He Is Working On Our Behalf!

He is always working on our behalf, so think much more about Him rather than yourself!

“We are always looking inwards and pitying ourselves and being sorry for ourselves, and looking for something to help us. Get rid of that outlook, forget yourself for a moment; the battle is the Lord’s! Salvation is His. It is for the honor of His great and holy Name. But go further and realize that because it is God’s battle this almighty power is being exercised on our behalf even when we do not realize it. Things are being done in this great campaign of which we are not aware. We may perhaps be half-asleep at our post, and we do not realize that the great Captain is planning something with respect to us. We are unconscious of it. We would all be lost were it not for that. He, I say, is exercising this power on our behalf.”

~ Martin Lloyd-Jones, The Christian Soldier

(HT: Of First Importance)

Do Literary Devices Have Their Origin In Christ?

My wife, Stephanie, has posted a very good article on literary devices and how they all have their origin in Jesus.....very interesting. I've copied a teaser from the article below...

"It occurred to me that without Christ, there would be no literary devices with which to tell stories. Jesus IS the ultimate foreshadow, type, figure, simile, metaphor, etc. Every story told in every culture exists because of the ultimate story that has been told."

You can read the whole post by clicking here.

Special Invitation

We are gearing up for our public launch this Sunday, June 21st.

If you live or happen to be in the Memphis area this weekend, please feel free to come and worship with us.

Our service time on Sunday morning is 10.30 am.

We meet at 12100 Highway 64 (right across from Dan West Garden Center).

Please lift New Life Church up before our heavenly and ask His favor upon our people as we gather this Sunday to worship Him!

You can check out New Life Church's website by clicking here or you can click the link just to the left.

If you plan to visit, please shoot us an email or you can let us know by leaving a comment in the 'comment section'.

Thank You!

'UP'

Today I took my two oldest boys to see our very first movie together. Yep, you read correctly, our very first movie. As you can tell I'm not the big screen movie buff, but I tell you, it was a great time hanging out with my boys....just the guys. We don't get to do that much. But I had some brothers in Christ recommend the movie and so we went to see it.

The movie is called 'UP' and it's in 3-D, which is really cool and overall it was a pretty good movie. The movie really uplifts marriage in a big way.

But obviously the best part was hangin' out with my boys with a big jumbo tub of popcorn and of course we washed it all down with good old Diet Coke.

Well I'm about to take the boys to go play their baseball game....it's been a good day and hopefully we'll be able to get a good game of baseball in tonight....Lord willing it doesn't rain, again!

New Life Church Is Now Online

Today we launched our website to Eads and to the world. As of right now we only have our front page online, but the rest will be coming very soon.

Please spread the word that New Life Church is online and soon we'll be an open book for everyone to read what we are all about!

Check us out at www.nlceads.org

Thanks!

Neighborhood Blitz...

Today we began inviting Eads to worship with the New Life Church family. We were able to meet many people today and invite them to our first ever public celebration service on June 21st.

Please pray with us that God will begin to use us as the light of the world. A city on a hill. To draw all kinds of people to Himself and for Himself.

Thank you for your many prayers!

For All Our Laboring And Striving....

Colossians 1.29

"And for this purpose also I labor, striving according to His power, which mightily works within me."

The purpose for our labor & striving....is to see every one complete in Christ (v.28). When we have this kind of focus for our 'laboring & striving' over the next two weeks....it should be done in 'His power', which is mightily working within in us. And His power is displayed for others to see, so that it is not ourselves in which we derive strength to 'labor & strive', but the power of God Himself gives you your strength.

So therefore, go labor today in His power. Go strive today in His power. So that one day, everyone might be made complete in Christ!

Two Week Sprint....

We are in our two week sprint for launch day!

It has already been a wild and crazy two days, for me, to the beginning of this two weeks. Our folks at New Life Church are definitely gearing up for this effort and it has been exciting.

I will do my best to keep an update going on as we begin to 'knock out' all our projects.

Please continue to pray for us as we sprint, in faith, toward the goal of seeing the glory of Christ manifested in Eads, TN.

God is building His Church!

Tim Hawkins Has A 'Spiritual Spoof' On The Credit Report Dot Com Song

How Do I Stop 'Losing It' With My Kids?

This is a really good post from Jordan Thomas' blog on parenting.

"As parents we are desperately needy (usually more often than we're aware) for God to enable us to point our children toward Christ by being accurate reflections of Him.

Not even Mary and Joseph, the earthly parents of Jesus, set the example perfectly. We're all flawed, and we all need help. As we seek the Lord's face, He will provide!

In his tiny-but-excellent (19 pg!) pamphlet, William P. Smith quickly gets to the heart-problem for many parents:

When your agenda, your will, your desires, and your reputation become more important than God's, that's a sign you are trying to be your child's god. That's right. Whether you thought about it or not, you want your child to treat you like God.

Instead of pointing to the only true God, our parenting-by-force approach projects to our children that we want to be their god. A poor trade indeed! Duck now warning: Here comes another painfully-true ouch quote from Smith:

When you lose control with your children, you are communicating to them that their priority is to wrap themselves around you. They must give you what you want or pay the consequences. You are, in reality, demanding their worship. Instead of teaching them to live according to every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, you are teaching them to live according to every word that proceeds out of your mouth.

A prayer: Lord help us to point our children to the matchless glory and worth of King Jesus through our parenting!

(I highly recommend this resource, and all of the similarly-small-but-excellent life-application and counseling booklets from the ministry of CCEF.)"

A Milestone....At Least For Me (1,000 hits!)

Wow! Will you always remember where you were when you found out that I had 1,000 hits to my blog 'Disciple the Planet'?

At 9.25 this morning, I now have a comma in the number of hits to my blog.....1,000!

Thanks to all of you who are faithful readers. I hope you have been encouraged and edified as you read through all the blog posts on this site.

It's been my aim to praise God for His faithfulness to my family and to our church as well as to minister, using the means of a blog, to talk about the gospel-centered life.

I can't wait to hit 2,000!

Praise God!

Prayer Request...

New Life Church is a little more than two weeks away from going public to Eads, Tennessee. All of our families (the Andersons, Blessings, Shearers, Troxels, and Whittens) have been working diligently over the last several months in order to prepare for this launch day on June 21st!

Would you go before our heavenly Father and ask Him to give us His wisdom and strength to persevere in faith as we labor to finish all the remaining details in order for our church to be ready for June 21st?

We will be going door-to-door on June 13th inviting people to our first public service. The building that God has provided us seats about 60. Because of our seating, we will target neighborhoods in phases over the next several months. So, on June 13th, we are targeting 60 homes near our church.

We still have a lot to accomplish, but by God's grace, we have definitely come a long way in the last four months. Once June 21st comes, this will only usher us into a new chapter into our church's ministry life, but for now we need God's people praying for us to this end.

Would you pray right now for us?

Pray for God's favor over our new church and our community of Eads.
Pray for God to go before us and breathe new life into dead souls.
Pray for God to do a sovereign work of grace in our own lives.
Pray for God to fill us with His Spirit.
Pray for God to allow us to meet a lot of people on June 13th as we invite them to church.
Pray for God to specifically work in these 60 homes that we are targeting.
Pray that our labor will be a sweet fragrant aroma of worship to God that will permeate this community for the glory of Christ and the salvation of hundreds and thousands of people!

If you would commit to praying for us, please leave us a comment, so that we can thank God for your faithfulness to His Church and Kingdom.

Thank you for praying for New Life Church!

Say To My Soul, 'I Am Your Salvation'

I was reading through Psalm 35 this morning. It is a prayer for rescue and protection from enemies. It is a psalm of David and in his prayer to God, in verse 3, he tells God to speak to his soul that God is his salvation in this time of uncertainty with his enemies. He wanted his soul to be at peace, at rest and David knew that the only way that this would be possible was for God to speak His sovereign power over his life. Only God could save him from the enemies that encompassed him and he prays for God to speak this kind of peace and assurance into his life and over his life.

I wanted to share with you Barnes' Notes on Psalm 35.3

"Say unto my soul, I am thy salvation"

"Say to "me," I will save you. That is, Give me some assurance that thou wilt interpose, and that thou wilt guard me from my enemies. Man only wants this assurance to be calm in respect to any danger. When God says to us that he will be our salvation; that he will protect us; that he will deliver us from sin, from danger, from hell, the mind may and will be perfectly calm.

To a believer he gives this assurance; to all he is willing to give it. The whole plan of salvation is arranged with a view to furnish such an assurance, and to give a pledge to the soul that God "will" save. Death loses its terrors then; the redeemed man moves on calmly - for in all the future - in all worlds - he has nothing now to fear."

I'm Not A Computer Nerd, But I Am A Husband And This Is Hilarious!!!

This is the funniest thing I've read all day! Let me know what you think...

Dear Tech Support,

Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slow down in overall system performance — particularly in the flower and jewelry applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0. In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5 and then installed undesirable programs such as NFL 5.0, NBA 3.0, and Golf Clubs 4.1.

Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and Housecleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system. I’ve tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail. What can I do?

Signed, Desperate

————————————-

Dear Desperate:

First keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an Entertainment Package, while Husband 1.0 is an Operating System.

Please enter the command: ‘I Thought You Loved Me.exe’, try to download Tears 6.2 and don’t forget to install the Guilt 3.0 update. If that application works as designed, Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the applications Jewelry 2.0 and Flowers 3.5. But remember, overuse of the above application can cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0 or Beer 6.1. Beer 6.1 is a very bad program that will download the Snoring Loudly Beta.

Whatever you do, DO NOT install Mother-in-law 1.0 It runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of all your system resources. Also, do not attempt to reinstall the Boyfriend 5.0 program. These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband 1.0.

In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited memory and cannot learn new applications quickly. You might consider buying additional software to improve memory and performance. We recommend Food 3.0…

Good Luck, Tech Support

(HT: The Blazing Center)

To Shout or Not To Shout?

A couple of days ago I was reading Psalm 32 during my time with the Lord. While reading it I came across verse 11, which is the last verse in chapter 32. There I read a few commands. One, 'to be glad in the Lord'. Two, along with being glad we are to 'rejoice' in the Lord. And three, 'shout for joy'.

Now that jogged my memory, because a year ago I preached Psalm 100 and in that Psalm we are also commanded to 'shout joyfully to the Lord'. After doing a word study on 'shout' in Psalm 100, I learned that the Hebrew word for shout is 'ruwa' which means to 'cry out' or 'to give a war-cry of victory'.

Having never really 'shouted' in this way, and to be honest, I was feeling a little weird teaching this, but I knew I had to teach what Psalm 100 was saying. But unfortunately it still remains unpracticed in my life.

Well today I came across a post by Mark Altrogge at his blog The Blazing Center, where he describes in one of his posts, his process of obeying this one command from the Lord. I found it interesting and thought you might as well.

I wonder....do you shout for joy in this way? Is this a normal practice for you in your time alone with God? In your corporate worship with your church?

Mark writes,

"I’m not a particularly emotional person. At football games I’ve never shouted and high-fived. I never danced or moshed or sang along or held up my lighter at concerts. And I was raised in a church in which the most expressive thing we did in worship was exchange the sign of peace with our neighbor - my brother and I would give each other a sideways glance and a smirk, then give each other the peace sign.

When Jesus saved me, I became convinced from preaching and the Word that God desires expressive worship. But for me to raise my hands or shout to God or sing with gusto was like telling me to do an Irish step dance at an opera."

You can read the rest by clicking here!

A Great Reply To The Accuser

From a post by Doug Phillips....which he got from an online article by Carl Trueman

It is well-known that in his writings in table conversation Luther would often refer to visits from the Devil, how the Devil would come to him and whisper in his ear, accusing him of all manner of filthy sin: "Martin, you are a liar, greedy, lecherous, a blasphemer, a hypocrite. You cannot stand before God."

To which Luther would respond: "Well, yes, I am. And, indeed, Satan, you do not know the half of it. I have done much worse than that and if you care to give me your full list, I can no doubt add to it and help make it more complete. But you know what? My Saviour has died for all my sins - those you mention, those I could add and, indeed, those I have committed but am so wicked that I am unaware of having done so. It does not change the fact that Christ has died for all of them; his blood is sufficient; and on the Day of Judgment I shall be exonerated because he has taken all my sins on himself and clothed me in his own perfect righteousness.

Luther knew what temptation looked like; he knew his own wickedness; but he also knew the all-surpassing perfection and grace of Christ.

God In The Wasteland

In the book Unfashionable, Tullian Tchividjian quotes David Wells and his hope for young evangelicals and the contemporary church:

"I want the evangelical church to be the church. I want it to embody a vibrant spirituality. I want the church to be an alternative to post-modern culture, not a mere echo of it. I want a church that is bold to be different and unafraid to be faithful,...a church that reflects an integral and undiminished confidence in the power of God's Word, a church that can find in the midst of our present cultural breakdown the opportunity to be God's people in a world that has abandoned God. To be the church in this way, it is also going to have to find in the coming generation, leaders who exemplify this hope for its future and who will devote themselves to seeing it realized...They will have to decline to spend themselves in the building of their own private kingdoms and refuse to be intimidated into giving the church less and other than what it needs....To succeed, they will have to be people of large vision, people of courage, people who have learned again what it means to live by the Word of God, and, most importantly, what it means to live before the Holy God of that Word."

This is a good word for us at New Life Church. We should strive to be the church that God desires His church to be and to live that out with a high view of God, regardless if it brings 'church growth'.

His Fullness For Our Emptiness

Here is a wonderful little quote from Stanley Voke on how Jesus satisfies the emptiness in different areas of our lives and by filling those areas up brings with it a revival toward God in us!

“Revival is Jesus bringing the fullness of His life into the emptiness of ours. For every lack in us there is a corresponding grace in Him. He is light for our darkness, life for our death, bread for our hunger, living water for our thirst, rest for our striving, wisdom of God for our foolishness and fellowship for our loneliness.”

~ Stanley Voke, Personal Revival

(HT: Of First Importance)

The Blessedness Of Being Forgiven By God

Psalm 32.1-2 & 11

1 How blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven,
Whose sin is covered!

2 How blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not
impute iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit!

11 [Therefore] Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, you righteous ones,
And shout for joy, all you who are upright in heart.

Have you been blessed? Have your transgressions been forgiven? Your sin covered? Have you been freed from the judgement of sin? Are you honest and truthful before God when confessing sin?

Then be glad in the Lord and rejoice and shout for joy, because of the wonderful work of grace in your life. God has lavished you with grace upon graces and mercy upon mercies. And this will always produce a glad heart in Christ. This will produce a joyful spirit in Christ. This is one of the many fruits of the upright in heart. For they will shout for joy, because of the abundant 'blessedness' from God the Father, through His Son Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Hallelujah....Amen!

The War Against Sin

This is a pretty good article and description on the 'war against sin' by Tim Challies. Warning: in this article he uses an extreme example of what sin could do in someone's life, when sin overpowers someone.

The Pacific Campaign of the Second World War has always fascinated me. In many ways, it seemed like a nonsensical series of battles between the United States and Japan. As the Americans sought to curtail Japanese aggression in the East, they fought their way across the Pacific Ocean, moving slowly and deliberately from island to island. Tiny, seemingly insignificant pieces of rock, jutting from the midst of a boundless ocean, hundreds of miles, thousands even, from the nearest mainland, became fierce battlegrounds. Tens of thousands of lives were lost in conquering these tiny little islands. And yet these islands were far more important than their size may have indicated, for they were able to serve as air bases from which strikes could be launched against other islands, and eventually against Japan itself. The insignificant islands were crucial stepping stones across the vast Pacific Ocean.

There are many lessons we can learn from the Pacific Campaign. Some apply to warfare, but others apply far beyond. One of the most important is this: little things lead to big things. This is as true in warfare as it is in the hearts of men and women.

The Spirit constantly challenges me to deal with little sins. As with so many other believers, I often tend to feel that I’m a pretty good guy. I have never committed any of the really “bad” sins. I’ve never killed anyone, I’ve never committed adultery and I’ve never stolen anything big enough for anyone to notice that it’s missing. I pay my taxes, stick near the speed limit, and try not to hate people. But while I have not committed those big sins, I’ve come to realize just how open I have become to the little sins. To use our military metaphor, while the mainland has not yet been conquered, I can see how I’ve gleefully allowed island after island to fall to Satan. Surely concentrated attacks on the mainland cannot be far behind. Surely big sins will follow these little ones.

You can read the rest of the article by clicking here.