Another Reason I Love theTURN!

Linda is a TURN leader that has captured the heart of everyone that is a part of theTURN! She is one of the greatest inspirations to our team and to others as she shares her testimony of God's faithfulness in her life! She sent me this email the other day and with her permission I wanted to share with you all of the impact that you and this ministry has had on her life.

For more of Linda's story, click here.

You wanna' know just one more reason why I love theTURN? Read below.

Pastor Craig,

"Turn your misery into your ministry" - that phrase has stuck with me Pastor Craig. You wanna' talk about revelation for me. God is using you, He has, and He will continue.

How amazing is it that a year ago, on this very day, I was taking a trip to Washington DC to visit the daughter of a pastor who happens to be one of my bff, because my ex-boyfriend told me that he didn't know if he loved me wholly and I decided on the 7th to move out from his house. I thought of this day just one year ago, on the tragedy of mine, but of others as well because of 9/11. I was experiencing this thing called loss.....I don't know what where u doing that day, but when I closed my eyes before the plane took off, I prayed that this trip to visit my friend would be the beginning of my healing; that I would find a pastor that would love God with all of His heart, that I would find a new group of friends that reminded me of Him; little did I know where I was landing... where I am now... the pastor God gave me... the friends He gave me... you didn't even know my face. But I think your spirit already was praying for me, because you prayed, I want the brokenhearted, the very lost, the ones without hope... healing started two months later and you didn't even know me. My prayer on 9/11 a year ago was answered!

I love you my pastor, with the deepest appreciation and gratitude I've never experienced before. I am the product of what was on the other side of your obedience to God all those nights you prayed and sought Him.

Sincerely,
Linda Reyes

WE love you Linda! Feel free to show her some encouragement by contacting her on facebook or leaving comments below!

A Power Reservoir

"You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."

-Acts 1:8

I heard of a story a few years ago about a farmer in the pan-handle of Texas. This farmer and his wife had squeezed out a meager living in the dusty panhandle for 30 years when a man dressed in a three-piece suit and driving a fancy car came to their door. He told the farmer that he had good reason to believe there was a reservoir of oil underneath the farmer's property. If the farmer would allow the gentleman the right to drill, perhaps the farmer would become a wealthy man.

The farmer emphatically stated that he did not want anyone messing up his property and asked the gentleman to leave. The next year about the same time, the gentleman returned again with his nice clothes and another fancy car. The oilman pleaded with the farmer, and again the farmer said no.

This same experience went on for the next 8 years. During those 8 years the farmer and his wife really struggled to make ends meet. Nine years after the first visit from the oilman, the farmer came down with a disease that put him in the hospital. When the gentleman arrived to plead his case for oil, he spoke to the farmer's wife. Reluctantly she gave permission to drill.

Within a week, huge oil rigs began the process of drilling for oil. The first day nothing happened. The second day was filled with only disappointment and dust. But on the third day, right about noon, black bubbly liquid began to squirt up in the air. The oilman had found "black gold," and the farmer and his wife were instantly millionaires.

You have a reservoir of power in your life. If you are a believer, the Holy Spirit works in your life. You can tap into His power and live your life with resurrection power. The Holy Spirit will empower you to live a life on a greater level, but you have to tap into His power just as the farmer needed to drill for the oil. The Bible says to, "be filled with the Spirit" (Ephesians 5:18) and to "live by the Spirit" (Galatians 5:16). People are searching for the power to change their lives when, in fact, the power is already dwelling within them in the form of God's Holy Spirit. Tap into His reservoir of power!

See you tonight!

pcraig

Consumerism - Kills the Mission of the Church

The church as a vendor of religious goods and services?

Yikes. Those are strong words. But I have started thinking about this. Have we, over time and with good intentions and pure motivation, turned our churches into vendors of religious good and services? In our desire to attract people to our churches, have we taught that church is where you come to learn about how God can help you fix your problems? Where you come to have others teach your children about God for you? Where you come for your weekly feeding in the Word of God? Where you come for quality programs to help you live life better and develop a social network? Where you come to experience high quality worship music?

If the church has become the place instead of the people on a mission, leaders only naturally start focusing their efforts on what people experience when they come to the place on Sundays, Wednesdays or Thursdays. In recent years, churches have added the words excellence and relevance to their value statements for the church. In doing so, have our churches naturally began to spend more time focusing on the quality of the music, sound system, and bulletins? As the church grows, the pressure to continue this focus increases and the problem escalates.

The bigger the church gets, the better the preaching needs to be with more dynamic presentations and better PowerPoint slides. The music needs to be more professional with better sound systems and lighting. The youth ministries need to be better to keep the teenagers happy and paying attention so their parents can sit in the larger gathering where religious goods and services are dispensed. Great intentions, but as a result the church can subtly lose sight of its identity and missional function, and people come to church to have their needs met by others, volunteering only if they have time to spare. We must be careful not to create a culture where people come to church; if so, people generally are content to remain spectators.

Remember, we don't go to church. We are the church.

pcraig

A Word Study: Image of the Invisible God

"He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation." - Colossians 1:15

"For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him." - Colossians 1:19

So, I wanted to share a little word study from one of my favorite passages in all of scripture. The scripture states that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. Let's unpack that a bit.

First, He is supreme in that He is the image of the invisible God. To understand this concept, there are words we must briefly illuminate in order to apply. First – image – the Greek word here is icon but rid your mind of the idea of an American icon and also rid your mind of the idea of a mere representational image like a knockoff of a fine fashion or a bad print of a great painting. The word icon doesn’t mean representation. It means manifestation. Not simply a photo of, but the presence of. How do we know that? Second word

– God was pleased to have His fullness dwell in Him. In other words, when one beheld the person of Jesus, it was not a semi-sort of view of God. You were beholding a full manifestation of God. Third word – God was pleased in this – to take infinity and place it inside the skin of this man for what purpose? To image – it implies someone has to behold. Who is it? You, me, anyone who will behold Jesus. God was pleased to do this so that we would know Him. Wow!

This is why Jesus said in John 14:9, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” This is why John the Apostle writes, “Jesus is the only begotten son who is in the bosom of the Father that has made him…..known.”

Let me make the idea of manifestation a little more clear.

When you go outside today, look up and look briefly at the sun. It is 93 million miles away. It is 109.3 times the diameter of this planet. Its surface is 12,000 times that of Earth, and in it Hydrogen and Helium are heated to 27 million degrees Fahrenheit, but who cares you say? You need to know that energy bursts from the sun, and it travels 93 million miles to us and hits the ground and you with this much power – 4 million horsepower per square mile. And when you put your hand in it, your body produces Vitamin D. And if you keep it there unshielded, it will burn you and if it weren’t there, you could see nothing and wou

ld die from exposure to cold temperature. Keep in mind that the sun doesn’t want to manifest itself to you. It has no feeling, but God who is billions infinitely greater than any of us, manifested, produces, lets you see by His Son. Now THAT is manifestation!

Thank God for His manifestation in Jesus Christ!

We love you Lord!

pcraig

Bible Reading Plan

"As long as he sought the Lord, God gave him success." - 2 Chronicles 26:5

A Bible reading plan is critical to your development as a Christian. It may not always seem like it in this time-pressured world we live in, but spending time with God and reading His Word is the most important part of your day. The Bible should be studied as eagerly as a hungry person seeks for bread. We must take its truth and appropriate it to our lives. The delivery person on a bakery truck may handle a 1,000 loaves a day, and yet go home hungry at night; so when we read the Bible we must not peruse large portions of the Word of God with little profit. We must make it our own and feed on it.

We must study the Word as a miner digs for gold or as a diver plunges into the depths of the sea for pearls. Most great truths do not lie on the surface. They must be brought up into the light by patient toil.

So for your targeted growth, it's important for you to find a plan that works well for you. Once you've identified that plan, you need to be faithful to follow it.

Each Bible reading plan is different. They are as varied as each individual, so you have many to choose from. Consider the following options on the posted link, but remember to choose one. For the effective Christian disciple, regular reading in God's Word is not optional. It's a necessity!

Here is a link to get you started on a Bible reading plan (I personally use the "Old and New" plan in the NIV found on the following website):

http://www.ewordtoday.com/year/

I pray this is a help!

pcraig

Top 10 Reads

As I promised you tonight, here are the top ten books that I have read that are my favorites. This list has helped me most in my walk with God over the past 8 years!

1. The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
2. Mere Christianity by CS Lewis
3. The Cross of Christ by John Stott
4. Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster
5. The Complete Works of E.M. Bounds on Prayer by Bounds
6. Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire by Jim Cymbala
7. The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
8. Learning Theology with the Church Fathers by Christopher A. Hall
9. Unfinished Business: Returning the Ministry to the People of God by Greg Ogden
10. Recapturing the Wesleys' Vision by Paul Wesley Chilcote

And I must give you some very close honorable mentions:

• Power, Passion, and Prayer: Greatest Sermons on Revival Through Prayer by Charles G. Finney
• The Wigglesworth Standard by P.J. Madden
• Basic Christianity by John Stott
• Healing is a Choice by Stephen Arterburn
• Knowing God by J.I. Packer

The Cost of Discipleship

Mere Christianity

The Cross of Christ

Celebration of Discipline

EM Bounds on Prayer

Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire

The Pilgrim's Progress

Learning Theology with the Church Fathers

Unfinished Business

Recapturing the Wesleys' Vision

Keep tuned in for our monthly recommended reads!

Seeking Him together!

pcraig

Worship - Cultivated out of a Fear of God

So we are back to the subject of worship.

We need to be reminded that we are called in the Old Testament to worship God in fear; to truly worship God in fear. When we worship God at all times in all places, because God is always available to the true worshiper, wherever that true worshiper is, we also need to understand that when we come to God, there is a foundational reality about Him that is to be understood. And here it comes from Psalm 96:9, “Worship the Lord in holy array, tremble before Him, all the earth.” Listen to those words: Worship the Lord in holy array. Tremble before Him, all the earth.

I was sharing this Scripture the other day with my leadership team. To whom does the Lord look? To whom does He look? “To this one I will look.” Isaiah 66:2, “To him who is humble, contrite of spirit, who trembles at My Word.”

Where does this fear come from you ask? This fear comes from the fact that God is holy. Take a look again at the way in which Isaiah responds to God in His presence in Isaiah 6. This chapter takes us, in a sense, to the essential attribute of God that relates to us worshiping in holy array, worshiping with fear. And that is God’s holiness.

It’s one thing to say God is spirit. It’s something else to say God is spirit but God is holy, holy, holy (like the angels sing). The true worshiper goes to worship in holy attire out of sense of fear. How many times in the Old Testament are we instructed to fear the Lord? Holiness inspires fear because we realize our sinfulness. It results in brokenness. It results in trembling at the Word of God, as we saw in Isaiah 66. True worship rises out of that context. It is essential if you’re going to be a true worshiper to have a vision of the true God, the God who is spirit but the God who is spirit who is holy, holy, holy. And I believe the true worshiper starts with an awareness of the awesome holiness of God and his own utter unholiness.

I really think what Christians need is a vision of the holiness of God. It was Habakkuk, you remember in Habakkuk 3:16, that trembled at the voice of the Holy One. The restored remnant feared the Lord when they heard His holy Word spoken by Haggai, the prophet in chapter 1, verse 12.

You say well that is just the Old Testament. Well even when you come in to the New Testament, God incarnate in Jesus Christ was a frightening, frightening person...truly. When on the Mount of Transfiguration Jesus pulled His flesh aside and revealed His manifest divine blazing glory, Peter, James and John who were there were literally scared into a coma. They fell over like dead people, like Ezekiel did when he had a vision of God, like Isaiah did in the sheer fear of being a sinner exposed to holy God.

Do you remember when the disciples were out on the Sea of Galilee, a storm came up and it says they were afraid. Jesus stilled the storm, and then the Bible says they were exceedingly afraid. It is more frightening to have God in the boat than a storm outside the boat. They knew who was in their boat, they were exposed. They knew they were in the presence of the Creator who controls the wind and the waves and they were terrified. And they should have been terrified. It’s a terrifying thing to be in the presence of absolute holiness when you are a wretched sinner.

Peter was fishing, Luke 5, couldn’t catch anything. “The Lord said to him, ‘Put out into the deep water, let down your nets for a catch.’ Simon said, ‘Look, Master, we worked all night, caught nothing. Do You think we did that on one side of the boat? What do You mean put out your nets for a catch, You think we missed something out there?’ But they obeyed.” And you remember what happened. They had so many fish they filled both boats and both boats started to sink. “And then Simon Peter fell at Jesus feet.” This is what he said, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” Why did he say that? Next verse, “For amazement had seized him.” (McArthur)

Trauma had seized him. He was panicked because he was in the presence of the One who controlled fish. And Jesus did this in His miracles to traumatize people. His authority was so apparent, it says, the people were astonished at His teaching.

A burning heart of worship is cultivated in the fear and holiness of God. Have you seen Him for who He is?

Let's ask for a spirit of revelation together (Ephesians 1:17)!

pcraig