My favorite was hearing from Alistair Begg last night. He is one awesome Scotsman! His passionate and genuine conviction that the Bible is the actual word of God shows on his face as he speaks and you can’t help but feel like you are almost getting to go back in time and listen to Robert Murray McCheyne who preached, “with eternity stamped upon his brow.” Alistair is also a full on wordsmith and busted out yoda-esque pearls of wisdom like, “even the best of men are men at best.”

Getting to spend time backstage, between sessions, with guys like Alistair is worth more than gold. And you can be sure I worked on getting him to bring his radio show, Truth for life, onto fresh life radio. James MacDonald’s show, Walk in the Word, will be coming on later this year and I hope to hear some sweet scottish preaching soon too.

with Alistair Begg

My message was on David’s time hiding from Saul in the caves (I called it Beverly Caves 90210) and how he had to trust God’s promises even when they seemed super unlikely. I love preaching on David. He was just a punk kid who God used in major ways because he had a special heart. Normally in life having a heart condition disqualifies you from certain things, but it was David’s heart condition that qualified him to be used. Not that he was perfect (far from it) but he was a man after God’s own heart.

I am headed home for skull church and will be prepping my message on the flight–praying for God to move!

In John 15:8 Jesus said, “When you produce much fruit, you are my true disciples. This brings great glory to my Father.”

God is glorified to the max through our fruit production. He is a vinedresser, and so the more fruit we bear the more His fame spreads. But we can’t grow anything on our own, we must abide in Christ and enjoy Him to grow good fruit.

So today the focus should be to remain in Christ so we can bear much fruit and bring glory to God. Everything else is secondary.

Text-msg question about tattoos answered @ Skull Church.

Text-msg question about sex/dating answered @ Skull Church.

Through out the series we will see what the accurate transmission of a genuine faith looks like in different areas like: facing temptation, talking, spending cash and so on. James has been called “the Proverbs of the New Testament” for a reason, he hits on a ton of different subjects and it is all super practical.

I absolutely LOVE the ultra short film that our creative team generated for this series. My hat is off to them at the way they artistically ran with the Hi-Fi concept, both in the vid and with the stage design. you can check out the video here:

The teaching that follows the video is on what the High Fidelity life looks and sounds like in Trials.

Questions like: Should I date this person? Should I buy a mac or a pc? Should I take this job offer? What should I do after high-school? and How can I know if I am hearing from God or it’s just my imagination?
Greg Laurie tackles these relevant subjects head-on in this message that he gave at skull church. Ok, maybe not the computer issue, but that is a no-brainer!

He also explains the gospel in a very easy to understand way so send a link to someone who could benefit from hearing it.

with Greg Laurie and Mark Driscoll

Spending time with him was a pleasure and I was especially impressed by his humility, kindness and genuine love for Jesus. No doubt those qualities are a big part of the the reason God has given him such a mega-platform, including press in the New York Times, and several appearances on ABC’s Nightline. (If you didn’t see the debate he did with Deepak Chopra on the existence of Satan–check it out on YouTube here.)

He is certainly not without his critics (those who are innovative and do much for the Kingdom never seem to be in short supply of criticism–see Luther, Nehemiah, Spurgeon, John the Baptist and others.) And even though we don’t have everything in common, I would say that we have a whole lot more in common than we do not. I definitely view him as a kindred spirit. I am stoked to see what God will do in and through his life and ministry as he continues to make Jesus famous and I hope to stay in communication with him in the future.

On Wednesday at Skull Church, in addition to a special message from Greg Laurie, as a bonus we were joined by Seattle rockband The Myriad. They get tons of play on fresh life radio, have a song on the game Rockband and have even received a good amount of attention from MTV. A few years back we had them at an O2 Experience event and I really dig them. They are super cool guys and musically they are awesome, without a doubt one of my favorites that have played at Skull Church so far–just good clean rock and roll.

After they played Greg gave a great message on how to know the will of God and we saw a number of people respond to the invitation, making professions of faith, at both the Strand and Liberty theatres. I love Greg’s preaching skillz (and his nunchuck skillz* too) he is passionate, easy to listen to, thoroughly Biblical, and hilarious. The next day we flew to SoCal and I spoke at his Bible study in Orange County. I gave a message called Flour Power on the story of Elijah and the Widow of Zarepath from 1 Kings 17 and then promptly ate at in-n-out. Today we spent some time with another super cool pastor who also lives in Seattle but more on that later. The boarding door just closed and I need to make some progress on this weekend’s NUCLEUS message.

*Napoleon Dynamite Reference