emotions= wimp?

Looking back at college I realize that a lot of the people or guys around me were very emotionally unstable. Too be honest I didn't know how to deal with it. Though this is not unrelated to spiritual health, the emotional health of believers today is I think often neglected. Especially in my Christian circle, to be a guy and be emotional at the same time is often frowned upon. The implications of which can be quite damaging in the long run.

Yet I think about Jesus and I wonder, are we to imitate him in his emotional life? Surely he displayed the full spectrum of emotions? Was that just his personality? Should we not be more like him? Is it therefore wrong to be emotionless? I honestly don't know. I dont consider myself to be an especially emotional person, in fact at times I probably have a bias against emotions and feelings, but considering the life of Jesus I wonder if I should "feel" more.

I believe that there is truth to the idea that Christians today are good at engaging the mind and at best the surface of the heart, but theres something below that that probably never gets touched. We simply don't know how.

Book I'd like to highly recommend. "The Emotionally Healthy Church" By Peter Scazzero.

Preaching is easy..NOT!

Preaching is freaking tough. Big lesson i've learned the past few weeks. I had the privilege of speaking for the catapult youth retreat this past weekend. I've been preparing for it for awhile. I knew preaching was hard, but man this was difficult. One things for sure, I will surely be less critical of other preachers from now on. Seriously, I doubt I could do any better...

Some things I learned I wanna keep in mind about preaching...all learned from doing one retreat.

1. I need time to immerse myself in the text....because of my lack of experience in life I need more time than others to really let a scripture text not just be knowledge, but be wisdom, letting it become a part of my life. I need preferably a few months.

2. Topical messages are easy...doing an expository message is crazy hard, you really need to submit to God and not try to be spectacular...

3. Don't try to be like my favorite preachers, but be me.

4. Pray....my first message I preached felt so powerless...I felt the spirit working in me a lot more through my second message, so pray. pray. pray.

5. It's hard knowing that a lot of the fruit of my messages i may never see. But I trust that God will work when his word is preached.

6. I need to be better at handling criticism.

7. Don't preach what I want to preach, but preach the Word. Sometimes its easy to go onto a tangent and preach something related, but not in the text, just it's something I wanna say. It may be a good concept, but may not be in the text or passage.

8. Approval of man is definitely a huge struggle in preaching. I couldn't help but wonder what others thought about me. That surely weakens preaching.

9. Always always always should I feel inadequate and have a healthy fear.

10. I'm so young..in every way.

Okay, this post is mainly for me. But I believe everyone could use a little more humility when listening to other preachers.