“FAM” is our church’s Foster and Adoption Ministry.  FAM currently has two main areas of outreach.  One is ministering to the social workers at the Division of Family and Child Services (DFCS).  Read more about that in a future update! The other way we’re serving is through Care Communities.  These are teams of people who commit to surround a foster or adoptive family with extra care and support by providing meals, childcare, transportation and other needs.  Families currently being served by FAM include:

• CFC member Megen, who adopted a daughter from China
• Members Taylor and Shelby, who adopted a son through domestic infant adoption
• A Roswell family who has a 9 year old daughter and is fostering 10 month old triplets

This family has warmly received our help, and we have been blessed as we walk alongside them by providing extra hands with the triplets and also by spending time with their daughter. We are looking for more people to join this Care Community.
Please pray for this ministry!

• Pray for our supported family’s 9 year old daughter as she undergoes extensive medical tests on March 25th.  Pray also for a close family recently diagnosed with advanced lung cancer.
• Pray for the salvation of these triplets and any family member who doesn’t know Christ as their Savior.
• Ask God if He might be calling you to get involved in this ministry
• Pray for the thousands of foster children who do not have a home and that God will open the hearts of His people to welcome these children
• Pray that God would raise up a foster family from within this church

Are you hearing the call of God to get involved?  Email info@christfellowshipga.org.

One of the most important spiritual disciplines a Christian can engage in is daily personal worship. Personal Worship is a time where you hear from God through Bible reading and reflection and talk to God through prayer. There are really four keys to making this a regular part of your life.

1. PICK A TIME AND A PLACE FOR YOUR DAILY PERSONAL WORSHIP

Where is a place where you can regularly go and be alone with the Lord? What is a time of day that you can set aside to be regular each day. I was always frustrated when I was a kid hearing my mentors tell me to do it in the morning, but they have a point. Placing personal worship in the morning makes it a top priority of your day and makes sure it isn’t affected when your schedule is thrown off mid-day.

2. PICK A PLAN FOR BIBLE READING

A sure way to make sure your personal worship time doesn’t feel meaningful is to open up to a different random passage of the Bible each day. Instead, have a plan. I’m currently working through a plan from D.A. Carson called For the Love of God. It includes 2 Old Testament chapters and 2 New Testament chapters each day, but can easily be adopted to be cut in half. Another great plan is called the Discipleship Journal Bible Reading Plan. Or, you may choose a book of the Bible to go through and after you finish it, pick a book from the opposite testament.

3. HAVE A METHOD TO REFLECT ON YOUR READING

Sometimes, when we just read the Bible, we can forget what we read within minutes. That’s why it is often helpful to have a plan to reflect on your reading. I love the R.E.A.P method for this. R.E.A.P. stands for:

Read the passage. Pray and ask the Holy Spirit to prepare your heart to receive and apply God’s Word.

Examine the passage. Dig deeper with the following questions:
What does this passage teach you about the character and nature of God the Father?
What does this passage teach you about the character and nature of mankind?
What does this passage teach you about the person and work of Jesus?

Apply the passage. Consider how you should apply this passage through the empowering work of the Holy Spirit. Ask the following questions:

Are there sins to avoid?
Are there promises to claim?
Are there examples to follow?  
Are there commands to keep?

Pray through passage with the following format:

Find something in the passage to praise and thank God for.
Find something in the passage to confess to God.
Find something in the passage to ask God for.

4. HAVE A METHOD TO ORGANIZE YOUR PRAYERS

This is why I love the R.E.A.P. Method - it blends Bible reading and prayer, leading you to praise, thank, confess and ask God for things based on the text from the Bible you read. Another popular method I’ve used many times is the ACTS method. You start praying by adoring God for who He is. Then you confess your sins from the day before. After that you thank Him for his grace and what He is doing in your life. Finally, you move to a time of supplication where you ask for your needs and the needs of others.

Personal worship should be a life giving daily habit for Christians. It keeps us grounded in the Word and talking to God. What about you? What would be a great next step to make your personal worship more frequent and more meaningful?  

When we go through suffering in life, we tend to hear the voices of others and even our own selves talking to us, “You deserved this. This is all your fault. God clearly doesn’t love you. God has abandoned you.” These voices can make the suffering we are experiencing even worse. Which is why it’s so important to learn how to preach to ourselves.

This is exactly what the author of Psalm 42-43 (originally, probably one Psalm) does. Three times in the course of these two chapters, the psalmist declares:

Why are you cast down, O my soul,
    and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
    my salvation and my God.

Martyn Lloyd Jones, the great 20th Century British pastor and medical doctor put it this way:
Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself? Take those thoughts that come to you the moment you wake up in the morning. You have not originated them but they are talking to you, they bring back the problems of yesterday, etc. Somebody is talking. Who is talking to you? Your self is talking to you. Now this man’s treatment [in Psalm 42] was this: instead of allowing this self to talk to him, he starts talking to himself. “Why art thou cast down, O my soul?” he asks. His soul had been depressing him, crushing him. So he stands up and says, “Self, listen for moment, I will speak to you.

If we are going to endure suffering in this life, we have to learn to preach to ourselves. Throughout the content of Psalm 42 and 43, the psalmist essentially preaches two things to himself.

First, he tells himself to hope in God’s salvation. In the chorus of the Psalm quoted above, he asks himself why he is downcast. And then he tells himself to hope in God’s salvation. Many times, you and I are downcast because we have placed our ultimate hopes in someone or something other than God. We hope for a relationship, job advancement, lake house or new car to save us. The first step in preaching to yourself when life is hard is to examine your heart and ask: what am I hoping in? And then, boldly preaching to yourself: Hope in God (not ____ )!

Second, he tells himself to rejoice in God’s love. Right in the middle of the two chapters is Psalm 42:8:

By day the Lord commands his steadfast love,
    and at night his song is with me,
    a prayer to the God of my life.

In the middle of the psalmist’s depression, we get this outburst of hope. He preaches to himself that the LORD (Yahweh) – the personal, covenant-keeping God of redemptive history – commands his steadfast love (Hebrew chesed) or unconditional, never-giving up love. The psalmist has turned this steadfast love into a song that he prays to God at night.

The people in the Old Testament knew that God had a never-giving up love for his people, but they didn’t know how that was possible. They couldn’t fully see how a holy God could offer unfailing love to a sinful people. But we know. Because we have seen Jesus. Paul tells us in Romans 5:8, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” We can know the love of God is unfailing because we can see the love of God not letting go, even allowing Christ to go to the cross to die.

Because we are sinners, we deserve to be cast away from God. But Jesus came and lived the life we couldn’t’ live, died the death we deserved to die and rose again proving he conquered sin, Satan and death. When we turn to him in repentance and belief we know his love and we see that he will never let us go. That allows us to rejoice in his love, even when life is hard.

So if you’re going through a dark time or a spiritual drought, learn the art of preaching to yourself. Preach to yourself, “Self – hope in God’s salvation” and “Self – rejoice in God’s love.”
Join us on Sunday at Christ Fellowship as we continue to look at the Psalms and see how they teach us to praise God for who He is, cry to God when life is hard and thank God when life is good. You can listen to previous sermons in the Psalms (including the one on Psalms 42-43) here.

Have you ever been in a church service and wondered, “Why did they sing this song and not that song?” Or maybe you’ve wondered, “Why did they do this in the gathering but not that?” At Christ Fellowship, we hope to be both intentional and biblical, so here are our 10 Guiding Principles for Worship (aka – why we do this and not that):

1. Gospel-Centered (Isaiah 6): The flow of our worship gatherings should serve as a retelling of the gospel with the major themes of praise, renewal, proclamation and response. At the heart of the gospel is the person and work of Jesus Christ. Therefore, gospel centered worship does not just tell us facts about Jesus but draws us to him through the work accomplished by him. This is why we start with a Call to Worship; God calls us to praise Him. It is why we preach through books of the Bible; because the books of the Bible tell the gospel better than our sermon series could. It is why we have a Prayer of Confession; we stand guilty before Him. It is why we take the Lord’s Supper every week; this is the most visual display of the gospel we have.

2. God Directed (Psalm 149, 150, 2 Corinthians 13:14): Our worship is to be intentionally and consciously directed toward our Triune God. We seek to worship God the Father through Jesus Christ the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. This is why we tend to pick songs that highlight God’s attributes more than our feelings.

3. Understandable (I Corinthians 14:23-25): Both Christians and non-Christians in attendance should be able to understand what is being communicated in the worship gathering. The content should not be too vague that it leaves people wondering what a specific element of the gathering meant. This is why we don’t do skits or interpretative dancing; meaning can be lost in these at times.

4. Congregationally Edifying (1 Corinthians 14:26, Romans 14:19, 1 Thessalonians 5:11): All the elements of the worship gathering should come together to build up the congregation in their love for God and one another. This is why we don’t sing songs that show off the vocal talent of the worship leader but render congregation unable to sing along with the worship leader.

 5. Scripturally Saturated (2 Tim 2:15, Gal 1:8, Colossians 3:16): We desire the content of our gatherings to be saturated with Scripture because we cannot be saved and sanctified without the Word of God. This leads us to present God’s attributes and actions in ways that are consistent with Scriptural teaching. This is why we have a Scriptural Call to Worship and Benediction. This is why we preach through books of the Bible.

6. Reverent and Personal (Revelation 5): Because God is transcendent (beyond us), our worship gatherings should feel reverent. Because God is immanent (near us) through Jesus Christ, our worship gatherings should feel personal. This is why our prayers, songs and sermon illustrations try to aim for both of these rather than one or the other.

7. Ancient and Modern (Hebrews 11, Psalm 96:1): Worship gatherings should both remind us that we belong to a long line of Christians and celebrate God’s work in our current culture and context. This is why we choose songs that are both very young and very old. This is also why we recite creeds; they remind us we aren’t the first generation of Christians to think of these things.

8. Participatory (1 Corinthians 14:26, Ephesians 4:7-13, Colossians 3:16, 1 Peter 2:9): Every believer is indwelt with the Holy Spirit and therefore has a contribution to make to the edification of the body. This doctrine (the priesthood of all believers) teaches us to minimize the traditional difference between “clergy” and “laity” by creating space for members of our congregation in various elements. This is why we have members of our church (not just the pastors) involved in the Call to Worship, Prayer of Confession, Prayer of Intercession, Preaching, and Benediction.

9. Undistractingly Excellent (Psalm 19): God is excellent in his person and work. Our worship gatherings should exhibit undistracting excellence; all the elements should be executed in such a way that they exhibit the highest quality without drawing attention to themselves, but instead to the God they point to. This is why we don’t use the gym florescent lights but we also don’t use a fog machine and strobe lights.

10. Familiar and Varied (Psalm 96:1, Acts 2:42): In order to ensure that we actively engage with God as we gather, our worship gatherings must not be foreign (so that we feel out of place), but neither can they be monotonous/routine (so that our minds, hearts, and spirits experience the gatherings as though automated). This is why we change the order and creeds from time to time, but don’t change it on a weekly basis.

Planning a worship gathering is anything but simple, but with these 10 principles, we hope it is intentional, biblical and helpful to those who attend.

This Sunday, millions of Christians from around the globe will gather to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. Christians will meet to worship a man they believe was crucified under Roman rule and literally rose from the dead three days later. Maybe you feel that is far-fetched. Maybe you think the idea of a man rising from the dead is about as ridiculous of a concept as you’ve ever heard. Maybe you feel Christianity is for the weak – for those who just can’t stomach the idea of death being the end. You may have a lot of doubts about the resurrection and the entire Christian message, but I’d like to give you three reasons to doubt your doubts this Easter.

1. The accounts of Jesus’ resurrection were written too early to be made up. Myths take generations to form, and generations more to grow. Myths take time to develop because the actual eyewitnesses of the event have to die first! That way, the myth can’t be refuted. But the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection were all written while many eyewitnesses of the resurrection were still around. Jesus was probably crucified around 33 AD. Matthew probably wrote his gospel in the 50s or 60s, Mark in the 50s, Luke in the early 60s and John in the 70s. Many of the gospel writers even mention names of eye witnesses, as if to say, “Go talk to them, they’ll tell you.” They didn’t have the luxury of making stories up (especially about the resurrection). There were too many people still alive that could refute it.

2. The accounts of Jesus’ resurrection were too countercultural to be made up. In all of the gospel accounts women are the first ones to see the empty tomb. They share the news of the resurrection first. This may not sound like a big deal to our modern Western ears, but it was scandalous to this first century Jewish audience. A woman’s testimony wasn’t even valid in court. In other words, if you were going to make up a story about someone rising from the dead in first century Palestine, you would not have women be the first witnesses. That would hurt your credibility, not help. The only logical reason women are included in the story is because it really happened.

3. The accounts of Jesus’ resurrection were too unhelpful to be made up. Before Jesus rose, he was crucified. And when he was crucified, his disciples scattered. Some people make the claim that the early disciples made up the resurrection to gain power and influence. If that were the case, why did they include so many of their flaws in the gospel accounts? The disciples are constantly misunderstanding Jesus. They constantly display lack of faith. During the crucifixion, Peter (who would become one of the main leaders in the early Church) denies Jesus three times. If you were making up a resurrection, you would make sure to make yourself look better than that. Furthermore, almost all of Jesus’ original disciples would be killed for their belief that Jesus was God’s Son who rose from the dead. Their message did not gain them political power or wealth. The only logical reason the disciples would write about their mistakes in the gospels and go to their deaths testifying to the empty tomb was that it actually was empty.

In the decades before Jesus was born, around a dozen men claimed to be the Messiah. Many gained a popular following and then were crucified. And their movement stopped. But 2,000 years later, we’re still talking about Jesus’ empty tomb. If you doubt, maybe it’s time to doubt your doubts.

And if you’re a doubter, we started this church for people like you. Come and talk about your doubts with us as we talk about why we believe the tomb really was empty. We’d be especially happy to see you this Sunday, on Easter.

We are reading through Alvin Reid’s book Sharing Jesus [Without Freaking Out] in our community groups during the month of March. Dr. Reid was my evangelism professor at Southeastern, and if anyone is an evangelism machine, it is him. I love the title though, because a lot of us are freaked out by the idea of sharing our faith. I’m praying that this book will help all of us share Jesus the way we were born to do it.

On pages 8-10 in the first chapter Dr. Reid talks about four reasons we struggle with sharing the gospel:

1. We tend to connect sharing our faith with sharing a set gospel presentation. We tend to associate presentations with public speaking. And we are terrified of public speaking!
2. Most of the people who teach evangelism are aggressive, type-A people. However, most people who learn evangelism aren’t. 
3. Many new Christians who were sharing about Jesus took an evangelism class, heard they were doing it wrong and got scared.
4. Most Christians spend most of their time with other Christians.

But there is good news! Sharing Jesus isn’t about memorizing a set presentation and giving a public speech, it’s about having gospel conversations with your neighbors, co-workers, friends and family. One great way to begin is by understanding how the gospel speaks to our cultural narratives. Dr. Reid gets into this on pages 26 and 27 in chapter two. He says that there are three popular plot lines in Hollywood:

1. Man falls into a hole - the main character falls into a predicament, can’t save himself and is ultimately saved by a rescuer. An example would be The Avengers.
2. Boy meets girl - the classic romance where a guy meets a girl, overcomes obstacles to woo her, finally does and lives happily ever after. An example would be The Proposal. 
3. Rags to riches - the main character grows up in poverty and is eventually rescued into great riches. An example would be Cinderella. 

Our culture loves these stories, and they all point back to The Story.

We have fallen in a hole. The Bible calls it sin. And this leads to all kinds of brokenness in life that is beyond our ability to fix. Life often is ‘rags’ and not ‘riches.’ We know death, anxiety, worry, betrayal. But Christ has come! At his cross and resurrection he has defeated sin, death and Satan and has set believers free. Not only has he rescued us from the forms of brokenness we can see right in front of us, Jesus has set us free from our greatest brokenness - being under God’s judgment.

We love romance because it points to our desire to be fully known and intimately loved. The Bible often refers to God as the Groom and His people as the Bride. God has overcome obstacles - He’s moved Heaven and Earth to woo His faithless bride back through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He knows us better than we know ourselves, but He still loves us!
The gospel speaks to the deep desires of the human heart. We just have to spend enough time listening to people to pick up on those desires, and then pray and ask God to give us boldness to speak about how Jesus fulfills them. Not a presentation, just a conversation!