. Too many planters simply want to get started, which is a good goal. As the church gets off the ground, they can quickly move into maintenance mode. They stop thinking ahead and the grind of preaching every week starts to set in. When before you had dream sessions, now you are having counseling sessions. Before you used to talk about the future, now you are dealing with what just happened. In this time, it is easy to stop dreaming, stop vision casting and just do. This is dangerous. At all times, as the leader, you must think twice your size. You must ask, “if we do this, will it keep us from doubling?” Or, “When we are twice our size, will we do that?”
  5. Learn from your mistakes cause you’ll make them. You’ll make mistakes. In fact, you’ll make them before you have your first core group member. That’s okay. Learn from them. When we started, we did small groups a certain way. Yet, they didn’t give us what we hoped to get, we weren’t seeing disciples made and community happen. So, 2 years into our plant, we scrapped what we were doing and started over. That was hard to admit because we had 85% of our adults in a small group. But we learned. Today, I know how to shut a ministry down. I can raise $45,000 in a month to make a big move. I know how to kill a worship service. How to start a new worship service. How to hire a leader. How to fire one. How to have tough and easy conversations. You can blow through those experiences, but I would encourage you to go through them slowly, write down what you learned and process it with someone. Lastly in this area, get a coach. Someone who is steps ahead of you in the journey. Someone you respect who can speak into your leadership and give advice and be a sounding board. It is helpful if this person is not at your church so you can be completely honest with them and not hold back.
  6. Bonus: Commit to outlast everyone, put down roots and commit to one church and city. I know I said 5, but this one is important. When you start a church it is exciting. Then the hard work starts. People stop coming, someone gets angry, shepherding sets in and it is hard work. That is why, before you start a church, commit to that church, to that city, put down roots. When we started Revolution, our prayer was and is still, that we would die in Tucson. We wanted to give our lives to one church, to one city, to one movement and out of that church, we prayed that 1 million people would follow Jesus because of it. This commitment has helped when times are the darkest, because sometimes, your calling is all you have. You will come back to it and question it and wonder if you heard God correctly. If you commit to stay, it makes difficult situations a little easier. They still hurt and are painful, but when we hit rough patches, Katie and I would look at each other and say, “We decided to outlast them, so let’s push through.”

Church planting is one of the greatest adventures you can ever take. As I look back on what God has done in the last 5 years, I am blown away. He has been faithful, protected our leaders and my family. He has made me a better husband, a better leader and a better pastor. I remember the 11 people we started with and wonder, “why did they stay?” Yet, I love all those people, even the ones who are part of other churches now (the ones who leave don’t belong to you anyway).

Today as I think towards the future and our first plant Lord willing in September 2014, I am so excited and hopeful for the future. The idea of planting our first church and seeing the beginning stages of the movement we’ve prayed for actually becoming a reality I get so excited. And I’m ready to sign up for more. On our 5th anniversary, one of our leaders who started with pulled me aside and told me, “I’m still in. I love what God has done in my life. What God is doing in the lives of others. I’m in. I’m ready, let’s take the next hill.” It is that passion that drives me and reminds me, for Revolution Church, the best is yet to come. 

Posted on

Loving People Who are Hard to Love

by

Made for Glory

Do you have anyone in your life that is hard to love?

You aren’t alone. All of us have people in our lives that try our patience, rub us the wrong way, use us, lie to us and even abandon us.

The question becomes then: What do you do with those people? As a follower of Jesus, how do you react?

This Sunday at Revolution Church, I will be preaching from John 13:31 – 38 where Jesus tells us that we will always have people in our lives who will be hard to love, but how we are to love them, when we are to let them go and how this act of love allows us to live the life we were created to live. 

While the words of Jesus are simple and straightforward, they are hard to live out. Yet, the freedom that comes from knowing who to love, who to let go of and when to move on from a relationship brings enormous freedom. It also shows us how much Jesus loves us and what He wants for us.

Remember, we meet at 10am on Sunday mornings at 8300 E Speedway Blvd.

Posted on

8 Things to do When You Don’t Feel Like Preaching

by

preaching

Let’s face it, if you are a pastor who preaches on a regular basis, you are going to wake up on a Sunday morning and not feel like preaching. In fact, you will have a Sunday morning, maybe multiple Sundays throughout your life, where preaching is the last thing you want to do.

I remember once getting a text from a pastor on a Saturday night asking me if I’d preach for him the next morning. I asked him if everything was okay as I thought some horrible tragedy had happened for him to send this kind of text. His response was, “Everything’s fine. I just don’t feel like preaching tomorrow.”

Now, pastors, let’s be honest for a moment. There are weeks you don’t feel like preaching. There are weeks you don’t feel like going to meetings, counseling someone or walking with someone through a hard time. Yet, it is part of your job.

So, if you are heading into this week or next week or next month and you don’t feel like preaching, here are some things you can do:

8 things to do when you don’t feel like preaching.

Click To Tweet

  1. Get a good night sleep Saturday night. Most people don’t sleep well before a presentation. Saturday night for pastors can be very intense and difficult. Get to bed at a decent time. Don’t eat dessert that night. Don’t watch some violent, exciting movie. Get a good night sleep.
  2. Eat a good breakfast. Eat something with protein. This will help to give you energy to last the morning so you won’t get hungry right before you preach.
  3. Exercise. If you don’t exercise regularly, you should. Pastors are notorious for being in bad shape, which does not help them in their jobs as their energy levels get low and doesn’t allow them have longevity in ministry.  
  4. Listen to worship music. Every week when I get ready to preach I listen to a regular diet of worship music. I listen a lot to the worship set we’ll play on Sunday morning to line my message up to the messages of the songs we’ve chosen.
  5. Talk to a trusted friend. If you are struggling with a situation, talk to a friend. When I have a hard week, a hard meeting or something that distracts me in sermon prep or preparing my heart for Sunday morning, I write about it. Writing it down has a cleansing effect on me and I’m able to let go of it.
  6. Pray. Spend time in prayer. You should do this anyway, but if you don’t, start. Pray for those who God will send on Sunday morning. Ask him to break your heart for the things that are weighing them down. Ask God for a heart that can feel the pain they carry, the weights that they are dragging around. To feel the bondage they feel. Preaching is a spiritual battle and pastor’s need to sense what those attending their church are dealing with.
  7. Visual yourself preaching. Visualization is a huge part of sports and more pastors need to spend time each week visualizing Sunday morning, preaching, what it will feel like, etc. This helps me to know where to look when in a sermon, the feel of the room, etc.
  8. Remember the result of preaching has little to do with you. At the end of it all, remember that the results of preaching have very little to do with you. God uses all kinds of people to reach people. While you should hone your craft, prepare as best you can, in the end, God handles the results. Give it up to him and preach with everything you have.
Posted on

When You Doubt God

by

Made for Glory

I’ve seen it so many times and every time it breaks my heart: someone whose life is held back because of doubt. 

If we are honest, all of us have doubts about Jesus. We struggle some days to believe that He can forgive us, redeem our sins, use our past for good or even that He really is who He says He is, that He is God.

What do you do with doubts?

For many people, they become their doubts, they allow their doubts to take over their lives and lead them to live in unbelief, completely missing the life God created for them to live.

Doubts keep us in the dark. Doubts keep us from experiencing freedom.

And truth be told, there is a way out of doubt.

This Sunday at Revolution Church I’ll be preaching from John 12:12 – 50 as we look at how to handle our doubts, how Jesus answers our doubts and helps us to live the life we were created to live. 

A life of freedom, passion, adventure and faith.

This is a huge Sunday at Revolution if you’ve ever struggled with doubt. 

Remember, we meet at 10am on Sunday mornings at 8300 E Speedway Blvd.

Posted on

How to Find Rest in the Midst of a Busy Life

by

rest

I talked this past Sunday about the idols of the heart and what drives us to do what we do. Yesterday after breakfast, Katie pointed something out to me in Isaiah 46.

While our idols drive us and only the gospel can transform our hearts to be driven by Jesus. We also look to our idols to carry us, to give us rest, to complete us.

We look for achievement to give us rest. When we’ve accomplished enough, we’ll have enough. When we have enough school, we’ll be enough. When we’ve taken enough vacations, we’ll have enough experiences.

When we have enough power, we’ll have enough control. We’ll have enough followers, enough employees. We’ll be important and feared because we have power.

When we have enough stuff, we’ll be able to slow down and rest. We’ll be able to sit on our new deck furniture, watch our huge TV from our plush chair.

We’ll finally be able to rest, because our idols will carry us.

Except. We lose employees. This year award becomes next year’s forgotten winner. That degree becomes not enough in 5 years when someone else gets one more degree than you. That vacation next year will be a distant memory when you hear about a new place, a new resort, a new experience. That power will fade as your company gets bought out or a new boss comes in and the game changes. And stuff rots and falls apart and last years most amazing TV becomes next month’s “last season’s model.”

Our idols fail. They do not carry us. They do not give us rest.

Isaiah 46:8-9 says:

Remember this and stand firm, recall it to mind, you transgressors, remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me.