hope is in the air...

so, i got a phone call here at the DO this morning, from a dear brother in Christ. this guy's faith is always an inspiration to me, and i'm excited that God has called him to be a pastor. i hope that those in the church he's been called to are willing to change their hearts and turn them toward Jesus. anyway, i had felt led to write a letter to him and his wife, among other things, asking them to pray for the churches in this district. at our last leadership team meeting, the CYOM team challenged the rest of the team to take time on Tuesday mornings (or at some time) to seek God's face in prayer for the churches we serve.

several churches have responded to my mailings with a "we have no children or youth, so please stop wasting your postage." this had been very disheartening to me. it's like these churches are devoid of young people and they're okay with that. or at the least, are not even willing to let God move and be His instruments for reaching out to kids and youth. so we came to the realization that we really needed to pray. David Baker shared that he believes we've been trying to unlock Kingdom doors with human keys. throwing out another program or book or system is not going to change anything if our hearts remain selfish and far from God. so we're committing to, and asking for prayer.

so back to the beginning. i'm talking to this guy, and he is flipping through Romans. there's a verse he wants to read to me. and when he found it, it really hit home. it's in Romans chapter 4. i'm not sure what translation he used, but i would like to share it with you in The Message.

some background: Paul is writing his letter to the Christians in Rome. the book of Romans is pretty much a step-by-step explanation of the Christian faith. Paul looks at the questions of "What's God doing, anyway?" and "What does the death and resurrection of Jesus mean?" it's a great book for new followers of Jesus to read. now, in chapter 4, he talks about Abraham, the father of the Jewish nation. it was with Abraham that God first made His covenant about a great nation of Chosen people. Abraham was the guy who God called to take his son (Isaac) up a mountain to sacrifice on an altar, then at the last second, God called him to put down his knife and sacrifice a ram instead. God tested Abraham's faith lots of times, and Abraham did indeed have his faith in God.

so here, in Romans 4, it says this:

So how do we fit what we know of Abraham, our first father in the faith, into this new way of looking at things? If Abraham, by what he did for God, got God to approve him, he could certainly have taken credit for it. But the story we're given is a God-story, not an Abraham-story. What we read in Scripture is, "Abraham entered into what God was doing for him, and that was the turning point. He trusted God to set him right instead of trying to be right on his own."
If you're a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don't call your wages a gift. But if you see that the job is too big for you, that it's something only God can do, and you trust him to do it—you could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked—well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God, by God. Sheer gift. ...
-skip a few-
... This is why the fulfillment of God's promise depends entirely on trusting God and his way, and then simply embracing him and what he does. God's promise arrives as pure gift. That's the only way everyone can be sure to get in on it, those who keep the religious traditions and those who have never heard of them. For Abraham is father of us all. He is not our racial father—that's reading the story backward. He is our faith father.
We call Abraham "father" not because he got God's attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn't that what we've always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, "I set you up as father of many peoples"?
Abraham was first named "father" and then became a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing. When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn't do but on what God said he would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, "You're going to have a big family, Abraham!"
Abraham didn't focus on his own impotence and say, "It's hopeless. This hundred-year-old body could never father a child." Nor did he survey Sarah's decades of infertility and give up. He didn't tiptoe around God's promise asking cautiously skeptical questions. He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God, sure that God would make good on what he had said. That's why it is said, "Abraham was declared fit before God by trusting God to set him right." But it's not just Abraham; it's also us! The same thing gets said about us when we embrace and believe the One who brought Jesus to life when the conditions were equally hopeless. The sacrificed Jesus made us fit for God, set us right with God.

just think about that for a second. even if you couldn't process the whole thing, reread the parts i put in boldface. the guy who shared this with me told me that he's believing God for kids that aren't here yet. when he walks into the sanctuary of his church building (they also have no young people), he envisions kids running around, laughing, praising God. isn't that what we need to do? just trust God? or do we 'live as people who have no hope?'

my challenge to you (if you're still reading!), is to have a risky hope. have a hope that doesn't make sense. hope and trust that God will do what you can't see yet. that He'll piece things together and work everything out to His glory and our good. bless you.

Also, and this is really funny - absolutely NO entries have been received for the essay contest. So really, if one person sends me one by midnight tomorrow, just one simple essay, 250 words, that person will win the gift certificate. Just goes to show that sometimes we miss out on really cool things because we're either not willing or too lazy (or uninformed) to do things. Oh well. At least this venture was a clear "don't do this again!"

INSERT: CONGRATULATIONS TO GERED COLEMAN, A SENIOR AT BERLIN HIGH SCHOOL! For his winning essay, he receives a gift certificate to the Christian Bookstore in the amount of $30.00!

Hey! I've just been on the tele. Last Sunday, Family Life TV out of Kittanning broadcast an interview that I got to do a little while ago. Pretty exciting! Click to see the Internet version. I feel kind of badly - I had posted an entry a few weeks ago about stewardship, and for some reason, it didn't end up on the blog. So maybe I'll try to rewrite some of that later. Anyway, thanks for reading - I hope to get some interesting topics going 'round. If you have a topic you'd like for me to address, go ahead and e-mail me at: wpadistrictyouth@yahoo.com

And if you're a youth leader, please e-mail me anyway so that I have your address!

Thanks much,
Abby