Thursday, February 22, 2007

C3...The Big Day

Today was the big day and a big day it was. The morning started with Ed Young, founding pastor of Fellowship Church, giving a message on turning "what if" into "what is". He talked about the need to dream, delegate, and investigate. He said that he creates at least 10 hours a week to dream and ask "What if..."

The second speaker was Craig Groeschel, pastor at LifeChurch.tv, and he talked about being an idiot for Jesus (you had to be there). He talked about living in this perpetual state of discomfort in serving the Lord. He talked about taking risks.

I was totall blessed by Craig while at Catalyst earlier this year and he brought it again! Check him out at LifeChurch.tv.

Mark Driscoll, founding pastor of Mars Hill Church, came up after lunch and threw it down. He talked about the true gospel and it's two biggest enemies: idolatry & religion.

He said that would never claim to worship idols and yet we follow sports teams and build enormous buildings to watch them play. We buy a television and arrange all our furniture in such a way as to watch it. We worship food, sex, our family, etc. Bottom line, he said, we take a good thing and make it a god thing. In other words, we take something that is not necessarily bad and give it our time, energy, and sacrifice - we worship them.

He talked about religion as being this idea that we earn our way to heaven. Religion is the idea that I obey in order to be forgiven. Grace is the idea that because I'm forgiven I can now obey. He said that religion leads to one of two demises; either pride (look at how righteous I am) or despair (I've tried but I'm a loser and God can't love me). Grace leads us to humble confidence that we are saved by the work and person of Jesus.

There are so many quotes I would like to share but I'm dead tired. Maybe when I get back I will download some of my favorite one liners.

1 comment:

Daniel said...

Mark Driscoll is the man.

The first sermon I heard from him was about God's wrath and what it would be had Jesus not provided us grace. Needless to say, it scared the heck out of me but got me hooked on Mars Hill's podcast. God has since used his teachings to kick me in the pants more than a few times.