"The Supremacy of God in Preaching"

So i just finished reading through this book by Piper again. I try to read it once every year or so, just because its one of those books you want to keep influencing you. So here are a few good things from it.

"How utterly dependent we are on the Holy Spirit in the work of preaching! All genuine preaching is rooted in a feeling of desperation. You wake up on Sunday morning and you can smell the smoke of hell on one side and feel the crisp breezes of heaven on the other. You go to your study and look down at your pitiful manuscript, and you kneel down and cry, "God, this is so weak! Who do I think I am? What audacity to think that in three hours my words will be the odor of death to death and the fragrance of life to life."

"Spurgeon said of John Bynyan, "Prick him anywhere; and you will find that his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him. He cannot speak without quoting a text, for his sould is full of the Word of God."

"Gladness and gravity should be woven together in the life and preaching of a pastor in such a way as to sober the careless soul and sweeten the burdens of the saints."

"Don't be content to guide people among the foothills of his glory. Become a mountain climber on the cliffs of God's majesty, and let the truth begin to overwhelm you so that you will never exhaust the heights of God."

"To blame a minister for declaring the truth to those who are under awakenings, and not immediately administering comfort to them, is like blaming a surgeon because when he has begun to thrust in his lance, whereby he has already put his patient to great pain... he won't stay his hand, but goes on to thrust it in further, till he comes to the core of the wound. Such a compassionate physician, who as soon as his patient began to flinch, should withdraw his hand... would be one that would heal the hurt slightly, crying, 'Peace, peace, when there is no peace.'" Jonathan Edwards

just some quotes that i appreciated while reading through it!

An Amazing Couple of Weeks

What God has been doing in the last couple of weeks has just been really cool. We kicked it off with our summer camp which went so well. Kids lives were changed by the ministry of the Word of God. They all had their minds on specific things to change and specific things to do differently.
Then we got back and we had CORE Week. That also went really well. The kids brought out all their friends and we had almost 200 kids on the first night! By friday we had so many kids that weren't just kids from other churches, but kids who were hearing the Gospel for the first time. On the last night Leah, Charity, and I were praying in the room next to the youth center throughout the message and apparently great things happened. Two young guys gave their lives to Christ and then Dave asked who was ready to deny themselves and give themselves to God and take up their cross, and pretty much the entire youth center stood up. Now obviously not everyone was standing for the right reasons, but it was still cool to see God working in so many lives at one time.
Now we're doing what we can to keep this going. This week i'll be finishing my devotional i'm making on Ephesians. I'm going to be selling those for a small price to put towards the resource center. Things that we've been talking about doing are getting done and its really exciting to see! We're going to be taking a group of kids to a place called People for People every thursday to help support them. They give out food packages to under priviledged and homeless people. The kids are really excited to help out with that, so that's neat to see. Then we have a huge group leaving in a couple weeks for a mission's trip to Brazil. Unfortunately, I will not be going on that, but i'm excited for those that are!
God has just been doing a lot of things through us here, and I'm excited to see where He's going to take us!