Today is my birthday. To tell you the truth I was sad to see this one come. Since I was born on a 7 it became my favorite number and I always enjoyed any age that had a 7 in it. Is that weird? I think that 27 is my favorite age I have ever been. I was thinking last night that 77 might be cooler but by then I might be too crazy to really enjoy it fully. But then again, I might be just the right amount of crazy to enjoy it ALOT. You never know.

My wife has this habit of taking the Psalm for her age and making it the anthem of her prayer life that year. I tried it last year and really liked it. One year ago today I woke up and immediately read and latched onto Psalm 27:1 which says, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; Of whom shall I be afraid?” Last night at 11:50pm I read the psalm again in the closing moments of my 27th year and reflected on the last 365 days. Here are some of the highlights:

Launching Skull Church
Skull Church is special to me. God gave me the idea for it several years ago and it has been a thrill to see it come to life. In the same way that when I am road-biking and draft behind another rider and it gets easier, Skull Church feels like a sort of spiritual slipstream, it fits the way I feel God has called & equipped me to minister like a hand in a glove.

The 20th anniversary Harvest Crusade at Angels Stadium
I have had the chance to be a part of a lot of Harvest Crusades but nothing can really compare to this weekend–a capacity crowd, thousands responded to the invitation, Chris Tomlin singing during a fireworks show, and Greg reached the amazing milestone of getting to share the gospel with 4 million people at crusades that weekend. Off the charts cool.

Fresh Life Radio
We went on the air this past year and it has been killer to have a nonstop source of killer Bible teaching and epic music 24/7 in the Flathead Valley and everywhere else streaming on the web. Plus, listening to Fresh Life Radio is 67 percent more fun than high-fiving a goat.
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When I used to work in a restaurant I hated St. Patrick’s day. I have very distinct (and unpleasant) memories of mopping up beer that had been dyed green and thrown up on the floor of the bar area. But getting pinched for not wearin green and throwing back toxic amounts of Guinness are a far cry from anything resembling a head nod to the life of the historical St. Patrick.

He was a lot more like the Apostle Paul than a leprechaun. He was a pastor/missionary with a passion to make Jesus famous. One historian wrote, “He found Ireland heathen and left it Christian.” In his lifetime He planted hundreds of churches, and baptized over a hundred thousand people. He loved God’s Word and quoted it extensively in his writings.

Legend has it that he used the iconic three-leaf clover to explain the mystery of the trinity to those he ministered to. And even though the whole banishing snakes off the island thing probably isn’t true I am comforted by the idea of it. I am with Indiana Jones–I hate snakes!

A much better celebration of his life would be to share your faith with someone who doesn’t know Christ! And I am stoked to preach a gospel message at Skull Church on St. Patrick’s day because his life was all about the gospel. (And as an added bonus I won’t smell like beer puke at the end of the night!) And don’t get sideways with the whole “saint” thing, in God’s eyes all his kids are saints! (Ephesians 2:19)

For more reading on the life of this killer guy–check out this article.

The meaning of life is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. Ok, but how do you do that?

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.

In Colossians 3 Paul describes the new clothes that we are to wear as new creatures in Christ. The old rags of sin and lust and flesh are to be put off and instead we are to daily be clothed in the righteousness of Christ. He gives a list of our new duds in vs. 12-14 and included is something called tender mercies–I dig the King James which simply says, “put on bowels of mercies.” This seems strange to us because we connect love with the heart but the Hebrews identified emotions with the part of the body where they are actually felt–in the abdomen. (Highly charged emotions trigger sensations in the pit of our stomachs.) What Paul is saying is that we should live in relation to the suffering of those around us with sympathy and compassion, and we should allow those emotions to move us to action.

Living green and doing philanthropic relief work today is mainstream (as it should be) even trendy, but it was extremely countercultural at the time when Paul fired off this old school e-mail to the Christians in Colossae. Commenting on this verse R. Kent Hughes said, “The ancient world, apart from Biblical revelation, was merciless. The maimed and sickly and aged were discarded: the mentally ill were subjected to inhumanities. But Christianity brought compassion, and it still does. The gospel brings with it sympathy and tenderness of heart. That is one of its great glories!”

This truth came to life this past week as the earthquake that devastated Haiti made us sick to our stomachs with God-given compassion. It has been so heartbreaking to see the pictures and stories coming from what is already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. There is no way I can even fathom what they are experiencing. And yet I have been so inspired to see God’s people mobilize and respond to the pain. The next day after the earthquake I felt lead to take up an offering at Skull Church to support the BGEA rapid response teams that were already en route with relief materials and chaplains who would bring the gospel and I was blown away by the generosity that was shown that night.

I have also been super blessed by the way James McDonald and Mark Driscoll have been trying to rally the church in America to specifically help the church in Haiti rebuild. They launched a website called, churcheshelpingchurches.com and the Lord opened doors for them to go down there personally this week (I have been following their trip on twitter here and here and they are on their way home now)  Mark described it as being in hell. They took a film and photography team with them so that they can show us how critical it is that we help our brothers and sisters in Haiti out.  I love what they are doing and encourage you to check it out and pray about supporting this ministry.

That’s what Paul tells us in 1 Thessalonians 5:16 when he says, “Rejoice always.” That is certainly a tall order. In my life, melancholy emotions are a recurring reality and I know that I am not the only one. I have been relieved to hear of many men and women of God ranging from Elijah the prophet, to Spurgeon the preacher who dealt with gloom. I recently read that Billy Graham’s family nicknamed him Puddleglum. Puddleglum is a dour character from C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia (he is not a dwarf as I said in my message this weekend but rather a Marsh-wiggle, which is some sort of amphibious creature) who always expects the worse. That is a strange nickname for someone like Billy Graham who has been a constant beacon of hope and optimism to the world for many decades. His family knew that though he trusted the Lord he also struggled with pessimism and skepticism like many of us do. But God calls us to fight those feelings and rejoice anyways.

Now when Paul tells us that, he isn’t saying we need to always be happy (that’s not realistic) or that we need go around singing songs from Mary Poppins all the time (that would be super annoying.) But what he is saying is that we should never stop being full of joy. Joy is a supernatural fruit of the Spirit that enables us to delight in God’s goodness no matter what we are going through. Joy operates independently from circumstances. It doesn’t require us to be ordering happy meals in order to for it to function. Joy goes deeper than that. In fact, even when we are suffering we can rejoice, remembering that God uses trials to make us more like Him. Paul’s life attests to this fact, and his great book on joy, the epistle to the Philippians, was written from a Roman jail cell. So whether you are a Tigger or an Eeyore by nature you can rejoice. Psalm 68:19 says, “Blessed be the Lord, who daily loads us with benefits, the God of our salvation!”

To hear a whole message on this click here.