I Told You So!

This is my latest blog for the HeartSupport website. Read it on HeartSupport’s site HERE.

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A lot of people think that God makes rules because He’s God and He can.

If God were on Facebook, most people think His hobbies would be: making up rules, striking people with lightning, and generally making people’s lives miserable.

That’s not reality.

For example, I choose to not let my 3-year old run around the house with a knife. I don’t enforce that rule because I’m mean or I enjoy taking things away from my daughter. I enforce that rule because I have her best in mind. I know what could happen if I let her do that.

In Deuteronomy 17, God sets up some rules for future kings of Israel. He knows if the kings follow the rules He sets up, they will succeed – their lives and their kingdoms will prosper.

Deuteronomy 17:7 – The king must not take many wives for himself, because they will turn his heart away from the Lord...

That’s pretty clear, right? He knows the consequences of lusting after women. He knows that if the king takes multiple wives, he won’t last long in his quest to serve the Lord. Unfortunately, not everyone listened. Look at what Solomon did…

1 Kings 11:3 – [Solomon] had 700 wives of royal birth and 300 concubines…

Back in the day, marrying 2 wives was normal. Some guys even married 3 or 4. Solomon wasn’t ok with just 1 or 2 or 17 or 328 or 699 – he married 700 women and had 300 concubines (women on hand available for sexual favors whenever the king desired). Basically, the king could sleep with a different woman every night for almost 3 years and not sleep with the same woman twice. To many men, Solomon seems to have been living the dream. I’m sure Solomon loved it!

But here’s the end of 1 Kings 11:3…

…And in fact, they did turn his heart away from the Lord.

In other words, this was a perfect chance for God to say, “I told you so!”

One perk to being God is knowing the future. So when He says not to do something because the consequences will be bad, He knows what He’s talking about. Like for instance when He says, “God’s will is for you to be holy, so stay away from all sexual sin,” (1 Thessalonians 4:3), He says that for a reason. He knows that there will be consequences.

Here’s the bottom line: God said to stay away from sexual sin. Don’t do it. You’ll regret it.

The concept is easy, the application is challenging. XXXChurch is one of many ways to help you cure your addiction to porn or sexual sin. Set up accountability, battle the sin that you struggle with, and steer clear of temptation and weak areas at all costs. Obedience is always worth the sacrifice.

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My name is Kevin Miller. I’m a pastor; and I use my past with porn to help others put porn in their past.

Tornadoes and Hockey

We had been told tornadoes were coming last Saturday, but it didn’t seem real till everything got crazy around 4:30pm. I was finishing up my notes for service (which ended up not happening, due to the weather) when the storm hit. It began with a downpour of rain, then came the 60mph winds, and huge, forceful hail. I know there have been much worse storms, but coming from New Mexico, that was the worst I’ve ever seen. The storm radio went off all day – sometimes only a couple minutes apart. Jenn and I hid in the bathroom for a few minutes, especially when we thought the hail was going to break our windows.

It was that bad.

We have Dish Network, so our TV kept cutting in and out as the weather ebbed and flowed. We were trying to watch the weather channel and see where the storm was headed. As we stood there listening to the pounding rain and howling wind, watching the storm tracker on the TV and listening to their warnings to duck for cover now before it’s too late, something interesting happened on TV: the news station split the screen in half. One side had the storm coverage, and the other side had the Predators hockey game. Was hockey that important at that moment that while they warned us to hide for our lives, some people preferred to see how the Predators were doing?!

Then it hit me. A lot of people lives their lives in split-screen.

We say we care about the “important” stuff: God, church, being a good person, etc, but we’re really only half-focused on that stuff. The other side of us really cares about all the other important stuff: hockey games, making money, having lots of friends, etc. While we act like we’re really concerned with the important stuff, we want to keep our attention on both.

The most popular term would be “riding the fence.”

As I stood there in amazement, I had to stop and ask myself if I was living in split-screen.

Did a hockey game have my attention while a tornado was sweeping through my city?

Was there something grabbing my attention that was taking my focus off of what was really important?

What about you? Are you living life in split-screen? What is your hockey game? What has your attention so much that you can’t let go of it, even when it becomes dangerous to hold on to?

Never stop learning.

We’ve arrived. Atlanta, Georgia was our destination and that’s where we are. We’re enjoying free wifi in our room now before heading to Calvary Stone Mountain for the Deep South Pastor’s Conference.

I’ve been to a few conferences before, but this will be my first as a senior pastor (that sounds so old). I’m excited to learn from men in the faith who have gone before me and learned many of the lessons I’m learning now. I’m also inspired by guys who have been doing this for so long, being faithful through the good and bad. I’m humbled to think that I’ll be learning right next to guys who have been doing this for years.

All of that reminded me of the importance of always being on the quest for more wisdom. When God told Solomon he could have anything he asked for, that was what he wanted – wisdom. Proverbs talks all about it and how valuable it is.

Probably the hardest part about learning and seeking wisdom is the humility that’s necessary to do so. It’s humbling to admit you don’t know what you’re doing or could use some advice. That’s the challenge of seeking wisdom and also the beauty of it.
When you’re around a wise person – someone more experienced than you – learn to be quiet and listen. If you’re going to talk, ask questions. There are endless pieces of advice to ingest wherever you go.

You won’t agree with everything, so learn to be discerning. Just like eating fish – you chew the meat and spit out the bones.

Never. Stop. Learning.

The Bible in HD

If you’ve subscribed to our video podcast, I sincerely apologize for the technical issues we’ve been experiencing. We’re working on it and hope it have it up soon.

In the mean time, the videos ARE working on our vimeo channel. You can follow the links from our service archive or you can go straight to our channel to watch each video from our Saturday night services!

If you have a blog, facebook, or personal website, feel free to spread the word by embedding the video there so that your friends and followers can enjoy it as well!

By the way, if you’re an iPad owner, Vimeo looks beautiful on the iPad!

Thanks, and enjoy the Bible in HD…

Being in the community

One thing that we love at Awaken Church is a chance to be in the community. That’s how we started the church, actually. After living in Clarksville for only about 2 weeks, we set out each Saturday for 8 weeks straight to a different park for an event we called “Unight.” The idea was getting into the community, sharing our faith, and spreading the word about the church. We grilled hot dogs and burgers, passed out drinks and Bibles, and just hung out with people. We even got to lead a few people to Christ!

Then came Riverfest. That took place the weekend before our first church service. We set up and manned a booth in this city-wide festival by the river for 2 days. We met lots of people and, again, got the Word out (in more ways than one)! We met Stacy and Skyler at Riverfest. Skyler, who’s 5, wanted her face painted, so her mom found the nearest free face painter: Awaken Church. She wasn’t looking for a church at all, but while she stood there waiting for Skyler’s face painting, we told her about the church. She came to service the following weekend (our first service), and accepted Christ!

After being in contact so often with the city about community events, they finally realized that we love to do that, so now they contact us! We helped sponsor the city’s first annual Spring Eggstravaganza a few weeks ago – an Easter egg hunt open to the whole city. They had over 20,000 eggs and thousand of people showed up! Another great chance to spread the Word!

Last weekend was the biggest festival of the year: Rivers & Spires. We were 1 of a few churches that set up a booth to be a part of this huge community event. Denver spent weeks fashioning our very own Skeeball game – he rocked it! Ashley, our face painter, had been out of town for a couple months, but made sure to come back in time to make it out to Rivers & Spires. She is a very talented face painter. No joke – when she showed up, we had a line at our booth for hours! We also had 200 CDs duplicated that we passed out for free – people love a free CD. We pray those are very timely messages delivered to people right when they need to hear them!

One thing I pray every day is that God would use Awaken to wake this city up. We want to make our presence known in this city by being a part of whatever is going on. If there’s an opportunity for us to show up and hang out with people, we’ll be there! I love that about our church, and I believe that’s important for any church. It’s easy (especially as a church becomes very large) to begin to focus on itself more than the community it is in. I pray we never lose our outward focus and always stay open and involved in the community.

How is your church involved in your community?

What have been some effective ways you’ve reached the people on the streets?

DON’T GIVE UP!

“They don’t know what they’re getting themselves into.”

“They’re ruining their lives.”

“I’ve told them a million times.”

You’re probably familiar with the pain and frustration of watching someone you know make decisions that they’ll regret in the future…especially when you’ve told them where their decisions are leading…and especially when you’ve made the same decisions yourself.

I met a guy like this years ago when I was a youth pastor. He reminded me a lot of myself when I was in middle school – lack of respect for authority, struggle with porn, desire to please people. I can’t count how many times I sat him down in my office and shared my story with him, counseled him, rebuked him, and even times that I took a softer approach and just hung out with him. Sometimes it seemed like we were getting somewhere, other times were really frustrating. His mom would call me and set up appointments for him to come see me. He hated those “surprise attacks.” We tried lots of things and nothing seemed to help. He was the ONLY student I gave my number to out of hundreds of kids who asked. We even counseled through text messages at times – sometimes at 2am, when temptation had really set in or something rough had happened at home. Eventually, he moved on to high school and things got much worse. The peer pressure that came with that certainly didn’t help. After counseling, befriending, encouraging, and rebuking him for years, the day finally came…

I gave up on him.

I know it sound terrible. Pastors aren’t supposed to do that; but I did.

I don’t know the day or what finally caused it, but I know I gave up on him. I became convinced that he’d just continue the downward spiral into all of the issues I’d warned him about: drugs, porn, alcohol, disrespect for parents… He’d never get better. He’d never repent. I should spend my time with someone who would actually listen. All of those were wrong conclusions, but that’s what I had convinced myself.

Apparently things got much worse after I moved here to Tennessee last summer. He got deeper into sin and continued living for himself and the world…just like I figured.

I honestly hadn’t thought a lot about him till last night around 9pm when I got a text message from him. When I first saw his name on my phone, my first thought wasn’t very optimistic. I figured for sure it was some of the same old stuff. To my surprise (and joy), this text was far different from the one I had received from him in the past.

Here’s part of the text he sent me:

“…Around October or November, me and [a friend] became accountability partners, something that we had done in the past but had neglected for quite a while. Since then, I quit looking at porn, quit weed, gave up drinking, stopped smoking, and I’m working on not cussing any more…”

Then the opportunity arose for him to help lead a small group at a recent youth group event…

“…I prayed about it and God said that I’ve been cleaning up and saying I want to live for Him and it’s time to prove it. For the first time in years, I had my hands up during worship…and I broke down and cried. I’ve never felt so unworthy…”

Here’s the part that rocked me…

“…I guess the reason I’m telling you this is because during one of his teachings, our guest speaker posed the question, ‘Who do you consider your spiritual hero?’ You instantly came to mind. It took a while but I think aaaalllllllll that stuff that you and me spent endless hours discussing is finally sinking in, and I honestly want nothing more right now than to try and steer other guys clear of that long way around that I took, and a big part of that is thanks to you. So I guess I just wanna convey my insane gratitude for caring enough to spend so much time with me. I love you man…”

So, when I say, “Don’t give up,” I say it to myself as well.

To every youth pastor that tried to talk to a kid but never got through: DON’T GIVE UP!

To every pastor that’s dealt with a situation that is just taking too long to resolve: DON’T GIVE UP!

To every parent with a kid who’s heading in the wrong direction and you’re ready to just be done: DON’T GIVE UP!

More Technology

I’m all about using the latest and greatest technology to make Jesus famous.

We’ve just added a new one at Awaken, for those of you who may be interested. In addition to our audio podcast, we now offer a brand new video podcast so that you can watch our weekend services!

Make sure to subscribe to one or both so you can follow us through our study of God’s Word – audibly AND visually!

Enjoy and spread the Word!

iPreach

I was super blessed this week when the other pastors at church pitched in to get me an iPad. I really wanted one, but knew I didn’t need one, then they surprised me by taking me to Best Buy and hooking me up. I got it Friday and had to hold myself back from opening it up till I had my preliminary studying done for Saturday night. It was challenging to resist, but I did it.

One reason I really wanted an iPad was to preach from it. Ink is expensive, plus I don’t have room on my pulpit for Bible and open teaching notebook without overlapping them. No big deal, but I was excited to give the iPad a shot. I was under the impression that it was going to be super challenging to figure out how to get my notes formatted for the screen and imported to my iPad. I was glad to find out that it was actually very easy. As in 5-minutes easy.

All I did was download an iPad app called GoodReader, increase the font size from 12pt to 16pt, and export as a PDF. From there, I just followed the directions from GoodReader, synced my iPad, and it was ready to rock.

Also, just for a little extra flare, I took my title slide, flipped it 90 degrees, and added a jpg of it to my notes before I exported it as a PDF. Not necessary, but I liked the extra look.

Preaching from it was flawless. I took my friend, Levi‘s advice and made sure the sounds were turned off and the screen lock was set to 15 minutes so that it didn’t shut down and lock while I was preaching. Up-sizing the font took my notes from 5 pages to 10 1/2, so that was a little different. Over all, it was great preaching from it. It was very portable, and neatly packaged.

I normally have a pen with my teaching notebook for any last-minute changes I may want to scribble in. Right before I left for church, I found another app called PadNotes that allows you to import a PDF then make extra markings on top of it – you can scribble in your own notes or even add typed text on top of the PDF. I barely got a chance to try it and don’t know how much I’ll use it, but we’ll see.

Over all, I loved it. I’m blessed to have some friends that were so generous to me and stoked to use anything I can to make Jesus famous.

Oh, and it was great to see new faces at church tonight and start a study through an incredible book, Esther.

Prayer With A Chair

You never know what kind of an impact the words you say will leave on someone. For some reason, the words of a youth pastor of mine have stuck with me for quite a few years now. I don’t remember the setting or how we got on the topic, but we were discussing prayer. He was talking about a way that had revolutionized his prayer time and how simple it would be for me to try.

If we could all think of one thing that makes prayer challenging, I’ll bet for many, it’s that we simply can’t see God. Having a conversation with Someone that we can’t see is a bit of a challenge. If this is a struggle for you, or if you simply need to breathe some fresh air into your prayer life, try this simple tactic:

Pull up a chair for Jesus.

It’s that simple. Pull up a chair for Jesus to sit in and invite Him to grab a seat so you guys can hang out and talk. Then talk to Him like He’s a real person who is really there and really cares (since He is all of those things!). If it helps bring it to life, pour Him a cup of coffee too (but don’t be offended if He doesn’t drink it).

Here’s why this works: it helps you to have a conversation with God as though He’s real. Prayer can so often turn into some kind of religious mantra, saying a bunch of religious words over and over with a lot of the word “just,” “Father,” and “Lord.” Forget that when you pull up a chair for Jesus. Talk to Him like He’s a buddy that you’re sitting down with for coffee.

Just a hint: you may want to do this at a time or in a place where no one else is around – other people being around might hinder you from a real conversation with Jesus. That’s what this is all about. Tell Him how you feel, release some burdens, confess some sin – just like how you’d do it if it were a flesh-and-blood friend sitting there with you!

It might seem a little weird at first, but give it a shot and let me know how it goes! This probably isn’t something you’d do every day, but it’s worth giving a shot once in a while if you feel like you’ve forgotten about the reality of Jesus sitting there with you!

Also, if you missed a post I wrote a couple weeks back about prayer, make sure to check it out for a few more practical thoughts on prayer.

A 3-Year Old’s Prayer

I love hearing my little girl, Emery, pray. Her prayers are often quite entertaining:

“Jesus, my mommy, my daddy, Emmy go potty on the big potty, daddy feel a little sick, Isaac, Mat, JoJo – he’s my best friend, Amen.”

“Jesus, Emmy go to bed, Emmy have breakfast tomorrow, Emmy food, Emmy apple juice, No! No juice! Emmy water, Doctor say ‘Drink lots of water,’ Amen.”

“Jesus, Emmy’s chicken, Emmy have a cow…later, play with all the kids later, mommy food, daddy food, Amen.”

“Jesus, Emmy’s juice, Emmy’s food, Emmy find a penny, amen.”

She does like to pray. I like that about her. Tonight, however, was the most significant prayer she’s ever prayed even though she doesn’t fully understand the weight of it. I was working on some graphic design out on the back porch and Emery and Jenn came out. Emery was supposed to be in bed, but she said she wanted to tell me something. She sat down in the chair in front of me and proceeded to tell me that she wanted Jesus to live in her heart. We talked about that and she said she wanted to pray.

The prayer was very simple and went something like this (with her repeating after me):

Dear Jesus, please come live in my heart. Help me to live for You, and obey my parents and You all the time. Help me to stay away from sin. Thank You for dying for me. In Jesus’ name, AMEN!

Judging by her response immediately afterward: “Man, I love this chair!” I don’t think she understood the weight of her words, but Jenn and I did. We looked at each other, and laughed, and smiled, and thanked God that we are able to lead our children to the Lord from such a young age!

To any skeptics out there: I know she doesn’t understand the concept of the Trinity (neither do I, fully) or know the difference between premillenialism and postmillenialism or really have an understanding of redemptive history, but she knows Who Jesus is and what He did, and that’s where it begins. My mom prayed with me in our front yard when I was 3. I was the same way then as Emery is now – very simple-minded and not a theologian, but I knew I wanted Jesus in me, so I asked. It was that simple. All I can say now is that Jesus answered that prayer. He’s in me. I still don’t have it all figured out, but He’s still working in me. I believe to this day that my simple 3-year old prayer is still being answered. I pray the same for my little girl(s)!

Jesus said that all we need is faith as simple as a child’s.

Thanks, Jesus, for making it that simple and forgive us for making it so complicated.