Bill Cornelius is the senior pastor of Bay Area Fellowship in Corpus Christi, Texas. He took us to the Book of Haggai and talked about the lack of prayer in the lives of pastors and churches. Here are a couple of takeaways from his teaching:

• It is ridiculous how much we do for God without God’s help.
• You can build an amazing ministry and never really know God.
• To hear from God, you have to get alone with Him.
• Man-made systems begin to eat away at the men who made them.
• Someone has been dealt a worse hand than you in life and they are winning with it.
• Your prayers should lead your feet to match your mouth.
• Our job is to make our town the hardest place to get to hell from.

I’ve never heard Bill speak before, but he was authentic and outstanding!

I am at the C3 Conference with some of our staff today and we just finished the first session.Ed Young, the Senior Pastor of Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, opened up the C3 Conference with a teaching about crazy people. Here are some of the random thoughts Ed shared with us today.

• There is a good crazy and a crazy crazy.
• Crazy people are on the ride of pride.
• The devil throws crazy people around you and me.
• You can’t change crazy crazy people.
• Crazy people love to play the “God” card, name drop, and one up everyone around them.
• Crazy people will constantly call you, ignore your advice, and love to talk about themselves.
• Crazy people don’t have a filter.
• Got an issue, grab a tissue!
• Crazy people enjoy their dysfunction.
• All of us have “crazar” (radar that detects crazy people) and when the crazar goes off, we better not ignore it.
• Ministry is breautiful. There is a brutal side to it and a beautiful side to it.
• Don’t get lazy about crazy. Confront it and deal with it. Speak the truth and shame the devil.
• There’s crazy people all throughout the Bible.

Of course, if you’ve ever heard Ed speak, then you know that he had way too many sound bytes for me to capture, but I thought I would at least share these with you.

I love the guys in this picture. God has blessed us here at Southside with an amazing team of pastors and I thank God for every single one of them. We’re in staff meeting right now, so I can’t take a lot of time to write, but I just wanted to give these guys a shout out. 

If you don’t know them, from left to right, we have Charlie Bibb, Andrew Cook, Billy Andrews, Dennis Clark, Jerry Walls, Randall Nash, Mark Balltzglier, Jim Gray, and Josh Ray.

I’ve been reading some of my older homiletics books and I came across a quote I don’t ever remember reading.

It’s an unbelievable quote that I’ll be leveraging publicly sometime in the future, but it also has tremendous application for me personally as well.

“The reason you can’t teach an old dog new tricks is not that he is incapable of learning them. It is that he is quite content with his mastery of the old tricks, and thinks that learning new tricks is strictly for puppies. Besides, he is busy paying off the mortgage on the dog house.” -John W. Gardner

I recently read Proverbs 21:16 and here is what it says: “A man who strays from the path of understanding comes to rest in the company of the dead.” (NIV)

Kind of frightening, right?

In other words, the moment you start drifting away from wisdom, the moment you start neglecting the pursuit of knowledge, the moment learning becomes unimportant to you- that is the exact moment you start going down a path that ultimately leads to your demise.

So maybe we should go after knowledge more aggressively. Maybe we should pursue wisdom more intentionally. And maybe we should never ever stop learning.

Just a thought.

Jonathan is the Senior Pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church.  He is also the Executive Vice President of Spiritual Affairs at my alma mater, Liberty University.

“If Jesus is not the only way, then I’m just wasting my time.” 

“As followers of Jesus, we have been called to say some things that may be unpopular”

“The church is not a civic organization…we have to do everything we do in the name of Jesus.”

“We have forgotten that we’ve been sent, that we’ve been called.””

“As we go after our communities, we must remember that God is with us every step of the way.”

“The ends of the earth will not be found within the walls of our churches.”