I talk to guys all the time and I would say 7 out of 10 guys have struggled or are struggling with some type of sexual addiction. It’s a huge deal. It wrecks you from the inside out. From personal experience in battling back w/ God’s help over something like this… it’s can create such a stronghold on your life.
But what about the ladies?
My wife and I have talked to more and more couples who are being torn apart. But, I’ve begun to see a trend that increases every moment… women are diving into pornography and sexual addiction like never before. The truth is- if you’re dealing with this… you’re not alone. There are thousands of other women out there struggling with the same thing. I recently watched the testimony of Anne Jackson. It is very moving. Check it out:
If you or someone you know is struggling in this area, please email Carrie or I so we can help point you to the resources to aid in battling back against that addiction with God’s help. Carrie’s Email Jason’s Email
Whenever I would catch a glimpse of a brick, I used to begin singing/humming “Brick” by Ben Folds Five. I love Ben Folds and his writing style… but after yesterday, I will no longer look at bricks the same way. Check it out:
Listening to God can be difficult for me at times.
Especially in sermon preparation.
“God, what do you want to say to your people?”
“What do they need to know that will bring them closer to you?”
“What if I totally drop the ball and wreck it completely?”
Thankfully, it’s not on me. God can use a great delivery or a sloppy mess to communicate His love. He does the work.
I just get to humbly be a part of the process.
Yesterday we talked about judging others. I used two scales and had bricks with words I used to judge the other person. The passage we kept coming back to was Matthew 7:2 “For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” We cannot put that weight on others, we’re not the ones to judge the heart, God is. We need to bury/kill that kind of thinking. We gave everyone a brick. Told them to take it home, write the things they are judging others about on the brick, and bury it.
Here’s one couple’s story…
“I’ve always been quick to judge. Especially when I feel threatened. My husband and I have been through A LOT the last year. I’ll spare the details, but it’s a year I’ve been wanting to forget. Because of things that happened, I put a lot of labels and judgment on my husband and other people. The judgment I passed on them has done nothing but make me expect the things I judged them on. I thought bad things, therefore I expected bad things. Which in return has made everyday a nightmare.It’s a horrible life to live expecting the worst everyday. And even when things are going good, it sucks when you manage to find or make up something bad about it because you’re convinced that’s how it is. Point being, when you tell yourself someone is bad, you start to believe it. I’ve been praying a lot lately for help letting go of the past and the judgments I’ve placed that I held onto. Finally, today you gave me the extra push I needed to stop thinking about doing it, and actually doing it. As I was writing on my brick it honestly felt like a weight was being lifted. Every time I wrote a word, it was like a little anxiety went with it. By the time I was done, I felt so calm and at peace. It feels good to let go. Really good. Here’s to a fresh start, a clean slate, an open mind, and a compassionate heart.”
Hey Gang, it’s Carrie. I’m coming to you live from my living room in the heart of Kempsville (woot woot). Each Sunday Jason gives his side of the service, message, and how things are going. Well, here’s… The Other Side.
The service yesterday was inspiring.
I am so excited that weekly now people are getting baptized and giving their lives to Christ. That is definitely a testimony that God is working through Forefront Church. If you hadn’t heard, 5 people came talked with Jason yesterday about getting baptized (That’s 10 people in the last three weeks. So cool.)
The bible passage in the message, Mark 7:31-37, was eye-opening. How Jesus, even in the midst of healing a deaf and mute man, thought about all of the temptations and trials that man would now endure in life- it was a change in perspective for me. Up until being healed, he had never been influenced by a dirty joke, curse word, or angry rant- he couldn’t hear it. He had never been tempted to say an evil thing, yell at someone, or speak in gossip- he couldn’t physically do it.
Lady Gaga, via Google Images
In thinking on that, it reminded me of the “innocence” of children. How they are slowly being exposed to all the negative influences we see in culture/society (as is everyone else who interacts with society). And it only took jumping into our car right after service to see it all go down first hand.
As we drove to lunch, we had the radio on and Lady GaGa’s “Poker Face” started up. Jason went to change the radio station and our 22 month old angel in backseat became unruly as she started screaming “NO! Song! Song! Daddy! Song!” She wanted to listen to Lady GaGa (seriously? she’s 22 months old!). Definitely not the influence we want Chloe to seek. But even at that young an age, she is already being exposed to the negative influences all around us. I am not saying that we shouldn’t listen to the radio or watch TV. I love TV (speaking of TV, any LOST fans out there? I love that show). But, we need to stay focused on God constantly so we do not become desensitized to the things around us. Once we become desensitized, we more easily give into those negative influences and the temptations they bring.
Wasabi Gospel by Shawn Wood
I finished a pretty good read recently, titled Wasabi Gospel by Shawn Wood. He takes a deeper look at key Bible passages that some of us have read 100 times and never thought much about, or maybe some of us have never read ever before. The main themes revolve around “true forgiveness” and “overcoming sin.”
At one point Mr. Wood discusses Matthew 5:27-30, where Jesus is teaching on sin and our actions, “If your eyes cause you to stumble, take it out, for it is better to loose an eye than for all of you to end in destruction.” The point the author gets to is that at the root of all sin- is our heart/mind. What we fill them with will ultimately be what we give and show to the world and others around us.
I was challenged on Sunday…
To share my story.
To live a life that makes people go, “Do you follow Jesus?”
To be a better woman of God.
Every week someone else is coming to us asking to get baptized.
It is such a humbling thing to see people’s lives changed. Thanks God for the way You move.
Thank you Forefront for being a community of people who accepts every person, no matter what their struggle, and showing them what it means to love Jesus.
Here’s what happened after service last Sunday…
What about you? Has God been pulling at you to make a decision?
Are you looking for every reason NOT to experience His love by making excuses, ignoring Him, etc?
I’d love to talk to you about it… Hit me up
Inked. Branded. Marked.
What does it look like to be marked by God?
By His love, healing, restoring power?
A couple of weeks ago we launched a series titled, “Inked.” We’ve been looking at the healings of Jesus. People’s lives being touched (branded) by Jesus, they are healed, and life as they know it is never the same.
As we filmed for the series bumper at Fuzion Ink, we hung out and talked with the artists (one of which attends Forefront with his family) and it was so cool to hear their stories.
How life has moved them.
How their lives and their clients stories intertwine through this artistic medium.
How a community of artists who many people are scared of just because the way they look (craziness!), is actually an amazing family of people who look out for one another.
Inked. Branded. Marked.
What does it look like to be marked by God?
By His love, healing, restoring power?
Last week we launched this series, “Inked” which is an extension of the scenes we see throughout the New Testament of the Bible. People’s lives being touched (branded) by Jesus, they are healed, and life as they know it is never the same.
As we filmed for the series bumper at Fuzion Ink, we hung out and talked with the artists (one of which attends Forefront with his family) and it was so cool to hear their stories.
How life has moved them.
How their lives and their clients stories intertwine through this artistic medium.
How a community of artists who many people are scared of just because the way they look (craziness!), is actually an amazing family of people who look out for one another.
One of the first guys we caught up with is Forefront’svery own, Dave Lukeson. Enjoy.
Forefront meets 10 a.m. Sundays at Ocean Lakes High School.
Fore info and directions check out: http://www.forefront.org
So, our new website is hosted by Clover Sites. They’ve been great and there are quite a few churches across the country who use them to create quality sites. One of those churches is launching this Sunday in ATL- The Courageous Church. I would love for everyone who goes to Forefront to do 2 things today:
Pray for Shaun King and his team that is launching Courageous Church this Sunday that God will move those who are far from God to get out of their homes and experience what God has in store for them.
Please read Shaun’s story (located below) of God’s amazing movement through a miracle. I know many people believe miracles don’t happen today, but they have happened in my life and I am glad they have happened in Shaun’s as well.
“I Experienced a Miracle and I’m Not a Loon”
I’m not sure how well you know me, but I am a relatively normal guy. Well, normal isn’t the best word for me, but you if we all agreed that I’m a down to earth dude, we’d at least be in the right ballpark. It is after 1AM as I am typing this and we get up at the butt crack of dawn in the King House so I have to cut to the chase. I tell you that as circumstantial evidence that what I am about to tell you is important and I am pretty confident that someone out there needs to hear this.
On November 28th, 2003 I experienced a miracle. Not a cool coincidence. Not a freak occurrence. I experienced a miracle.
I am completely sure of it. Several very normal members of my family witnessed it and doctors at the University of Kentucky were baffled by it for days.
On the evening of November 28th, 2003, my wife and I were in a very serious automobile accident in which I was sent through the windshield face first in a head-on car collision going full speed on an icy interstate. I have talked about it several times on this blog in terms of what I had to overcome, but have been reluctant to share my entire story with the world – in part because I did not want to become known as the Miracle Guy.
Tonight I realized that not sharing this story is a disservice to God. Not only that, I feel in my spirit that someone out there needs to read this story right now.
THE SETTING
Visiting our family in Kentucky for the Thanksgiving holidays, my wife and I, after a long day of Christmas shopping, got a bite to eat at Moe’s and were preparing to meet my brother and his wife to go see the movie Mystic River. The roads were covered with black ice that day and Rai and I had actually witnessed a few minor accidents earlier in the afternoon. Being the safe driver that I am, I knew that I would have to be extra careful during the 7 or so mile drive to the movie theater.
Rai and I were SOOOO happy that day. We were scheduled to close on our first home the day we returned to Atlanta and had purchased a bunch of cool items for our new home super early that morning in those crazy, day after Thanksgiving sales. On the way to the movies Rai and I were JAMMING! I mean music cranked all the way up, heads bobbing, full blast JAMMING to the new Byron Cage CD. It had only been out for a little while and we loved it! We were there in Atlanta for the live recording a few months before then and we were Jamming with a capital J to the main song on the disc – “The Presence of the Lord is Here”. In some ways, we were singing it in celebration because we were both keenly aware of how good the Lord had been to us and we had even mentioned our blessings earlier that day.
The instant the song was over, I reached down to hit the button to start the track from the beginning so we could re-do our jam session. As soon as the track began again, I hit a patch of black ice on the interstate and completely lost control of the car.
THE ACCIDENT
After doing a complete donut in our lane of the interstate at about 40 MPH, I tried as hard as I could to straighten the car out, but couldn’t do it. Separating one side of the interstate from the other was not a rail, but a very steep ditch. Our car, a black 2002 Mitsubishi Galant, my first new car, sped toward the ditch, and, according to eye witnesses in the police report, our car went deep down into the ditch and then went airborne into oncoming traffic on the other side of the highway. Seeing the headlights of a truck coming toward us, I very clearly remember my wife screaming out,
“I’m going to die!”
Desperately, with what little faculties I had left, I tried to move the car out of the way of the truck that was coming right for us and BOOOOOOM! Some type of bomb went off in the car. The explosion was so violent that I could smell it, taste it, hear it, feel it, but not see it. Something weird had happened to my face in the explosion.
I could catch only a small glimpse of my wife who was moaning in pain and appeared to be about to pass out or die. Within seconds I started to realize that the bomb that went off must have gone off in my face. I started screaming in pain. I could not see and it felt like my face may have been on fire. My mouth was full of glass and I could tell from the way I sounded in my own ears that something terrible had happened to my lips and teeth. Afraid that my wife was dying and pretty confident that I was about to die myself, I screamed as loud as I could for help and did not understand why my wife was not trying to help me. I noticed that the song, “The Presence of the Lord is Here” was still blasting and felt just a slight comfort by its message. The mind is strange, because I remember thinking that having it playing will probably let people know that I wasn’t a drunk driver. That was important to me.
A bomb had not gone off in our car at all, but, instead, our car collided head-on with a truck going full speed on the interstate. Instead of the truck hitting my wife on the passenger side, which we were told would have likely killed her in an instant, we hit the truck head-on and the impact threw me forward and I crashed, face first (not head first or arms first, but nose first) through my windshield and was thrown back into the car after hitting a side railing on the road.
Unable to free myself, I felt like my face had been broken into pieces. I felt skin falling off of my face and both of my legs felt broken. I could not move. Smelling the smoke, I was panicking and screaming in agony like a raving mad man, but did not sound like myself. Something bad had happened. I could not see and I felt and tasted blood everywhere. A man, who unknowingly broke my heart, came next to the car, looked at me, said nothing, and left. He could have gone for help for all I know, but when he left I felt like I had been totally abandoned and was moving much closer to death.
What may have been just a minute, but felt like about an hour passed when a very sweet woman, like an angel without fear, came to the car. I moaned to the woman that I was a young pastor and that the woman with me was my wife. She grabbed my hand and told me very gently that she was a nurse and a Christian and that she was praying that I would live and for me to hold on. Her words were nice, but I began to feel an unspeakably deep sense of depression fall over me. (I never stopped screaming in pain throughout this ordeal.)
Her words confirmed for me that I must be dying and I began to get very sad. I am crying now as I type this because I remember the overwhelming sense of sadness and despair that started to swallow me as I considered all of the unfulfilled dreams and hopes with my wife and our young family. My daughter was not even two years old and I was about to leave her alone in the world. The woman told me that it was urgent that she find a cover to wrap my face up to keep it together. She grabbed a blanket from my back seat and began to gently wrap my face with it. She never left my window until the police and EMT’s got there a few minutes afterwards. The police asked me for emergency contact information and I seemed to have given them my mother’s contact information. Apparently my wife also gave them contact information for her mother and her aunt.
After a team of people yanked the door open to get me out, my grief and sadness began to grow because I could hear and sense the trepidation and fear on behalf of every person that saw me. I was being carted away on a stretcher away from my wife and I had no idea what her condition was. My sadness grew because I kept feeling like I was going to die. I began to imagine places that we wanted to vacation together and all of the things I wished I had told her about my love for her. I had convinced myself that if I could live until I got to the hospital, that everything would be OK.
I heard the EMT’s assess that my left leg was badly broken and that it appeared that every bone in my face had been broken when it went through the windshield. I started to drift in and out of consciousness and heard the EMT’s tell the driver that they “were losing him.” Real life is different than television because it was clear that the EMT’s were very nervous. The driver then started yelling at them that he couldn’t rush or that they’d all end up like “him” (me).
The EMT’s kept lying to me and telling me that we were almost there. It helped me a little. I heard them say that my blood pressure was dropping. Because something had happened to my eyes, I could not see anything, but could hear very well. I heard them charge the paddles and, I kid you not, got so afraid that they were going to use them on me that I think the last adrenaline I had left kicked in. They told me that my injuries were very severe, but to just hold on until we got to the hospital.
I held on and prayed and prayed and prayed that God would just spare my life.
THE MIRACLE
By the time I got to the hospital, my mother, my mother-in-law and many of the members of her small Pentecostal church, my wife’s aunt, and my brother, who was a youth pastor in Indianapolis at the time, had all been notified by staff or called by one another. My mother was told that my legs were broken and that my face was broken into many pieces and that my injuries were life-threatening.
Every person above that I just named began praying for me and for my wife. My brother began praying for healing. My mother began praying that the Lord would save her son. The nurse that comforted me at the scene of the accident had prayed that I would live.
After they got me into the emergency room and began to assess my injuries, I began to feel the Spirit of God in a way that I had never felt before or have never felt since. With doctors and plastic surgeons waiting to perform surgery on my face, I heard them talk about assembling the right hardware and plates that were needed. Knowing that I would not be able to talk once they started operating on my face (while I was awake), I began to beg nurses to write a note on my chest that said,
“I still believe in the Goodness of the Lord”
After begging two nurses to write the note and trying to tell them that I wasn’t crazy, the third nurse wrote the note and placed it on my chest. I asked her to not let anyone remove the note and pointed to it every chance I got. It is on my chest with my blood on it in this photo.
After washing my face and picking out shards of glass from it, they rushed me to have a CATSCAN done on my face and on my legs. The results shocked them and shocked me.
In spite of the fact that my face went through a windshield during a full speed head on-collision with a truck, in spite of the EMT diagnosis that “every bone in my face was broken,” in spite of the phone call made to my mother, in spite of all of that…
NOT ONE SINGLE BONE IN MY FACE WAS BROKEN. NOT ONE. NOT EVEN MY NOSE. NOT ONE BONE IN MY LEGS WERE BROKEN. NOT EVEN A HAIRLINE FRACTURE IN MY FACE OR MY LEGS.
Doctor after doctor and nurse after nurse told me that nearly ever person that goes through a windshield in such a violent head-on car collision dies and every single one of them ends up with scores of broken bones.
In spite of the fact that it took over 300 stitches to put my face back together – including stitching a big part of my bottom lip back on and my left eyelid back on – NOT A SINGLE BONE WAS BROKEN IN MY BODY.
I have thought about this across the years and there is a chance that every nurse and EMT and doctor that examined me and felt on my face and legs and studied me before I had those CATSCAN’s and MRI’s was simply wrong. They all misdiagnosed my condition. That is possible.
But for me, it takes just as much faith to believe this as it does for me to believe that something unexplainable, something strange, something miraculous happened to me that put the bones in my face back together again.
For days while I was recovering in the hospital at the University of Kentucky, doctors would visit me and discuss the strange occurrence of what happened. Medical students came by to examine me because of the peculiar nature of it all. My eyes were swollen shut for several days, but I could hear how peculiar people found my condition. Because my face still looked so horrible, I think people had a hard time actually believing that no bones were broken beneath the wounds.
I am choosing to believe that a miracle happened on that day. I experienced it for myself. If you know much about me, you know that I’m not that religious and I’m certainly not a very spooky dude. Before this happened to me, I probably leaned more to the side of believing that miracles rarely, if ever, happen in the real world. I had prayed for miracles before this incident and saw my prayers go (seemingly) unanswered.
I can’t explain miracles. I can’t predict when they’ll happen. I’m not sure why they happen when they happen. I don’t know why they don’t happen when we often want them to.
But doggone it, they happen and I am convinced that God still wants us to hope and believe that they are possible in every circumstance. Will a miracle happen every time? No. Why? I don’t know. But miracles can happen and my face (scars and all) is living proof!
Now if you don’t mind, I have to jam out to the track, that while nearly killing me, gave me a new lease on life!
