A Wife's Blessing, a Pastor's Rebuke/Exhortation

My beautiful wife has absolutely blessed my socks off this Sabbath morning by taking the kids out and leaving me to invest time devotionally with my Lord. What I chose to do was listen to a sermon by Matt Chandler, who hopefully, prayerfully, will be coming to share at our Newfrontiers Prayer and Fasting on May 11th. Matt Chandler is a special guy and a guy I met almost 8 years ago now on a youth summer camp in Galveston Texas - but whom God has used powerfully to lead a speedily growing church in Dallas Texas called The Village Church.

I looked in my 'theResurgence' rss feed in my Mac mail program and found a list of sermons based on the Acts29 media page. I chose to listen to this one: 'Ministry for the Long Haul & Ambition' (click here to listen yourself). I was not disappointed and was significantly rebuked and exhorted to search my own heart as a Leader of God's people.
What a joy to have a morning spent receiving a Wife's blessing and a Pastor's rebuke!

On my next entry I want to read a quote Matt read out from Eugene Peterson that may be a bit more challenging to the flock rather than the Shepherd.

Blessings
Simon

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Simon

JT's Captaincy of England

Delighted with the news on Friday that Fabio Capello (England's International Football Team Manager) has decided to strip John Terry of his captaincy of the national team. For those of you reading from another nation and not caught up in this headline catching story, our national team captain and a powerful symbol in English life has not been such a good boy in recent times. Over 2 weeks ago it was revealed that he had attempted to have a 'media silence' order placed over the revelations of some infidelity in his life. This was not granted and naturally the backlash of trying to silence these blood-sucking tabloid papers is that they have gone all out revealing his sexual frivolities (yes he is married) with the girlfriend of (believe this if you can) another member of the England national team! Oooh, yes I know what you're thinking.

Story aside (you can do further research if you choose) the revealing thing to me in these past weeks is the modern/postmodern anomaly that a man's immoral, totally unworthy-of-respect-lifestyle decisions can somehow be made to live apart from, or to one side of, his role as a national leader in the arena of sports. Again and again, pundits and others seem to say that what he has chosen to do in crushing his wife, lying to her and to others, taking the girlfriend of another man and having sex outside of marriage and choosing to violate your relationship with a fellow team mate can be totally disconnected from his role as captain of the national Football team.

This is quite absurd and sad testimony to the moral vacuum that we have somehow created in the West.
Our 'heroes' are able to lead without any character whatsoever, and we are to point a new generation (for example my son Malachi) to these men and women as role models for their life. We need to learn the vast distinction between celebrity and hero and we need to come to grips with the reality you cannot divide a person saying he/she is a great leader while placing infidelity, immorality and relational destruction to one side of him/her as if devoid of him/her in 'reality.'

Well done Capello.

Simon