I’m in awe of God. What we experienced on Sunday is difficult to put in words.

Quick Aside:
As I shared on Saturday, our church showed up big time at our East Baltimore location where we are preparing to launch our next campus. The Baltimore Sun ran a story about an initiative that some political leaders are trying to get started in our area. Unbeknown to us, we are on the cutting edge. Check out the story by clicking here.

Back to Sunday: This Sunday was one of our most powerful services to date. We baptized 6 at the beginning of service. I’m including the video at the bottom of this post. CHECK IT OUT. When we baptize I like to take time to tell their stories. I truly believe Baptism becomes one of the greatest avenues for the Gospel to be shared. It’s one thing for a Pastor to preach and tell people what they should do. It’s an entirely new ballgame when someone sees an adult profess Jesus as Lord and follow through in Baptism. Suddenly it’s not the Pastor preaching… its their friend or someone with whom they can easily identify. (See pictures at the bottom of the post)
I preached from Luke 15 about the lost sheep and then asked people if they would like to respond to the prompting of Christ in their life. What happened next was powerful. Over the next few minutes we saw 10 people come forward to respond to the invitation to receive Christ. We have people come forward to make a public decision. One by one I hugged each person as our church celebrated. This is new life in Christ! Every one of those people are special but one of them was my own 15 year old sister. I was wrecked when I saw her coming.

What you should keep in mind about our weekend was that not only did a bunch of our people come to serve in East Baltimore on Saturday. They brought friends and 10 received Christ. Then after service we had a “VIP” team meeting. (We’ve jacked the VIP concept from our friends at Elevation Church) While the previous week we had 12 sign up… close to 40 came out to the training!

Not only that but it was raining here and the restaurant we selected wasn’t conducive for a meeting so a few of our guys went and grabbed our VIP tents and set them up outside of the restaurant. Right there, outside, in the middle of the Towne Center we held our VIP team training! Our people are ready to do whatever they can to reach people with the Gospel and I love them for it!

What a weekend, what a church, what a God!

Today at Captivate we finished up our “Together” series with a challenge for all of us to come together and grow up into and under the headship of Jesus Christ.

To give men a proper view of self we have to begin with a proper view of Jesus. I took some time to read a ‘poem’ (church song) to a big African American biker who I pulled from the crowd today. I asked the audience how many men felt comfortable singing “Cause nothing else could take your place, to feel the warmth of your embrace. Help me find a way, bring me back to you.” The reality is that singing is awkward for many men and on top of that the average guy has no desire to sing songs about feeling warm embraces with a man.

In the picture above I also addressed our own view of Jesus. This picture I brought on stage used to hang in the fellowship hall of my childhood home church. I described all of the graven images it sends. A white man with long perfect hair and a manicured beard gazing off into the distance. God didn’t give us a description of Jesus because none of us has a corner on the identity of God. I reminded our church today “We are made in the image of Christ but yet we spend time making Christ in our image.” That is a sin we must repent of and stop. It’s idolatry. We don’t worship an image, we worship a Savior.

Finally we discussed headship of Christ by pointing out his attributes in Hebrews 1:1-4. He is creator, sustainer, forgiver of sins, savior, higher than any other… etc. I then closed by taking the men in our church to Revelation 19 where we see a returning and triumphant Jesus coming back. He makes the UFC men look like they prance around with tulips and daisies in their teeth. Our coming Savior returns to handle business. Men can afford to worship that Savior. Men need to learn to worship the fullness that is Christ. The compassionate, just, righteous, loving, powerful, mighty and masculine “radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being”(Ephesians 4:3)

We need our churches to be under the headship of Jesus Christ. We must be about nothing else that can distract us. We are indeed His body on this planet and He alone is our head. Men, lets become great men of God who demonstrate to the world who our Savior is. Lets lead our churches with grace, love, truth, boldness and strength.

References from today: (Ephesians 4:11-16, Hebrews 1:1-4 and Revelation 19:11-21)

Article about 20-somethings: http://tinyurl.com/233doxp

Article by Mark Driscoll: http://tinyurl.com/2exdoe3

I came across this site called “Birds Eye Tourist” which is basically a blog collecting interesting images from satellite images via Google Earth and Microsoft’s Live Search.

After seeing a few sites from my hometown of Baltimore, MD I decided to take a look for some key places of my childhood. I’ll post two.

The first is the church building where I was lead to the Lord. 2nd and 4th Baptist Church. It’s located on the corner of Orleans and N. Luzerne in Baltimore, MD. In the heart of the city. I came to Christ because a guy I called “Mr. Don” got in touch with a bunch of us kids running the streets and started a Sunday School class of hoodlums. I was the first in my family to receive Christ because of Mr. Don’s efforts and now I’m a Pastor… pretty cool.

The church owned a row house across the street that they used for classrooms and Mr. Don’s new class of street kids got the basement. In a basement classroom for nearly 5 years is where I received the bulk of my ‘intro to Christianity’. We had a table, some donuts and the bible. Pretty complicated discipleship.

The last bit of show and tell is of the place of residence I remember most in Baltimore. Most of my developing memories came from this place. My mom showed me a receipt a while back of rent she paid here… $60/month. We lived in government housing (projects) for a number of years into my middle school life. During this time my mom got her G.E.D. and a 2 year business degree. I credit her for being the springboard to everything I’ve been blessed to enjoy.

(back yard)

(front of house. Middle section, 3rd entry from left)

As you may see from this picture, the windows and doors are all boarded up. I drove through the neighborhood a few weeks ago and it looks like the city is trying to get the residents out so they can level the place. See below.

Our place was right across from the school (left of this pic) so it looks like they started leveling with that section. We had the tree in the yard so the circle above is accurate. If you look closely you can still see the road under the grass.

It’s cool to look back at where we’ve come from so that we can see God’s hand in our lives. Too often we live with a horizontal vision that doesn’t take into consideration the past or future. All we tend to do is react to what’s in front of us today. As I see what God has done in my own life I am forever grateful for his continued blessing on my life. I know that he’s already been able to use my past experiences up until today but I’m certain he’ll use this past to further his Kingdom in new ways in years to come.