Element Church Insider

…So we developed our Core Values. Later that Fall I picked up a book by Erwin McManus called Soul Cravings. It only confirmed the values we had stated. Erwin widdled it down to three areas that all humans crave but in those three areas he talked about all of our values.

Through that book and through my quiet time with God over the past year and a half I’ve come to understand one VERY crucial part of these cravings. These cravings of the soul. They can ONLY be met IN God. “In” NOT by Him. Rain is sent BY God. Money can be given BY God. Health can be given BY God. The cravings of our soul are only met IN Him.

We don’t like that. We want to have God but find our Life in worldly pleasures.
We want to have God but keep some of the “little” sins we enjoy so we don’t REALLY change. (Which doesn’t really make sense cause deep down we really long to be better. To not hold on to those things)
We want to have God but not commit to HIS family. We want to have God but worship other things in our lives. We want to have God and find our significance in our job, our title, our possessions, our accomplishments.

We want to have the “good” parts of God and hope he just GIVES what our souls craves. THAT CAN’T HAPPEN! We HAVE to give ourselves COMPLETELY to God. To find what our soul craves we MUST find ourselves IN Him. We use words like “SURRENDER” “DEDICATE” “DEVOTE” to describe this, but however you describe it it MUST be done to satisfy the soul.

The problem the church has is it’s full of Jesus Stalkers. What’s a Jesus stalker? Tune into Part 3 tomorrow.

Following Christ,

Jeff

We are finishing up today our look at the Core Values of Element Church. Hard to believe we only have one more week of Unplugged after today. I still feel so TOTALLY unprepared for what is about to happen. Almost seems surreal.

In March (06) Grant, Terri, Sabrina and myself sat down and started talking about this church plant thing. We had just “accepted” the call of God to come to Cheyenne. We didn’t know anything about church planting, didn’t know anything about Cheyenne and didn’t know anything about the people we would be reaching but we knew something. People CRAVE things.

Not like I crave White Castle hamburgers or how my wife craves Mexican food. Not how I CRAVE coffee in the mornings or how we crave our favorite of moms home cooked meals. Cravings of the soul. We knew that deep down within every one of us were things, the SAME things, that we all crave. Why not start there with core values. Why not make the cravings of our soul the core values of our church?

We didn’t even have a name for the church at that point. I still have the notebook from that March night when we started brainstorming core values and church names. We’ve wrestled over these values. We’ve tweaked them, changed the “names” of them and studied them. We came to the point of six core values.

Life – We all long to be ALIVE. We want to live. Not just physically, but we want to have REAL life. A life that matters. An abundant life.

Family – We all long to belong. We want to be a part of something bigger than us. From the earliest of ages we want to fit in, to be a part, to be accepted. There is a reason for peer pressure. We long to belong. There is a reason that young men/women call gangs their “family”. It’s a craving.

Change – We all long to be better than what we are. We want to be “good” people. No matter how bad or good a person is, deep down we want to be better than what we are. We want to change.

Worship – We all long to know something is out there that is bigger than me. Something or someone has this all figured out. Someone cares for me and knows me. I believe we all LONG to give ourselves to something/someone else.

Significance – We all long to be worth something. We desperately want a life with meaning, purpose and a sense of destiny. We all want our lives to mean something beyond the moment, beyond the day, in light of eternity.

Allegiance – We all long to be devoted to something. When we find a healthy sense of life, family, change, worship and significance, we find a proper placement of our allegiance.

Part 2 later today…

Jeff