New Youth Bible Study with Francis Chan plus Francis comments on the Christian reaction to the Osama Bin Laden news
Yesterday our team was in San Francisco to film teaching with Francis Chan for an upcoming youth Bible study resource called Surrender. We loved working with Francis last year on the Courage series. When it came time for our team to tackle this issue of Surrender it was our first choice to see if Francis would partner with us again.
The tag line for this Bible study is Others before self. Christ above all. It will address surrendering our stuff, our status, our sin and ultimately our self. Our culture tells us that we should only look out for ourselves. The idea of surrendering is usually only talked about when a bad guy surrenders to the good guys in the movies or on the news. But as Christians isn’t that what we are called to do too? We are the “bad guys” (sinners) and we can continue to try to fight our way through … or we can surrender to the “good Guy” and let him take over.
We hope the Surrender Bible study is a great resource for pastors to inspire and encourage the students in their youth ministry. It will be released this August.
The night before our filming with Francis is when news broke of Osama Bin Laden’s assassination. Twitter and Facebook exploded with comments both rejoicing the death of this tyrant and warning Christians against getting smug. I have always appreciated Francis’ attention to scripture and living Biblically … so I asked him for his thoughts on recent news events.
Here’s what he had to say …
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Our family is officially back on the active list for fostering. That means at any moment we could get a call asking for us to take in a child.
We are still pretty new at all this. We’ve only received a few phone calls in our 3 years as foster parents.
Call 1 - We took in a cute little baby girl who was 3 months old. By the time she was 9 months old her mom was ready and able to take her back. They called at 4:00 in the afternoon and by 8:00 pm she was at our house.
Call 2 – We took in a 2-day old baby and 18 months later we adopted little Ashley (pictured on the elephant). They called on a Saturday afternoon and by Sunday they brought Ashley to us straight from the hospital.
Call 3 – Just 2 weeks ago we got a call for a 7 week old baby who was partially in a cast. It seemed like a tragic scenario … but we were heading out-of-town the next day and they couldn’t give us this baby.
Every time the phone rings I wonder if this is it. Most people prepare for about 9 months for the baby … we get 4-24 hours. I can wait!