Free Time

“Daily life is so filled with hundreds of choices to either give in to selfish whims or yield to Christ's Spirit...

“How did you spend your free time? Doing what you felt like doing? Or pouring out your life for Him?”

-Leslie Ludy, Wrestling Prayer, p60-61

Hello fellow followers of Christ,

This question and thought has been bouncing around in my mind this week, and it has been really stirring and convicting me:

“How do you spend your free time?”

Is your free time “me time?”

Or do consider each extra moment that you have as an opportunity to bring extra glory to Christ?

I started thinking too, what does it look to change Me-Time to glorifying God time?

One could take free summer, with which we can serve God in many ways: acts of service for our communities, missions trips, Bible studies, street evangelism, among other things.

But what about those free minutes or seconds?

Even our free moments ought to be taken to serve Christ.

How?

By giving our thoughts to Christ.

(2 Corinthians 10:5b)

“...Bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.”

It's pretty difficult to wrap my little mind around that concept.

But Psalm 1 talks about meditation on God's Word, which is amazing. (Dr. Bill Gothard talks in depth about meditation in Achieving Daily Success, which I highly Recommend!)

A very powerful way that we can dedicate our thoughts to Christ.

Here's an interesting perspective that helps me to think of dedicating every second to Christ.

Imaginary Story:

One bright summer afternoon, your family is out and about doing errands and activities, and you just walk into your home as you return from a local Ultimate Frisbee game. You open the door, and to your surprise you find huge stacks of $1 bills, in brick sized bundles, each stacked in gigantic 4 x 4 x 4 feet cube shapes, and each cube according to your estimation, contains about 100,000 bills, all throughout your house.

“Wow!” You say. “What's goin' on here?”

The stacks of money nearly fill up every single room in the house, except for a walkway through each room.

You start walking down the aisles of money, and think to yourself: Is this all for me and my family? I can do so much with all of this money!”

You walk into your bedroom, and see just one cube of money.

Interesting. You think to yourself, all the other rooms are filled with cubes of money. I wonder why this one only has one cube.

To your shock, you see one bundle on top of the cube, where the dollar bills are literally evaporating into thin air.

“What?!” You exclaim in amazement, as you slowly and cautiously walk forward.

As you observe with a closer view, and pick up a bundle, you see and feel one bill at a time disappearing every second.

You find a note on top of a nearby stack which says:

Dear [insert your name here],

Each dollar bill represents 1 second of your life.

Don't ever forget

That your time on earth is limited.
Use each second wisely.

Love,

God

How do you spend each free second?

Godly Perspective

We are each given at most 3,153,600,000 seconds. (Pretty conservative... because that is if we live to be 100 years old)

I've already spend about 600 million of those (at most, most likely) 3 billion seconds, at 19 years old.

Crazy.

Imagine all the things you could do with $3,153,600,000.

Probably too much for us to even comprehend.

Now think about this...

Each second can be thought of as more valuable than a dollar,

Because each second can be invested in eternal treasure in heaven.

Is there anything in your life that you should give up,

In order to invest in things that glorify Christ?

Let's take every extra moment to meditate on the awesome goodness of God,

To say a prayer of thanksgiving for all the blessings He's placed in our lives,

To pray the requests of our brothers and sisters in Christ,

To earnestly ask God to save the lost,

And let's take our free time and do something that Jesus would be proud of!

God bless you all this week!

Love in Christ,

Landon

Psalm 90:12

“So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”

No Excuse

“All scripture is given by inspiration of God”

Paul's Second Epistle to Timothy

(II Timothy 3:16)

Dear followers of Christ,

I don't know if you all realize this, but....

We are SO blessed to be a part of the body of Christ!

The more that I evangelize to people, the more thankful I am for Christian fellowship.

When you're out there on the battlefield, sharing truth that can impact people's souls,

A lot of things just seem to shrink in value.

In the book“The Bravehearted Gospel,” Eric Ludy talks about the Canon tested word of God.

I had never even heard exactly how books of the Bible were added on to the 5 books of Moses. I had always wondered about that, but it is just amazing to hear the process that those people went through to make sure that the things which were being added, actually were the Word of God.

Now, not only do I know for sure that all scripture is given by the inspiration of God,

but I know HOW I can know that to be true, and WHY no other religion can say the same thing.

Powerful stuff!

Literally, we can come up to anyone, anywhere, with any background, and have complete confidence that what we as Christians have is completely true.

While we should be very thankful to have this information, and spend more time studying it, some people get so focused on winning arguments, that they forget or stray away from the main thing.

The main purpose for studying Biblical Canon, is to be able to tell more people about God.

What is scary about this information, is that people don't even know about this. So there are some people who have just been raised to believe a certain thing a certain way, and they are just lacking the correct information to really believe in Christianity.

When you study Biblical Canon, it completely takes away every excuse a person could have to not share the gospel of Christ with anyone.

I encourage you all to study that! It's at the end of the book in The Bravehearted Gospel.

It never ceases to amaze me, how SO many people are open to talking about spiritual things.

Remember, even though people don't typically talk about death and eternity,

EVERYONE thinks about it at least occasionally!

Sometimes they are just waiting for you and me to bring up the topic.

Then we can share the truth of God's amazing, awesome love.
Remember, it's not us that saves people.
Jesus saves people!

We just obey God and share the truth of the gospel in love, and then pray He saves them.

Let's go out and make sure we share Jesus' love with others!

God bless you all this week!

Love in Christ,

Landon

Do you have an excuse for not sharing Christ?

Project 100 Update

After devoting more prayer and thought toward this idea,

As well as taking wise counsel from my dad,

We decided that Project 100 is something that is best to not be taken while on our vacation.

Project 100 Highlights will be delayed until May 2,

Unless something changes before then.

Fact

“But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear:”

-1 Peter 3:15

Dear Christians,

I hope this information is an encouragement to your belief in like it was to me.

I talk a lot about evangelizing, and sharing the good news of the gospel of Christ.

But are you ready to answer a person if they come up and starts attacking our faith in Jesus?

They may ask you this: “Do you choose to believe the Bible?”

If you're a follower of Christ, hopefully you will say “Of course!”

This is a question that many people are asked in school, at work, or with family and friends.

It's a question that while many of us say: “Of course,”

Most Christians don't even know why we do.

So that's the next question they ask:

“Why do you choose to believe the Bible?”

“Hmm.” You think. “Good question.”

Well before I give the answer that I've learned to that question, I'd like to explain WHY it's an important question.

It's important, because as Dr. Dwight Fredrickson explained on our Sunday service, we Christians have Feeling, Faith and Fact.

When our feelings fall, our faith is more inclined to fall.

Fact is what picks up our faith, and faith picks up our feelings.

So by having some facts to fall back on, we are able to know for sure that what we believe is true.

In order to present the gospel, you don't need to have this answer memorized.

But just ask yourself, am “Ready to defend the reason for the hope that's in me?”

That question, can increase someone's faith tremendously,

Or in some very sad cases, young people are asked this question at school, and instead of being ready to answer, they say.... “Ummmm.... I dunno. Never thought about that!”

A few years back, I heard a sermon by Dr. Voddie Baucham, called “Why I Choose To Believe the Bible.”

I highly recommend that you all listen to that!

According to Dr. Baucham, most people answer with one of two responses:

Either 1. I believe the Bible... because my parents taught me.

Or 2. I believe the Bible... because I tried it, and it worked for me.

Dr. Baucham says that we shouldn't ever use those are our answer, because every person involved in any religious belief can say the same thing about whatever they believe.

“What? Well then what else can I say?” Is what I was thinking a couple years ago when I was listening to that sermon.

I'm thankful for Dr. Baucham explaining a passage of Scripture that can answer that question, and also sharing exactly what he says.

2 Peter 1:16-21

^“For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount.

We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts: Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”

Basically, Dr. Baucham summarized that passage of Scripture into one phrase. Word for word, this is what he says:

“I choose to believe the Bible because it is a reliable collection of historical documents,

written by eyewitnesses during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses.  

They report supernatural events that took place in fulfillment of specific prophecies,

and they claim to be divine rather than human in origin.”

It's an amazing response that should be studied a bit more than the depth of what I am going to talk about now.

But I am so encouraged to know what we have isn't only Faith and Feeling.

It's Fact.

Thousands of years of history and thousands of detailed prophecies point every “scientific” or “facts” person, (or anyone for that matter) toward Jesus Christ as Lord.

Why do YOU choose to believe the Bible?

Story:

Upon pondering the statistic that such a small percentage of people even know why they believe what they believe, I decided to take action.

I decided to experiment.
At the time, I was attending Kishwaukee Community College. So for every student that I talked to, I simply asked them their beliefs about eternity, and asked “WHY do you believe that?”

Most of the people were Catholic, and Christian, and few said they were atheist. About a third each.

I talked to a few people who were Muslim, or who said “I don't want to talk about it,” or “I don't really care.”

Interestingly, the reason for about 95% of those people's beliefs was:

“That's how I was raised.”

There are 2 things that this discovery did for me.

1. It made me realize the power of the leadership, good, bad, or absence of.
2. It also made me realize that our generation is being brainwashed by the world, and needs to hear the gospel of Christ, and be ready to defend the faith.

Recommendation: Why I Choose To Believe The Bible, Dr. Voddie Baucham http://www.sermonaudio.com/playpopup.asp?SID=530914253

Project 100

I'm going to Florida now, and I'd appreciate your prayers as I share tracts and start a conversation with to 100 people in 1 day, starting off by asking the 1 question of: “What does Easter mean to you?” And then transitioning to the gospel.

Lord willing, I will be able to video tape all the people and post some highlights.

Most importantly, my goal with “Project 100” is to honor and glorify God through sharing the gospel, to encourage other believers, and also to personally draw closer to God. I pray that the hearts of these people will be open to the gospel, and for boldness to proclaim the gospel unashamed.

The Lord bless you all this week!

Love in Christ,

Landon

Hallelujah!

“Greater love hath no man than this,

that a man lay down his life for his friends.

Ye are my friends,

if ye do whatsoever I command you.”

- John 15:13 -14

Dear Christians,

The purpose of this post to be in solemn reflection on what exactly took place roughly 1,979 years ago.

1,979 years ago something happened that changed the world forever.

It was in the year 33 A.D.

One man literally shook the face of the world.

His birth split the calendar into what we know as BC and AD.

This man was 33 years old, when He was sentenced to death.

He was falsely accused and tortured.

He was killed.
His name was Jesus.

He was God's only Son. (John 3:16)

He was wounded for our transgressions, (Is. 53:5)

He was bruised for our iniquities

He was separated from presence and approval of God,

He bore the full weight of the sin of the WHOLE world.

Instead of you and me being punished for breaking God's law,

Jesus took that punishment.

He payed the fine.

For you.

For me.

That is real love.

The story gets better.

He rose from the dead,
And ascended to heaven.
He's alive with His Father in heaven.

And now we can be made alive in Him!
How?
If you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, you will be saved. (Acts 16:31)

After we have the Son, we can have the assurance that we will spend eternity with Him! (1 John 5:11-12)

Hallelujah! (Listen to “Christ Arose,” by Robert Lowry)

God is awesome!

Amen?

Amen!

And Can It Be, by Charles Wesley, really conveys this message well. It's my personal favorite hymn. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMCOyY0Rlus

Jesus said “You're my friends, if you obey whatever I command you.”
So let's make sure we're friends of the Savior of the world.

Let's help others make sure they're friends of Him too!

God bless you all this week!
May He bless you above what you could ask or think! :)

Love in Christ,

Landon

He is Risen!

Challenge: Read The Bravehearted Gospel, by Eric Ludy.

An incredible book written by an godly man. Extremely challenging, inspiring, and encouraging. It will change the way you view the church as it is today, and show how our world has watered down the gospel so much, and watered down the way most Christians do everything. It's a call to action down the Bravehearted road. I challenge you to read it, and let me know what you think of it!

Special Announcement: Project 100 Coming Soon. 100 People. 1 Question. 1 Day. Details To Be Announced Next Week.