Crossroads

New Attitude is coming up fast… We’re going to have a hotel registration table for our church people on 4 Sundays in February in the lobby. So get your roommates and sign up for your room this Sunday! Here are the details you should know:

• All the roommates must to sign up together.
• The cost for the hotel room for the entire conference (3 nights) is $82 per person if you have 4 people in a room. YOU NEED TO PAY THE ENTIRE AMOUNT in order to sign up for a room.
• Please make the check out to ‘Sovereign Grace Church’ and write ‘NA Hotel Registration’ in the memo section.

If you’re tight financially and not sure if you can go, please let me know or let your caregroup leader know. We don’t want money to be an issue for you not being able to attend the conference. We will seek to help you in any way we can! To find out more about the conference, or if you haven’t registered for the conference and would like to register, click HERE (Check out the promo video!).

Boy, wasn’t that a helpful seminar last night? It was wonderful to see so many of you there. If you missed the seminar last night, but would like to grow in your effectiveness in reaching out to unbelievers, you should definitely get the message and the outline. They are available here. There were a number of "ah!" and "mmm…" moments. Randy helped us to see that using simple questions and simple dialogues can be a more effective way to move a person along in the direction of hearing and responding to the gospel than an elaborate apologetics of the Christian faith. As we continue to apply what he taught us last night, I trust we can start to see evangelism as something we need not fear so much. But apply the message, we must! So, I’m reminding you that Randy gave us an assignment of having a conversation with a non-Christian friend and use some of the questions he provided for us by the next meeting (2/8). As you do, please let me know who you talked to and how the conversation went. I’d love to hear from you!

Questioning Evangelism Class with Randy Newman, author of Questioning Evangelism, is tomorrow night at 7:30pm in the Basement Auditorium. Come early for coffee at 7pm!  I trust Randy’s heart for the lost will inspire us to continue to seek growth in our effort in evangelism, and I trust you’ll find Randy’s teaching a bit more winsome than this video. (Make sure your volume is turned UP!) 

Yesterday Al Mohler, the President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who recently experienced a near-death health crisis, wrote a personal commentary titled "Lessons Learned in a Crisis of Life". You can read the entire commentary here. He models for us how to view and respond to trials in a way that is gloryfying to God. The lessons he learned should help us respond to trials in godly ways. Even if you’re not going through a trial now, I’d encourage you to read it so you can prepare for the inevitable. "The truth of the matter is that all we have to do is live long enough, and we will suffer." (D.A. Carson)

John Piper also went through a health crisis last year and wrote "Don’t Waste Your Cancer". I hope these resources will help you as you go through various trials and as you seek to help others who are going through trials.

We had a wonderful privilege of having Kenneth Maresco address us on the topic of pursuing fellowship yesterday. It was a very practical message, but we must make sure we apply what we heard in order for us to grow in our pursuit of fellowship with one another. If you missed the message, this is one of those must-hear messages, so I’d encourage you to listen to the message and get the outline here.

As much as we want to apply all that Kenneth talked about, it’d be impossible for us to do so well. So here’s my suggestion:

• Review the outline sometime this week (sooner rather than later) and prayerfully consider what one area you think the Lord wants you to grow in as you pursue fellowship. Confession? Responding to correction? Making a plan for change?
• Come up with a specific action item (e.g. "Confess ___ to my accountability partner" or "Ask ____ for observation." etc.) that you will do this week.
• Tell your accountability group about your action item and hold yourself accountable to them.
• Repeat the above steps as many times as possible in the coming months.

Next week our pastoral team will be taking a class on John Owen at Sovereign Grace Ministries’ Pastors College, taught by Dr. Carl Trueman from Westminster Seminary. For this course we are reading John Owen on the Christian Life by Sinclair Ferguson. Chapter 6 entitled "Conflicts with Sin" is worth the price of the book. In this chapter Ferguson synthesizes Owen’s teaching on sin and temptation. If you are intimidated by Owen’s Temptation and Sin, I suggest you read this chapter. It’ll give you an easy intro to Owen’s teaching on this topic. Here are some choice quotes by Owen:

"It is in vain for a man to have any expectation of rest from his lust but by its death; of absolute freedom but by his own.

"What a man is in secret, …that he is in the eyes of God and no more."

"Mortification from a self-strength, carried on by ways of self-invention, unto the end of a self-righteousness, is the soul and substance of all false religion in the world." 

"Store the heart with a sense of the love of God in Christ, with the eternal design of his grace, with a taste of the blood of Christ, and his love in the shedding of it; get a relish of the privileges we have thereby, — our adoption, justification, acceptation with God; fill the heart with thoughts of the beauty of holiness, as it is designed by Christ for the end, issue and effect of his death; — and thou wilt, in an ordinary course of walking with God, have great peace and security as to the disturbance of temptations."

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas celebrating the birth of our Savior with family and friends. We have a slight change in our Crossroads schedule this month. As you probably know, we’re having an evangelism seminar with Randy Newman, author of Questioning Evangelim,on 1/25 and 2/8, and we (singles) will be hosting the seminar for the rest of the church. Instead of having a Crossroads meeting on 1/11, that night will be designated as an accountability night. Please check out the schedule tab above and make sure to tell your friends who might not check the blog and might actually show up on 1/11 thinking there is Crossroads… Be a good friend!