The Way, the Truth and the Life???

On Sunday we began our 1st week in a 3 week series entitled "Knowing God". How you know God begins in a conversation between Jesus and his disciples in John 14:1-7.

In it, Jesus says that the way to know God is to know him and that he is the only way to know God (v.6-7).

The question I challenged the students with is if Jesus is THE ONLY WAY to know God, are we making him OUR WAY to know God? By that I meant that there are many people and many religions out there that will say that they are the way and that they have the right truth and if they follow them, they will get to God. Or, there are things out there that are tempting like that great party coming up or a hook-up that will make them feel that if they just do that, they will have found their way and that life would be complete because of that.

But, what Jesus is saying is that He is the way, the truth and the life. That if we want to get to know God, we have to go through Jesus. That is the only way.

So, the question is - is He YOUR way and YOUR truth? If so, why and if not, why not?

The challenge this week is to go out and discover who Christ is so that:

1. You can get to know who God is and what He is about.
2. You can begin to make him your way so that when that next big event that comes about or when that next person comes up and says he know the way to true happiness, you can say, "That's ok, I know the real way and the real truth that leads to true life".

This week, discover who Christ and God is by opening up the Bible and reading. If you need a place to start, start with Luke 1 and do a chapter a day for the rest of the week. When you are done with that chapter answer these 3 questions:

1. What did Jesus say or do?
2. What does Jesus' words or actions communicate about who God is?
3. How can I apply what happened to my life?

Based on my life, I know that when I follow Jesus' way, His truth, I know God better and my life is more complete. How about yours? This week, let's all go out of our way to search the way and the truth Christ was about so that our way and truth can lead up to a full life that Christ promises to give us by following Him (John 10:10)

A Dance Party at Church???

Yep, that is what we did. During our 5th Quarter event, we transformed our high school room into a cool dance floor.

Now, doing a dance party can be quite controversial as dancing in christian circles is not always encouraged. But, at Cedar Run, we are a non-denominational small-to-medium sized church with not lots of tradition. Because of this, we have done some very impromptu dance parties throughout the years so we thought this would be something we would like to try. But, in order to do this, I felt that there had to be some good benefits to doing this. Here are the benefits we felt we could gain by doing this:

• It was a way to draw students into our Church. As I have posted before, 5th Quarter has been a great bridge event. Because of this, we already have a solid reputation around the area and felt that we could have a big draw.
• The t-shirts are a good promotion tool as the students will likely wear those shirts again, spurring possible questions like, "Where did you get that shirt" or "You had a dance party at a Church"???
• The word about Cedar Run would expand. So far, the excitement that we generated from the dance party was something we haven't generated since the Super Bowl Bash. It gets people talking and hopefully helps the students realize that there is something for them at Cedar Run.
• It was a good opportunity to promote other things we were doing at Cedar Run. Our latest Sunday night series is on "Tough Choices". We figured that if more non-Christians were going to come to 5th Quarter on Friday night, this would be a great series to promote for them to come to. So, as students were leaving, the leaders and I passed out our fliers for Sunday night. Students got to see that we weren't a place in which you just had fun at. We were a place where we talked about tough choices students face.

The one thing I have always loved about Cedar Run is that they give us the freedom to try new things. They allow us to be creative in our efforts to draw students (as long as it is safe). If all we ever did was Sunday School and then Sunday night Youth Group, then I feel that we would have missed opportunities to draw new students into our program. That is the purpose of these "bridge events". A dance party is neither traditional or a new idea. But, it is something we wanted to try and I am glad we did.

For More on the Dance Party, you can check out my other blog - www.notamegachurch.com