Coach’s Corner

WoW!  Totally exhausted tonight.  There has been so much going on this week and this weekend that I feel completely spent.  This is always a recap of Sunday, but in light of all that has been going on, I feel I must recap the weekend as a whole, so here goes —

PROMISE KEEPERS

PK came to Peoria this weekend for the first time in 5 years.  And what an event it was.  God has been connecting dots for us over the last couple of months and it is beginning to play itself out.  Lesley & I went to Wisconsin to assist in a church planter’s assessment week in June.  While there, we met Bob & Michelle Olla.  After a exploring what God was doing, we hired Bob as our Assistant Coach of Men.  Bob officially kicked off his ministry here by leading our men to PK… how cool is that.  We had 24 guys attend PK.. that’s almost 100% of the men who weren’t working or traveling.  It was a fantastic time of team-building and challenge for what is ahead.

In addition to our men, several of our women became PK Cheerleaders.  I can’t tell you how proud that made me of our women.  To see them cheering the men…. not just our men.. but all men that were attending PK meant the world to me.  And I know that men coming into the arena were moved by their support and commitment.

SUNDAY MORNING

• We kicked off the service today with all the guys leading our church in worship with “All Hail the Power of Jesus Name”…. very cool to see that.
• Coach Bob made the announcements… I know that seems small, but that’s a HUGE deal to me.  That’s a piece of the service that is necessary, but just feels like too much for me.  It frees my mind up from having to stay on top of those details and allows me to be more focused on the worship and the message.
• We had two great songs launching us into the message, “All to You” & “Battle Cry”.  The intensity was AWESOME!
• We began a series today looking at spiritual disciplines.  We are running concurrently with the Olympics.  Every Olympian dedicates themselves through incredible amounts of discipline to pursuing the gold.  Without the discipline, you will never get the reward… you will never get the gold.
• As much as I dig the Olympics (and I totally dig the Olympics), the gold medals are still momentary.  The amount of discipline and dedication it takes to achieve that is mind-boggling, and in the end, it’s temporary.
• We should be pursuing the real gold, the real treasure that God charges us to pursue.  And it takes discipline… spiritual discipline.
• The first discipline we explored was Bible study.  It seems to me that it is the key discipline to understanding the others.
• We compared our Bible to a treasure map… If we held an honest-to-goodness treasure map in our hands, we would spare no effort in understanding how to read and study it.  The truth is we actually do hold an honest-to-goodness treasure map in oru hands… and it is called the Bible.  It not only points us to treasure, it is treasure itself.
• We looked at ways to utilize and understand our map and challenged our people to start mining for gold.
• Every athlete will not win gold… but every Christian will!  It just takes the discipline to pursue it.