Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, Awesome LIFE Group! I hope each of your respective Christmas days were wonderful with blessings as you spend time with your friends and families. I wanted to post especially today for a lot of reasons, but first:

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Hebrews 8

All this talk about Melchizedek comes to a point at Hebrews 8: Jesus is our High Priest. He does not follow the rules set up by men (ie the Levitical priests), but fulfills a role with "better promises" (verse 6) in the "true tabernacle" (verse 2). With Jesus, there is a new covenant, a new promise, a new contract - God promises that he will not remember our sins, that we will be his people, that he will be our God!

I love the image of the church, the label on the church that we are the bride, Christ is the groom. God calls us his people not in the sense necessarily that he owns us, that we are his property like slaves, but we are his people, like a man calls someone his bride (and likewise, the church calls Christ the groom). That's unleashing a whole other discussion, but I'll end with this:

God gives us that new promise. What an appropriate time for this chapter! Jesus came to earth as a real, physical, tangible representation of that promise - that we could know God and be in relationship with him. Amazing. I hope you can appreciate that today.

A song to share with you all: Welcome to our world by Chris Rice. It's an old one, but it's one that's touched me for years, and I hope it'll do the same for you.

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Awakening

I was at one of the UIC services one Sunday, the one where Pastor Seth came to speak. It was a crazy moment - he didn't bring up his laptop! Instead, he just took out his Bible, opened up to a passage, and just started sharing what he thought God wanted him to share.

In the midst of his sermon, he started sharing something - he felt like the church at UIC needed to pray. To really come earnestly before God and seek Him in dependence. He threw out a number - 21 days.

21 days.

It wasn't until a few weeks later that Pastor Seth shared about Awakening. It's a movement started by one of the bigger churches in America, where they take 21 days every January to start the year in prayer. It spread, and Pastor Seth had a chance to take part in it. How could he not? Preaching on what he did, throwing out the number that he did, how could our church not take part in this?

Something big is going to happen. I'm not sure what it is, but when God moves, you move with Him, even if you're not sure what it is. And we need to pray. We, as a LIFE group, need to pray. We, as a church, need to pray.

I want this LIFE group to begin now in preparation for these 3 weeks of prayer. If we just decide to give up something when it starts, then we'll be legalistic about it - "Oh, I can't eat because I have to." Instead, what I'm hoping is we come to the point where we all can say, "God, we're giving this up because we want you more than we want this."

As funny as it sounds, it's a way of saying, "God, I want you more than I want chicken shack." And for me, being home, I really want chicken shack. But man, oh man, if we see a thing of God happen... how incredible!

I hope that we can all reflect these next few weeks on what the year has brought us, and where we are now. And I want to encourage everyone to bring prayer requests! Yes, this is a time for our church, but this is a time to bring any request to God - prayers for ourselves and maybe our growth, prayers for our LIFE group, prayers for our friends that are in need, prayers for our campus, prayers for our church...

It's an exciting time coming. But I hope we can all prepare for it so we can get the most out of our time of prayer together. We will give more direction as a group in the coming weeks, but please, I'm asking you to reflect on this past year, look forward to the year ahead, and ask God for blessings in everything that happens this year.

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Blog

A more personal announcement: the blog designs are done! Head over there to see them in all their glory and splendor -

Evanston
Downtown

Some things I wanted to bring your attention to:

- Missions Projects : Sign ups are located on the blogs for both summer and spring projects. Please consider these and talk with your parents about them. I want to challenge some of you especially about the summer. Steps of faith require action, and for some of you, the next step of faith would be to participate this summer in our inner-city projects. Prayerfully consider this.

- Winter Retreat : I don't have to sell this as much, but the link is on the blog as well. Last year was pretty awesome, undergrad retreat was pretty awesome, and this retreat is gonna be pretty awesome. And this is one of the last times we'll have to hear Pastor Seth share from his heart, especially with the Jakarta plant coming soon. Sign up soon, with your mounds of Christmas money I know some of you got for Christmas ;)

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That's all I have for now. Merry Christmas again, get your sleep in before winter quarter starts up, be good to your parents, and I'll see you in a week and a half =)

-Josh