God Is Amazing!!

Last night was an amazing night with our D-Group. This is a great group of 9th & 10th grade guys that is led by yours truly and another amazing volunteer of mine, Mr. Tim Young. Tim and I have been leading this group for several months now and we have some good discussions, but last night just blew me away. We were supposed to talk about denominations: theirs, ours, differences, similarities, etc. Well, to start the conversation, I read off seven straight forward Orthodox (standard) beliefs that Christians “should” believe at their core, regardless of denominational affiliation. The third one was “Grace through Faith”…this is an essential Christian belief, because it is only by God’s Grace that we are forgiven!! One of the guys brought up that he just wasn’t sure he believed that or not. At that point, denominations went out the door, and we got down to some serious discussion!! We talked about grace, faith, evil, hell, heaven, God, His attributes, and on and on and on it went until we figured out that we don’t have it all figured out, but that’s ok! By the end of the night, we had one thing down though, and that is “Grace through Faith” & not by works (Ephesians 2:8-9) is the only way to God. Contrary to what people might think, I am so proud of my young 10th grader who sparked this amazing discussion. Many others in the room and many of you possibly reading this blog may have questions as well about your faith, or what you believe, etc, however it takes a lot to admit that in a room full of people, especially knowing it will be discussed by those people. I want to make sure everyone knows that is ok to have questions or doubts about what we believe. I am a firm believer that by asking hard questions & through the discussion created by them, we were able to flush out the TRUTH last night. As Proverbs 27:17 says….iron sharpens iron…discussing the hard questions is what strengthens & sharpens us as believers.

Thanks to those who ask the hard questions…

JC