LaRosa Johnson {dot} com

Now that I’m done with the "Read.Pray.Worship.Live." series, I’ve been thinking about what to study next. I felt that the previous study was important because the basics are always needed, for new and seasoned believers alike. From there, I wanted to take it to the next logical step, but I really didn’t know where to go. So, I’ve been praying and surveying things at Trailblazin Ministries, and I’ve finally decided what my next major Bible study is going to be. I’m going to pursue a study on spiritual gifts.

Why spiritual gifts? Well, after surveying things on the website, I felt that this is an appropriate doctrinal study to undertake. There has been a lot of discussion on spiritual gifts on the message board, as well as a seeming misunderstanding between gifts, talents, and ministries, and so on. With that in mind, I also feel that after learning the basics it’s important for a believer to find out what their spiritual gift is so that they can begin employing it for spiritual service. So, taken together, it was quite obvious that this is the next study that I needed to do.

There are a few things I plan to cover over the course of this study, which will happen in several parts. Some of the things I’ll cover will include: the origin of spiritual gifts, a definition of all twenty (20) spiritual gifts, scriptural use of each gift, cessation of particular gifts, the purpose of spiritual gifts, and how to discover your spiritual gift. The one thing I will note, that in discovering your spiritual gift, it doesn’t involve taking a test or filling out a survey.

I’m not sure when the first study part of the study will be up on the website, but it’ll likely be some time during the first quarter of 2009, Lord willing & rapture pending. So, until that time, keep me in prayer as I undertake this study, and pray that the Lord would open my mind to understand & correctly divide the Word of Truth so that I can teach it to His people.

This past weekend I had the opportunity to witness something special. Cliff Beveridge, one of the deacons at Austin Bible Church, had spent the past few years training his gift of pastor-teacher under the tutelage of Pastor Bob Bolender. Well, after completing his training, he was to officially be ordained and recognized as a pastor-teacher. He had already completed his written exam, and Friday he had to stand before a council of pastors and go through his oral examination before the final determination of whether he would be ordained. Well, being the first ordination at ABC since his own, Pastor Bob decided to open up the oral exam to the congregation so that we could witness the event. This would serve particularly beneficial to the likes of myself who are currently training for the same gift, so that we could see what to expect if (3rd class condition) our time comes. Long story short, he passed the oral exam with flying colors and was ordained later that evening in a magnificent and God honoring ordination service.

For me, this series of events was particularly insightful because it served as further confirmation as to what the Lord had in store for me. Cliff and I had been joking in the weeks leading up to his ordination that if I showed up one of two things would happen: 1) they would never see me again, wondering what happened to me, or 2) I would be greatly encouraged. Well, the latter is what happened. I was more than encouraged, but I became all the more convinced of my gift and calling as a pastor-teacher. If I had any doubts before, they’re completely gone now. Before getting thrown into the Sunday night rotation back in August, I was always wary of my voice and my ability to stand behind the pulpit and deliver a sermon, and possibly shepherd a flock. Well, after that was over, I felt much more comfortable and confident in being able to deliver the truth of God’s Word orally, and not just in written form like I do via this website. Then, add the events of the weekend, and visualizing myself up there, I can see it clearly now.

What’s more, for the past month or more, I’ve heard several pastors attest to the fact that if you can see yourself doing anything else other than preaching that you should do it. I’ve had that at the forefront of my mind of late, and the more I think about it, I can’t see myself doing anything else than teaching God’s Word and shepherding a flock. Sure, I love my job, but it is far from a passion. I live and breathe the Word of God; I love reading and studying it, talking about it with others, fellowshipping with other believers, and so on. Everything I want to do centers around communicating the truth of Scripture, including raising and leading my family (of which I need to do a better job doing).

So yeah, I’m convinced. I’m a pastor-teacher, and I’m dedicated to training that gift as best I can (through learning Greek & Hebrew, Systematic Theology, church history, learning to shepherd, and anything else that will benefit me). From there, only the Lord knows what will happen, and I’m content leaving that in His hands. It’s funny to think about because many at church were telling me that they were looking forward to my ordination. On the one hand, I’m looking forward to it too; but, on the other, I’m content in living where I am and being a student of the Word, patiently waiting for my time to come. In the meantime, many congrats to Pastor Cliff and all of his hard work; I look forward to continuing to learn from him and Pastor Bob as I train my gift!

In a word, humility is a beast, and God seemingly has an infinite number of ways in keeping your boy humble.

Today, I was looking at a website and noticed that they had a devotional section. I was immediately like, "Aww yeah! Let me check this out and see what’s going on!" I saw that it was being headed up by a good friend of mine, and that gave me a good bit of comfort. Then, given that I know a good number of people who had a hand in putting the site together, and them knowing that I write devotions too, my flesh immediately started to rise up. My flesh started to say, "Why didn’t they holla at me about putting my devotions up there? Mine are just as good!" and so on. Needless to say, I wanted to start beating my chest and cry foul play, especially when I had gotten an email about submitting content for the site, but only asking for editorial/reviews/news type pieces (of which I could care less about these days).

Then it hit me. I had to remember my last blog post and the admonishment I had given to the HHH community. Simply put, I needed to humble myself, put myself in check and realize that they asked my boy to do it, and not me. It was their decision to make, and not mine. Plus, who am I anyway? I’m not ordained or anything of the sort; I’m just a layman training his gift and trying to teach the Bible. The more I thought about it, I realized that it was God’s call and not theirs. Given the circumstances, I’ve already dedicated myself to my studies and will already be cutting back on what I do with the site (that’s my decision, by the way, in reference to a previous blog entry), so I wouldn’t be able to commit to providing content for another site anyway. After that, I felt pretty low and humbled before the Almighty because I knew that it was definitely His call and His circumstances. I repented for my jealousy, covetousness, anger, and pride because I was absolutely in the wrong. If the Lord wills, it’ll happen in His time; and, if not, He’s still God and I’ll just have to be content with what He’s given me stewardship over, nahmean?!

Blessings. G&P.

After tonight’s classes at church, I was having a conversation with my pastor and one of the deacons (who teaches my Greek class) and we were talking about the increased workload that I’ll have when the new year starts. I’m not sure if I’ve discussed it here before, but I’ll likely be picking up 1st year Hebrew alongside 2nd year Greek, while still doing pastor’s ministry workshop classes among other things. With all of that, I realized that I need to address what I’m going to do with Trailblazin Ministries.

Here’s a glimpse at what I’m facing. I’m looking at the current pace of my studies here at Trailblazin Ministries and it has taken me 1.5 years to get through a rather small book of the Bible. With that, throw in the fact that, up to today, I’ve only done 80 devotions in that time, which averages out to a little over one devotion per week. That doesn’t include the Bible studies, podcasts, music reviews or anything else I do with the site. Quite frankly, by my own standards, an average of one devotion per week isn’t a lot; when I started off the year, it was my goal to do at least two or three devotions per week, but apparently that didn’t happen. Now, when you add on the workload that I’m about to add, will the rate of devotions suffer even more? Will it be a single devotion every other week?!

If I’m honest with myself, I know that it’s going to take a lot out of me to make the most of my studies, but at the same time I don’t want the website to suffer because I realize that it’s a ministry in and of itself that is helping others grow in their spiritual walks. In my mind, a website is only as good as the content that is contained, and I’m the kind of person that hates to keep a website stale. It bugs me to no end when I don’t have enough time to study and get a devotion up because I feel like the website isn’t doing what it’s supposed to or that I’m not doing my "job" well enough.

The bottom line, at least here, is that I realize that the time I devote to the website will decrease as my studies increase. From there, the question becomes: what do I do? Do I let the website just sit stale and update it whenever I can? Do I try to squeeze in the extra time to at least remain at the level I’m at now, and probably wear myself out in the process? Or do I toy with the idea of shutting down the site entirely while I pursue my studies and let the Lord lead from there? The one thing that I do know is that this site is a resource to believers all over the world, and it’ll even serve as a benefit, probably more so once I’m done with my training because I’ll be better equipped to serve. I just need to figure out what to do with it while I’m in the heart of my training.

Right now, I don’t know what I’m going to do. At the very least, I’m going to finish out the year strong with the podcast and attempt to finish the James devotion series. In the meantime, I think I’ll seek some wisdom from my pastor and others and see what they think I should do. The one thing I know for sure is that I don’t want to neglect the gift that I’ve been given, but at the same time I want to give my best at all times. So, I guess I’ll leave this as a rant and see where things go from here…

Yet another interesting night in the pulpit. I got a call yesterday afternoon from Radley, one of the other pastor-teachers in training, telling me that he wasn’t feeling too well and asked if I could fill in for him tonight. Feeling fine at the time, and already having a new study ready to go, I figured I could fill in with no problems. Well, wouldn’t you know it, I came down with a sore throat, stuffy nose, and other symptoms later on in the afternoon and evening hours. Now, how was I going to preach with my throat being on fire?!

I went to work hoping I’d fight it off. Not even a few hours into the work day, I just knew I couldn’t keep it together enough to focus on my work. So, I talked with my manager and headed home, where I literally crashed the rest of the afternoon, while being plenty drugged up with cold medicine. It came time to get ready for church and my throat was at the worst point it had been all day. I journeyed on anyway because I knew that the Word had to go forth and it was too much of a short notice on a Wednesday night to have anyone else fill in.

Needless to say, I (barely) got through all of my material, with my throat burning the entire time. There were quite a few points where I just wanted to call it quits and just close early, but I pressed on, knowing that I wanted to finish what I had started for the service of the Lord. So, I finished, and only about 5 minutes early.

Hopefully, that’s something I won’t have to do that again any time soon, but it’s comforting to know that I was able to do it and see the Lord sustain my voice so that I could do His work.

Well, pray for your boy as I try to get some rest and soothe my aching throat & body. God bless!

That’s the question that’s on my mind tonight. I’m sitting here pondering what I want to do with the UrbanWordz podcast. As it stands right now, it’s a quasi holy hip-hop and teaching podcast aimed at extracting the biblical truths of some of today’s hot holy hip-hop music. It’s something that I had planned on doing monthly, and had done rather consistently up until June; I haven’t put up a new one for July or August.

I’ll admit that I like the podcast and what it brings to both the Christian community and the HHH scene, as it has a niche that no one else is really tapping into. I enjoy it, but it’s hard work and requires a lot of brain power. The process of putting together a podcast looks like this: 1) find a solid holy hip-hop artist, 2) find a song with a biblical message and that doesn’t hit on a topic that I’ve already covered (that part gets hard), 3) find some Scriptures to base the study on, 4) prepare a brief outline of what I want to talk about and discuss, 5) record the podcast & mix it down, 6) upload to the website and create the new page. Now, the actual process of recording the podcast isn’t all that bad, but it’s finding the song that presents a problem. For starters, most artists don’t include the Scripture that their songs are based on in the liner notes. Secondly, so many artists these days tend to hit on a lot of the same topics (just in different ways) that it makes it difficult to find original subject matter to base a study on. That’s part of the reason why I haven’t done a podcast in the past couple months, I’ve just had a hard time finding a good song to use (not that there’s a lack of good songs, just finding one to base a study on). On another hand altogether, I feel that I’m limiting myself in a way because I’m forcing myself to talk about someone else’s stuff, instead of maybe bringing in something new altogether (that may or may not have been covered in a song).

At this point, I don’t want to drop the podcast. It adds a nice bit of flavor to the website and the media/audio component is a necessary part of the ministry, I feel. I’m just not sure what to do with the podcast. Do I press through and try to make it work with the way it is now, and struggle to find songs? Or do I try something new? In a way, I’m leaning towards doing something new, but I haven’t the slightest idea of what that would be. I figured that I could just do something like I’m doing for the devotions and Bible studies, find a book of the Bible or character and start doing an audio teaching (basically a mini-sermon [or full sermon]) at least monthly. The only thing with that is remaining consistent because it’s already hard enough to remain consistent with the written devotions. It doesn’t make much sense to add another layer of study on top of that, which would require just as much work in exegeting a text.

I’m not sure, I’m still mulling over ideas. But the reason I’m writing is to get some input from you guys and what you would like to see. What are your ideas for the UrbanWordz podcast? At this point, I’m pretty much open to suggestions while I figure out where to go from here. So, leave any & all suggestions as a comment below.

You absolutely have to love deadlines. Earlier this month I found out that I would be teaching on Sunday evenings in August. That has gone fairly well thus far. Well, there was also the lingering possibility of me teaching in September too, giving me the opportunity to finish teaching my "Read.Pray.Worship.Live." series that I’ve been doing for Trailblazin Ministries.

Well, it’s amazing what a deadline has done for my productivity! I’ve been working on the third part of the series (Worship) off & on since December of last year and barely made any kind of progress. With the thought of needing to preach it in a couple weeks, I knocked out an outline and the fully written teaching in a matter of days. What’s more, it’s even been proofread and edited! Nothing like a good kick in the pants to get the juices flowing.

Next up is the Live study (and possibly a recap message); hopefully I can knock that one out just as quickly. Oh yeah, maybe I’ll be able to get back on track with devotions soon too!

I’m sleepy @ the moment, but I feel good. Feels good to get something like that done, especially when it’s been hanging over my head for so long.

So, it’s been three weeks in a row now that I’ve preached the Sunday evening service at church. As previously noted, the first Sunday I filled in for another teacher, and then got put into the rotation as a result. These past two Sundays I’ve taught on "Prayer God’s Way: The Disciple’s Prayer," and it has gone well so far. I’ve finished on time, both times (even though I admittedly had to wing the last 5 minutes tonight just to take up the time because I didn’t want to get into the next section until next Sunday), so I can’t complain there.

How do I feel? I’m still not sure. I feel confident in the material because I know that the material is sound and I’m basically allowing the text of the Bible to speak for itself and expounding where needed (at least I hope that’s what I’m doing). But in the midst of that, I still feel a bit shaky with my public speaking in general, although I am fairly comfortable getting up there without feeling like I’m going to totally bomb. I still stumble over my words and feel like I’m reading way too much from my notes, but I can feel a bit of growth each time out. It’s truly a humbling experience because I’ve really had no public speaking opportunities outside of preaching (not even in school unless it was mandatory, like for a report or the one debate in my sociology class in high school). When I’m done I feel like a bumbling idiot, yet at the same time feel like God’s Word was taught clearly and accurately.

I will say that it gives me a lot more respect for my pastor and other pastors alike who make it seem so flawless at times. Shows me what I need to aspire to and the work that I need to put in to get there, if I ever will. Right now it’s in the Lord’s hands, and that’s where I’ll leave it.

On a final side note, this open door opportunity has served as a great big kick in the pants to finally start making some progress on my worship study. Well, good night.

P.S. – If you want to hear my teachings, just visit my page @ the ABC website.

Wow, what a day it’s been! This has definitely been a Sunday like no other, that’s for sure. On Wednesday I find out that Cliff, the deacon that runs the recording desk during most services, is going to be out of town on vacation; that meant that I would be needed to run the sound for Sunday morning. No worries there as I’ve done it several times before. Throw on top of that that I get an instant message from Pastor Bob saying that he won’t be at church on Sunday because he has strep throat and can’t talk. No worries there either because Warren Doud would be covering for him teaching from his series on Acts. So far so good.

This morning goes off without a hitch, so I was feeling pretty good. Had planned on getting home from church and doing some Greek homework before class. I’m not even home an hour and I get a call from K.C. Williams (another deacon) telling me that Mr. Doud would be unable to teach tonight’s class (his regularly scheduled session), and was asking if I had anything prepared that I could possibly teach in his absence. I told them that I could and immediately scrambled to find something to teach. I ended up deciding on "A Heart for God’s Word" from the Read.Pray.Worship.Live. series on Trailblazin Ministries and rushed to get notes printed off, along with putting together a PowerPoint presentation to help the congregation follow along. Having to leave at 4:00 to get to my Greek class on time, I basically only had 2 hours to get everything ready. Luckily I did.

I get to church and attend my Greek class. That was cool. Service went well and I think I did a halfway decent job presenting the material, especially considering I hadn’t looked at it but once or twice since writing it towards the end of last year.

It was definitely a wild day, and one that I’ll never forget. It just goes to show that as a minister of the gospel I need to be prepared in season and out of season to teach His Word (2 Timothy 4:2). The Lord is good, and I’m glad I was able to come through with something in my pastor’s absence. It’s such a blessing that there are so many faithful men who are able to teach the Word in our pastor’s absence and that I can be counted as one of them, even on short notice.

By the way, if you want to listen to the MP3, visit the Austin Bible Church website.

Bless the Lord!

I’ve been spending the past few weeks putting together a curriculum for the Steps Discipleship Training Ministry division of Trailblazin Ministries and I must admit that it has been some experience. The process of gathering materials has been an experience, and it’s really gotten my juices flowing in how I want to continue to mold and shape Trailblazin Ministries into what the Lord desires for it to be. One of the things that has always been at the forefront of my mind has been the discipling of individuals so that they can be assured of their salvation and built up in the faith so that they can chew on spiritual meat instead of drinking milk. Steps DTM is going a long way in making that vision a reality because it is equipping the saints with the gift of teaching to best use their gift for the glory of the Lord. I don’t want it to just stop there though.

Now wanting to simply leave it at that has really gotten me thinking about doing much more. What am I thinking of? Very simply, I think it would be great to have a Steps DTM for the layman who is just interested in growing in their knowledge of the Scriptures, but has no desire to write for the website, nor do they need the in-depth teachings on exegesis or hermeneutics that are in the course of study right now. In many ways what I’m seeing is a course of study that is geared toward the new believer of the Christian who has not progressed in the faith since being born again. First and foremost, I would love for them to be able to rest assured in their salvation and then be able to properly articulate their testimony to others (how they were a sinner saved by grace, as opposed to being a person who just decided to "try Jesus"). From there, I envision showing them the basics of confession of sins to the Lord, staying in fellowship, and how to study the Bible. With that, I would also provide many different resources that can help them to establish the habit of studying the Bible and praying. Then it’ll move into showing them how to share their faith and do evangelism. That’s really what I see happening.

What’s more, I don’t see this being something like Steps DTM is right now where people have to register to get access (although there would be some kind of registration for contact purposes); instead, this is something that would be available to the public and freely accessible on the website so that anyone can come along and start growing in the faith. It really is my heart to see people grow in the Lord and I want to do whatever I can to make those kind of resources available so that they can make it happen, especially if they’re not in a church that offers something like this. I think I’m doing myself and the Body a disservice if I limit my "discipleship training" to only those who have a desire to write for the website; this is the kind of thing that should be made available to any and everyone that needs and wants it.

I think that with that in my sights, I want to do whatever I can to make it happen, even if it starts out as something small. So, please keep me in prayer as I start to formulate the ideas for this "open" discipleship training ministry and for the first class in the Steps Discipleship Training Ministry. Discipleship is important because it’s more than something we "do," but it’s a way of life. We must live as disciples and stay before the Master’s feet yearning to know more about Him, instead of looking at our walk as an obligation.

I think this is something the Body needs and I want to make it happen. Sure it’s been done, and I’m not reinventing the wheel, but I do want to reach my demographic. So, thank You, Lord, for provision and purpose. Amen.