J.R. Lee

One of the most exciting things we do at Freedom Church is celebrate with people who have become followers of Jesus!  Absolutely love watching people go public with the fact that they have experienced life in Christ!

We celebrated with 61 people in April and in just a few weeks we are doing it again!  
On Sunday (June 27th), we will be having a huge Baptism Celebration at both 9:45 and 11:15.

Several months ago I was at a conference when a good friend of mine was preparing to take the stage.  I overheard the people on the row behind me begin to unload on this person – criticizing everything from his shoes to his demeanor.  After about 15 seconds I couldn’t take it anymore and I confronted them on the spot.  It was more than awkward but they were messing with the wrong person in my book.

Some things people say will roll off my back, but say something about certain people in my life and chances are that I will come just short of kicking you in the shins.  The truth is that there are certain people in my life that I will fight for and I am not just referring to people that are in my family.

There people at Freedom – I will fight to protect.
There are MANY Pastor’s in my life that I will fight to protect.
There are friends in my life that I will fight to protect.

I know it’s more popular to seek out people who have your back.  You better find out whose back you have or you might get to the end of your life and find out that no one has yours.

Robert Sutton is an Author and Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford.  He has a great blog you should check out as well.  Last week I read an article he wrote for the Harvard Business Review.  Loved it enough to share it with you. Wrestle with this whether you are a business/church leader, student, or stay-at-home mom.  Check it out.

12 Things Good Bosses Believe

• I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.
• My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods.
• Having ambitious and well-defined goals is important, but it is useless to think about them much. My job is to focus on the small wins that enable my people to make a little progress every day.
• One of the most important, and most difficult, parts of my job is to strike the delicate balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough.
• My job is to serve as a human shield, to protect my people from external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe — and to avoid imposing my own idiocy on them as well.
• I strive to be confident enough to convince people that I am in charge, but humble enough to realize that I am often going to be wrong.
• I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong — and to teach my people to do the same thing.
• One of the best tests of my leadership — and my organization — is “what happens after people make a mistake?”
• Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too.
• Bad is stronger than good. It is more important to eliminate the negative than to accentuate the positive.
• How I do things is as important as what I do.
• Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.

I can’t wait to be back at Freedom Church on Sunday!  Be there at either 9:45 or 11:15!

Don’t forget::  We’re meeting at Barber Middle School for the summer while North Cobb High School completes renovations. North Cobb High is doing a great job getting things ready for our arrival on August 8th!

You can get a map to Barber here.  See you Sunday at 9:45 or 11:15!!

Don’t let the familiarity of these verses cause you to disregard the significance.  Maybe a different translation will breathe new life…

Ephesians 4:17-24

^17-19And so I insist—and God backs me up on this—that there be no going along with the crowd, the empty-headed, mindless crowd. They’ve refused for so long to deal with God that they’ve lost touch not only with God but with reality itself. They can’t think straight anymore. Feeling no pain, they let themselves go in sexual obsession, addicted to every sort of perversion.

^20-24But that’s no life for you. You learned Christ! My assumption is that you have paid careful attention to him, been well instructed in the truth precisely as we have it in Jesus. Since, then, we do not have the excuse of ignorance, everything—and I do mean everything—connected with that old way of life has to go. It’s rotten through and through. Get rid of it! And then take on an entirely new way of life—a God-fashioned life, a life renewed from the inside and working itself into your conduct as God accurately reproduces his character in you.