Will You Choose Me?

Taking notes with Glory (the cat)

This past week in 2nd year we started our preaching project.  Everyone in 2nd year gets to preach to a group of about 30 other students and 1 leader.  We each have 10 minutes to preach and then 5 minutes of feedback.  So I know what you're thinking... 10 minutes, really?  You could take that entire time to tell one story.  My thoughts exactly.  How am I supposed to develop an entire sermon in 10 minutes?  I can't even take a shower in 10 minutes, or make my lunch in 10 minutes!  So in one respects it would appear to be a fairly simple project.  Get a good scripture, explain what it means, and give some revelation.  Done!  Oh, but let me tell you, sermon prep is not that easy.  Sure, if I wanted to talk on something random, just pulled something out of the hat, I could easily have done it.  But I wanted to share something that had been stirring in my heart for 6 months.  How do you summarize 6 months of process and revelation in that amount of time?  Well, three full afternoons, many long chats with Jesus, lots of brain food, and 22 pages of notes later, I felt like I was starting to know what my sermon was going to be about!
Now that you have an idea of the process... about my preaching.  I was the last of 5 to preach on Tuesday. I won't say I wasn't trembling on the inside or that I didn't have that moment of panic at the thought of "What if I forget everything once I'm up there?"  But I did it, and it was great!
A summary on the summary of my past 6 months/sermon...  I titled it "Will You Choose Me?" and the theme was - Jesus doesn't always make sense, but He wants to know, will you still choose Him?  I spoke out of John 6:56, 60-69.  In this text, Jesus addresses the offense His disciples have because they couldn't understand His sermon on the need to eat His flesh and drink His blood.  (Who would understand something that crazy?!)  But instead of explaining Himself, He told them that they were offended because they were trying to understand by the flesh, or through their own ability to understand.  The problem was that Jesus words were spirit.  They were looking for rational explanations from a spiritual God.  It just doesn't work that way.  So Jesus purposefully offended them to see how they would respond.  Would they allow their offense to drive them away from Jesus, or would they let it drive them closer in relationship with Him?  Relationship has always been the standard for God.  He wants to know if we can get past our right to understand and have everything make perfect sense to us, and see if we will still choose Him when it doesn't.  Can we choose Him when things aren't lining up the way we expected?  Can we choose Him when we aren't seeing the answers to our prayers?  Can we choose Him when we feel offense rising inside of us?  My challenge was that all of us would come to a place where, yes, we still seek God for answers, but that we could say "God I want you more than I want answers.  So I choose you."
So there you have it!  I have successfully finished my preaching project.  But not to worry, there will be more to come :)