Last Psalms talk...

The last week of the Psalms series that Mike and I split was this past Sunday, when I shared about Psalm 121.

I got a lot of my material for the from the "Stepping Up" Bible Study by Beth Moore, as well as some other Bible dictionaries and commentaries.

The link is up, so you can now listen to the message online here(Book V). If you want to download the .mp3, just right click on the link to Book V and click "Save Target As." Feel free to leave comments or constructive feedback on what you thought.

tonight is the night, plus other happenings.

tonight is roscoe's night... a.k.a. our church staff team's chicken and waffles night at the hartsooks!

i am so excited! the chinns are taking care of the waffle part. ryan has promised to use his personal recipe for the fried chicken, and several others are bringing sides and such. i will post pictures later! :)

in other news:


last night, we had our final summer women's bible study. we've been doing the stepping up study with beth moore, and it has been quite a journey. the focus of the study is the psalms of ascent, and i have learned so much from these 15 songs. as a group we memorized psalm 121, and kiera helped us put hand motions to the verses last night. she is extremely talented and creative, and it helps to have those left-brained people in such a group. several folks had to miss last night, so we are going to wait and take our group picture when all are around. that gives us a good reason to have a "reunion" in a few weeks (to take a picture together and maybe share a pot-luck). i will miss my monday nights with these ladies as they truly have blessed me with their presence. we have all grown so much, individually in our walks with God as well as together as a group. we've laughed together and shared our hearts with each other. its been one of my favorite groups ever!

finally, i am going to be making an impromptu road trip to richmond tomorrow to visit rachel! year two of med school starts next week, and my job starts in august, so now is the time! i'll try to snap some pics and make a post from there as well.

did i mention...

...that God is downright amazing? i meant to post this yesterday, but the day went faster than i could keep up with.

yesterday i had the opportunity to speak on psalm 51 at church, and to start the week i wasn't excited about it. but on friday, God gave me a fresh word and it just rocked and rolled from there. i had the chance to do something i've never done, and that was speak without notes during my sermon. i didn't need any, because it was all God and i just spoke from the Word. i couldn't contain my excitement and passion for God's word, and it was just a blast. like seriously it was the coolest thing ever.

of course i was nervous ahead of time even though i had practiced for several hours on saturday, just pacing around our basement preaching to the air. but nerves are good because they keep me humble and remind me that it is not me -- its ALL God!

this weekend has been full of so much joy. my excitement over God's Word is just because He is good and alive and i just want to share it with others. so i hope others are blessed by what he can say through me, and if it can encourage anyone else to get into His Word for themselves, i've done my job.

if you go online to listen, i'd love to hear any constructive criticism or feedback. i'm really desiring to work on my communication skills as i seek to honor God in his call on my life as a bible teacher.

and if you remember, keep me in your prayers that i will be faithful in this role in His kingdom. the next time i'll speak is aug. 10, when i'll cover the psalms of ascent in our last week in our psalms series.

thanks for everyone's encouragement. and remember, God is good. run hard after Him and He will always come through!

psalms meditations

Mike Swann and I are splitting the latest teaching series at church. It's on the Psalms, and I did the intro last Sunday.

Each day I'm posting a meditation on the nlcf.net web site from Eugene Peterson's "A Year with the Psalms" book. This is a nifty little book my mom loaned me from the library of Walnut Grove Baptist Church. It was written in 1979 (the year I was born!) but it is still very timely. I'm digging the short meditations and prayers, and it seemed like the perfect thing to post daily on the web to encourage our church members to be reading/thinking/praying about the Psalms daily.

Feel free to follow along on nlcf.net and if you want, you can listen to the messages here.