Sunday ReCap

Okay, for those of you who were out of town, or slept in, or were watching the Seahawks lose; here is a reCap of Sunday's lessons for High School Crosstalk and Middle School Crosstalk.

In Middle School, Scott continued teaching on worship. This week was worship through prayer. I love how all of the students dove right in and prayed for nearly forty minutes! It was great to hear how you realized that prayer can be creative. Scott had nine different prayer stations set up through out the Cabana and the Middle School room. The stations ranged from praying through art, through rewriting the Lords prayer in your own words, and even through praying for the world over a map. It was neat to see that there are all sorts of ways we can worship God through prayer, not just the traditional close your eyes and hold hands till they get sweaty while thinking about what you will eat for lunch. Hopefully you can continue to practice these creative ways to talk to God, and they will freshen up your prayer life.

In High School, we started a new series! Our new series is called "the Bible Jesus read" and it is going to be an overview of the Old Testament. We learned that there are a couple of main reasons (among many I am sure) that keep us from studying and enjoying the Old Testament. Mainly because it can be boring to our suburban western culture. We don't get it because we don't have land wars, and water wars, and arranged marriages. The other main reason is because it seems like the God of the Old Testament (which is the same God as the New) can be mean and offensive. He cares so much about the perfect sacrifice (no bent winged doves or limping lambs) but seems to not care about a whole human ethnic group like the Amelikites (God told Saul to obliterate the Amelikites; man, woman, child, baby, camel, goat, cow, all of it). These are two fairly legitimate reason why we don't study the Old Testament; its boring and offensive.

But we countered those two points with three. We need to study the Old Testament for these three (and many more) reasons.
1. The New Testament authors treated it like it was important. All the books except Philemon, 2 John and 3 John quote or allude back to the Old Testament.
2. The Old Testament is still applicable to our lives today. We find our selves in the pages! When we get more familiar with the culture and the weird words, we start to enjoy it because we resonate with the people who wrestled with walking with God.
3. It is the Bible that Jesus read. It is the prayers he prayed. The stories he heard at bedtime. The songs that he sang. The more we comprehend the Old Testament, the more we comprehend Jesus.

Thats what we did Sunday! It was a blast, because we ended it all with coffee cookie fellowship downstairs! And in my opinion, that was better than watching a poor performance by the home town team (by watching I mean by skipping church) (and by poor I mean really really really ridiculously bad playing) (and by home town team I mean the Seattle Seahawks).

much Love,
Johnny