A group of tweeps including myself have suggested the Sunday Twitter Challenge. To be successful at this challenge you do the following:

1. Do not get on Twitter, do not tweet on Sunday.

2. Use the time you would normally spend on Twitter to do things that further God’s kingdom:

Spend time in God’s Word or reading books that expound it
Spend time building family relationships
Spend communal time in prayer, worship and learning (church)

Add a comment to this post to sign up, then sometime next week add another comment to share how God used the time to build you and yours up.

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Three times in the New Testament we find the word “Abba”. It is generally translated “father” but there’s much more to it than that. “Abba” was the word used by Jewish children to address their father with affection, trust, and loyalty. It was not generally used outside the home, it was too intimate. Our best translation might be something between “Da-da” and “Daddy”.

While wrestling with His impending fate in Gethsemane, Jesus used the word “Abba” when he was so full of sorrow that he described Himself as near death:

Mark 14:35-6
Going a little farther, he fell to the ground and prayed that if possible the hour might pass from him. “Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”

Paul uses “Abba” when he describes our relationship to the Spirit as sons of God:

Galatians 4:6
“Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father’.”

Paul again uses “Abba” when contrasting Christian “sonship” vs. the slavery of life under the Law:

Romans 8:15
“For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.”

We communicate in prayer and worship with the triune God, a Father who prefers to be called “Daddy”, whose Son our Savior calls Him “Daddy” and whose Spirit resides in us also calling Him “Daddy”. We ourselves because of Jesus and through His Spirit can align our spirit to feel Him with this intimacy. We are invited into God’s internal communication in prayer and worship.

I exhort you when you next worship in song, to think of yourself as He thinks of you, as a parent admiring His child and be the child by trusting wholly as He tosses you into the air and catches you again.

with your mouth wide open and your face ablaze with joy. Raise your hands to “Da-da” so He knows you want Him to pick you up and then feel your Spirit leap when He picks you up.

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• Early Christians as Viewed by an Outsider
• Derek Loux Memorial/Josiah Fund

I once heard a quote from a 1st century Roman skeptic and persecutor who was instructing the Roman army on how to find Christians. How? Look for groups of people who sell everything and share everything. Ouch!

I’m in love with our God. I cannot not speak that what’s happening in many church buildings may not be all there is. I don’t feel like I have time to make mistakes or get it wrong or be either of the prodigal brothers of Lk 15  that I was in my 20′s.

God is teaching me to see Him run through great writers — He is sustaining me. I finished The Prodigal God a few weeks ago, I am finishing The Shack today and I”m half done with Crazy Love. Each is shouting “It’s about the relationship, stupid!” I can’t miss it, God is BIG. I will not be pulled into mediocrity, I will serve Him as He is, big!

For now, I immerse by unemployed soul in God’s Word, books, Christian music & worship and prayer. I pray daily for God to refine my works through the perceived threat of financial loss, like so many. I like Psalms 3 for this.

I don’t feel plugged in to any group yet, I am still searching. God bless my online friends, God bless you every one.

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I settled an issue with God recently: When I prayed, I knew I had a block. Over and over again our patient God showed me that I had a prideful attachment to my middle class lifestyle. Like many men, I attached my own value to my professional success, rather than to Him. I began to pray (say out loud) that I gave it up, that I now only needed enough for today and to avoid money being a stumbling block.

Why did God make me a middle-class American Christian, I’ve often wondered, why would He strategically place me here? Is it because I would be “saved as by fire”, a Christian who can only believe in the soft, soft, rich environment of the U.S.? Would I never see the truth if I, like my friend from Sudan, was chased by Muslim helicopters for my faith? I so often ask the right question but miss the answer. The average American, even in a down economy, earns many times what others in the world earn. I am an American because I am called to give generously, crazily, sooner rather than later.

God affected another change in my praying. I began to tell God out loud that I would go anywhere and do anything for Him. How can I not when He has pursued me so personally and poured His grace so generously into my life? There are seats at the table of the last feast that are unfilled. How He must ache for those who do not yet see what is so obvious.

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I got up late one night in 2007 to go to the bathroom and noticed an oddity when I returned to bed. As I approached the foot of the bed on my side I saw a lack of something as if light and space had been altered on my wife’s side of the bed. It was a shape that I took to be some sort of “other” thing or apparition looking down at her from about midway between the head and foot of the bed. I didn’t see something I saw a lack of something.

I continued toward my side of the bed and just before getting in look again and there it was again. I got into bed and fell fast asleep.

I am most often asked how I could just get into bed and go to sleep. I have a skeptical mind, I presume things have a natural explanation until there is a sufficient weight of evidence to change my mind. I did not know if this odd use of space and light was a being of any sort so it was just an oddity to me. I didn’t fear it, in fact, I didn’t even know if it was an “it”.

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My older brother and I were throwing a tennis ball off our roof in the backyard of the house we grew up in. It was getting dark, so Stan (still my best friend today) and his brother went into our house to meet their mom. As these three talked with my mom inside the house, something caught our eyes outside the house.

A large “fireball”, roughly the side of a hot air balloon crawled slowly across our neighbor’s yard, beginning at the house and traversing the entirety of the yard to the just above a shed that inhabited the back corner of their lot, just against our shared fence and just short of an alley. We, of course, screamed and ran into the house, where both moms assured us nothing had happened.

That would be the end of the story but for this:

I was watching a show on the Discovery Channel or equivalent more than 20 years later at my brother’s house when I mentioned seeing something unidentified in the sky when 5. When my brother’s eyes enlarged, I left the room and asked him to relay the story to his wife, giving every detail he could remember. He left the room and I, in turn, told the same story to our volunteer arbiter. My brother and I told the SAME story 23 years later, verified by a third party, though we had never told the story again since the night of the sighting.

Strange but true.

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1. I am a former youth minister.
2. I love languages. I speak English and French and read Greek.
3. I am left-brained. I am mathematically inclined but not artsy at all.
4. I memorized almost 500 verses of the Bible and 500 lines from Hamlet.
5. I regularly share from my prodigal journey and God’s grace in local churches.
6. God came to get me when I wasn’t seeking Him. Upon reading my account of this experience, others have now had God touch them through similar experiences.
7. My brother and I saw a UFO when 6 and 5, respectively.
8. I’ve had the same best friend since I was 4. I met him by throwing rocks at him.
9. I was twice batting champion in high school baseball.
10. I once saw an apparition.
11. I love music, hence the “mc” in my Twitter and Facebook moniker “mcProdigal”.
12. I type really fast. I took typing in high school because the class was all girls. Do the math.

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