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Does your prayer life seem dry lately?

Do you feel a overwhelmed by life?

Are you facing a partcularly challenging trial?

There is nobody who can “recycle” your soul like Jesus when times get tough. Come to God in prayer in the name of Jesus and the power of the Spirit and he will fill you up, give you strength and replenish your reservoir of hope.

In the toughest times in my life God has used recycling prayer to strengthen my soul. It encourages me to know that Jesus relates, not just to my pain, but to my prayers as well. I can’t help but imagine Jesus on a mountainside, in a desertscape or between a pair of olive trees in The Garden of Gethsemane getting his own soul strengthened through prayer.

If you are going through a tough time why not break away to pray? Whatever “thing” you are facing, whether it be internal or external, trial or temptation, satanic attack or divine discipline, God can give you the grace you need to overcome. You just need to ask him for it in prayer.

This week’s podcast may encourage you in this quest. Check it out if you get a chance.

Speaking at Creation is one of those rare speaking venues every preacher dreams of. Tens of thousands attentive, excited and ready-for-what-God’s-going-to-do crowds in a beautiful setting. I’ve never encountered a festival that, not only has the top Christian bands, but puts such a big emphasis on the Word of God. Pastor Harry has done a phenomenal job of finding just the right blend of Worship, the Word and rocking your socks off.

I get the honor of sharing a few times at Creation east and west this year. It should be a lot of fun.

On Thursday at 9:15 am I’ll be speaking a new sermon called “Heaven, Hell and everything in between.” I’m excited to preach this motivational sermon that, I’m praying, will energize the crowd to make a difference on this planet while they can.

On Friday at 9:15 am I’ll be training everyone how to share their faith in a little sermon I call, “Reach out don’t freak out!” Imagine tens of thousands equipped to share their faith with their friends and then unleashed to do it! Pray with me that God does some big, big things as a result.

For the youth leaders I’ll be doing a special training called The X Factor in the Interlinc tent on Thursday. This session will give youth leaders the tools they need to build a youth ministry with, both spiritual and new conversion growth. I can’t wait for youth leaders to get this training!

Please pray for me as I prepare these sermons and start another writing retreat this week! Hope to see you at Creation!

Two days ago Jeremy (7), Kailey (3) and I were going out to take a walk. As we went outside we were greeted with a wonderful sight. The biggest Cumulus Nimbus cloud I think I have ever seen. It was black on the edges and purple in the middle, that’s right purple. I have never seen a more breathtaking cloud in my life.

I told Jeremy, “Now that’s a Jesus cloud.” Jeremy knew what I was talking about. Many a night we had talked about Jesus returning on a great big cloud someday. He immediately started freaking out, “Jesus is coming back! Jesus is coming back!”

“Yeah, I know but…”

Before I could finish he ran toward the screen door and yelled, “Mom, get out here! Jesus is coming back!”

“But son…”

“Look daddy! The cloud is opening up! HE’S COMING! HE’S COMING!”

He grabbed Kailey by the shoulders, looked her squarely in the eyes and proclaimed, “Look at that cloud Kailey! You better get ready! Jesus is coming back right now!”

Before I could intervene she started crying and ran inside. I’m sure neighbors were peering out their windows wondering what kind of hillbilly micro-evangelist I was raising. But, just as I was about to tell Jeremy to keep it down, I remembered that this is the kind of news that should be shouted with utter excitement. The last words of Jesus in the second to the last verse of the Bible say, “Behold I am coming soon!”

This proclamation strikes fear in some (Kailey), embarrassment in others (daddy) but sheer excitement in the hearts the few (Jeremy.)

Lord make me more like my little boy. On second thought, make me more like yours! Father, I can’t wait until he comes back.

Shout it Jeremy! Shout it!

I’m doing a new series on our Dare 2 Share Uncensored Podcasts called Going Green. No, not that kind of green. But I do think that environmentalism concern is a great analogy for taking care of the climate of our soul.

Here are the titles and descriptions of the sermons in this short series.

1. Plant a Tree for Jesus (on Psalm 1 and what takes place when we plant our tree by the rivers of water instead of the world)
2. Jesus Recycles (on the power of prayer to transform our inner life and give us a renewed strength)
3. Conserve Energy (on living in the power of the Spirit of God instead of trying to live the Christian life in our own strength)
4. Pick up your trash (on cleaning up the areas of our lives that are littered with beseting sins and bad habits.)

Anyway, I hope the environmental analogy won’t tick anybody off. Sometimes people are sensitive about this subject. If you happen to be one of those who get angry at this sort of thing just realize I’m using this series as an analogy, nothing else. Please don’t burn my books or waste fuel by getting in your car to drive over to Starbucks to confront me. It will only add to global warming.

Seriously, my hope and prayer is that this series encourages all of us (no matter what our take on the issue of creation care) to make our souls the purest place in all of God’s green earth.

By the way Dare2share Uncensored podcasts are available on dare2share.org as well as itunes. You can download the sermon outlines and use them in small group or Sunday school or wherever. Check them out!

This morning I dropped Jeremy (my seven year old) off at the babysitter’s house and we had a short but funny conversation. I told him, “Hey Jeremy we gotta get you water baptized soon. Now that you’ve trusted in Jesus as your Savior we need to get you to take the next step.” His response cracked me up.

“Yeah daddy. It’s time to get watered up.”

I have never heard it put that way but it made me laugh.

So I have a question for you blog reading believer in Jesus. Have you been water baptized? If you are a Christian it is the first step of obedience that our King calls us to take. While water baptism doesn’t save you it is a crucial step toward spiritual maturity. It is a public proclamation of an inward transformation. It is an opportunity for the community of Christ to rejoice with you, pray for you and invest in you as you grow in the grace and the knowledge of ourLord Jesus.

I never understood Christians who were nonchalant about being water baptized. Jesus commands us to make disciples and “baptize them in the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” That doesn’t sound optional to me.

If you are a dry believer it’s time to get “watered up” for Jesus. Take a cue from Jeremy and jump on in…the water’s fine.

Those of you who read Soul Fuel and want to enter the drawing for the Wii may be looking on this blog for the right place to tell your 48 hour challenge and/or Double Dare stories. Any place is fine but if it helps you can put them right here. Tell me your story of what happened when you took the Double Dare to share Jesus with all your friends.

I can’t wait to hear them!

To be honest I can’t afford to see movies like I used to back in the day. A date night with my wife can be an expensive proposition and not because she has got extravagent tastes (she married me after all) but because of all of the extras:

Dinner before the movie can range from $35-$65 depending on whether we are at Applebees or Outback. The actual movie tickets can cost almost $20 if we go primetime. Popcorn, Drinks, Milk Duds are about $17ish. Add to that babysitting fees and fuel costs and you are spending over $100 for a night at the movies…cha ching!

But over the last two weekends I did something I rarely do. I double dipped on back-to-back opening movie weekends. Last weekend it was Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. This weekend it was Indiana Jones: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I really enjoyed Chronicles. It was a good follow up to the first movie. It had spiritual points that I can use for the Dare 2 Share Invincible conference tour next year. I was tuned in from the opening scene through the final scene. But, and I hesitate to make this declaration, I hated Indiana Jones.

There I said it.

Don’t get me wrong, Harrison Ford did a great job in reprising his role as the combative and compelling archaeologist. Shia LaBeouf did a fine job as a whippersnapper whip snapper in the making. And the villain, Cate Blanchett, was very good at being vey bad. But the real villains in this movie were not the old school Communists of Russia but the lame writers of the movie screenplay. Indy should have hunted them down instead of the Crystal Skull and given them a good shalacking.

Please don’t misinterpret. I am a HUGE Indiana Jones fan. I really wanted this movie to be great. In the first thirty minutes of the movie I thought that it could be. The next thirty minutes made me start to doubt. Doubt turned into resignation over the next 1,800 seconds. The last cringe-inducing, please-don’t-go-there segment made me want to reach through the screen, grab Spielberg by the lapel and ask him, “Why? Why? Why?” The director of E.T. should go home, sit in front of his old school typewriter (the one he typed the screenplay of Jaws with) and bring back a plot worthy of his considerable talents.

If you watched Indiana Jones and liked it then good for you. My wife and I didn’t. Aslan’s roar beats Indy’s whip paws down in our humble opinion.

(Insert cheesy spiritual metaphor here)

God opened a door so wide that if we didn’t walk through it we would have been disobedient to his Spirit. So we walked through it. It is the door to all of Asia. It is the door to world-wide missions and ministry. It is the door into the churches of South Korea.

Dare 2 Share Korea is becoming a reality.

Our good friends Mr. and Mrs. Foley at Seoul USA are leading the charge to make this all happen. Dare 2 Share Korean staff have already been hired and a Dare 2 Share conference is being planned in the near future.

What’s really great is that we have been training our Korean brothers and sisters in the principles we operate by and they are actually going to do the contextualizing and actual training. We are not going to try to pretend we know how to reach Korean teenagers. But what we are going to do is train our Korean fellow Dare 2 Shareites in the “above culture” principles that work with humans in general. Our Asian compadres will contextualize all of these principles and all of our stuff into Korean.

By the way they have had to coin their own term for teenager (since there is not a word for “teenager” in the Korean language). That word is “paranee” (par-ah-knee) which means “blue” or “horizon” or “revolution”. It has to do with the sky, with hope and change on the horizon. These Korean teenagers are the blue generation, who God is going to use to revolutionize everything.

You may be thinking “I thought that South Korea was the Christian capital of Asia?” You’d be right. The churches there are some of the biggest in the world. They are vibrant in prayer and global missions. And they are losing their young as fast as we are in America.

It’s time to raise up an army of on-fire teenagers in Korea and America who will set the pace for revival and transform their culture for Jesus by reaching every teenager they know with the message and mission of Jesus. It’s time to go global, not with Dare 2 Share the organization but with the principles we run by. To take a look at these principles go back and watch our first podcasts under the section “Ministry to the 10th power” section on Dare 2 Share Uncensored.

Pray for our Korean brothers and sisters as they are used of God to launch D2S Korea in a big way for the glory of Jesus!

There I was yesterday walking back and forth in front of Starbucks while blabbing away on my cellphone when I saw them, two high school girls in a parked jeep pointing and laughing at me. At first I thought they could be mocking someone else. But I looked around and there was nobody to mock but me. Even when our eyes met they continued to point and laugh.

It didn’t bother me much. I had gotten used to being laughed at by high school girls…in high school. I just went inside and continued my phone call.

After the day was done I finally realized why those girls were laughing at me. I had my cool Quicksilver shorts on inside out. These are the kinds of shorts that look very inside out when they are inside out. Tags galore, the back side stitching for pockets hanging everywhere should have been two glaring cues to my “can’t dress myself” dilemma. I don’t know how many people I encountered yesterday, but only two had the courage to point and mock and laugh out loud at the over forty guy who was wearing surfer hip clothes inside out.

Maybe I’ll start a trend.

Please pray for Paul Leavitt (the dude who co-writes and directs all things dramatic for the D2S conferences) and myself as we will be writing the drama and skits for the Invincible Tour over the next few days. He has a pretty solid idea for the drama. And hopefully we’ll get the right brainstorming mojo for the skits.

Pray that God pulls together a program that is Biblical, practical and transformational for every student who attends!