SNOWED OUT! Sat. March 17th

Happy St. Patrick's Day! See you next week!

Iron Sharpens Iron

Last Saturday, March 10th, 11 men from BCC attended Iron Sharpens Iron at Loudonville Community Church. It was a worthwhile experience and everyone took something of value away from the conference workshops and plenary sessions. Additionally, it was great being together with the guys, getting to know one another just a little bit better (wasn't a lot of time for hangin' out) and doing something together outside of our home church. If you attended, we would all love to read your comments about your experience and the specific workshops you attended, so, feel free!

Business Cards

We're going to be trying out some ideas for business cards for the men's group. Please feel free to post your comments or suggestions. Here's the first one. (see above) This one is kind of fanciful. We are VERY serious about the men's group but perhaps want to convey that we are not overly self-serious and maybe we even have a little fun. I thought of it cause I know some guys are leery of a church men's group cause they think they're going to have to talk about "feelings" and do touchy/feely stuff. So I thought we could have a little fun with that. Kind of bring that thing out into the open. What are your ideas? Picture? Sayings?

More Prayer and Confession

Today we watched the DVD session “Praying and Confessing” from John Ortberg’s The Life You’ve Always Wanted and held a discussion based on questions from the Participant’s Guide.

The main points from the video are:

Prayer really does matter

In the Bible you don’t really find “nice”, religious prayers. People haggle with God. They are bold, reckless in their prayers. They seem to operate from the assumption that prayer really does change things.

No heroics – start where you are

Start small. One step at a time. If you’re too ambitious you might burn out and give up after awhile. Start out with 5 minutes a day devoted to prayer. Even if you feel you can do more sometimes, stick to 5 minutes to start. Consistency is more important than quantity.

Pray about what really matters

We need to slow our minds down to be able to pray effectively. Ortberg used the phrase “monkeys in the banana tree” to describe our wandering minds. When your mind wanders, rather than fighting it you might want to consider maybe that’s what’s really important to your heart so you need to talk to God about it. The concept of “simple prayer” is just talking with God about what really matters to me. Being real in prayer is important.

Stains on the sofa

We all have sinned. We have all “stained the sofa”. That is, done what we ought not to have done or not done what we ought to have done. The remedy? The practice of confession. Why do I have to confess? Ortberg suggests it’s not for God as much as it is for us. So that we can become the kind of people who don’t sin anymore. It’s really about “how do I become a different kind of person.” We should practice self-examination. You can use lists such as the 7 deadly sins, or the 10 commandments to assist in bringing to mind our sins for the purpose of confession. Be ruthlessly honest. Confess to specific acts not general sins. The goal is think and feel differently about the situation where you sinned so you don’t do it again. Confess to another person as well as to god.

The real value of confession

I can only be loved to the extent that I am known. Through confession to God I appropriate his love more fully. By confessing to another person I become fully known. Thereby I can be fully loved and start to heal.

Since we will not have a meeting next Saturday because of Iron Sharpens Iron, we have two weeks to put what we’ve learned in this session into practice.

1. Practice confession to God by yourself.
2. Establish a pattern of prayer. There’s section in the participant’s guide on page 63 to help with this. Give it a try. (The handouts this week were copies of the relevant pages in the participants guide.)