Sermon's up & NSC

Sorry for the hold-up, but our site was down. Here's our sermon.

Also I spend most of last week at the National Student Conference in Evansville, IN. It was pretty decent.

I heard a guy named Kent Paris from Nehemiah Ministries speak on "overcoming the dark side." He had an extremely disturbing childhood. He was molested by several people growing up, including some teachers and relatives. He explained that he had over 300 sexual encounters from the time he was 12 until he was 19, one of which was rape and most of which was with male partners. His father was distant and his mother was overly sexual with him. His dark side was far worse than anything I had to experience. According to him this lead to his homosexual lifestyle. He is now a counselor in Urbana, IL has a wife a 2 sons and deals mainly with people struggling with homosexuality.

The things he experienced growing-up are saddening. Life is not meant to be that way. We live in a fallen world and we often feel pain because of it. It's really messed up and we are called to comfort the hurting, broken and poor. It's really inspiring to see that someone can use the traumatic and terrible things that happened to them to bring others to a deeper relationship with Christ. Kent now lives to resurrect others from their darkside; from their scars, from the areas where people have let them down and from their mistakes.

We find righteousness and wholeness in the blood of Christ. Praise Him.

-SAM