January 12, 2008
I got some news recently about a young man that I know. I first met him when he was a middle-schooler and I was a youth group volunteer. He was quite an energetic young man, and I always enjoyed being around him. I was his small group leader in the youth group for a while. After my wife and I stopped working with the youth so that we could focus on having a child, I lost touch with him.
I actually ran into him about four or five months ago at a restaurant one morning while meeting some other friends for breakfast. He told me about how he had just been released from several months in jail that morning, and was there to meet his parents. He was in jail for getting into a fight that got a little too carried away because someone was using racial comments about his girlfriend. He was so fresh out of jail that I could even still smell it on him. He hadn’t even been “home” yet, and really didn’t have a home to go to anyway.
As I spoke with him, he shared with me about how his life had gotten way out of control since he stopped coming to church. I got the idea that he just started heading down the wrong path, and step-by-step, before you knew it he was knee-deep into a pretty bad lifestyle and was running with all of the wrong people.
But I also heard a desperate cry. One that was reaching out for a hand to help him get out of the lifestyle that he was in. So I told him that my wife and I were now leading the young adults ministry at our church, and that I knew that there were several guys there that had come from rough pasts that he could really connect with and help him to get on the right path. He told me that he would come, but I never did see him …
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December 9, 2007
My special Guest Blogger on the Horizon today is Dan King of BibleDude.net, an online Bible study resource. Dan works with a young adults ministry in Sarasota, Florida. His goal is “to challenge the way you think about the world around you as you look at it with God-goggles on. Comfortable Christianity is a dangerous place to be, as the world around us is trying to chew up the Church and spit it out.”
Coming Back New
by Dan King
I must have asked myself if I was sure about this somewhere around a million times. Am I actually going to go through with this? Why do I need to do this anyway? Isn’t my salvation enough?
After my salvation experience about a year and a half earlier, I did notice some great changes in my life. However there was always the sense that I could always go back to my old way of life if this Christianity thing turned out to not be what I thought it was. After all, I was a liar with an immoral heart and a hypocrite. I never did open myself up completely to those close to me. I was a Christian now, but wondered why I still struggled with things. I even started serving as a helper with the youth group, and often found myself talking to young men telling them that they shouldn’t be doing the very things that I know that I struggled with in my own mind and heart.
I was told that the water baptism was about a bunch of different things, and it all made sense. But most importantly my Jesus told us to do it, and to me that was enough. However, I still struggled with the idea of going through with it. Now I understand why. I didn’t want to let go of the past. I enjoyed my past. I had fun, and if I were to do this whole baptism thing, then I knew that it was done.
Keep reading . . .
