Archive for March, 2012
OVER 920 AT OUR MEN’S CONFERENCE IN SPRINGFIELD
Sunday, March 25th, 2012
When we first started doing the local leg of a brand new concept called Iron Sharpens Iron National Men’s Conference in March 2007, we had no clue what we were doing. We were just a bunch of guys from Business Men in Christ (BMIC) investing about $3500 of our income to bring a Discipleship men’s ministry to town, which ran with the big dawgs in Colorado, New England or Orlando, Florida. Tom Cheshire, who spearheaded that in 2007 has since moved on from BMIC and now leads the successful Relevant Practical Ministry for men, which focuses in growing this movement to disciple men across central Illinois.
As the leader of the Prayer and Marketing Committee that first year, my job was to run two prayer rooms – one with men and women praying all day as intercessors for the day long conference – and the other with another minister and myself, open to men only, to counsel and pray with them.
That first year, less than 10 days out, we only had 45 men register. On conference day, over 550 men showed up! This year, 14 days out, we only had 175 registered. Today, over 920 showed up. All the classrooms for the 16 Equipping Seminars were so packed, we had men overflowing out the doors! God showed up and showed us Who was in charge! Not us!
WE ARE ALL ETERNAL BEINGS….
Saturday, March 24th, 2012
SEIZE ETERNITY by LORI CLAYTON
Have you ever been looking for something and you focused your search so minutely, in one small area, that when you finally backed, up and took a wider perspective, you finally found what you had been searching for? Sometimes we need to back up and take a long range look. What we see here on earth is deceptive. For one we can only see things as they are, which is after the fall of Adam. Everything we know about life and everything we perceive is filtered through the effects of sin. We don’t know nor can we see what life could have been like on earth if there was no original sin. Secondly we have been trained to look at a small area in our immediate surrounding when truly we are here for such a short time. Understand, I am a Dave Ramsey fan, pay off your debt, baby steps, live like no one else so that you can live like no one else, plan for retirement, but we are going to spend a lot more time when we are not here rather than when we are here. In other words we are eternal beings.
The Bible tells us Adam lived 930 years and then he died. Some speculate that he lived 40 years before the fall, and that the total years could be 970 years. No matter, God said that in the day you eat (of the tree) you will die. If one thousand years is as a day and a day as one thousand years, Adam died in one day. But that was not God’s plan; Adam was to live far longer than one day.