Wow it's that time already!!!!!

I can't believe that we are gearing up for another set of mission teams this summer. God has truly blessed us with 6 teams of missionaries coming up this year. We have teams from Georgia, Colorado, Illinois, Oklahoma,Wyoming and a current team with college students from Edmonton Alberta. They will be helping us with Spectrum, Stampede, Kid's Day camp and prayer walking and Block parties. 

 Our first team will be coming from Rome, Georgia. It has been a dream of theirs for several years for a church to be started here in Medicine Hat. They have been coming up the last 5 years to serve at Spectrum which is a festival that brings in over 40,000 visitors in 3 days. Please be in prayer for this mission team. Their names are :

Craig and Mandi Bagwell

Chris and Kim Holland

Jarrod and Tiffany Roberts

Gina Scurlock

Jamie Bomer

Lamar Ray

Please pray for safe flight, easy border crossing and that God would use them mightly when they are here. We had a great time with this team last year and look forward to serving with them again this year at Spectrum. Last year they served over 40,000 at this festival and we are hoping that we can have a fun time serving our community.  They will be here in Medicine Hat from June 3 to the following Monday.

I will Rise

A couple of weeks ago I was listening to the Christian radio station in Medicine Hat and Chris Tomlins song "I will rise". it is a very powerful song.

We Feel Fine

So I was watching TED yesterday and I went to Jonathan Harris's website after his talk. His website, wefeelfine.org is a different website that views blogs that have the line "I feel....." in them. It shows that the people who blog the most are those whose ages range from 20-29 years. The other thing I noticed is that there are tons of hurting people, and tons of hurting people here in Medicine Hat. There are so many who openly confess their sexual exploits and how that leaves them empty and hurting. I am not surprised at how many people are hurting, but I am surprised at how many are open about it. People are literally screaming for somebody to love them, and yet most of us feel scared to go out and pull them out of their pit of despair by telling them about Jesus.

Check out wefeelfine.org and see just how many hurting people are in your city and you may realize that we don't feel fine at all.

The Love of My Life

Next to Jesus, my wife is the love of my life; it wasn't always that way though. about 12 years ago I was attending Briercrest Bible College in Caronport, Saskatchewan and one of the professors said something that rang through my head until this day. He said, "I was a missionary in a Muslim country and had a conversation with a man about arranged marriage. I couldn't believe that people would marry somebody that didn't love and most of the time didn't know. The man said something very profound, he said, 'You Americans (the term applies to North Americans) fall in love, then get married and ten years later get a divorce. We get married, then we fall in love.'"

My wife and I saw each other three times before we got married. We talked a lot on the phone, and email, but only saw each other for 3 weeks, one week at a time within 364 days. There was a lot of prayer that went into our marriage before we were married because both of us wanted to make sure that this was God's will and not ours. It was very easy to determine that it was God's will just by the answered prayer that happened, but we still sought God.

I remember during our first year of marriage I yelled at God, "You lied to me!" Leigh was feeling the same way. I thought that since God was in this that our marriage would be heavenly bliss from the start. There were many times in our first few years of marriage that we contemplated divorce, but never said it to each other. It wasn't until I started being the husband that God demands a Christian husband to be that our marriage started to work. According to the book of Ephesians I am supposed to love my wife the way that Christ loves the church, and give myself up for her and her needs and to help make her holy before God. I knew how Christ loved the church, and to be honest, it was hard for me to love my wife that way, but because God said to do it, I had to. I am so glad I did it God's way, now our marriage is much like heavenly bliss. My wife is not only my best friend, but my lover. Sometimes I feel like a teenager again with her, and I love being around her.

This Valentine's Day, I want my wife to know just how much I cherish her and love her. She is the most beautiful woman I know, inside and out, and the way she looks at me makes me feel like I'm the only man in the world.

I am so glad that I chose to obey God and love my wife the way Christ loves the church. If you don't know how Christ loves you or the church, you are missing out on the best love possible. Your marriage will never be as great as it would be with Christ. Almost everybody, Christian and non-Christian have the capacity to love, but Christ's love is much deeper. Let me explain.

Everybody has sinned against Almighty God, and that means that all of us are not worthy of God and deserve to go to hell for ever. The Bible is clear, there are two types of people in the world. There are bad people and then there are bad people who have been redeemed by Jesus. God did not see any good in us at all, but He still chose to love us. He sent His Son, His only Son, to come to earth to pay the penalty for our sins by dying on a cross. Jesus gave every bit of His being to pay our penalty in order to re-unite us with the God who so desperately loves us. Gentleman, that is how you are to love your wives. You need to give yourself totally to her. You want her to be reunited with God, and you need to love her like Jesus. And boy oh boy, she will love you forever if you love her like Jesus.

Leigh, baby, I love you so much.

Wow!

I am going through my sermon for Sunday right now. It is titled, "Why Do I Need To Go To Church?". I am in the book of Hebrews and showing from the book of Hebrews the importance of public worship and how the church (not the building, but the people as a group) become the Holy of Holies. After I started preaching about the mercy seat found on the Ark of the Covenant, I must have accidentally hit a key on my computer and Revelation Song started playing. The lyrics go "Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, Holy Holy is He. Sing a new song, to Him who sits on Heaven's mercy seat." There is nothing like an awesome confirmation from God!"

Desensitized To Sin

Two of my favourite TV programs are Law and Order SVU and Law and Order Criminal Intent. If they're on, I'll watch them. Last night I was watching SVU and got into it about half way through. The program was about how a female astronaut was murdered. Anyway, near the end of the television program, there was a double homicide in the police department and Staveler's teenaged boy witnessed it. The kid wasn't the least bit freaked out. Now, I know that he's only an actor and he's doing what the screen writers are telling him to do, but my concern is that the boy was not freaked out about the double homicide since it must have been a very traumatic moment.

I was in eighth grade, at a hockey practice on a Thursday night in Onoway, AB. My coach was having trouble breathing on the ice that night, and after we got back into the dressing room, he had a heart attack and died right before our eyes. He was 38 years old; he just dropped and all I could hear was the gurgling of blood going into his lungs. He had a massive heart attack and the whole team just watched him die, his son included. I had a very hard time for the next few years trying to get that image out of my head.

Now television is showing that watching a double homicide happen right before our eyes should really be no big deal. As we watch these things on television, are we desensitizing ourselves to sin? Our we showing our children that it is OK to watch someone being killed, but not OK to kill someone? What kind of message is that sending to our children? Probably the same kind where we say it's OK to watch pornography online, as long as we don't act it out.

Honestly, what's the difference? God is very clear that He abhors those who delight in violence, and yet we let our kids play some very violent games. Why don't we just go ahead and let them watch porn while they're at it?

It is obvious that we have different levels of sin, and that watching and doing somehow are different. We are approving violence as we watch our television shows that promote violence, just like people promote illicit sex as they watch pornography. So, I was convicted last night about my sin desensitization, where are you? As much as I love Jack Bauer, I think it's time that he gets turned off in my house, and yes, I will also have to say good-bye to my beloved SVU and Criminal Intent. 1 Chronicles 16:29 tells us to worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness. Another way we can translate that is to worship God in the beauty of holiness. Can I call myself holy if I am visually indulging in the same violence that caused God to destroy the earth? God is a God who demand holiness from his people, and can't stand those who come to Him in pretense. (Jeremiah 3). He actually says in that same chapter the unbelievers are more righteous than those who call themselves Believers and just offer lip service to God, rather than holy lives.

Are you desensitized to sin? Are you playing around with God's holiness? What does God have to say about that? What are you going to do with it?

Second Sunday

We had a great day today. Today was Pathway's second Sunday service, and we had 4 more people than last week.! Things are really starting to grow, and so is our excitement. We are still going through New Beginnings, and today's sermon was titled, "I Get What!!??!!"

We saw that the moment we make Jesus our Lord (that means to make Him our owner, our master, our boss) the Holy Spirit comes and lives inside of us.

The first thing He does when he comes to live in me is He becomes my Guarantee. (Ephesians 1) He becomes my guarantee for eternal life
The second thing is He becomes my Helper (John 16). He helps me look like Jesus
The third thing is He becomes my Teacher (John 14) He teaches me to live like Jesus.
The fourth thing is He becomes my Gift Giver (1 Corinthians 12, Exodus 31) He prepares me to serve with Jesus.

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong before the service started. The sound system wasn't working, we forgot the coffee, we forgot an extension cord, and my projector wasn't working properly. I called a time out, and we took time to pray before the service, and God showed up! God answered a prayer today that we prayed with our mission team from Sulphur, LA. There was a a girl at the Canada Day celebrations this past summer, that was very angry, and used a lot of profanity. One of our ladies on the mission team said that we need to pray for her, and we prayed that she would come to church. She was at Pathway today! Praise God for what He is doing!

On top of that, we had a non Christian family come to church today. We have been ministering to them for the past 6 months, and they came to church, then they volunteered to bring the snacks for church next week! God totally ROCKS!

I love seeing God work like this.

My Apologies

I want to personally apologize to all of you who are reading my blog. I had a post on here titled "I'll Let the Spider Pay My Debt." I had a hyperlink to another blog post where they decided to change the gif picture of a spider to repulsive picture that I won't talk about. A good friend of mine told me about the change in pictures, so needless to say, that blog post is now gone. I apologize if any of you have seen that picture on my blog. This blog is all about glorifying God, and not promoting smut. I thank you for your understanding.

Jason

A Dream Became Reality

Today, an eleven year old dream of mine became a reality. Today is the day that I pastored the very first church service for our very first church plant. Things went great, we had a lady show up who has never been to our small group, she came from reading our website.

We had 26 people at our first church service, and things went very well. Our singer came down with tonsillitis this week, but she still sang. Talk about a trooper! My sermon title was "Where Are We Going?" and it was based out of Acts Chapter 1:1-11. We saw that God has a purpose for the church and that is
1. To experience a changed life (Acts 1:3)
2. To experience God (Acts 1:4-5)
3 To experience Kingdom Growth (Acts 1:8)

Today I basically shared the vision for the church. It was so cool to see everybody taking notes.

One thing that I really loved about church service today was what happened AFTER the sermon. People didn't want to leave! Everybody stayed and talked with everybody else. Nobody wanted to leave at all. That is a great sign, where people want to stay and socialize and feel like they belong.

So one of my dreams came to fruition today, and oh, was the dream a good one!