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I’ll pay for my own lunch thanks…

Chatted to a guy at a 21st last night for about an hour and a half. I’d been praying that I’d be bold and take the opportunity to chat to him… one of the speeches was gold! It really lead well into a discussion. It was tragic to chat to this guy. The last thing he said was that even if I could 100% convince of the truth of the claims that Jesus makes about himself, he’d rather just stand before God and take his own punishment. Tragic. Row found this quote from John Stott (The Cross of Christ) today. The last sentence (in bold) pretty much summarises this chap. Pray for him that God would give him ears to hear.

The doctrine of substitution affirms not only a fact (God in Christ substituted himself for us) but its necessity (there was no other way by which God’s holy love could be satisfied and rebellious human beings could be saved). Therefore, as we stand before the cross, we begin to gain a clear view both of God and of ourselves, especially in relation to each other. Instead of inflicting upon us the judgment we deserved, God in Christ endured it in our place. Hell is the only alternative. This is the ‘scandal’, the stumbling-block, of the cross. For our proud hearts rebel against it. We cannot bear to acknowledge either the seriousness of our sin and guilt or our utter indebtedness to the cross. Surely, we say, there must be something we can do, or at least contribute, in order to make amends? If not, we often give the impression that we would rather suffer our own punishment than the humiliation of seeing God through Christ bear it in our place.

Yesterday I got my mobile phone back from 3 months using a loan phone. This photo was taken last night. 7 warm fuzzies to the first person or reptile to correctly identify the car I was driving…

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Youth Ministry: J-Walk has landed

Our brand new monthly magazine for CCECYOUTH has just landed!! We launched it last night. There has been some good feedback already… Shout out to Alex, Jackson, Josh and Nicole – they are part of team J-walk – and have done a fantastic job! Thanks also to Aaron, Andrew, Andrew and Kelly for their contributions.

Go check it out here

What do you think? Would love to hear your feedback…

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Monergism.com

Busy finishing what I blogged about yesterday.  No time for longer than 30 second post.  Here it is: Monergism.com has a new design.  This is good.  Check it out – it's got great content.

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Youth Ministry: J-Walk is coming

J-Walk is the name of a new magazine that we are launching on Friday night at CCECYOUTH. The magazine will have both web and print content.

J-Walk has been a long time coming! In 2003 on a youth group camp a number of teenagers were flicking through some girly magazine (Girlfriend? maybe?). It was reasonably innocent at the time… but it got me thinking that there isn’t really anything available for the teenagers in my youth group to read that will help them make sense of the world around them (that’s what those girly magazines are doing) and also what it means to be a Christian living in that world. When I was a teenager there was a youth magazine that matthiasmedia had running for a year called Zed – it almost sent them bankrupt – so they canned it! But at the time I wasn’t at a great church and it was actually Zed that helped me to keep going as a Christian for that year!

I had plans at one stage to do a larger-scale project (ie Nation-wide)- but thought that I’d rather launch something specific to our context and our group – that other teenagers would be more than welcome to download and read as well. So each month we plan on putting out a printed edition of J-walk (glossy cover – with simple black and white pages), having a pdf downloadable from www.ccecyouth.com + a number of interactive articles online.

Basically the aim of J-walk is to help teenagers understand the Bible and the World. The key to understanding the world is understanding what God says about it in the Bible… my prayer is that our teenagers would be able to understand the world through the Bible’s grid.

In the first edition I have an article that explains the title and what it means… so stay tuned! (I might even post it here)

A month ago I made this post on the youth site. And this guy found it and linked to it. It lead to 1000 hits of traffic – he has a very popular blog! They all said they liked the graphic in the comments section…

Do you like the logo? Do you think this whole J-Walk thing will be effective? Time will tell…