being jake wood

Wednesday Night Youth Service: Part Three

Weekly Teaching Series:

RE Part III

RE is a 3 part series we have been doing that covers three topics all centered around discussing revival. This series topic was something God put on my heart to teach and so we broke the series down into 3 parts. REform, REspond, and REvive. This week we talked about “responding”. Our theme verse for the series has been from 2 Chronicles 7:14… “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

Tonight I shared about how God is in the business of interrupting. And in many cases when He interrupts us it’s because He is desiring a change. When we are confronted with this change we are always given a choice to respond. In many ways it’s like an internal lever that we decide to leave be, or switch. When we turn this lever, 2 things usually occur. The first is “repenting” of our sin. We begin to see and recognize sin in our life and work towards it’s removal. We also “release” our dreams, desires and plans to God and receive His desire and plans. When we wrap ourselves in God, He wraps Himself up in us. But we can always choose to do nothing. It’s always our choice. Revival is simply our choice to respond to God’s interruption in our lives. Will we respond?

Tonight I also had Chris Kremski (one of our students who God has TRANSFORMED recently) read about a dream he had that related to everything we talked about tonight. He did an awesome job and the students seemed to really respond. Change is infectious!

Sermon In a Sentence:

When God interrupts, you have the choice to switch.

Element of Fun:

Blake led us in a tribal competition of “Roadkill Chubby Bunnies”.  Yes, 1 student from each tribe stuffed as many ketchup covered marshmallows into their mouths while saying “Chubby Bunnies”.  It was possibly one of the grossest things I’ve ever seen or smelled at that!  It was also hilarious!  We even had one of our new visitors volunteer to win (and almost did).

This Week’s Scale of Difficulty:

5 out of 10. This was one of the final week’s of doing the video editing before our new video team led by Jordan takes over. I worked on two videos and had a blast with it. I’m so pumped to see what our video ministry comes up with from here on out! Overall it was a great week. Every leader and student leader jumped in and worked hard! We saw 7 students out of 115 make decisions to follow Christ tonight and that was due in part to the work and prayers of the incredible leadership team we have here. I’m so blown away each week at how much they pour their lives into these teenagers week in and week out.

Attendance:

The attendance was up 167% from last year. No lie! God is doing some amazing things in the youth ministry at Freedom Life. We had 5 new visitors and 7 students who made the decision to follow Christ for the first time! We also had 7 students who signed up to be baptized next month on November 15th! God is shaken up this generation… sorry, I just get excited thinking about it!

Service length:

90 minutes

Music Playlist:

Salvation is Here

The Great I Am

Everything (themed worship song for the series)

How He Loves

Wednesday Night Videos:

Our Wednesday night movie this week was based off of an SNL skit that we tweaked to make our own.

This week Chris and Victor opened up the welcome with a short excerpt of “A day in the life of Victor” before we divided into tribe huddles. Too funny, especially if you know Victor.

Overview of the Night:

What a great night of change. One thing I love about youth ministry is the fervent passion that teens possess. It’s no wonder Jesus said to feed my lambs before he said to feed the sheep. I get inspired every week when I hear the stories of what God is doing. Every week I’m amazed how God just tops the previous. He keeps stretching and molding. I can’t wait to see what He does next week!

For those interested, here is the schedule for last nights service..

Wednesday Night Youth Service: Part Three (October 14, 2009)