Just Walk Across the Room

Tomorrow we will start the discussion on "Just Walk Across the Room" by Bill Hybels. For the next four weeks we will join the rest of the church in looking at this material. I have now had a chance to read the book and am getting excited about this direction.

If I had to summarize the heart of Hybels as expressed in the book, it would be that he loves God and loves people. Although it is book about evangelism, the measure of success is not winning converts but winning relationships. Hybels portrays Jesus' heart for people and meeting them where they are and not just getting them to where you what them to be.

At the same time you get the sense of Hybel's heart for God and wanting everyone to see and experience the fullness of His love for them. This motivates him to look for opportunities to move someone just another step closer to that love.

All disciplines of the Christian faith runthis tension. You do not want to be legalistic by making people DO things. Yet, you know that as they obey God they will experience more fully the love of God for them. Outreach is the same. Philemon verse 6 is great verse that explains this.

Leading our class for the next 4 weeks will be Karan Reavis. She is filled will passion for the Lord which will be contagious as we listen. Below are a three requests I have for these next few weeks.

1. First of all, please come. We are diverging from our normal topics, but this is a chance to trust the leadership that there is something God has for us in this new direction.
2. Please use the time to get to know some of the other people in the church. Our church is filled with saints who love the Lord. These next few weeks will give us a chance to know a few better.
3. Even though we are not talking about parenting, you will be able to make some easy correlations about this topic to raising your children intentionally. Please share any interesting connections with the rest of the class so that we all can learn together.
   

The class will meet whenever the first service gets out in room 227. I am looking forward to see what God has in store in this.

Fall Topic: Sacred Marriage

We hope everyone enjoyed their break. As the heat of summer continues to rise, we are getting close to the starting back point of the POPs class. This fall we will be going through Gary Thomas' book, Sacred Marriage. We will be taking a look at our marriages and how important they to our kids.

We will also be leading a class for Newly Married couples at our home during the same time. This similar class will just focus on the importance of prioritizing marriage early on and will not have childcare. Please let any of your friends who do not have kids know about the class. We are also taking new people for out class, so let the word out. You can lead them to this blog. If you are reading this and not in the class yet, please sign in so we can keep you inform you when we get close to start.

I look forward to getting everyone together again in September.

Shame Off You Recap

Congratulations! We now have no shame. :) We actually went through a lot of material the last few weeks. I have put together a directory of each lesson for your reference in case you want to go back. The link within the title is the blog post related to that week and the notes link is the handouts for the class.

• Shame Off You Introduction
• Chapter 1:   The Power of Words
• Chapter 2:   The Power of Marriage
• Chapter 3:   The Power of Forgiveness
• Chapter 4:   The Power of Confession
• Chapter 5a:   The Power of God’s Voice (notes
• Chapter 5b:   The Power of Celebration
• Chapter 6:   The Power of Mom and Dad
• Chapter 7:   The Power of Boundaries
• Chapter 8:   The Power of Walking With Jesus
• Chapter 9:   How to Change Others
• Chapter 10:   How the Church Tries to Change You
• Chapter 11:   How the Gospel Tries to Change You
• Chapter 12:   How Idols Keep You from Real Change

It has been a great semester. I know I have learned a lot. Let's all take the summer and rest our brains. Try to incorporate some of the things we discussed in class. We will be having some fun events over the summer, so if you have signed up for the RSS feed on the right, you will be updated of them. We will also be sending out an email, but I thought I would encourage the late adopters to sign up for the feed.

Spring Topic: Shame Off You

Starting January 11th, we will start the Parents of Preschoolers class back up. The next topic will be Pastor Alan's book, Shame Off You. This will be a perfect follow up to Shepherding a Child's Heart. Just as Tripp wanted us to focus on the heart issues when addressing our children's behavior, Pastor Alan will take us to the things that form those heart issues. This book is written for the reader's vantage point, but our class will focus the discussion on how to take shame off our children.

The book and other resources are at the Welcome Desk before you enter the sanctuary. The book is $10, the workbook is $15, and the sermons are $50. Feel free to use as much or as little of the resources you want. Just like we have been doing, we will set up the discussion, so even if you have not read you can participate and get resources out of the class.

As another free resource, I found these two recordings of Pastor Alan's Shame Off You Conference at Lighthouse Christian Fellowship in Prosper, Texas.

• Shame Off You Conference: Morning Session (mp3)
• Shame Off You Conference: Afternoon Session (mp3)

Shepherding a Child's Heart Recap

This week we finished our classes on Shepherding a Child's Heart by Tedd Tripp. We spend Sunday discussing the things God has taught us through the discussions, and God has been great in opening our eyes to things He was wanting us to know. We have become aware of the importance of our kid's hearts over their behavior. We have learned that we have been authority by God to parent our children, and that they are under a blessing as they stay under our authority. And, we have started to come to grips with a proper role of disciplining or punishing our children. I heard Pastor Alan say that disciplining is also an opportunity to bless, which I think is what Tripp would also say with three chapter on communication and one on the rod.

I will end with an observation from Sara, which I will paraphrase because I do not remember it word for word. She mentioned that she came to realization that one of the main problems in our nation is people do not know how to be under authority. Parents are not teaching this to their children, and so they do not give it while in school. Finally, when these children grow up they do not know how to give it to their bosses. If there are blessings for us when we are under authority, when a nation of people refuse to be under authority, we are in danger.

If you want to go back to look at what we have talked about, I have listed each of the notes below. You can also select the Shepherding a Child's Heart label to the right to find each of the blog entries for this topic. We will start back up on January 11th with a brand new topic.

Get the class notes

• Introduction to Shepherding a Child's Heart
• The Heart of the Behavior
• Shaping Influences for Children
• Godward Orientation
• You're in Charge
• Unbiblical Parenting Goals
• Unbiblical Parenting Methods
• Parenting Communication part 1
• Parenting Communication part 2
• Disciplining Children
• Parenting Fundamentals
• How to Discipline Toddlers

Goals for the Class

As I was thinking about our assignment for this week to generate goals for parenting our children, I put together my goal for the class. I ran it by Allison to see if she agreed with my assessment of what our goals really are. We have had these goals unwritten in our minds since the beginning, but in appreciation of the class assignment, I guess now was time to put it on paper. Since it affects each of you in the class, we will share it.

We want people to know that marriage and parenting are wonderful and they show us the intensity of God's love for us.

There is an enemy that intends for us to miss every blessing God want us to have.

Fall Topic: Shepherding a Child's Heart

The Parents of Preschoolers will start off this Fall looking at the principles in Shepherding a Child's Heart.

Allison and I read this book together about a year ago right at the time we needed to start thinking about discipline methods. This book is great in helping you move past only focusing on the outward behavior.

"Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart."

1 Samuel 16: 7b

We found this book to be refreshing and think it will provide excellent material to springboard discussion for us this Fall.