Sunday was great!

Thanks to all of you who prayed about my sermon on Sunday. God was really great and it went very well. I was about to look at the Song of Solomon 3:12 through the end of chapter 4, the wedding and wedding night of Solomon and his bride to finish our series. Its an amazing passage that shows the loving intimate relationship between and man and woman. We walked through the passage, I gave some commentary and took time to address both unmarried and married people in the room. The best comment I got was from one person who came up and said, "I have heard it a million times that Christians should have sex before marriage, but today I saw in Gods word the plan for sex and marriage and my questions have been answered." High five for God. This was never my goal, but I was glad to hear it. The series was a huge success, but now we all have to live it out and that is a lot more difficult.

Right now I am preparing for our second day of training for our small group leaders on "The Story of God". This is a really exciting material we are using, where we retell many of the stories of the Bible that give the bigger picture of what God has been doing. We have been going through these stories in our small group for a couple of months and its been so exciting to revisit many of them and talk about them and learn about God. Basically you read a story for 5-8 minutes, taken straight from the bible text and then you have some discussion questions and you talk as a group. Its all based on oral learning, so the point is to help make is something you can retell to your friends or kids or anyone. Our groups really enjoy it. I am leading the training with Chris with about of our leaders and its been a ton of fun.

This is also a little FYI. Reena and her sisters have a singing group. They don't really perform much anymore, but they really wanted to do one more CD with many of their new songs and especially a capella ones. Well they finally got things recorded and hope to get it out sometime, but they may need some extra help financially, so if you would like to help with that, drop me an email at craig@goingup.ee. If you would also like to get a CD, then we could maybe sell some autographed copies at a premium price to help make it a reality. Again, craig@goingup.ee if your interested.

How do you study?

I am preparing for my sermon this weekend. The topic is pretty tough. We are finishing our series on sex and relationships and my topic is "How to have a Great Sex Life". The title is probably more flashy than the content. We will be looking at the Song of Solomon for advice on the physical relationship between a man and woman, its connection to the emotional relationship and ultimately our relationship with God. I have been studying the text for a while and have really enjoyed my time. I have also been reading several commentaries. I have also been reading a few books and online resources about relationships and specifically physical relationships between husbands and wives. I have found this to be really helpful. The books have been very helpful in providing information on different studies that have been done on these type of situations and problems. Also, the great part is so much of the research which have been done by secular universities or organizations time after time, promote marriage and the sanctity of marriage to be the best place for sexual relations. I always like to see how Gods truth can be discovered by everyone, after all, God created sex, he had a plan and if you really search for the honest truth, you will find God there.

The most interesting part of my sermon is I am having to divide it up into different groups, I will try to address, high school students, college students/singles and finally married couples. Its going to be a pretty interesting sermon and I hope it goes well. Peep has done such a great job the last few weeks sharing Gods plan for sex and relationships and what sex is not, and now I have to wrap it all up.

I was interested in how do others study and prepare to speak or lead a small group, or sunday school class.

Check out the New Banner!

I guess there are a lot of you who are not sure of what Nora looks like. Look up at the banner and you can see the latest family picture. We did some family pictures a few weeks back and I finally got it up on the blog. Also, at the right of the page is a slide show of some family pictures. If you click on that it will send you to Picasa where we have uploaded a lot of pictures lately, including some of Nora, so you can enjoy those.

An update on things here in EST. The family is doing good. Alex will have his second birthday on Friday. It seems impossible that he is already 2 years old, but its true. Oskar has been really growing up fast. He has been so good at taking care of Alex and Nora. While my parents were here, Alex sometimes didn't understand what my parents were saying, so Oskar would get in a hug like position and translate into Estonian so he could understand. It was so cute and cool and I was impressed at Oskars language skills at 3.

Reena is the greatest wife in the world. She is so good with the kids and has so much strength. She is also teaching now 4 students violin and is enjoying being a teacher at the music school.

The church is going well. We are in the midst of a series about relationships and sex. We felt this was a very important topic to talk about in our culture and context. I am preaching this week to finish up the series and I am pretty excited about the opportunity. Next series we are doing about the Holy Spirit and this is going to be very cool. We will be talking about the Trinity and specifically about the role of the Holy Spirit in the Bible and in our daily lives.

I am also working a lot of some things for the Global Leadership Summit that I will be helping with in November. I will travel to Tallinn on Thursday for a meeting. I really enjoy working with this team and the opportunity to work with different church leaders that are helping to put it together. The cooperation between the different churches in Estonia is very good and this has just showed me of how much people can come together under the right opportunities.

Back to the Grind

Its Tuesday and I have been at the office since 8.00AM and its now 5.30PM and I am headed to a meeting. This is not typical, but a few things have come up and I have to take of them. I just finished my first drama practice for our kids program, TAGAHOOV. I am now leading this project for a season and am leading the drama this time. I wrote the script which I thought was good till we started to act it out and then realized that we need to work through a lot of bad jokes and ideas, but in the end it went well. I got to work with Oliver and Ragnar which was great. I really enjoy these guys and they are talented. I also like getting lots of time with them.

All I wanted to say really was its days like this that are tough when you will get home after the kids are asleep. Its tough, but I am glad there are too many of these. But I didn't get the last 2 weeks at home to enjoy my parents and my family which makes these days a lot more bearable.